In setting his 1898 tale In the Cage in a telegraph office, Henry James was adapting and investigating a metaphor that earlier novelists had used for the workings of fiction. As invoked by writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens, the idealized image of the electric telegraph hints at some of the formal and ideological properties of…[Read more]

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]

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]

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]

An approach to understanding modernism in literary history through the lens of translation by tracing the work of key figures such as Pound, Dos Passos, Jiménez, and Unamuno to translate US and Spanish literatures after the Spanish-American War of 1898.

This article investigates the writing mode, multimodal aspects, and folksonomic elements of digital composition gathered from a WordPress-based ePortfolio platform. Focusing on the student perspective, data was gathered through both surveys of first year students and text analysis of digital compositions in order to produce quantitative results…[Read more]

In this paper, I show how, as a philologist, William Strunk’s approach to language was a rich historical and rhetorical experience far from the prescriptivism E.B. White ascribes to him in the first edition of The Elements of Style (1959). An interesting historical parallel exists between Strunk’s tenure as a PhD student in philology at Cornell…[Read more]

Contribution to “Why Teach Literature?” Program arranged by the forum TM The Teaching of Literature. Gaurav G. Desai, Tulane U, presiding.

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]

I piloted this course as “Introduction to Digital Humanities” during fall 2016 at Portland State University’s English department. Revising my syllabus for inclusion in university-wide cluster courses, I retitled it “Digital Literary Studies.”