This voyeuristic page is a general personal history; academic work details are on my projects page.
I’m Fred Gibbs, an associate professor in the history department at the University of New Mexico.
From 2009 – 2013, I was an assistant professor in the department of History and Art History at George Mason University (Fairfax, VA) and director of digital scholarship at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media.
I completed my History of Science PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I discovered a new passion for obsession with applying technology to the humanities. For a few years before that, I did menial and distinctly non-humanities web programming for IBM and Target (and also built elaborate soda-can towers in my cubicle) after studying physics at Carleton College.
I grew up in Prior Lake, MN, where I enjoyed riding bikes through neighbors’ yards, playing mindless video games (experiments in algorithms, really), and trying to get computers to do stuff. Thanks, dad, for tricking me into thinking that programming was a actually a really fancy computer game.
Early in my graduate school days, I developed a fascination for cooking, food writing, and food history. I wanted to write a dissertation on monastic diets, to see if our cloistered friends actually followed the dietary advice that they dutifully preserved. Struggling to find sources about food, my extraordinary advisor Mike Shank suggested I look at texts about poison remedies to see if they talked about food. Then I noticed a lot of medieval and early modern texts about poison. They seemed really interesting.
So thus began the “poison chapter” of my life, which focused on late medieval and early modern medical texts on poison. I wrote a boring but I think somewhat insightful book about it. Reveling in its own pedantry, it shows how physicians cultivated a distinct genre of poison literature in which they explored the natural philosophy of poison, debating its existence and wide range of meanings. So, no food, really. But a really cool natural philosophy meets medicine project.
For over a decade I have worked and published in various facets of digital history/humanities. Early on I focused on computational history, digital editing, and data visualization. More recently my interests have shifted toward two distinct aspects of digital history: 1) Using technology to encourage others to engage in the fundamental questions of the humanities; 2) developing post-custodial, community-based archives that can help facilitate a new kind of historical record and new kinds of historical research.
When I’m not experimenting with new digital forms of history and archives, I like trying to grow food in harsh desert climates, starting (and occasionally finishing) DIY projects around the house (which entails many hours of research with YouTube videos and chat forums—a truly fascinating window onto American DIY culture), and making awkward event flyers to remind myself why a design career will always be out of reach. I’m a closet bike geek. I enjoy the absurdity of middle-distance triathlons.
This site is run through GitHub Pages, a free hosting platform through GitHub. Individual pages are written in Markdown, which makes it super easy to write and edit webpages without code getting in the way, uploaded/committed to my GitHub repository and rendered (via a tool called Jekyll) by GitHub Pages into the website. It’s easy, maintenance-free, and extremely flexible. Over a decade ago (!) I jotted down a few reflections on my switch from Wordpress to GitHub, which continue to hold true.