Walter Hawthorne named Director of Matrix: Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences

August 18, 2025 - Emily Jodway Patyna

Michigan State University College of Social Science recently announced Dr. Walter Hawthorne as the director of Matrix: Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences. Hawthorne takes the helm after Associate Professor of History Dean Rehberger’s 18 years of leadership.

Founded in 1997, Matrix is an internationally recognized and respected research center at Michigan State University. Its staff works with universities, museums, libraries, archives, and world heritage sites to digitize, preserve, and provide public access to collections of cultural and historical materials. Faculty and researchers have collaborated on a host of research projects across the humanities and social sciences through Matrix, many of which have had an Africa or African-diaspora focus. Through partnerships with scholars, practitioners, educators, institutions, and local community members, Matrix aims to create tools and digital experiences that engage researchers, students, and the public in critical questions about our collective past, culture, and heritage.

“It’s a real honor to take the lead of an institution that’s been around for so long and has produced so many important digital humanities projects,” said Hawthorne. “I’m appreciative to our dean, Brent Donnellan, for the opportunity to direct Matrix, and to Dean Rehberger, the current director, for suggesting my name and getting me so heavily involved in the center, and for the staff who work here for being very supportive of me in this transition. We’re really positioned to continue to thrive as a research center.”

In addition to his role at Matrix, Hawthorne is a Professor of African and Digital History in the Department of History and African Studies Center. His research focuses on the history of Atlantic slavery and the Atlantic trade in enslaved people of African descent. He is the director of Enslaved.org, a discovery hub that links data from multiple universities, archives, museums and family history centers providing information about the lives of named enslaved and freed individuals, which is  a prominent grant-funded project within Matrix. He is also Editor of the Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation. Hawthorne first became involved with Matrix in 2008 when  he began development of Slave Biographies, an open access data repository of information on the identities of enslaved people in the Atlantic World that was the foundation for Enslaved.org.

Photo by Jacqueline Hawthorne.

“Since the birth of the internet, digital history and digital humanities have been exciting, cutting-edge fields in humanistic studies, and Michigan State and Matrix has really been right there on the forefront of this,” Hawthorne said. “Matrix’s projects digitize information and make data findable and analyzable on the internet, which is important for the preservation and accessibility of endangered materials. Matrix-based projects are freely accessible to anyone with a computer and an internet connection. On the internet, projects really takes on a life of their own. You never know who is going to find this wealth of data helpful.”

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Hawthorne!