Draft work (notes and bibliography not included) from one of my books in progress tentatively titled Against the Cultural Singularity: Digital Humanities & Critical Infrastructure Studies. Excerpted are a few portions from the beginning of the manuscript that bear on the critical potential of the digital humanities and critique.

Literary scholars’ conversations about distant reading have spent too much time pitting it against close reading, and not enough time understanding connections to other disciplines. Distant reading is better understood as part of a methodological shift that has permitted humanists and social scientists to build stronger interdisciplinary connections.

This essay explores the meanings and effects of postcolonial authors’ recent refashioning of classical historical fiction. That refashioning has two aims: a materialist cartography that counters the nationalist vocation of classical historical fiction by revealing the supra-national, global aspirations of colonial capitalism as a system; and an e…[Read more]

This syllabus delineates the readings and assignments for an advanced undergraduate course on the history and theory of the novel taught in fall 2014 at the University of Georgia.

A book review of Jerome McGann’s A New Republic of Letters: Memory and Scholarship in the Age of Digital Reproduction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

A reflection on the state of the archive in the state of post-theory.

This course, designed for a graduate program in education which focuses on leadership, explores works of literature that have had a significant cultural impact and shaped ways in which societies view social issues from the perspective of how leadership is enacted within the texts. For students from disciplines outside of literature studies, this…[Read more]

In this essay, I follow debates about forms and sites of memorialization in post- Soviet Belarus. Begun during perestroika, the public discussions about Khatyn’ and Kuropaty eventually evolved into persistent attempts to realign the Soviet past along new narrative axes. Most prominently, this discursive reformatting of the socialist experience w…[Read more]

In lieu of an abstract, here is the beginning of the chapter:

Ungleichzeitigkeit and global modernisms

Over the last twenty-five years, the modernist canon has been significantly revised as theoretical and empirical interventions have emphasised its transnational and globalised patterns of connection through a range of disciplinary…[Read more]

In lieu of an abstract, here is the beginning of the chapter:

Ungleichzeitigkeit and global modernisms

Over the last twenty-five years, the modernist canon has been significantly revised as theoretical and empirical interventions have emphasised its transnational and globalised patterns of connection through a range of disciplinary…[Read more]

This article explores what Gershom Scholem has called Herbert Marcuse’s “unacknowledged ties to [his] Jewish heritage.” At the core of Marcuse’s vision of transformed, non-repressive social relations, I argue, is a struggle over time, which rests upon a distinctly Jewish approach to the twin questions of remembrance and redemption. One example…[Read more]

In lieu of an abstract, here is the beginning of the article: In a recent discussion of modernism, Peter Osborne argues that the terms “modern,” “modernity,” and “modernization” need to be understood through their shared philosophical status as temporal constructions. The emergence of the modern within Western philosophy is predicated on a subjec…[Read more]

In lieu of an abstract, here is the beginning of the article:

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of communism in the former Soviet bloc, the concept of utopia was blighted with the stigma of Stalinist totalitarianism. Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s despotism at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party in 195…[Read more]

A review of Alexander R. Galloway, Laruelle Against the Digital.

A review of Warren Montag, Althusser and His Contemporaries: Philosophy’s Perpetual War (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 256pp., $23.95 pb ISBN: 978-0-8223-9904-9.