A two-page abstract of the book.

The following is a response delivered at the end of the Critical Infrastructure Studies Panel, which took place at the January 2018 Modern Language Association Conference in New York City. This response argues that the call for critical infrastructure studies can ultimately help us mobilize a critically informed resistance to capital and set of…[Read more]

A survey of the foundational disciplines of literate culture in the British isles, from the failure of the Roman imperial project in the fifth century to Henry VIII’s promulgation of uniform Latin grammars in 1540-42.

Grammar and rhetoric were the disciplines charged with teaching correct and effective use of language in antiquity. In the M…[Read more]

Looking from a distance, as a condition of knowledge, participates within a long-standing Western tradition of power relations. This article considers the use of “distant reading” as theorized by Franco Moretti in his book by the same title and suggests that the method of literary analysis that uses such a metaphor should be aware and critical of…[Read more]

As in other early language traditions, premodern English poetry was written out with very light punctuation. The sparsity of manuscript punctuation appears especially problematic in the period before 1200, when poetry in English lacked visual linebreaks. The difficulties of parsing this poetry are substantial. Modern editors of Old English verse…[Read more]

Document annotation is almost as old as writing. The designers of the World Wide Web envisioned a system that would allow people to publicly annotate any document. The advent of cloud computing has finally made this feasible: distributed annotation systems like Hypothes.is allow users to save annotations privately, or share them with the public.…[Read more]

Document annotation is almost as old as writing. The designers of the World Wide Web envisioned a system that would allow people to publicly annotate any document. The advent of cloud computing has finally made this feasible: distributed annotation systems like Hypothes.is allow users to save annotations privately, or share them with the public.…[Read more]

From the twelfth century to the seventeenth, political prophecy was prominent among English literary genres no less than in English political life. Derived from Welsh poetic tradition via Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin History of the Kings of Britain, prophecy reached all social classes. Prophetic texts influenced the decisions of kings, shaped p…[Read more]

Document annotation is almost as old as writing. The designers of the World Wide Web envisioned a system that would allow people to publicly annotate any document. The advent of cloud computing has finally made this feasible: distributed annotation systems like Hypothes.is allow users to save annotations privately, or share them with the public.…[Read more]

I was the invited respondent for this panel of papers jointly-sponsored by the CLCS Celtic and Old English MLA Forums. These are the remarks which I prepared in response to the papers in order to help draw them together into a frame to generate discussion, and which were read for me in abstentia.

Syllabus and Course Reader (Creative Commons Licensed) of survey course of premodern Hispanic literature and culture taught as a series of debates on social questions (see https://davidwacks.uoregon.edu/2017/12/14/survey4/)

Course description: This class introduces students to a variety of texts written in Spain and the New World from 1100-1600…[Read more]

Syllabus and Course Reader (Creative Commons Licensed) of survey course of premodern Hispanic literature and culture taught as a series of debates on social questions (see https://davidwacks.uoregon.edu/2017/12/14/survey4/)

Course description: This class introduces students to a variety of texts written in Spain and the New World from 1100-1600…[Read more]