Since then, the initiative has grown under the leadership of Dr. Jamila Moore Pewu to include: a long running DH Colloquium series and Keynote address; several grant funded digital public humanities projects, multiple cohorts of graduate students pursuing fully digital MA projects; two new courses in digital humanities theory and practice, and successful collaborations with CSUF’s digital literacy librarian Colleen Robledo Greene and other faculty and library staff who are invested in establishing communities of practice to support digital scholarship, digital literacy and community engaged digital ethnic studies broadly.

To formalize these collaborations and build campus leadership around supporting & sustaining digital scholarship at CSUF, Dr. Moore Pewu began applying for institutional capacity building grants, and in 2021 these efforts were rewarded with the largest single contribution to CSUF’s Digital Humanities initiative, a three-year, $3 Million capacity building grant from the Andrew A. Mellon Foundation. The Mellon Funded Digital Ethnic Futures Grant, supports the establishment of a national consortium of professionals engaged in digital humanities research, teaching, and ethnic studies at regional public colleges and universities.

As a Co-Principle Investigator, on this grant and a lead institution in the DEFCon consortium, Dr. Moore Pewu and the CSUF DEFCon team are cultivating and training the next generation of Digital Humanities practitioners from amongst CSUF’s faculty and staff, with the expectation that they will craft innovative research and pedagogical experiences that center first-generation and minority students along with the communities they call home into the broad fields of digital humanities and digital studies.