Positions

University of Colorado Denver, 2020-Present
Associate Professor Clinical Teaching Track, History Department, 2020-present
Director of Digital Initiatives, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, 2023-present

Northeastern University, 2016-2020
Assistant Professor, History Department

Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, 2016-2017
Visiting Scholar

Rutgers University, 2015-2016
Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow, History Department

Education

Stanford University, 2009-2015
Ph.D. in American History
Dissertation: “The Postal West: Spatial Integration and the American West, 1865-1902”

Pomona College, 2004-2008
B.A. in History, minor in Religious Studies

Publications

Books

Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).

• Winner of the 2023 Vincent P. DeSantis Book Prize, Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
• Winner of the 2022 Western Heritage Award for Outstanding Non-Fiction
• Winner of the 2022 National Postal Museum Award for Scholarship in Postal History
• Accompanying Website: Cameron Blevins, Yan Wu, and Steven Braun, “Gossamer Network” (2021), https://gossamernetwork.com.

Articles

Cameron Blevins and Annelise Heinz, “‘Separated, but Far from Alone’: Forging Lesbian Networks in the 1970s–1980s,” Pacific Historical Review 93, no. 3 (August 1, 2024): 417–44.

Cameron Blevins and Christy Hyman, “Digital History and the Civil War Era,” Journal of the Civil War Era, Vol 12, No. 1 (March 2022).

“Sound and Community: ‘Singing Box 331’ as Digital History,” William and Mary Quarterly, 77, no. 3 (July 2020).

“Into the Virtual Stacks,” Modern American History, 2, no. 2 (July 2019).

“Women and Federal Officeholding in the Late Nineteenth-Century U.S.” Current Research in Digital History, vol. 2 (2019).

“Digital History’s Perpetual Future Tense,” in Debates in Digital Humanities 2016, Matthew K. Gold and Lauren Klein, eds. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

Cameron Blevins and Lincoln Mullen, “Jane, John…Leslie? A Historical Method for Algorithmic Gender Prediction,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 9.3 (2015).

“Space, Nation, and the Triumph of Region: A View of the World from Houston,” Journal of American History, 101, no. 1 (June 2014), 122-147.

“‘Owned by Negro Venture’: Land and Liberty in the Life of Venture Smith,” in James Stewart, ed., Venture Smith and the Business of Slavery and Freedom (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), 129-159.

Reviews

Project Review, Outliers and Outlaws: Eugene Lesbian History, in Reviews in Digital Humanities, 4, 3, March 2023.

Book Review, Philip Rubio, Undelivered: From the Great Postal Strike of 1970 to the Manufactured Crisis of the U.S. Postal Service, in Business History Review, 96, 2, Summer 2022.

Project Review, The Programming Historian, in The Journal of Interactive Technology & Pedagogy, 15 December 2015.

Digital Projects

Data Advocacy for All, with Laurie Gries et. al. (ongoing)

Recovering Auraria’s Past, with Michelle Comstock and Rachel Gross (ongoing)

Gossamer Network, with Yan W, and Steven Braun (2021), gossamernetwork.com.

Geography of the Post”, with Jason Heppler, Jocelyn Hickox, and Tara Balakrishnan (2014), cameronblevins.org/gotp/

Data and Code

Cameron Blevins and Richard Helbock, US Post Offices, Harvard Dataverse, April 2021. Accompanying website: https://cblevins.github.io/us-post-offices/

Public Writing

“Teaching in the Age of Generative AI”, ThinqStudio Blog, March 6, 2023.

“The Spatial Framework of Nature’s Metropolis,” part of roundtable on “Nature’s Metropolis at 30” in Commonplace: The Journal of Early American Life Journal, December 2021.

U.S. History Qualifying Exams: Book Summaries, January 2012.

Grants and Fellowships

Arts and Humanities Seed Grant, CU Denver Office of Research Services ($10,000), “Auraria As We Remember It,” 2024-2025.

Co-Project Director, NEH Humanities Initiatives at Colleges and Universities ($149,197), “Recovering Auraria’s Past: Building a Digital Tour of a Displaced Neighborhood and Reckoning with Campus History,” 2023-2025.

