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]

Call for Papers for the Panel at the 2017 Biennial ASLE Conference, Detroit, MI

In this short piece I look at media creations of the contemporary political landscape by way of popular history as accessed through films. I suggest that one of the ways figures like Donald Trump or Narendra Modi access a certain violent masculinity is through a shared understanding of this repertoire of images.

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]

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]

My paper concerns two radically distinct portrayals of genital injury. The first examples, drawn from legal and doctrinal narrative, describe the cultural norm of meaningful castration. The other, which provides my paper with its title, is from Peter of Cornwall’s Book of Revelations. This set of one is an analogous injury that may mean nothing: n…[Read more]

Syllabus for a final-year undergraduate course on Modern Periodicals, exploring late 19th and early 20th-century magazines and newspapers from the UK, US and Canada.

Most critics of contemporary literature have reached a consensus that what was once called “postmodernism” is over and that its signature modes—metafiction and irony—are on the wane. This is not the case, however, with videogames. In recent years, a number of self-reflexive games have appeared, exemplified by Davey Wreden’s The Stanley Parable (…[Read more]

Anxieties abound regarding the ostensible obsolescence of the book. Exploring whether the book is in fact becoming obsolete — and what it might mean if it were — requires thinking distinctly about the specific material form of the book (the codex) and about the content that it has long carried. If the form were to change — becoming digital, for i…[Read more]

This paper argues that there is a need to look beyond what is merely “homeward” in the work of Thomas Wolfe. I take up Wai Chee Dimock’s expansive conception of American literature as “a crisscrossing set of pathways, open-ended and ever multiplying, weaving in and out of other geographies, other languages and cultures,” demonstrating how Thomas…[Read more]

This course examines the literary, cultural, and material life of written correspondence from the poetic epistle to the snarky tweet. And while we will read and analyze epistolary literature (both fiction and nonfiction) such as Ovid’s Heroides, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and
Alice Walker’s A Color Purple, we focus our efforts on “real” letters o…[Read more]

In THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR, a cozening knight and a jealous husband assume without question the availability of female bodies to adulterous liaisons, revealing their confidence in the cultural narrative of female inconstancy. Falstaff attempts to write a story in which he is the recipient of the wives’ sexual and economic favors. Ford, like T…[Read more]

This is a book about the power game currently being played out between two symbiotic cultural institutions: the university and the novel. As the number of hyper-knowledgeable literary fans grows, students and researchers in English departments waver between dismissing and harnessing voices outside the academy. Meanwhile, the role that the…[Read more]

Giving voice to women who suffer the brunt of masculine anxieties, THE TRAGEDY OF MARIAM privileges what I call “feminine anxieties” in its depiction of all the female characters, especially in the trinity of Mariam, Doris, and Salome. By depicting women who defy convention, the play stages women’s multiple perspectives on, reactions again…[Read more]