In this article, I examine how Sissieretta Jones (frequently described as America’s first Black superstar, among other superlatives) strategically leveraged her European performance reviews in order to increase her listenership and wages in the United States. Jones toured Europe for the first (and only) time from February until November in 1895. A…[Read more]

In this short essay I discuss two new translations of Helmuth Plessner’s work, “Political Anthropology,” translated by Nils F. Schott (Northwestern University Press, 2018), and “Levels of Organic Life and the Human: An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology,” translated by Millay Hyatt (Fordham University Press, 2019).

Syllabus for spring 2021 graduate seminar, “Approaches to the Material Text.” Readings survey in history of the book and related fields. Includes prose introductions synthesizing each week’s readings.

Birds are everywhere in nineteenth-century American literature, including the work of Emily Dickinson. Women poets often referred to their poems in terms of making songs. This essay rethinks the birds in Dickinson’s letters and poems. It suggests that Dickinson’s birds, and their songs, show her awareness of business. They exist within com…[Read more]

Syllabus for the English ENG921 course, “Narrative in a Digital Age” for the Winter 2021 semester, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada.

In an early version of his article “Harlem Literati in the Twenties,” first published in the Saturday Evening Review in 1940, Langston Hughes offers the curious suggestion that Wallace Thurman was the ghostwriter of Men, Marriage and Me (erroneously written as Men, Women and Checks in Hughes’ article), the tell-all memoir ostensibly by the origi…[Read more]

The attached is the schedule that I devised for an entry-level, cross-disciplinary grad course in digital humanities, offered across several schools and departments. It is licensed by Creative Commons as Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International, meaning that you are free to adapt and repurpose it for non-commercial uses as long as…[Read more]

In Nobel laureate Kawabata Yasunari’s novel Snow Country, the protagonist Shimamura refers to an “old book” which gave him in-depth knowledge about the region known in Japan as the “Snow Country”. The name of the book is not disclosed by Kawabata, but it is now known that the “old book” is Hokuetsu Seppu (first published in 1837), written by Su…[Read more]

This is the syllabus for the Spring 2021 section of Texts & Technology in History, which will be taught synchronously via Zoom at UCF as part of the PhD in T&T. This iteration of the course particularly considers whose texts are archived, who shapes our technologies, and which histories are preserved and retold.

The syllabus for the Spring 2021 asynchronous online course “Theory & Practice of Interactive Storytelling,” which includes both critical and creative projects, and uses Twine, Inform 7, and Ren’Py.

Introduction to a special issue on Renaissance post-humanism and its afterlives.

Introduction to a special issue on Renaissance post-humanism and its afterlives.

Projects that bridge the humanities and sciences often attract attention from journalists, but evoke dismay from humanists who feel that their subjects of expertise have been misinterpreted. For the humanities to reclaim a place of pride in public conversation, humanists themselves need to embrace interdisciplinarity and take the lead in this…[Read more]

The current mechanisms by which scholars and their work are evaluated across higher education are unsustainable and, we argue, increasingly corrosive. Relying on a limited set of proxy measures, current systems of evaluation fail to recognize and reward the many dependencies upon which a healthy scholarly ecosystem relies. Drawing on the work of…[Read more]

The current mechanisms by which scholars and their work are evaluated across higher education are unsustainable and, we argue, increasingly corrosive. Relying on a limited set of proxy measures, current systems of evaluation fail to recognize and reward the many dependencies upon which a healthy scholarly ecosystem relies. Drawing on the work of…[Read more]

This paper argues for the need for a Literary Platform Studies in order to develop a full understanding of electronic literary work. Understanding the authoring platforms used to create interactive digital stories enable a more nuanced and sophisticated appreciation of the procedural creativity of these works. The paper examines Twine…[Read more]

HuMetricsHSS strives to cultivate an academy that’s inclusive, open, collaborative, collegial, and generous. A scholarly life well-lived does not allow harassment in any form. This code of conduct governs the environment of our meetings, workshops, interactions, and communications, and exists to remind us of our values as we interact with others.

A report on the creation of a prototype digital edition of a REED collection. Includes “Guidelines for REED at-codes Application and TEI P5 Markup” (Appendix C).