Viola Muse Digital Edition

The Viola Muse Digital Edition (VMDE) presents the notes and draft narratives of Viola B. Muse (1898-1981), who worked from 1936 through 1939 as an interviewer and writer in the Negro Writers Unit of the Florida Federal Writers Project in Jacksonville, Florida. Muse and the other writers in the Negro Writers Unit, including Zora Neale Hurston, attempted to document the achievements and folkways of African American communities in Florida, and in Jacksonville specifically. 

Faculty Project Leaders

Dr. Laura Heffernan is an associate professor of English at UNF. She works on nineteenth and twentieth-century literature and culture, with a particular focus on histories of reading and histories of literary criticism. She helped develop the Digital Humanities minor at UNF and, in 2019-21, she served as Director of UNF's Digital Humanities Institute. 

Dr. Tru Leverette is an associate professor of English and the director of African-American/African Diaspora studies at UNF. Her areas of expertise include African-American Literature, Race and Ethnicity in American Literature, Cultural Studies, and Women's and Gender Studies. She received a Ph.D. in English (American Literature) at the University of Florida. 

Dr. Clayton McCarl is the director of the International Studies Program at UNF and an associate professor of Spanish, Latin American literature and culture, and digital humanities. He leads coloniaLab, the North Florida Editorial Workshop, and Editing the Eartha M.M. White Collection. He was the founding director of the Digital Humanities Institute from 2018-2019.