Author Spotlight: Amy Hackney Blackwell & Christopher W. Blackwell

 

Amy Hackney Blackwell & Christopher W. Blackwell are the authors of Hijacking Shared Heritage: Cultural Artifacts and Intellectual Property Rights, which will be featured in the upcoming issue, Vol. 13 No. 1.

Amy Hackney Blackwell holds faculty appointments at Furman University and Clemson University, both in upstate South Carolina. Her current projects include researching historic botany for the Botanica Caroliniana, planning collections policy for the National Botanical Gardens, and writing an encyclopedia of science for the educational publisher, Gale Cengage.

Dr. Hackney Blackwell graduated with an A.B. in History and Medieval and Renaissance Studies from Duke University. After two years teaching English in Japan through The Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Programme, she attended University of Virginia School of Law. She practiced law in Greenville, South Carolina, for several years. Since 2000, she has worked as a writer. Her books include Mythology for Dummies with Christopher W. Blackwell, LSAT for Dummies, The Essential Law Dictionary, Career Launcher: Law, and The Everything Irish History and Heritage Book. She has written hundreds of articles on topics ranging from employment law to chemical compounds. In 2013, she received her Ph.D. in Plant and Environmental Science at Clemson University, focusing on maximizing the research and education potential of living and preserved scientific collections and the implications of the Convention on Biological Diversity to U.S. collections institutions. She is engaged in ongoing research at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris and the Natural History Museum in London, publishing new findings on plant collections assembled in the 1700s by Mark Catesby, John Lawson, André Michaux, and other early American explorers. She is also a competitive ballroom dancer and is currently homeschooling her two children.

Christopher W. Blackwell is currently the Louis G. Forgione University Professor and Chair of the Department of Classics at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. He holds a B.A. in Classics from Marlboro College, Vermont, and a Ph.D. in Classics from Duke University. He has served on the faculty of Furman University since 1995.

Professor Blackwell’s professional activities include Greek history, Greek epic poetry, digital library infrastructure, and computational image analysis. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He has conducted digitization work at the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice, at the Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial in Madrid, at the British Library and Natural History Museum in London, and at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. He has lectured on topics in computer science and their application to the humanities at King’s College, London, the University of Leipzig, and Leiden University. His work on networked services for identification and retrieval of data through generic protocols has defined widely adopted standards for scholarly publication and communication. He is the co-author of Alexander the Great: The Story of an Ancient Life with Thomas Martin. He was the 2009 recipient of the Alistair G. Furman and Janie Earle Furman Award for Meritorious Teaching, Furman University’s highest teaching award.