This presentation explored the implications of constraints on due process and academic freedom in light of contingent faculty hiring.

The purpose of this article is to refl ect upon the process by which two professors in Spanish programs at small liberal arts colleges in the southeastern United States developed courses with civic engagement components that enabled our students to engage with the local Hispanic community in meaningful ways. From the outset, we focused on what we…[Read more]

Blog on writing about writing sessions from MLA 2016

PMLA Forum piece that argues for the direct and indirect value of the scholarly enterprise to the sacred art of teaching.

I argue that The Elements of Style by Strunk and White comes out of a history connecting it to the nineteenth century “conversation handbook” (Connors) and other cultural guides to middlebrow identity formation including The Book-Of-The-Month Club. The Elements of Style is a guide to a genteel language performance rooted in the racialized,…[Read more]

This is a longer version of my conference paper, in which I provide some ideas on how to merge scholarship on 18th-c France, especially the revolutionary period, with the kinds of advocacy promoted by the MLA. I foreground exciting new work done by colleagues in the US, UK, and Italy, and provide a “sneak peek” at materials to be included in the…[Read more]

In this free workshop, children and preteens (age 8-12) creatively explore and expand their sense of self by thinking and writing about their life – past, present, and future. Group activities, games, solitary writing, and illustrating provide for a fun and productive setting. Students will receive individual attention and gradually realize how…[Read more]

One of the hardest concepts to teach first-year composition students is the role of authority in academic writing. How are young adults who have a limited social world view and older adults who have left school for several years expected to assert themselves with confidence? Equally, another difficult threshold concept for FYC students is the act…[Read more]

“The Lore and Lure of the Academic Job Market” is an MLA 2016 special session in which panelists consider how discipline-specific “lore” continually lures graduate students and contingent and full-time faculty members into an already overcrowded job market. Instead of providing advice about getting a job, participants evaluate that advice and gen…[Read more]

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]

The “modern university” is the social institution that has grown beyond the confines of brick and mortar to become a certifying body granting approval to those subjects who pass through its machinery, typically operating under the regulation and supervision of a government-sanctioned system of formalized accreditation. The modern university is ine…[Read more]

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.”

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]