Co-Principal Investigator, CU Next Award for intercampus pedagogical innovation ($297,271), “Data Advocacy for All: An Open Access Digital Repository for Innovative Data-Driven Curricula,” 2022-2025

ThinqStudio Faculty Fellowship, University of Colorado Denver, 2022-2024

Teaching Enhancement Grant ($1,350), Center for Excellence in Teaching & Learning, University of Colorado Denver, 2022

Project Co-Director, with Serena Parekh and Liza Weinstein, National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute ($152,962), “Engaging Geography in the Humanities,” July 2020. [Postponed due to Covid-19]

Seedling Grant ($1,000), NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks, Northeastern University, 2019

Seedling Grant ($1,800), NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks, Northeastern University, 2018

Thomas D. Dee II Graduate Fellowship ($34,239), Bill Lane Center for the American West, Stanford University, 2014-2015

Research Grant, Graduate Research Opportunity Fund, Stanford University, 2013

Research Grant, Presidential Fund for Innovation in the Humanities, Stanford University, Summer 2010

Awards and Honors

Vincent P. DeSantis Book Prize, Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, for Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West, 2023

Western Heritage Award for Outstanding Non-Fiction for Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West, 2022

National Postal Museum Award for Scholarship in Postal History for Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West, 2022

Runner-Up, Outstanding Western Book Award, WTAMU Center for the Study of the American West, 2022

Centennial Award for Graduate Teaching, Stanford University, 2014

Prize for Excellence in First-Time Teaching, Stanford History Department, 2010-2011

Presentations

Conference Papers

“Building a Data Advocacy Curriculum,” Digital Pedagogy Institute, August 2023

“Integrating Geography into History Classes,” on panel “History and the Spatial Turn: Pedagogical Approaches,” American Historical Association, January 2023

“Putting Lesbian Community Building on the Map,” on panel “Geography, Media, and Queer Community Formation,” (Panel Organizer) Critical Digital Humanities International Conference, September 2022

“The Unessay,” on panel, “Beyond the Essay: Rethinking Student Assignments,” (Panel Organizer and Chair) Organization of American Historians, April 2021

“Spatial Expansion and State Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” Networks: The Creation and Circulation of Knowledge from Franklin to Facebook, American Philosophical Society, June 2019

“Women and Federal Officeholding in the Late Nineteenth-Century U.S.” Current Research in Digital History, March 2019

“The Agency Model of the State,” on panel, “Reinterpreting the Nineteenth-Century State: Digital History’s Intervention,” Organization of American Historians, April 2018

“What Gets Lost: Spatial History’s Disciplinary Shores,” Creating Spatial Historical Knowledge, German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C., October 2016

“Trickles and Torrents: Mapping the Female Consumer Revolution of the 1890s,” on panel, “Gendered Spaces of Western Commerce,” Western History Association, October 2015

“The Perpetual Sunrise of Methodology” on panel, “Authoring Digital Scholarship for History: Challenges and Opportunities,” American Historical Association, January 2015

“Mapping the American West through the U.S. Post,” on panel, “The Place and Space of the Post,” Social Science History Association, November 2014

“Opening up the Dissertation,” on panel, “The Future of Graduate Education: The Digitally Informed Dissertation,” American Historical Association, January 2014

“Bodies in Motion: Women, Mobility, and the Overland Trail,” on panel, “Merchants, Emigrants, and Vacationers: Transplanting Gender from East to West,” Western History Association Conference, October 2013

“Digital Diaries, Digital Tools: A Comparative Approach to Eighteenth-Century Women’s History,” Women’s History in the Digital World, March 2013

“A Geography of Nineteenth-Century English and American Fiction,” on panel ”A Place for Text and Narrative in Humanities GIS,” Social Science History Association, November 2012

“Slave Narratives in Space: Mapping the World of Venture Smith,” on panel “Networks, Maps, and Words: Digital Humanities Approaches to the Archive of American Slavery,” Modern Language Association Convention, January 2012

“Topic Modeling Historical Sources,” Digital Humanities 2011, June 2011

“Mining the Diary of Martha Ballard,” Berkshire Conference of Women’s History (poster session), June 2011

“A Midwife’s Tale in the Digital Age: Text Mining the Diary of Martha Ballard,” Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), June 2010

Invited Talks, Panels, and Workshops

“Large Language Models and Historical Data,” National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute “Archives as Data,” June 2024.

“Creating, contributing to, and/or using digital archives,” Business History Conference Midyear Event, September 2023.

“Data as Archives,” National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute “Archives as Data,” June 2023.

“Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West,” Johns Hopkins University Digital Humanities Workshop, March 2023

Roundtable, “Graduate and Early Career Committee Open Forum: Pathways from Dissertation to Book,” American Historical Association, January 2023.

Roundtable, “Teaching Digital History: 10 Design Principles,” American Historical Association, January 2023 (cancelled).

“Information, Infrastructure, and the Geography of State Power,” keynote address for Processes of Spatialization under the Global Condition, Leipzig Collaborative Research Center, September 2022.

“Spatial Data and Digital Mapping,” workshop for National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute “Engaging Geography in the Humanities,” June 2022.

“Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West,” co-sponsored by the Center for Presidential History and the Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University, November 11, 2021.

“Historical Data: A How-Not-To Guide,” History as a Data Science, Columbia University History Lab, January 2020.

Roundtable Plenary Session, Current Research in Digital History, March 2019.

“Digital History and the Spatial Turn,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology, February 2019.

