This is the submission (unedited) version of the article published in Times Higher Education on April 11, 2019, which argues that the market-based competition that fuels so much of academic life is doing us all far more harm than good.

English 412 is, in its official description, “A survey of drama from 1558 to 1603, including works by William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe.” In this version from 2017, students focused on six revenge tragedies, the blockbuster genre of the Elizabethan theatre: plays filled with bloody violence, elevated rhetoric, and ghosts imploring…[Read more]

How will immersive virtual reality (VR) cognitively affect the audiences who interface with it to interpret Shakespeare performances? Current theories of performance and cognition are based on theatre and film audiences, but VR performances combine features of both media: a disembodied spectral presence, like a theatrical audience; and a flexible…[Read more]

This paper will outline the cultural connections between women that are being brought to light as part of this conversion process. Starting with the concept of women’s “coteries” as small networks that lead to larger examinations of their cultural, intellectual and societal influence. Using HuViz (Humanities Visualizer) to demonstrate the conne…[Read more]

In late 2017 Diane Jakacki was awarded a Mellon/NHPRC Planning Grant for a Records of Early English Drama (REED) Project, focussing on three collections of records from London, England, covering the years 1400-1558. Throughout 2018, the REED London Team has been testing the boundaries of production within the Canadian Writing Research…[Read more]

Sophisticated digital platforms and infrastructures offer scholarly editors opportunities to make textual materials accessible and negotiable online. Still, we feel pressure to reify the passive reading experience within a web browser. The challenge lies in constructing (or reconstructing) our texts to best provide for dynamic text and data…[Read more]

History and theory of video games with a focus on cultural impact.

DTC 392 explores the cultural and historical impact of video games. We will learn about these issues by engaging in a semester-long project where we will prototype a video game. Video games are not just entertainment: they can be art, a form of political resistance, even a way…[Read more]