Biography

Setsuko Yokoyama is an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at the Singapore University of Technology and Design. She received her doctorate in English from the University of Maryland in 2020, and is one of the inaugural graduates of its Digital Studies in the Arts and Humanities program. She also holds a master’s degree in Information Science from the University of Michigan School of Information, which she earned in 2015 while on the Fulbright scholarship.

Her current research investigates a colonial history of “Visible Speech”— the physiological alphabet invented in 1867 — and how it intersects with linguistic imperialism, scientific racism, and technosolutionism. In the classroom, Setsuko invites her students to analyze how technologies — including languages — can become a tool of oppression. In so doing, she encourages aspiring information professionals to practice reimagining technologies as a means to center humanity and social justice. As a part of her public humanities praxis, Setsuko works with a group of multilingual Asians in the diaspora who have digitally come together to address structural discrimination within Asian communities. Through her transpacific translation work, Setsuko practices anti-imperialism exemplified by Yuri Kochiyama in the 1960s.

Key Publications

• “Social Responsibilities of Digital Humanists,” Digital Humanities in the Western Worlds. Bungaku Tsushin Publishing, 2021, pp. 52-62.
• “The Open Access Spectrum: Designing Electronic Editions of Literary Works,” Access, Control, and Dissemination in Digital Humanities. Routledge, 2021, pp. 205-221.
• “The Sound of Public Humanities: Some Editorial Precautions for an Online Audio Edition of Robert Frost,” The Robert Frost Review, vol. 29, 2019, pp. 74-89.
• “Digital Technologies for Exploring Prosody: A Brief Historical Overview.” Arcade, Stanford University Department of English, 2018.

Invited Talks & Lectures

• “‘Get in Formation’: A Global Coalition of Humanists in the Digital Age,” Applied Humanities Program for Cultivating Global Leaders, Chiba University, 8 June 2021.
• “Transformative Power of Language Diversity: (Un)Learning as Healing,” Department of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Barbara, 19 May 2021.
• “This Book of People against Rural Sociology,” Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, University of Oklahoma, 28 April 2021.
• “Data x Intersectional Feminism,” Department of Physics, University of Alaska Fairbanks, 19 April 2021.
• “The Sound of Public Humanities and its Oscillatory Accessibility,” Digital Dialogues, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, 1 October 2019.

Digital Humanities Project

• Founder & Primary Investigator, Digital Frost Project, 2015-Present
• Contributor, Redefining Doctoral Education in the Humanities, 2020-2021
• Co-Founder, Digital Humanities Collective, 2013-2015