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Modernist Archives Publishing Project

Lacuna

Global Medieval Sourcebook

Bibliopedia

Experimedia

Text-Mining French Political Rhetoric

Networks of the DLCL

Turn, Counter-turn, Stand and Weep: Three Elegiac Odes

A study of the elegiac ode as a genre, focusing on three poems.

Samson’s Touch and a Thin Red Line: Reading the Bodies of Jews and Saints in Bury St Edmunds

On March 16, 1190, Palm Sunday weekend, a mob massed outside Clifford’s Tower, to which the Jewish community of York had fled. Rather than face the mob, most of the Jews committed mass suicide, ‘the fathers of each Jewish household’ cutting the throats of their wives and children.

Genre Trouble: Embodied Cognition in Fabliaux, Chivalric Romance, and Latin Chronicle

My dissertation examines the intersection between theories of body and of genre through the lens of cognitive science. It focuses, in particular, on representations of bodies in exemplars of fabliaux in Old French and Middle English, chivalric romance that feature the figure of Sir Gawain, and the Latin Chronicle of Bury St Edmunds.

An Experiment in Collaborative Humanities: Envisioning Globalities 500 – 1500 CE

The idea of a “Global Middle Ages”—involving experimental, transhumanities work that requires humanities scholars to step outside their disciplines and specializations, and dynamically engage with social scientists, and computer technologists to make sense of an interconnected past—now seems to be an idea whose time has come.

The Problems with Genius: Annotation, Consensus, and Bias

Like Wikipedia, Genius assumes that collaboratively-authored annotations can lead to a stable, monolithic truth about a text, a kind of crowdsourced exegesis. This model fails to respect the possibilities of divergent readings and collapses ambiguity into single narratives authored via consensus.

Scholarly Adventures in Digital Humanities: Making the Modernist Archives Publishing Project

How can we represent the material circumstances that have shaped modernist literary production and publishing in a digital form? How can we avoid providing just another content management system that divorces item from context?

Toward Text-Mining the Middle Ages: Digital Scriptoria and Networks of Labor

Some questions that we might pose of medieval corpora that are currently impossible to answer definitively, but that would become possible if we encourage digital scriptoria include: How did genres develop and change over time? What are the salient stylistic features of genres and vernacular literatures? Do these stylistic or topical markers vary across regions within the same language?

The Rhetoric of Cartoons

Undergraduate course, The University of Texas at Austin, Department of Rhetoric and Writing, 2008

In this course, we will study how visual artists deploy rhetoric to convey meaning. As a writing-intensive course, students will be expected to submit several long research papers and drafts. Works studied will include Alan Moore’s graphic novel Watchmen, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, editorial cartoons, and Scott McCloud’s landmark work Understanding Comics.

Banned Books and Novel Contexts

Undergraduate course, The University of Texas at Austin, Department of English, 2011

We will read a diverse, but relatively small selection of texts, all of which have at one time or another been banned for their content. The first two books we will read are novels, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita; the first is short and disturbing, the second long and disturbing. We will then continue back in time, and shift to poetry, to the ecstatic transcendent chants of Walt Whitman. The last readings will be a very small fraction of the glory that is Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which you will read in the original Middle English.

Literature and Psychology

Undergraduate course, The University of Texas at Austin, Department of English, 2011

Why do we read literature? What, if anything, do we get out of literature that makes it important? What cognitive faculties to we use when we read and how do those faculties effect or even determine our interpretations? In this course, we will explore these and related questions in order to introduce students to the study of English literature through criticism focused on how the mind works. We will emphasize, in particular, the rapidly growing field of cognitive literary studies, which applies the findings of contemporary cognitive science and neuroscience to traditional humanities questions about the nature of literature, the practice of reading, and the possibilities of interpretation.

Digital Texts and Research Methods

Workshop, Stanford University, Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, 2013

A workshop surveying the most common tools and methods used for literary text analysis.

Introduction to Digital Humanities

Mixed graduate and undergraduate course, Stanford University, Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, 2014

In this course, students explored the perspectives of scholars who have thought about what “digital humanities” means and the technologies and tools that are shaping new kinds of research, scholarship, and publishing. Topics included history of the digital humanities, textual studies, electronic literature, computational and new media, and emerging work around text, image, and new media curation and visualization.

Programming & Poetry

Mixed graduate and undergraduate course, Stanford University, Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, 2017

How can we study computer code as literature? What can poetry teach us about programming and vice versa? These types of questions drove this course, which had two different tracks: one for computer science students and one for literature students. The focus was on the development of a shared conceptual middle ground at which these two tracks can meet.

Reading Leo Tolstoy in the Digital Age

Mixed graduate and undergraduate course, Stanford University, Slavic Literatures and Languages, 2017

How did Tolstoy’s realist prose fiction gave birth to such modernist conceptions of art? What can we learn from Tolstoy’s aesthetics today? How can we read Tolstoy’s prose fiction by means of digital humanities methods? This course is arranged as a series of digital labs and seminar discussions and utilizes a project-based learning approach.