The attached syllabus was written for my Honors undergraduate seminar “The Art of the Book in the Digital Age,” taught Fall 2016 at UNC Chapel Hill. Here is an excerpt from the course description: “The book’s role and significance within literary culture is being scrutinized today with an intensity unseen for five centuries. Nowhere is this quest…[Read more]

This chapter illuminates a different sense in which Gentili’s work was influenced by humanist sensibilities. Differentiating between legal humanism (the mos Gallicus) on one hand and rhetorical humanism on the other, it argues that Gentili did not subscribe to the rigid historical approach to legal sources as practised by the French humanist…[Read more]

In this paper we present a statistical method for inferring historical social networks from biographical documents as well as the scholarly aims for doing so. Existing scholarship on historical social networks is scattered across an unmanageable number of disparate books and articles. A researcher interested in how persons were connected to one…[Read more]

In this paper we present a statistical method for inferring historical social networks from biographical documents as well as the scholarly aims for doing so. Existing scholarship on historical social networks is scattered across an unmanageable number of disparate books and articles. A researcher interested in how persons were connected to one…[Read more]

In this paper we present a statistical method for inferring historical social networks from biographical documents as well as the scholarly aims for doing so. Existing scholarship on historical social networks is scattered across an unmanageable number of disparate books and articles. A researcher interested in how persons were connected to one…[Read more]

Syllabus for a final-year undergraduate course on Modern Periodicals, exploring late 19th and early 20th-century magazines and newspapers from the UK, US and Canada.

Anxieties abound regarding the ostensible obsolescence of the book. Exploring whether the book is in fact becoming obsolete — and what it might mean if it were — requires thinking distinctly about the specific material form of the book (the codex) and about the content that it has long carried. If the form were to change — becoming digital, for i…[Read more]

C. S. Lewis’s fourth Narnian chronicle is considered as detective fiction, illustrating principles for solving a murder mystery, especially alertness to the difference between appearance and reality. The human protagonists nearly fail through carelessness, overconfidence, and forgetfulness, combined with the deceit and magic of a shape-shifting v…[Read more]

This course examines the literary, cultural, and material life of written correspondence from the poetic epistle to the snarky tweet. And while we will read and analyze epistolary literature (both fiction and nonfiction) such as Ovid’s Heroides, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and
Alice Walker’s A Color Purple, we focus our efforts on “real” letters o…[Read more]

This paper describes approaches I use to teach Shakespeare’s The Tempest using intertextuality in the undergraduate introductory literature course.

Critics have long used the heuristic device of opposing John Milton and Thomas Hobbes, but this essay explores surprising affinities between the two. After observing that Milton and other Restoration dissenters often agreed with Hobbes on questions of ecclesiastic jurisdiction and toleration nearly as much as they disagreed with what seemed at…[Read more]

In THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR, a cozening knight and a jealous husband assume without question the availability of female bodies to adulterous liaisons, revealing their confidence in the cultural narrative of female inconstancy. Falstaff attempts to write a story in which he is the recipient of the wives’ sexual and economic favors. Ford, like T…[Read more]