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]

An introduction to a newly published edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

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.

In the 2018 MLA Convention, the Luso-Brazilian Forum organized a meeting to remember Professor Antonio Candido (1918-2017), on January 6, 7:15-8:30 PM. This posting collects most papers read at the meeting. Should you be interested in contributing your own remembrance, or reflections on Candido’s career, please send them to me on the Commons. I…[Read more]

Establishing a meaningful digital identity is essential to managing one’s scholarly and professional reputation. This workshop addresses ways to cultivate an online identity and offers guidance on “going public” using tools and strategies for building a community around your work. Topics include social media, writing for different audiences, perso…[Read more]

In this essay I argue that the portrait of Arruntius as a passive Stoic is injudicious, and then I develop a new reading of Jonson’s depiction of Arruntius based on the textual evidence from both the quarto and folio editions of the play. The essay proceeds in three sections. In the first section, I question the commonly held view regarding A…[Read more]

This presentation explores ethical dilemmas for graduate school educators in programs that prepare M.A. students to teach English in community colleges. Such graduate programs attract students and produce strong, enthusiastic teachers, and university administrators value the programs because they draw tuition; however, the job prospects for…[Read more]

Slides accompanying a panel representing the Pittsburgh Bicentennial Frankenstein project to build a digital scholarly variorum edition that updates, bridges, and intersects multiple divergent editions of Frankenstein, including the manuscript notebook drafts of 1816, the 1818, 1823, and 1831 print editions, as well as the handwritten notes in the…[Read more]

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 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]

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.