About
Katherine D. Harris, a Professor in the
Department of English and Comparative Literature, and
Director of Public Programming for the College of Humanities & the Arts,
San José State University, specializes in Romantic-Era and 19th-century British literature, women’s authorship, the literary annual, 19th-century history print culture and history of the book, textuality, editorial theory, Digital Humanities, and Digital Pedagogy. Her work ranges from
pedagogical articles on using digital tools in the classroom to
traditional scholarship on a “popular” literary form in 19th-century England. She chronicled her teaching adventures in the March 2011 blog,
A Day in the Life of Digital Humanities, along with 200 other participants which turned into a plenary address for the 2012
Re: Humanities and an article about the successes and failures of teaching with digital tools, “TechnoRomanticism: Creating Digital Editions in an Undergraduate Classroom” (
Journal of Victorian Culture April 2011). Because of this work, Harris was named to the Council on Digital Humanities for the National Institute of Technology in Liberal Education and co-taught a week-long seminar in Digital Pedagogy at the
Digital Humanities Summer Institute, University of Victoria. In January 2012, she represented Digital Pedagogy as a panelist at the DHCommons pre-conference workshop, “
Getting Started in Digital Humanities,” at the
2012 Modern Language Association Convention. Harris wrote about her
pedagogical adventures over at FairMatter.com, a blog hosted by W.W. Norton Publishers. Her most recent
article on digital pedagogy was published in Fall 2013 for
Polymath. The latest experiment, along with co-editors Rebecca Frost Davis, Matthew K. Gold, and Jentery Sayers, involves open peer review, GitHub, and establishing a digital pedagogy collection of teaching materials,
Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities along with the Modern Language Association.
In keeping with her work in Digital Humanities, Harris chaired the
California Open Educational Resources Council, a state-funded initiative to promote adoption of open educational resources textbooks in the University of California, California State University, and California Community College segments (113 campuses). After 3 years of state-funded work, that initiative has been converted to a program supporting adoption of OER materials on individual campuses throughout the CCC and CSU (AB 798 [Bonilla 2015]). The Council’s work culminated in a series of helpful OER resources:
Council members, including Harris, continue to submit journal articles to publicize their findings — the latest published article by
Hanley & Bonilla presents initial findings based on surveys, focus groups, and a pilot project conducted on CCC, CSU, and UC faculty and students as well as the infrastructure of the CA-OER Council.
In her scholarly adventures, Harris’ research on 19th-century British literary annuals resulted in a literary history of annuals:
Forget Me Not: The Rise of the British Literary Annual (1823-1835) (Ohio UP, 2015), a monograph based on her articles, “Feminizing the Textual Body: Women and their Literary Annuals in Nineteenth-Century Britain” (
Publications of the Bibliographical Society of America 99:4) and “
Borrowing, Altering and Perfecting the Literary Annual Form – or What It is Not: Emblems, Almanacs, Pocket-books, Albums, Scrapbooks and Gifts Books” (
Poetess Archive Journal 1:1).
She created a
legacy scholarly edition for the study of literary annuals,
The Forget Me Not: A Hypertextual Archive, most of which has been re-coded into
TEI and incorporated into the
Poetess Archive Database edited by
Professor Laura Mandell. Harris’ edited collection of
Gothic short stories from the 1820s’ most popular annuals, with Zittaw Press (2012) was part of her plenary address at the
Gothic Fiction Studies Conference in March 2012. Two talks that were offered during Spring 2014 at universities in New Zealand addressed some of the more interesting findings about the publishers, printers, and engravers in the business of literary annuals.
In January 2013, she returned to her textual studies foundation with her presentation, “
Echoes at Our Peril: Small Feminist Archives in Big Digital Humanities” at the 2013 Modern Language Convention in Boston, a talk originally given in October 2012, Scripps College as part of their
Humanities Institute lecture series. In February 2013, Harris spoke at the
Mellon-funded Digital Humanities Colloquium, Austin College. In Spring 2014, she returned to the road with a talk focusing on the work of David C. Greetham at The Graduate Center, City University of New York being published in
Textual Cultures 9.1 (2015). In Fall 2014, the travel continued with an invited talk on collaboration at the University of Alabama’s Digital Humanities Center and another on “archive” at the University of Tulsa, and then an appearance at the Modern Language Association Convention 2016 in Austin to
co-preside over a digital pedagogy poster session.
As of Fall 2019, her promotion to Full Professor and ensuing sabbatical have offered an opportunity to dig deeply
into the intellectual representations of British Romanticism to continue to investigate moving beyond the Big 6 of this literary period. Her current project combines her work on SJSU’s “
Deep Humanities” endeavors to conjoin Humanities and STEM curriculum on campus as well as continuing the commitment to publish in open access journals. She has spent the last few years on community-building through the Humanities, especially with her talk to the both the Book Club of California and
the San Jose Museum of Art.
She is the architect of the successful
H&A in Action initiative for the College of Humanities and the Arts.
Her latest work focuses on teaching Digital Humanities in teaching-intensive universities, the literary annual in 19th-century India, and the efficacy of Public Humanities.
You can watch some of her keynotes, guest lectures, and conference presentations on her
YouTube Channel and read about her scholarly adventures on her
professional WordPress blog. Some of her publications are available in SJSU’s institutional repository,
ScholarWorks.
To see her most recent and upcoming talks as well as the accompanying slides, check
this page.
For a full list of courses, syllabi, assignments, calendar, office hours, contact information, see Harris’
teaching page.
