This is the Introduction to my new book, _Victorian Skin: Surface, Self, History_.

Explores select works of Matthew Arnold, as well as Robert Browning’s “Caliban Upon Setebos” and Edward Fitzgerald’s “Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám,” for evidence that societal growth during the late 19th-century was done not entirely in hopes of leaving previous authorities behind, of accepting and dealing with felt feelings of being abandoned for…[Read more]

Explores Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” as a space-world where anxious Victorians might place the perhaps exciting but also anxiety-producing New to subsume its affect of disequilibrium within the sturdy, assured and predictable.

Explores Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” as if it were experienced by many viewers of a particular type — SCM’s: suburban, collegiate young men — as a feeling out of how they might contrive themselves so that their future development would not place them as identifiable as losers by he-men pulp figures they’d learned early represent…[Read more]

A talk given at the ANT workshop at the University of Southern Denmark in 2017. I develop some of these ideas in chapter 4 of my current book

Many digital humanists in centers or libraries—interdisciplinary positions that cater to multiple departments—are expected to demonstrate the products of their digital labor to high-ranking administrators and stakeholders on a consistent basis. As such, they often are on tight and over-extended timelines to produce high-quality digital sch…[Read more]

This chapter details a credit-based orientation & information literacy course taught with local archival and special collections materials.

This study focuses on the cultural history of illegitimacy and its representation in literature, with an emphasis on the gender of fictional bastards and foundlings.

What is the relevance of Bruno Latour’s work for literary studies?

How might ANT help us rethink questions of comparison and translation?

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]

Since mid-2005, archivist–activists at the Historical Archive of the National Police of Guatemala have been digitizing a century’s worth of previously suppressed police
records so as to protect, mobilize and provide access to them – 23 million pages to date. We find that digitization amplified the staff’s repurposing of the archive to serve v…[Read more]

This essay looks to the near history of copyright, commercially licensed resources, and fair use that shapes digital scholarship on nineteenth-century periodicals today. Using the digitization of British Library newspapers as a case study, I demonstrate how arguments about access to public domain materials do not fully account for the complex…[Read more]

Students learn more when they play—while the value of play often is emphasized only for those early in their education, play has a role in higher education as well. To teach book history across time and space, I developed two card games: Codex Conquest (http://codexconquest.lib.uiowa.edu/) and Mark (under development: h…[Read more]

Teaching Book History through Card Games: Codex Conquest and Mark
Amy Hildreth Chen, English and American Literature Librarian, University of Iowa
Students learn more when they play—while the value of play often is emphasized only for those early in their education, play has a role in higher education as well. To teach book history across t…[Read more]