Thoreau’s relation to print culture was complicated and at times contradictory, but from his writing life to his family business, he was shaped by it. Scholars note that he was both successful and a failure as a professional author. He published books and articles made possible by technological changes in papermaking and printing to his west on t…[Read more]

This paper explores the extent to which whiteness is represented in the Fall 2016 issue of Brevity. I suggest that the authors’ representation of whiteness manifests in the forms of both white privilege and white supremacy, and thus serves as the predominant theme of this issue of the magazine. I also consider the ways in which distant reading t…[Read more]

This paper revises book history’s historiography to account for feminist inquiry.

Although we have long discussed the rise of consumer culture and the increase of print in Restoration England (see Birth of a Consumer Society, 1982), comparatively little information exists on specific methods publishers used to advertise to audiences and what role they played in creating new markets. My project fills this gap by examining…[Read more]

A review of Richard Kegler’s, The Aries Press of Eden, New York.

The extracodical stanzas of John Lydgate’s Testament and “Quis Dabit Meo Capiti Fontem Lacrimarum” in the Clopton chantry chapel of the Great Church of Holy Trinity, Long Melford, not only are two intriguing witnesses differing in presentation and language from the manuscript copies but also can be considered as part of a rhetorical program where…[Read more]

Theories of the public sphere and of imagined political communities of shared reading have had lasting effects on the theoretical conceptualization of Americanist book history, but they also largely overlook the materiality of texts in ways that early and nineteenth-century American readers and writers did not. This essay reads early and…[Read more]

The attached syllabus was written for my Honors undergraduate seminar “The Art of the Book in the Digital Age,” taught Fall 2016 at UNC Chapel Hill. Here is an excerpt from the course description: “The book’s role and significance within literary culture is being scrutinized today with an intensity unseen for five centuries. Nowhere is this quest…[Read more]

Syllabus for a final-year undergraduate course on Modern Periodicals, exploring late 19th and early 20th-century magazines and newspapers from the UK, US and Canada.

Anxieties abound regarding the ostensible obsolescence of the book. Exploring whether the book is in fact becoming obsolete — and what it might mean if it were — requires thinking distinctly about the specific material form of the book (the codex) and about the content that it has long carried. If the form were to change — becoming digital, for i…[Read more]

This course examines the literary, cultural, and material life of written correspondence from the poetic epistle to the snarky tweet. And while we will read and analyze epistolary literature (both fiction and nonfiction) such as Ovid’s Heroides, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and
Alice Walker’s A Color Purple, we focus our efforts on “real” letters o…[Read more]

The attached syllabus was written for my undergraduate seminar “Renaissance Media” (ENGL 281) taught Spring 2016 at UNC Chapel Hill. The learning objectives for the course were as follows:
“During this course, students will:
* learn the basic history and culture of media technologies in England during the early modern period (roughly 150…[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]

This syllabus describes an interdisciplinary course for first-year students in the NC State University Honors program in Fall 2015. “Interpretive Machines” offers a historically ranging, critically intensive, and hands-on learning environment about the technologies by which humans transmit our cultural inheritance and ideas. The course also…[Read more]

This syllabus describes a first-year interdisciplinary honors course undertaken in fall 2014 at NC State University. It welcomes students into a hands-on environment for thinking about and practicing with new and old platforms for reading, interpretation, and understanding. It attempts to bridge book history and digital humanities into an…[Read more]

Nearly all scholars who work on medieval or early modern texts at some point work from digital facsimiles. There are advantages and disadvantages to such objects: what they might offer in terms of convenience and availability, they lack in material information. We can adjust the nature of what questions we ask of which object, consulting digital…[Read more]

I argue that The Elements of Style by Strunk and White comes out of a history connecting it to the nineteenth century “conversation handbook” (Connors) and other cultural guides to middlebrow identity formation including The Book-Of-The-Month Club. The Elements of Style is a guide to a genteel language performance rooted in the racialized,…[Read more]