This course is a study of the literature of the U.S.-Mexico border from the 1980s to the present. We begin with Gloria Anzaldúa’s foundational texts, Borderlands / La Frontera, and her landmark feminist anthology, co-edited with Cherríe Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Radical Writings by Women of Color. We then consider the legacies and aft…[Read more]

Part of the Digital Media MA / Texts & Technology PhD Digital Media track at the University of Central Florida. In this graduate course, we’ll engage with the making and critique of interactive works ranging from “Choose Your Own Adventure” comics to electronic literature and interactive fiction. Drawing on readings including Janet Murray’s Hamlet…[Read more]

In late-ninth-century China, poetry and meditation became equated — not just metaphorically, but as two equally valid means of achieving stillness and insight. This article discusses how several strands in literary and Buddhist discourses fed into an assertion about such a unity by the poet-monk Qiji 齊己 (864–937?). One strand was the aesthet…[Read more]

This article traces the breadfruit tree’s strange career as an eighteenth-century superfood, its journey from the Pacific world to the Caribbean islands, and the rhetorical practices, epistemological slippages, and linguistic permutations that undergirded these developments. Comparing indigenous, Spanish, English, Dutch, French, and US-American d…[Read more]

In the Arab world, Beckett’s plays or their adaptations have not only been popular with audiences and directors but have also inspired other literary and media genres. The Beckettian wait itself has become synonymous with the condition of the Arab person. It is a wait that offers an unrealized potential of hope that reverberates with the d…[Read more]

Building Digital Archives as We Fight, a panel sponsored by the Digital Humanities Caucus of the American Studies Association, will consider the affordances and challenges of building digital archives, as well as the ethical dimensions of using emerging technologies that affect the process and pace of digital archiving. Drawing on firsthand…[Read more]

Chapter 21 of The Routledge Companion to Media Technology and Obsolescence, ed. Mark J.P. Wolf (New York and London: Routledge, 2019): 296-310.

As the digital humanities have rapidly gained prominence and attention over the last decade, learning has shifted from individual experiences at training environments such as THATCamps and Institutes to more formal institutional instruction. This means that the number of people teaching digital humanities (DH) has had to increase. Who are these…[Read more]

This special issue of the Journal of Creative Writing Studies centers on how creative writing changes when writers actively engage computers as nonhuman collaborators in “creative making.” Using examples from McGurl’s The Program Era, Emily Dickinson, and the crowdsourced “translation” of Melville’s classic into Emoji Dick, Berens suggests th…[Read more]

Syllabus for ENGL 64.05 “Cultural Analytics,” taught Fall 2019 at Dartmouth College.

This panel will consider the changing landscape of research support for digitally-inflected scholarship in higher education through the lens of digital humanities project management. Digital humanists acting as project managers must continually adapt their practices in response to shifting institutional priorities and concomitant changes in the…[Read more]

This review essay approaches Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller’s Thinking Literature across Continents (2016) from a set of questions about what it means to read in the age of hyperarchival accumulation. Written against the background of events in the United States and elsewhere during the fall of 2017, the essay tracks and assesses Ghosh and…[Read more]

Syllabus for ENGL 479P: BookLab, an upper-division undergraduate course at the University of Maryland. Taught with the resources and facilities of the Department of English’s BookLab, the course is a historical, imaginative, and experiential introduction to the multitudinous forms of what is not the oldest but is surely among the most enduring of…[Read more]

This chapter examines the tendency of readers of Thoreau’s 1864 book “The Maine Woods” to read the landscape through which Thoreau travels as pristine wilderness. I argue, by contrast, that Thoreau presented a social landscape, a “working-forest” avant-la-lettre.