Read 8 January 2016 in Austin, TX, at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, session number 218, “Quantity in English Verse: Linguistic and Neuroscience-Based Challenges to the Accentual Paradigm.” This short historiographical paper was the half-time show in our roundtable—an interlude between the session’s more substantive linguis…[Read more]

This presentation explored the implications of constraints on due process and academic freedom in light of contingent faculty hiring.

The purpose of this article is to refl ect upon the process by which two professors in Spanish programs at small liberal arts colleges in the southeastern United States developed courses with civic engagement components that enabled our students to engage with the local Hispanic community in meaningful ways. From the outset, we focused on what we…[Read more]

PMLA Forum piece that argues for the direct and indirect value of the scholarly enterprise to the sacred art of teaching.

This is a longer version of my conference paper, in which I provide some ideas on how to merge scholarship on 18th-c France, especially the revolutionary period, with the kinds of advocacy promoted by the MLA. I foreground exciting new work done by colleagues in the US, UK, and Italy, and provide a “sneak peek” at materials to be included in the…[Read more]

In this free workshop, children and preteens (age 8-12) creatively explore and expand their sense of self by thinking and writing about their life – past, present, and future. Group activities, games, solitary writing, and illustrating provide for a fun and productive setting. Students will receive individual attention and gradually realize how…[Read more]

It has long been acknowledged that syntactic violations in poetry are central to the difficulty of a poetic text (e.g. Fowler 1971, Fois-Kaschel 2002, Burke 2007, Thoms 2008). However, for all its merits, most of the work carried out so far tends either to be more concerned with linguistic theory than with literary effects (i.e. the generativist…[Read more]

“The Lore and Lure of the Academic Job Market” is an MLA 2016 special session in which panelists consider how discipline-specific “lore” continually lures graduate students and contingent and full-time faculty members into an already overcrowded job market. Instead of providing advice about getting a job, participants evaluate that advice and gen…[Read more]

This is a position paper for an upcoming workshop convened by the Council of Graduate Schools on rethinking the dissertation. In it, I reflect on what new technologies enable us to do with this critical milestone in graduate study. My main argument is that while the affordances of specific technologies can be exciting, more important is the shift…[Read more]

In an essay entitled “Digital Blake,” J. Hillis-Miller (2006) asks a question which dominates discussions of William Blake’s relationship to New Media: “[w]ould Blake have approved of the William Blake Archive?” (p29). The Archive has itself been the focus of enormous theoretical reflection. The “Articles about the Archive” section on the Archive…[Read more]

The “modern university” is the social institution that has grown beyond the confines of brick and mortar to become a certifying body granting approval to those subjects who pass through its machinery, typically operating under the regulation and supervision of a government-sanctioned system of formalized accreditation. The modern university is ine…[Read more]