Participant Info

First Name
Zoe
Last Name
LeBlanc
Affiliation
Scholars' Lab, University of Virginia
Website URL
http://zoeleblanc.com/
Keywords
digital history, international history, media history, Global South, history of ideas, urban history, news, networks, international organizations, Cairo, Arab world, decolonization, data mining and visualization
Additional Contact Information
Also contact at zgleblanc@gmail.com

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

Zoe is currently a digital humanities developer at the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia. In this position, she works on building large-scale data pipelines for humanities text data, web apps for mapping and data visualization, and statistical modeling for text and image analysis projects. She consults with undergraduate, graduate, and faculty at UVA and beyond, and teaches workshops in wide range of digital humanities topics.

Zoe is also entering her final year as a doctoral candidate in history at Vanderbilt University. My dissertation, “Circulating Anti-Colonial Cairo”, is about Cairo’s emergence as an international anti-colonial media empire and a meeting place for revolutionary nationalist movements from across the Third World. Zoe explores how the establishment of the Middle East News Agency, a national press in Cairo in 1955, was a vehicle for the UAR to counter Western press agencies, assert international leadership among decolonizing states, and legitimize revolutionary nation building projects. Zoe quantitatively traces how the discourses and imagery in Cairo print media transformed from 1948 and the early revolution to the late 1960s and early 1970s, as Egypt transitioned away from the socialism of the Nasserist era.

Recent Publications
Media Coverage
Country Focus
Expertise by Geography
Africa, Middle East, United States
Expertise by Chronology
Modern, 20th century, 21st century
Expertise by Topic
Computational, Diplomacy, Politics, Rebellion & Revolution, Technology