Review of Daniel Hack, “Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature” (Princeton UP, 2017).

By reading each of the novels of Kate O’Brien’s oeuvre as ‘a travel story’, just as we read Balzac’s Père Goriot, it becomes necessary to read them as ‘a spatial practice’, a narrative that locates itself in and responds to a specific space. The specific geography of Kate O’Brien’s Parisian novels of development, Without My Cloak (1931), The…[Read more]

The Jewish ‘question’ is treated in the Recherche by way of the Dreyfus Affaire, which is not spoken of but scattered in the discourses of different characters. Definitions, opinions, even facts are, therefore, spread in the ubiquity of social instability, so that it is impossible for the reader to identify any of Proust’s ideologies.In our paper…[Read more]

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press Blog, 28 March 2018. A Q&A about the essay “JavaScript Affogato: Programming a Culture of Improvised Expertise,” published in Configurations 26.1 (2018): 47–72, DOI: 10.1353/con.2018.0002.

Course syllabus for Eng 260: Introduction to Women Writers focused on the theme of food fiction. Taught at Central Oregon Community College as a general education course. We are on the quarter system which limits the number of readings. The course will require that students complete a collaborative digital project.

This article examines Sphinx, the debut novel of the French novelist Anne Garréta, which was recently published in English translation in 2015. The reception of Sphinx in both French and English has focused primarily on Garréta’s virtuosic removal of gender from a love story, passing over a caricatural and crude rendering of racial difference tha…[Read more]

This essay attempts a philological, meaning a both technically and socially attentive historical study of an individual computer programming language, JavaScript. From its introduction, JavaScript’s reception by software developers, and its importance in web development as we now understand it, was structured by a continuous negotiation of e…[Read more]

The digital archive of Saint-Domingue poses major questions relating to power and the production of history, especially since North American institutions possess and have digitized massive collections of French language materials. Once digitized, how will the material be curated, read, and interpreted by the archive’s various users (teachers,…[Read more]

The digital archive of Saint-Domingue poses major questions relating to power and the production of history, especially since North American institutions possess and have digitized massive collections of French language materials. Once digitized, how will the material be curated, read, and interpreted by the archive’s various users (teachers,…[Read more]

To move global Shakespeare studies beyond the more limiting scope of nation-state and cultural profiling, I would like to propose we consider a number of critical concepts as methodology. These concepts critique the limitations of cartographic imagination, and connect the performance site to spaces of knowledge production: (1) the site of…[Read more]

In his eighteenth-century Memoirs, criminal Stephen Burroughs tells of his campaign to establish a library in Bridgehampton, New York. When the town elders discover the plan, they insist upon reviewing Burroughs’s choices. Undercurrents of other debates spill over into what would otherwise merely be some quibbling over book selections. In a series…[Read more]

Looking from a distance, as a condition of knowledge, participates within a long-standing Western tradition of power relations. This article considers the use of “distant reading” as theorized by Franco Moretti in his book by the same title and suggests that the method of literary analysis that uses such a metaphor should be aware and critical of…[Read more]

This essay explores how the early American stage functioned as an incubator for ideas about national identity, artistic expression, and masculinity. Reading four plays from the early years of the Republic – Royall Tyler’s The Contrast, William Dunlap’s Andre´, John Augustus Stone’s Metamora, and Robert Montgomery Bird’s The Gladiator, I demonstrat…[Read more]