This essay looks to the near history of copyright, commercially licensed resources, and fair use that shapes digital scholarship on nineteenth-century periodicals today. Using the digitization of British Library newspapers as a case study, I demonstrate how arguments about access to public domain materials do not fully account for the complex…[Read more]

This essay looks to the near history of copyright, commercially licensed resources, and fair use that shapes digital scholarship on nineteenth-century periodicals today. Using the digitization of British Library newspapers as a case study, I demonstrate how arguments about access to public domain materials do not fully account for the complex…[Read more]

Students learn more when they play—while the value of play often is emphasized only for those early in their education, play has a role in higher education as well. To teach book history across time and space, I developed two card games: Codex Conquest (http://codexconquest.lib.uiowa.edu/) and Mark (under development: h…[Read more]

Teaching Book History through Card Games: Codex Conquest and Mark
Amy Hildreth Chen, English and American Literature Librarian, University of Iowa
Students learn more when they play—while the value of play often is emphasized only for those early in their education, play has a role in higher education as well. To teach book history across t…[Read more]

This is the Introduction to Rural Modernity in Britain: A Critical Intervention (Edinburgh UP, October 2018), which argues that the rural areas of Britain were impacted by modernisation just as much – if not more – than urban and suburban areas. It is the first study of modernity and modernism to focus on rural people and places that experienced…[Read more]

This is the Introduction to Rural Modernity in Britain: A Critical Intervention (Edinburgh UP, October 2018), which argues that the rural areas of Britain were impacted by modernisation just as much – if not more – than urban and suburban areas. It is the first study of modernity and modernism to focus on rural people and places that experienced…[Read more]

Introduction to the new feminists modernisms in the inaugural issue of Feminist Modernist Studies.

In 1526, royal refiner and natural historian Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1478-1557) praised the singular quality of the “muchos tesoros de oro labrado / en poder delos indios q̄ se hā cōquistado” (lxv, v). By 1535, however, he had to define what, exactly, he meant by gold: “No hablo aquí en el oro que se ha habido por rescates, o en la guerra, ni…[Read more]

This talk focuses on peer review models, considering issues of labor and credit within them. It then turns to the ethos of care to discuss how peer-to-peer review processes can be structure with care to ensure that participant labor is valued. The talk ends with a focus on the nature of the labor in peer-to-peer review, arguing that it is…[Read more]

This talk focuses on peer review models, considering issues of labor and credit within them. It then turns to the ethos of care to discuss how peer-to-peer review processes can be structure with care to ensure that participant labor is valued. The talk ends with a focus on the nature of the labor in peer-to-peer review, arguing that it is…[Read more]

Drawing on research in developmental psychology, rhetorical narratology, and cultural history, as well as on digital data mining, this essay seeks to broaden the interdisciplinary and interpretive range of cognitive literary studies.

Drawing on research in developmental psychology, rhetorical narratology, and cultural history, as well as on digital data mining, this essay seeks to broaden the interdisciplinary and interpretive range of cognitive literary studies.

History and theory of video games with a focus on cultural impact.

DTC 392 explores the cultural and historical impact of video games. We will learn about these issues by engaging in a semester-long project where we will prototype a video game. Video games are not just entertainment: they can be art, a form of political resistance, even a way…[Read more]

Digital humanists have a labor problem, but it’s not what you might think. In this chapter, I describe the problem of student labor in digital humanities as I see it, and examine some of the structural issues that drive the use of student labor. I place the labor economy of digital humanities projects within the broader context of the innovation e…[Read more]

This is a paper that I presented at the 2019 MLA in Chicago. In this paper I situate discussions of the field of Iberian Studies within the context of the crisis of the Humanities and the future of Cultural Studies.

This article analyzes Stop-and-Frisk policing within the long history of lynching through the analytical framework of performance studies. Contemporary audio recordings of stop-and-frisk procedures are thought in relation to the historical examples of the Zoot Suit Riots and late 19th-century and early 20th-century lynchings of African Americans.

In light of (re)new(ed) interest in focusing interdisciplinary scholarly attention on the history of capitalism – a focus captured in Edward Baptist’s recent book, The Half has Never Been Told – this essay reads Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel A Mercy as a key text for considering the history of capitalism as central to conceptions of circum-…[Read more]

The purpose of this course is to introduce graduate students to the tools, methods, and history of sinology. Sinology refers to the study of China as performed in a philological manner. Philology refers to the historical study of language and literature in its fullest context. It is inherently interdisciplinary. It draws on the fields of…[Read more]