Cameron Blevins (History) was awarded a 2026 Digital Justice Development Grant from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).
The grant program supports digital projects across the humanities and social sciences that critically engage with the interests and histories of people of color and other historically marginalized communities through the ethical use of digital tools and methods.
Supported by the Mellon Foundation, the program also prioritizes projects that bolster the local ecosystem of digital humanities across academic, community, and cultural heritage institutions, thereby creating opportunities for scholars, especially those in historically underfunded fields, to pursue innovative, diverse digital scholarship.
Blevins' project, “Expanding Queer Cartographies,” will digitize and map approximately 27,500 women-friendly and lesbian-friendly venues that appeared in Gaia’s Guide (1975-92), the first national travel guide published for women and lesbian travelers. Along with LGBTQ+ archives and community advisers, the project will integrate this data into “Mapping the Gay Guides” an existing project that maps historical travel guides for gay men. Their goal is to build a national, comparative map of lesbian and gay male geographies and how they shifted over multiple decades. The other members of the principal project team are Eric Gonzaba (Cal State Fullerton) and Annelise Heinz (University of Oregon).
“Expanding Queer Cartographies” is one of seven established projects that received ACLS Digital Justice Development grants of up to $100,000.
"From our most competitive and disciplinarily diverse pool of applications to date, the projects funded this year represent the breadth of what ACLS imagines ‘digital justice’ to entail," said Keyanah Nurse, senior program officer of intentional design for an equitable academy programs. “Novel methodological frameworks such as histofuturism, community-centered uses of tools such as LiDAR scanning, and critical interventions into questions around data sovereignty contribute to the program’s orientation toward restorative and reparative justice practices.”
An award-winning historian and digital humanities scholar, Cameron Blevins is Teaching Professor of History, Director of Digital Initiatives for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and an AI Faculty Fellow in the Office of the Provost.