An introduction to a newly published edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

Christina Rossetti, sexuality, narrative poems

This paper analyzes Walt Whitman’s American Civil War poems in his collection Drum-Taps
in comparison with the poetry written by British soldier-poets of WWI. These poems present
Whitman as a problematic model for future generations of war poets since he hardly ever
questions the meaninglessness of bloodshed in the battlefield, a trait which i…[Read more]

The text of the job talk that I gave for my position as Head of Graduate Programs in the Scholars’ Lab at the UVA Library. The talk argued that the position as advocate for graduate students and facilitator of collaborative DH pedagogy required a person to think in terms of prepositions. Such a position requires making connections across the…[Read more]

How does our daily mindreading—that is, our attribution and misattribution of mental states (such as thoughts, feelings, and intentions) to ourselves and others—differ from the mindreading we engage in when we read fiction? I have argued elsewhere (e.g., “Secret Life of Fiction,” PMLA, 2015) that drama, novels, and narrative poetry play and exp…[Read more]

This essay draws on cognitive literary theory to offer new ways of reading Cao Xueqin’s classic novel Dream of the Red Chamber (紅樓夢) aka The Story of the Stone.

The Manifesto of Modern Digital Humanities is an avant-garde statement regarding digital methodologies used by scholars of modernist literature and culture. Its experimental format uses handwritten HTML to mimic the typographical qualities of modernist literary manifestoes.

The Manifesto of Modern Digital Humanities is an avant-garde statement regarding digital methodologies used by scholars of modernist literature and culture. Its experimental format uses handwritten HTML to mimic the typographical qualities of modernist literary manifestoes.

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]

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]

Why We Read Fiction focuses on one of the most exciting areas of research in contemporary cognitive psychology known as “Theory of Mind” and discusses its implications for literary studies. It covers a broad range of fictional narratives, from Richardson’s Clarissa, Dostoyevski’s Crime and Punishment, and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to Woolf’s…[Read more]

This essay explores how the early American stage functioned as an incubator for ideas about national identity, artistic expression, and masculinity. Reading four plays from the early years of the Republic – Royall Tyler’s The Contrast, William Dunlap’s Andre´, John Augustus Stone’s Metamora, and Robert Montgomery Bird’s The Gladiator, I demonstrat…[Read more]

To understand the Oulipo’s forays into computer science and more importantly, why they abandoned them, I designed and carried out one of the inaugural projects of the Princeton Center for Digital Humanities. The goal was twofold: first, through exploratory programming, I intended to create interactive, digital annexes to accompany my doctoral…[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]

In 1941, Orhan Veli Kanik, Melih Cevdet Anday, and Oktay Rifat Horozcu, published a poetic manifesto, called Garip (or Strange), that heralded a new period in modern Turkish poetry, known as “The Garip Movement.” In the manifesto, Kanik, Anday, and Rifat declared a total aesthetic break from the conventions of the classical Ottoman poetry, and cha…[Read more]