How and why do we read? And what is the relationship between academic reading and the reading we do for pleasure? This course is divided into two parts. The first part, on critical reading, surveys some of the most influential critical approaches in recent decades, including structuralism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, feminism,…[Read more]

Full collection of essays written during my undergraduate and graduate studies in literature.

Graduate-level syllabus for a seminar in the Department of English. Neither “history of the book” nor “media studies,” this course sits somewhere in-between combining the ethos of a makerspace with the hands-on resources of a letterpress and book arts studio.

When it comes to Japanese literary heritage, why and how are we able to access it? The shape of what is preserved and available is driven by and in turn dictates the shape of our canon(s). Yet we often do not think of the labor and social networks behind the reprinting and digitizing that allows us to access literature in the first place, whether…[Read more]

The article presents illuminated charters and discusses how they might be presented online.

Archives and libraries operate within a complex web of social, political and economic forces. Digital technologies, globalization, the corporatization of the academy, and increasing commercial control of the scholarly record are just some of the myriad forces shaping their evolution. Libraries and archives in turn have shaped the production of…[Read more]

In light of (re)new(ed) interest in focusing interdisciplinary scholarly attention on the history of capitalism – a focus captured in Edward Baptist’s recent book, The Half has Never Been Told – this essay reads Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel A Mercy as a key text for considering the history of capitalism as central to conceptions of circum-…[Read more]

At the intersection of comics and medicine is the rise of the Graphic Medicine scholarship field. This course examines the ways in which the sequentialized hybrid of word and image is bringing new insights to patient, healthcare, and clinical experiences.

In any manner of ways, the comics medium (whether known as comic books, graphic novels,…[Read more]

Front matter for Literatures of Liberalization: Global Circulation and the Long Nineteenth Century

Since his first works came to critical attention, Ernest Hemingway has occupied a space in the critical and cultural imagination as a definitively ‘masculine’ writer. His novels and stories focus on male narrators in difficult or extreme situations involving war, violence, and the natural world, and his critical heritage has focused on these ele…[Read more]

Bound by market pressures, twenty-first century academia finds itself fettered by the demands of “student success” that a capitalist knowledge economy places on its participants. Humanities scholars are, as Jonathan Dollimore noted in his 2014 SAA address, pressed with their back against the wall, “in a marketplace pretty indifferent to what…[Read more]

This paper explores the commodification of archival information through the exploitation of library labor related to the ongoing management, preservation, description, and digitization of unique and rare materials. Through this discussion, the author highlights the cultural, social, and economic factors that play a central role in creating an…[Read more]

“Film Museum Practice and Film Historiography is a meticulously researched work and a welcome addition to the already growing body of work related to film archiving practices. Lameris’ book is not only about engaging with the history of the Nederlands Filmmuseum but also about situating this case study within the larger context of film history a…[Read more]

Outlines the restoration of the Russian film classic “Man with a Movie Camera” (USSR, 1929) by Dziga Vertov which was carried out by the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam between 2008 and 2010. The restoration allows contemporary audiences the possibility to once again experience Vertov’s film as the filmmaker originally intended – or at least in a v…[Read more]

Situates the composition of Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistas—from manuscript notes, source material, and pilot essays to its publication as an 84-page pamphlet—within the intellectual tendencies of the Reconstruction-era American social science movement to reveal Whitman’s text as an important case study in the nascent discipline. In his pro…[Read more]