Commentator, Digital Research in Early America Workshop, William and Mary Quarterly-UC Irvine, October 2018

Participant, Arguing With Digital History, George Mason University, September 2017

“Data Literacy for Historians,” American Historical Association Career Diversity for Historians workshop, University of New Mexico, February 2016

Participant, Western History Dissertation Workshop, University of Washington, Seattle, May 2014

Participant, Sorting the Digital Humanities Out, Umeå University, December 2013

Participant, NEH Institute for Spatial Narratives and Deep Maps, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, July 2012

Participant, NEH Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship, University of Virginia, May 2010

“Combating Modern Slavery in the Digital Age,” Abolishing Slavery Then And Now, New York City, June 2008

“Land And Liberty in the Life of Venture Smith,” (keynote address) Documenting Venture Smith Conference, Haddam, CT, October 2007

Teaching

Introduction to Digital Studies, CU Denver, Spring 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2024

U.S. Since 1876, CU Denver, Fall 2020, Fall 2021, Fall 2022, Fall 2023, Fall 2024

Theory and Practice: Introduction to the History Major, CU Denver, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Fall 2022

History Seminar (capstone for history major), CU Denver, Fall 2020, Spring 2022

Data: A User Manual, CU Denver, Fall 2021

Civil War and Reconstruction, Northeastern University Spring 2019, CU Denver Fall 2020

Digital Space and Place, Northeastern University, Spring 2018, Spring 2020 (graduate)

Introduction to U.S. History, Northeastern University, Fall 2018, Spring 2020

Texts, Maps, and Networks: Methods and Readings in Digital History, Northeastern University, Fall 2018, Fall 2019 (graduate)

History of the Western U.S., Northeastern University, Spring 2018, Fall 2019

History and Trump, Northeastern University, Fall 2017

Mapping the Past: A Spatial History of the United States, Rutgers University, Spring 2016

The Digital Historian’s Toolkit: Studying the West in an Age of Big Data, Stanford University, Autumn Quarter 2012

Teaching Assistant, Global Human Geography (Martin Lewis), Stanford University, Winter Quarter 2012

Co-Instructor, Tooling Up for Digital Humanities, Stanford University, Spring Quarter 2011

Teaching Assistant, Nineteenth-Century America (James Campbell), Stanford University, Winter Quarter 2011

Teaching Assistant, Colonial and Revolutionary North America (Caroline Winterer), Stanford University, Autumn Quarter 2010

Professional Service

Reviewer, Journal of Digital History, 2024

Reviewer, Reviews in Digital Humanities, 2023

Reviewer, International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, 2016, 2022

Grant Reviewer, NEH Office of Digital Humanities, 2016, 2018, 2022

Reviewer, Current Research in Digital History, 2020, 2022

Reviewer, Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021

Reviewer, Journal of Policy History, 2021

Reviewer (Open Peer Review), American Historical Review, 2020

Reviewer, Cultural Analytics, 2020

Reviewer, Population Research and Policy Review, 2020

Reviewer, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2018

Reviewer, Environmental History, 2017

Reviewer, History Compass, 2015

Reviewer, Literary and Linguistic Computing, 2011, 2012

Organizing Committee, THATCamp Bay Area, 2010

Institutional Service

Director of Digital Initiatives, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, CU Denver, 2023-present.

Working Group on Artificial Intelligence, CU Denver College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, 2023.

Working Group on Microcredentials, CU Denver, 2023

Interim Director of Digital Initiatives, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, CU Denver, Spring 2023.

Core Faculty Member for Digital Studies Certificate, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, CU Denver, 2020-present.

History Department Honors Committee, CU Denver, 2020-present.

History Department Public History Committee, CU Denver, 2020-present.

Standing Committee on Digital Proficiencies and Quantitative Methods, College of Social Sciences and Humanities, Northeastern University, 2019.

NULab Working Group on Digital Minors, Northeastern University, 2018-2020.

NULab Subcommittee on the Digital Humanities Graduate Certificate Program, 2018-2020.

College of Social Sciences and Humanities Research Working Group, Northeastern University, 2018-2019.

Advisory Board Member, Northeastern Humanities Center, 2017-2019.

Peer Teaching Mentor, Stanford University, 2013-2014

U.S. History Graduate Admissions Committee, Stanford University, 2012-2013.

Workshop Coordinator, Visualizing Complexity and Uncertainty, Stanford Humanities Center, 2011-2012

Coordinator, U.S. History Workshop, Stanford History Department, 2011-2012

Graduate Representative, Stanford History Department, 2010-2011

Co-organizer, Tooling Up for Digital Humanities, Stanford University, 2010-2011

Skills

Programming: Python, R, Jupyter

Mapping, Visualization, and Design ArcGIS, QGIS, Tableau, Adobe Illustrator

Other: Wordpress, Git, Jekyll

Last updated: October 15, 2024