Shakespeare has become a boomerang business in the twenty-first century—a phenomenon that is fueled simultaneously by globalized local economic and cultural developments. His plays have been traveling the world since his lifetime and now returned to Britain with many different hats, making the familiar strange and bringing home the exotic. U.K. t…[Read more]

My chapter on “Food” for the POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY (ed Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova, forthcoming)

A consideration of classical and medieval oyster lore, a study of oysters as the “minimal animal.” Hand-corrected proof for Steve Mentz, ed. OCEANIC NEW YORK (Punctum 2015) – https://punctumbooks.com/titles/oceanic-new-york/

My response to “New Materialisms and the End of Critique,” MLA 2015, Session 454. http://newmaterialisms.mla.hcommons-staging.org/2015/01/07/hello-world/

The purpose of this graduate course is to examine key texts of the twentieth century that established the fundamental connection between language structures and practices on the one hand, and the formation of selfhood and subjectivity, on the other. In particular, the course will focus on theories that emphasize the role of formal elements in…[Read more]

English 3386 equips students for critical encounters with the texts, images, sounds, and situations that constitute American life, politics, history, and culture. This section is organized around the theme of “Versioning Digital Humanities.” Many texts go through various “versions” as they are revised for republications, corrected for new edition…[Read more]

In the last six years, scholars have engaged with the effects of globalization on the study of collective memory, emphasizing the de-territorialization, de-nationalization of memory cultures. While being attentive to the global circulation and transformation of collective memories, authors in this issue seek to revisit and critique some…[Read more]

The emergence of the digital humanities in specialized disciplines and librarianship alike necessitates a recalibration of the balance of knowledge and what Julia Flanders calls “metaknowledge.” DH in the disciplines has brought discussion of metaknowledge – data structures, archival and editorial standards, digital curation and representation -…[Read more]

Draft work (notes and bibliography not included) from one of my books in progress tentatively titled Against the Cultural Singularity: Digital Humanities & Critical Infrastructure Studies. Excerpted are a few portions from the beginning of the manuscript that bear on the critical potential of the digital humanities and critique.

Literary scholars’ conversations about distant reading have spent too much time pitting it against close reading, and not enough time understanding connections to other disciplines. Distant reading is better understood as part of a methodological shift that has permitted humanists and social scientists to build stronger interdisciplinary connections.

Syllabus for an advanced graduate course on realism and the Victorian novel taught at Temple University in Fall 2015.

Syllabus for an advanced graduate course on realism and the Victorian novel taught at Temple University in Fall 2015.

This essay explores the meanings and effects of postcolonial authors’ recent refashioning of classical historical fiction. That refashioning has two aims: a materialist cartography that counters the nationalist vocation of classical historical fiction by revealing the supra-national, global aspirations of colonial capitalism as a system; and an e…[Read more]

This syllabus delineates the readings and assignments for an advanced undergraduate course on the history and theory of the novel taught in fall 2014 at the University of Georgia.

Unlike his earlier novels, J.M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg, has not received the attention that it deserves from the critics. The novel, which is set in Russia not only draws on real aspects of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s life but also on certain events in the Russian author’s novels, specifically The Devils. Coetzee’s Dostoevsky is an aging a…[Read more]

A reflection on the state of the archive in the state of post-theory.

Examiner/examined, analyst/analysand, subject/object, sane/mad, science/art: the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature appears to conform to this binary logic, with the first term in each set clearly privileged over the second. The realm of the literary is populated with an impressive assortment of mad characters and mad authors:…[Read more]