Two faculty from the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) have recently received awards for their digital projects. Jessica Otis, associate professor of history and Director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, has been awarded the Renaissance Society of America’s Digital Innovation Award for 2026 for her project, Death By Numbers. Stephen Robertson, professor of history and Director of the MA Program in history, won the Angel David Nieves Book Award from the American Studies Association and received an Honorable Mention for the Mary L. Dudziak Digital Legal History Prize from the American Society for Legal History for his project, Harlem in Disorder.
Otis’ Death by Numbers is a project focused on London’s historical Bills of Mortality, a series of weekly documents that recorded cause-of death statistics in the city. The bills began publication in 1603, initially to track plague mortality, but eventually expanded to cover dozens of other causes of death. This project’s goal is to transcribe and publish data from nearly 8,000 weekly bills published between 1603 and 1752, creating an open-access dataset that makes these extensive historical records available to scholars for new analyses.
Robertson’s Harlem in Disorder is a groundbreaking digital monograph that examines the violence that erupted in Harlem on March 19, 1935, the first large-scale racial disorder in the United States in more than a decade. Through a granular analysis of those events and the mapping of their locations, Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935, reveals that Harlem’s residents participated in a complex new mix of violence that was a multifaceted challenge to white economic and political power. Harlem in Disorder was published open access by Stanford University Press in 2024 and demonstrates how the digital medium can be used to create a multi-layered monograph that captures historical complexity and makes historical interpretation transparent.