PDF of slides for a panel presentation on Jane-Austen and Regency-themed video games.

Although we have long discussed the rise of consumer culture and the increase of print in Restoration England (see Birth of a Consumer Society, 1982), comparatively little information exists on specific methods publishers used to advertise to audiences and what role they played in creating new markets. My project fills this gap by examining…[Read more]

In late 1991, an editor at the Sunday New York Times Book Review asked me to write a feature article about that uniquely American genre, the Indian captivity narrative. When the editor called, I was dean of the College of Humanities at the University of Arizona. I accepted the Times assignment in hopes that writing this article might prove a…[Read more]

Fantastic tales of rebellious robots and animated artifacts are a permanent fixture in popular culture and have been since antiquity. What kind of behavior do we expect from conceptual hybrids in science fiction, nonsense poetry, and surrealist art?

372 [HUM] 19th Century Literature of the British Empire and the Americas. 3 credit hours. Literary and cultural texts in English from 1800 to 1900 focusing on global British literature and literatures of the Americas.

My investment in the course.
I am concerned about our country’s inability to work against climate change, the mass i…[Read more]

Theories of the public sphere and of imagined political communities of shared reading have had lasting effects on the theoretical conceptualization of Americanist book history, but they also largely overlook the materiality of texts in ways that early and nineteenth-century American readers and writers did not. This essay reads early and…[Read more]

This essay examines a longstanding normative assumption in the historiography of slavery in the Atlantic world: that enslaved Africans and their American-born descendants were bought and sold as “commodities,” thereby “dehumanizing” them and treating them as things rather than as persons. Such claims have, indeed, helped historians concept…[Read more]

This, the first critical collection on Delarivier Manley, revisits the most heated discussions and adds new perspectives that will change the conversation on the foremost woman writer in the age of Queen Anne. This compilation demonstrates the wide range of thinking about Manley’s literary production and significance. While contributors r…[Read more]

Between 1694 and 1757, there were at least five adaptations of Behn’s “The History of the Nun; or The Fair Vow Breaker”. Modern critics have focused on Thomas Southerne’s play, “The Fatal Marriage: or, the Innocent Adultery” (1694), David Garrick’s 1757 revision of Southerne’s play into the tragedy, “Isabella: or, the Fatal Marriage,” and Jane…[Read more]

In this paper we present a statistical method for inferring historical social networks from biographical documents as well as the scholarly aims for doing so. Existing scholarship on historical social networks is scattered across an unmanageable number of disparate books and articles. A researcher interested in how persons were connected to one…[Read more]

Claude Dupin published two versions of his critique of the Esprit des lois: Réflexions sur quelques parties d’un livre intitulé ‘De l’esprit des loix,’ in 2 volumes, which appeared in 1749 and was suppressed by the author; and Observations sur un livre intitulé de l’Esprit des loix, in three volumes, published before 1755 and also suppressed.…[Read more]

Panelists explore the research impact of digital scholarship. How is it enabling novel yet critical questions and discoveries otherwise unimaginable? What new paradigms for authorship, attribution, scholarly work, audience, and value are emerging? If research and teaching inform each other, how does their give-and-take play out for humanists…[Read more]