The rhetoric of “excellence” is pervasive across the academy. It is used to refer to research outputs as well as researchers, theory and education, individuals and organizations, from art history to zoology. But does “excellence” actually mean anything? Does this pervasive narrative of “excellence” do any good? Drawing on a range of sources we…[Read more]

In the past, Palestinian cinema was dominated by a nationalist discourse revolving around refugee ideology, resulting from the trauma of the lost homeland. As the past is generally static, revisiting it became an exercise in nostalgia. The last decade, however, has seen the emergence of a number of transnational Palestinian films telling stories…[Read more]

The attached syllabus was written for my Spring 2017 Freshman Year Seminar course “How We Read.” This was a freshman-only seminar oriented towards introducing how different fields ask questions and solve problems. From the course description: “In this seminar, we explore the histories, sciences, and technologies of reading. Guest lectures and…[Read more]

The attached syllabus was written for my Spring 2017 graduate course “Technologies of Literary Production.” From the course description: “This course has two complementary goals. The first is to introduce the history of technologies used to produce and circulate literature, from the parchment upon which Beowulf is written to the social media…[Read more]

Peer review’s importance in academic research and scholarship suggests that it may present a particularly challenging and useful design problem for the digital humanities. How might scholars who are particularly engaged with the challenges presented by networks for the gathering, structuring, and analysis of data work together to develop flexible…[Read more]

Syllabus for a graduate level methods survey (introductory) course for the digital humanities. Taught Fall 2016 at Dartmouth College for the Masters of Arts in Liberal Studies (MALS) program.

Steering committee’s opening roundtable for conference on the present and future of digital humanities at UVA: the career path of a feminist who embraced “A Cyborg Manifesto,” learned to love bibliography, libraries, and technology, and urges cross-pollination: “thrilling tedium of growing things together,” getting our hands dirty in humanist…[Read more]

This essay examines the influence and effects of water in post-colonial African American women of the Gullah and Gee-Chee cultures from the sea islands of Georgia and south Carolina, reviewing the ecological theory of phenotypes establishing the eco-boundaries of the resulting pure-selves through the examination of one film and a novel: Julie…[Read more]

Recent theorizations of archival silence signal a heightened and expanding concern with information that is lost, concealed, destroyed or simply not available for scholarly use. As our access to the archive becomes more dependent upon technologies of the interface, scholars exhibit increasing concern about the impact of digital affordances and…[Read more]

This chapter explores the strange intimacies of dis/avowal that obtain between Holocaust studies and postcolonial theory, with particular reference to writing by Aimé Césaire and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. For all that the Jewish body remains, by and large, unmourned in the canonical texts of postcolonial theory, the Holocaust has, I seek to a…[Read more]

In his address at the Madrid Peace Conference, the Head of the Palestinian Delegation, Dr Haidar Abdul-Shafi challenged the persistent myth that has defined Palestinian existence for at least a century by saying: “For too long the Palestinian people have gone unheeded, silenced […] we have been victimized by the myth of ‘a land witho…[Read more]