Why has the 1985 Air India Kanishka bombing not claimed a more prominent place in Canadian history and public memory?

In the summer of 1864, fourteen-year-old Jacob Stroyer was sent to work in Fort Sumter. He did not go willingly. Stroyer was a slave owned by the wealthy Mrs. Matthew R. Singleton and was sent from the large Kensington plantation outside Columbia, SC to labor for the Confederate cause. The Confederate Corps of Engineers called upon slave owners to…[Read more]

Arrested for treason against the British Crown and deported to the penal colonies of Australia, the Irish revolutionary John Boyle O’Reilly managed to escape to the United States and within a few years became one of Boston’s most prominent political and literary figures, one of the best known Irish immigrants in the United States and one of the…[Read more]

This article explores editorial practice in the British and North American periodicals between c.1800 and c.1850. The article uses a Transatlantic studies approach.

The following is a response delivered at the end of the Critical Infrastructure Studies Panel, which took place at the January 2018 Modern Language Association Conference in New York City. This response argues that the call for critical infrastructure studies can ultimately help us mobilize a critically informed resistance to capital and set of…[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]

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.

In a follow-up installment in 1839 to the anonymously authored Recollections of Slavery by a Runaway Slave, the narrator testifies that a Charleston slave speculator known as “Major Ross” had sold his brother. The narrator notes that Ross lives in “a nice little white house, on the right hand side of King street as you go in from the country…[Read more]

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 course considers literary experiment instigated by the Internet and exercised on both analogue and digital platforms. When we think of “hacking,” we frequently think of solitary computer programmers in dark rooms. But hacking also implies a culture of profane disruption that closely mirrors developments in literary experimentation over the…[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]

This chapter explores how a culture of transatlantic environmental journalism emerged during the early to middle decades of the nineteenth century. How did interest in science, travel and exploration during those years shape the ways in which North American and British magazines represented the natural environment? To what extent did articles in…[Read more]