about summer

Dr. Summer L. Hamilton is an Assistant Research Professor of Digital Scholarship at The Pennsylvania State University. She is also the Digital Projects Designer for the Digital Liberal Arts Research Initiative in the Office of Digital Pedagogy and Initiatives. In her position, she utilizes her technical skills and project management background as well as her research expertise and content knowledge to support Pennsylvania State University’s Center for Black Digital Research and digital projects emerging from the Just Transformations Initiative.

Prior to PSU, Summer amassed a decade of technical experience working as both a systems and network analyst. She also spent five years as an Upper School English teacher at The Hockaday School, an independent PK-12 all-girls college preparatory school, where she collaborated with Hockaday’s Institute for Social Impact to connect the study of literature to the stories of people in the Dallas community and spearheaded the development of an anti-racist curriculum.

Summer earned her Ph.D. in English from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Her research recovers literary interventions into a harmful discourse surrounding Black housing options during the Jim Crow era. As a Black Digital Humanist, she is concerned with the visualization of this discourse and the ways in which the counterdiscourses can be recovered. She holds an M.A. in English from Southern Methodist University and a B.S. in Computer Science from Christian Brothers University in Memphis, Tennessee.