Dr. Elise Takehana
Elise Takehana is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Borderlands Digital Humanities Center at The University of Texas at El Paso. Her areas of scholarship include 20th and 21st-century print, digital, and multimedia literature, media studies, epistemologies of data and quantification of culture, and digital humanities. She contributed to or launched public art and digital humanities projects including The Alphabet Project, When We Were Normal, and three Robert E. Cormier Digital Archive Exhibits with her students. Her 2020 book, The Baroque Technotext, focuses on baroque aesthetic practices that underpin several print and digital literary texts that value their materiality. Her 2024 co-authored OER textbook for first year writing, Polyphony: Reader and Explorations for First Year Writing, centers on language politics. She is currently working with graduate students and student interns on three digital archives on Lalo Delgado, the Alvarado v. EPISD case, and MEChA at UTEP. She is currently researching affective metadata design, dynamic data visualization, and alternative histories of data science.
SCHOLARLY AND CREATIVE ACTIVITY:
Book
- The Baroque Technotext: Literature in a Digital Mediascape. Intellect Press. February 2020
Book Chapters
- “Centering Our Locality through the Digital Humanities: Amplifying the Striking Complexity of El Paso-Ciudad Juárez” Debates in Latinx DH, University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming
- “Digital Humanities” Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory Concepts and Applications, Edited by Puspa Damai, Routledge, 2025, pp. 212-21.
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“Writing in the Age of AI: The Wicked Problem of Process versus Product” When Teaching Gets Tough: Challenges and Possibilities in Secondary Writing Instruction, Edited by Annamary Consalvo and Ann David, Teachers College Press, Nov. 2024, pp. 130-140.
TEXTBOOK
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Polyphony: Reader and Explorations for First-Year Writing. ROTEL Project, October 2024, https://rotel.pressbooks.pub/polyphonyoerreader/. (Co-authored with Jennie Snow and Diego Ubiera)
CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS
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“Woven Borders: Chicanx and Latinx Fiber Art as Alternative Data Cultures” Latino Art Now, UTEP, El Paso, TX, November 2026
- “The ‘Stars,’ Strings, and Skulls Stuck in Cultural Analysis” Making Relations Visible, UTEP, El Paso, TX, October 2026
- “Centering Our Locality through the Digital Humanities: Amplifying the Striking Complexity of El Paso-Ciudad Juárez” (Panel moderator), National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies, San Antonio, TX, April 2025
- “Do You Speak Math? Or Extrapolating Humanity in How Mathematicians Talk” New Directions in the Humanities, Paris, France, June 2023
- “The Map Is in the Details” NeMLA (Northeast Modern Language Association), Niagara Falls, NY, March 2023
- “Georges Perec on the Street and in the Mind.” PAMLA (Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association), Los Angeles, November 2022
Contact Information
Email: eotakehana@utep.edu
Phone: 915-747-0896
Hudspeth Hall 212
Personal Information
