Graduate seminar syllabus: In this seminar, we will explore the contemporary comic, considering literary and cultural works across a range of platforms and markets. Comics are still frequently (and historically) associated with popular culture, and linked to children’s literature and mass media, even as they loom large through big and small screen…[Read more]

This article examines the religious and political worldview of the Scottish minister John Dury during the English Revolution of the mid-seventeenth century. It argues that Dury’s activities as an irenicist and philo-semite must be understood as interrelated aspects of an expansionist Protestant cause that included Britain, Ireland, continental…[Read more]

In this short essay I discuss two new translations of Helmuth Plessner’s work, “Political Anthropology,” translated by Nils F. Schott (Northwestern University Press, 2018), and “Levels of Organic Life and the Human: An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology,” translated by Millay Hyatt (Fordham University Press, 2019).

Syllabus for spring 2021 graduate seminar, “Approaches to the Material Text.” Readings survey in history of the book and related fields. Includes prose introductions synthesizing each week’s readings.

Syllabus for the English ENG921 course, “Narrative in a Digital Age” for the Winter 2021 semester, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada.

In an early version of his article “Harlem Literati in the Twenties,” first published in the Saturday Evening Review in 1940, Langston Hughes offers the curious suggestion that Wallace Thurman was the ghostwriter of Men, Marriage and Me (erroneously written as Men, Women and Checks in Hughes’ article), the tell-all memoir ostensibly by the origi…[Read more]

The attached is the schedule that I devised for an entry-level, cross-disciplinary grad course in digital humanities, offered across several schools and departments. It is licensed by Creative Commons as Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International, meaning that you are free to adapt and repurpose it for non-commercial uses as long as…[Read more]

This discusses the multi-year process of implementing co-requisite composition courses and establishing a multiple measures placement mechanism to determine which students need what kinds of developmental course work, if any. The end result was an increase in course pass rates and an increase in retention.

This is the syllabus for the Spring 2021 section of Texts & Technology in History, which will be taught synchronously via Zoom at UCF as part of the PhD in T&T. This iteration of the course particularly considers whose texts are archived, who shapes our technologies, and which histories are preserved and retold.

The syllabus for the Spring 2021 asynchronous online course “Theory & Practice of Interactive Storytelling,” which includes both critical and creative projects, and uses Twine, Inform 7, and Ren’Py.

The first Aswan Dam was built at the dawn of the twentieth century and celebrated as a triumph of imperial engineering. Five years after its completion, workers returned to extend the dam. Photographer D. S. George recorded both the building and extension projects for the Egyptian Public Works Department in a series of images that give a unique…[Read more]

Introduction to a special issue on Renaissance post-humanism and its afterlives.

Projects that bridge the humanities and sciences often attract attention from journalists, but evoke dismay from humanists who feel that their subjects of expertise have been misinterpreted. For the humanities to reclaim a place of pride in public conversation, humanists themselves need to embrace interdisciplinarity and take the lead in this…[Read more]

The current mechanisms by which scholars and their work are evaluated across higher education are unsustainable and, we argue, increasingly corrosive. Relying on a limited set of proxy measures, current systems of evaluation fail to recognize and reward the many dependencies upon which a healthy scholarly ecosystem relies. Drawing on the work of…[Read more]

This paper argues for the need for a Literary Platform Studies in order to develop a full understanding of electronic literary work. Understanding the authoring platforms used to create interactive digital stories enable a more nuanced and sophisticated appreciation of the procedural creativity of these works. The paper examines Twine…[Read more]

A report on the creation of a prototype digital edition of a REED collection. Includes “Guidelines for REED at-codes Application and TEI P5 Markup” (Appendix C).