This is the PowerPoint presentation to accompany my comments for the Theoretical Foundations of Victorian Studies roundtable on January 7, 2021.

This essay draws on formalist cultural studies and material feminism to argue for a new approach in modernist studies, which I call formalist materialism, an approach that reads ecological forms alongside aesthetic forms. Such an approach may have distinct advantages. Formalist materialism illuminates a new direction for formalists by connecting…[Read more]

This is the syllabus for the Spring 2021 section of Texts & Technology in History, which will be taught synchronously via Zoom at UCF as part of the PhD in T&T. This iteration of the course particularly considers whose texts are archived, who shapes our technologies, and which histories are preserved and retold.

The syllabus for the Spring 2021 asynchronous online course “Theory & Practice of Interactive Storytelling,” which includes both critical and creative projects, and uses Twine, Inform 7, and Ren’Py.

Projects that bridge the humanities and sciences often attract attention from journalists, but evoke dismay from humanists who feel that their subjects of expertise have been misinterpreted. For the humanities to reclaim a place of pride in public conversation, humanists themselves need to embrace interdisciplinarity and take the lead in this…[Read more]

The book: it’s a soothingly familiar technology, one we all know how to operate. Open the front covers to reveal the text; turn the page to continue reading. Yet even the most seemingly ordinary aspects of the book, like titles and page numbers, had to be invented. In this course, we will work to defamiliarize the book, investigating how the f…[Read more]

The current mechanisms by which scholars and their work are evaluated across higher education are unsustainable and, we argue, increasingly corrosive. Relying on a limited set of proxy measures, current systems of evaluation fail to recognize and reward the many dependencies upon which a healthy scholarly ecosystem relies. Drawing on the work of…[Read more]

This paper argues for the need for a Literary Platform Studies in order to develop a full understanding of electronic literary work. Understanding the authoring platforms used to create interactive digital stories enable a more nuanced and sophisticated appreciation of the procedural creativity of these works. The paper examines Twine…[Read more]

A report on the creation of a prototype digital edition of a REED collection. Includes “Guidelines for REED at-codes Application and TEI P5 Markup” (Appendix C).

Prior to the advent of the printing press, the page—the medieval manuscript page—was often complexly multimodal, containing elaborate scripts, rubrications, and illuminations; the medieval page was a multimedia experience for its community of readers, viewers, and listeners. Both writing and the page are, and always were, visual: rendered in mul…[Read more]

Prior to the advent of the printing press, the page—the medieval manuscript page—was often complexly multimodal, containing elaborate scripts, rubrications, and illuminations; the medieval page was a multimedia experience for its community of readers, viewers, and listeners. Both writing and the page are, and always were, visual: rendered in mul…[Read more]

In the opening of Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen (1904), the protagonist, Elizabeth, comes across Marianne North’s autobiography, Recollections of a Happy Life (1894) and her description of the bathing near Putbus, “a sandy cove where the water was always calm, and of how you floated about on its crystal surface, and be…[Read more]

It is apparent that George Eliot’s novels were heavily engaged with development in natural history; her metaphors made use of and reflected on mid-1800s discussions of evolution and taxonomy. In this essay, research in science history and Eliot studies leads to evidence of how, in Felix Holt (1866), Eliot was influenced by evolutionary s…[Read more]