This is a position paper for an upcoming workshop convened by the Council of Graduate Schools on rethinking the dissertation. In it, I reflect on what new technologies enable us to do with this critical milestone in graduate study. My main argument is that while the affordances of specific technologies can be exciting, more important is the shift…[Read more]

In an essay entitled “Digital Blake,” J. Hillis-Miller (2006) asks a question which dominates discussions of William Blake’s relationship to New Media: “[w]ould Blake have approved of the William Blake Archive?” (p29). The Archive has itself been the focus of enormous theoretical reflection. The “Articles about the Archive” section on the Archive…[Read more]

In an essay entitled “Digital Blake,” J. Hillis-Miller (2006) asks a question which dominates discussions of William Blake’s relationship to New Media: “[w]ould Blake have approved of the William Blake Archive?” (p29). The Archive has itself been the focus of enormous theoretical reflection. The “Articles about the Archive” section on the Archive…[Read more]

In an essay entitled “Digital Blake,” J. Hillis-Miller (2006) asks a question which dominates discussions of William Blake’s relationship to New Media: “[w]ould Blake have approved of the William Blake Archive?” (p29). The Archive has itself been the focus of enormous theoretical reflection. The “Articles about the Archive” section on the Archive…[Read more]

Studying William Blake means studying the event of history, the way history merges with and emerges within theology, politics and philosophy. William Blake’s poetry has had a precarious relationship with history; his work resonates from very specific historical concerns and yet also seems to struggle against being confined to any formal h…[Read more]

This essay compares two mid-twentieth century poets of the Americas, Allen Ginsberg and Haroldo de Campos, in view of how their work circa 1960 intersects despite the differences in their poetics. It introduces the notion of the obversal, or the identity among poems through a common history.

Published in PBSA 108.4. Began as the annual address to the Bibliographical Society of America in 2014; also given as the Mann Lecture at Penn State and at RBS in Charlottesville. Inspired, of course, by D. F. McKenzie’s great paper, “Printers of the Mind.”

Published in PBSA 108.4. Began as the annual address to the Bibliographical Society of America in 2014; also given as the Mann Lecture at Penn State and at RBS in Charlottesville. Inspired, of course, by D. F. McKenzie’s great paper, “Printers of the Mind.”

Published in PBSA 108.4. Began as the annual address to the Bibliographical Society of America in 2014; also given as the Mann Lecture at Penn State and at RBS in Charlottesville. Inspired, of course, by D. F. McKenzie’s great paper, “Printers of the Mind.”

Published in PBSA 108.4. Began as the annual address to the Bibliographical Society of America in 2014; also given as the Mann Lecture at Penn State and at RBS in Charlottesville. Inspired, of course, by D. F. McKenzie’s great paper, “Printers of the Mind.”

This essay focuses on the autobiographical strategies deployed by Ambrose Bierce in response to shifting conceptions of the literary representation of everyday life. I place Bierce at the transition point between nineteenth and twentieth-century realism, between an understanding of typical experience as comfortably generic and a growing sense that…[Read more]

his essay positions the use of machine learning within the digital humanities as part of a wider movement that nostalgically seeks to return literary criticism to the structuralist era, to a moment characterized by belief in systems, structure, and the transparency of language. It argues that the scientific criticism of the present attempts to…[Read more]

BACKGROUND This article sets out the economic problems faced by the humanities disciplines in the transition to gold open access and outlines the bases for investigations of collective funding models. Beginning with a series of four problems, it then details the key players in this field and their various approaches to collective “procurement” mec…[Read more]

If you work in a university, you are almost certain to have heard the term ‘open access’ in the past couple of years. You may also have heard either that it is the utopian answer to all the problems of research dissemination or perhaps that it marks the beginning of an apocalyptic new era of ‘pay-to-say’ publishing. In this book, Martin Paul Eve…[Read more]

If you work in a university, you are almost certain to have heard the term ‘open access’ in the past couple of years. You may also have heard either that it is the utopian answer to all the problems of research dissemination or perhaps that it marks the beginning of an apocalyptic new era of ‘pay-to-say’ publishing. In this book, Martin Paul Eve…[Read more]