In his fiction, journalism and letters, Dostoevsky recurrently mentions ethnicity of his protagonists. Russians, Poles, Englishmen, Germans, Turks, Greeks etc. never act as individuals with their personal life but rather as ‘carriers’ of some national idea. Amidst the nations represented in Dostoevsky’s oeuvre, there are some Jews. The fashi…[Read more]

Syllabus, project assignments, and milestones for HON 313, “Reading Machines” (Fall 2017), a first-year interdisciplinary experience course at NC State University. Reading Machines invites students into a historically ranging, critically intensive, and hands-on learning environment about the technologies by which humans transmit ideas. The course…[Read more]

This chapter situates the Victoria’s Lost Pavilion project (https://pavilion.chass.ncsu.edu/) amid related work in virtual modeling and their interpretive problematics. Drawing from a tradition in textual criticism, the chapter renovates Jerome McGann’s notion of “radiant textuality” to extended virtual objects and built environments in digital…[Read more]

The first section of David Mitchell’s genre-bending novel, Cloud Atlas (2004), purports to be set in 1850. Narrative clues approximately date the intra-diegetic diary object of this chapter to the period 1851–1910. This article argues for the construction of a stylistic historical imaginary of this period’s language that is not based on mimet…[Read more]

Situates the composition of Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistas—from manuscript notes, source material, and pilot essays to its publication as an 84-page pamphlet—within the intellectual tendencies of the Reconstruction-era American social science movement to reveal Whitman’s text as an important case study in the nascent discipline. In his pro…[Read more]

Nicholas of Cusa’s _De visione Dei sive de Icona_ (1453), in addition to its contribution to the question of the vision of God, engages with numerous debates concerning visibility in general, and thus addresses the dimensions of phenomenality–namely, questions concerning the icon as a type of phenomenon, the reversal of vision into a…[Read more]

The article examines the Romanian and American reception of Cristian Mungiu’s 4 weeks, 3 months, 2 weeks (2007), arguing that the film’s representational minimalism indirectly caused an excess of interpretation across cultural contexts. This overinterpretation was possible because the film’s aesthetic minimalism encouraged viewers to decode the s…[Read more]

CFP for a special issue of the European Journal of Humour Research

This syllabus is my fifth version of a course aimed at introducing the digital humanities at an undergraduate level. In consultation with my colleagues, I decided that this year’s version should also include a unit that looked at digital objects with a humanities perspective. The course is organized around four projects, each of which is oriented…[Read more]

Seminar paper for ‘Translating the Nonhuman’, organised by Liam Lewis (University of Warwick) and Haylie Swenson (The George Washington University)

Seminar Abstract — This seminar invites participants to consider the connections created by translations of the nonhuman into human languages. To what extent is language the domain of the human,…[Read more]

This is the first version of a larger project that I’ve been working on in my spare time to create a dataset of the guests, songs, books, and luxuries on the long-running BBC radio program Desert Island Discs (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qnmr, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Island_Discs). Originally, I began with data gathered by…[Read more]

This article positions agency as a necessarily lacunal aspect of Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North. By allowing the theatricality of doubling and metaphor to overdetermine Mustafa’s narrative, the novel implicitly challenges both the substitution of symbol for material experience and the rational logic of causation. The disruptive pot…[Read more]

This article collides St. Apollonia’s medieval passion narratives – manuscript illustrations, church screens, and paintings by Francisco De Zurbarán and Carlo Dolci – with A.L. Kennedy’s contemporary short story “Story of My Life” to find out what happens when we move beyond the theoretical violence imposed by traditional approaches to gothic studies.