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Quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education

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Jun 032011

Jennifer Howard recently wrote an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education on “Building a Better University Press.” She mentioned Mark Sample’s recent challenge for a group of scholars to create their own university press. She also quoted from my THATCamp proposal, which was inspired by the challenge:

Inspired in part by a Twitter discussion of some of Sample’s ideas, Roger Whitson, a postdoctoral fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has now proposed a session for the upcoming THATCamp at George Mason University. (THATCamp stands for The Technology and Humanities Camp, which operates on a free-wheeling, participant-led unconference model.) This year’s unconference will take place June 3-5—the same time as the AAUP gathering up the road in Baltimore.

On the THATCamp planning blog, Whitson explained what he has in mind. “I’d like to use the THATCamp spirit (hacking before yacking, collaboration, digital forms of communication) to try to imagine what a digital indie academic press (or UnPress) would look like,” he wrote. “Would it feature articles? Online conferences? Hacking sessions? Multimodal presentations? Could we institute peer-to-peer review? When would we publish?” He said he hoped participants would leave the session with “the beginnings of a plan” for some kind of THATCamp-affiliated indie press.

Article on Atlanta Comics Symposium in Technique

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Apr 252011

Georgia Tech’s college newspaper, Technique, ran an article about the Atlanta Comics Symposium for their April 15th issue. Here’s a little quote from me, on how to teach comics in a writing course:

“You’re writing all the time, but then when you present someone with the final comic book, the writing is actually embedded in the way you describe the story and illustrations [posted on their blogs] and getting people together,” Whitson said. “I feel like, ultimately, the students produced really great comics.”

You can find the article here.

2011 James Dean Young Award Dinner

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Apr 222011

Here I am at the 2011 James Dean Young Award Dinner. I was obviously pretty happy to win the 2011 Writing and Communication Award for Pedagogy.

Fall 2011 Course

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Apr 102011

Visualizing Nineteenth-Century British Poetry

The literature and arts of the nineteenth century were highly engaged in questions of vision and visuality. In this course, students will study poets and artists who contributed to the evolution of British visual culture, from the poetry of the picturesque and the sublime to the poetry of decadence and the grotesque. Along the way, we will examine how various visual artists imagined the poetry of the nineteenth century. Projects will include a visual picturesque narrative, a multimodal analysis of poems and their illustrations, and a video reimagining a single poem from the course.

Invited Talk at Emory

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Apr 012011

Here’s a video of a talk I gave at Emory University last December. Walter Reed invited Jason Whittaker and I to talk about how William Blake is adapted by artists in the Twentieth Century. I’m also archiving this video on my “video” page and hope to have more videos very soon!

Why I Love THATCamp

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Mar 072011

As a master’s student in my introductory theory course, I became particularly enamored by Roland Barthes’s essay “Why I Love Benveniste.” At the end of the essay, Barthes says that

Working with him, with his texts […],we always recognize the generosity of a man who seems to listen to the reader and to lend him his intelligence, even in the most special subjects, the most improbable ones. We read other linguists (and indeed we must), but we love Benveniste.

What a magical feeling! While I tried desperately to be like those scholars I most admired, Barthes saw in Benveniste a figure who would lend his readers his intelligence. Derrida had an unearthly ability to evade me. Deleuze was so cool that I wanted to ride the wave of his hyper-prose. I knew I could only be, at best, a pale imitation of these thinkers. But the magic of Barthes’s sentiment is that Benveniste didn’t want you to be like him; he wanted to share with you.

I can’t think of a better way to characterize my experience at THATCamp. So much of my experience in the humanities has been centered around finding, and defending, an increasingly small track of academic land. Conferences have often filled me with a sense of the resentment that I feel almost programmed to acknowledge as the proper approach to academic life. Most recently, I remember having a discussion about the role of love in philosophy. One participant remarked that we should be critical of love, that it often keeps us starry-eyed with a thinker or a topic while ignoring important problems. I didn’t necessarily disagree, but I was truly disgusted. You mean I can’t even really love what I do anymore?

September/October Update

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Oct 162010

I’m busy busy busy!

Jason Whittaker and I just turned in the proposal for our collaborative book project entitled Zoamorphosis: William Blake and Media Studies 2.0. The project combines work in the reception of Blake’s work from the Victorian period to the present with research methods enabled by social media: digital pedagogy, digital ethnography, and digital image rendering. These methods, we argue, reveal a William Blake heavily invested in collaboration, whose work invites – even demands – creative responses.
TECHStyle recently completed their coverage of Georgia Tech’s Future Media Fest conference. I included three articles on the startup and technology showcase, the social media and collective intelligence panel, and the digital media skills panel. I conclude my portion of the coverage with a recap about the need for further reflection on the future of citizenship in a world of social marketing and continuing incursions into individual privacy.
I also joined the Romantic Circles Teaching Romanticism group blog. My first two posts, archived on my personal website, explored ways of historicizing Romantic collaboration in classes and the need to consider objectives for Romantic courses that aren’t limited to period surveys.

Joe Sacco on Footnotes in Gaza

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Aug 302010

Here’s a great presentation of Joe Sacco’s most recent graphic novel Footnotes in Gaza. I’m teaching a great selection from The Fixer, a great piece of comics journalism about the Bosnian War, in my current Comics and Graphic Novels class.

August Update

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Aug 242010

It’s a little late, but here’s an update for my research and teaching in August.

I finished my summer project, a social network and group blog for my Department called TECHStyle. We already have a few articles on the website. Check it out!
I’m rewriting my Byron article to connect to my current interests in Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology. Originally, I had based my article on a re-reading of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and accounts of Byron’s corpse after his death. Now, I’ve started to focus on what I notice to be Coetzee’s remarkably realist orientation to animals, postcolonialism, and existence in general to herald a different way of approaching Romantic Ideology. Instead of an epistemological or historical critique of RI, as McGann and other New Historicists have attempted, I’m going to offer a realist account of Romantic objects in the novel.
I’m also writing up two book proposals. One of these is for my dissertation, The Romantic Mediology, in which I argue that Mediology (coined by Regis Debray but, for me, filtered through the realist accounts of ontology offered by thinkers like Graham Harman and Levi Bryant) can give us a different understanding of how Romantic ideology persists beyond the Romantic period. I’m looking specifically at the 1970s to the present, but my argument could be extended beyond that time period. My second book proposal is a co-written monograph with Jason Whittaker on using Social Media to teach and research William Blake. Whittaker is specifically interested in using digital ethnography to understand how people are really quoting, citing and using William Blake on the web. I’m interested in designing a meme network of Blakean projects where artists, filmmakers, students, and the public at large respond to a series of what I call challenges by Blake. The first of these, I’m hoping, is focused on the Ghost of the Flea. I’ll keep you posted.

Ten Influential Books on Blake

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Jul 272010

Cross-posted at Zoamorphosis: the Blake 2.0 Blog

I’m sure Jason Whittaker has already posted a similar article, but I thought it would be interesting to outline some of what I consider to be the books that had the most influence on how I study Blake. I did this a few years ago on the NASSR listserv, but these lists are always changing. These are in no particular order.

1. Blake: Prophet Against Empire by David Erdman (1954). I still consider this to be the most impressive and comprehensive historical intoduction to Blake’s time. Not only does Erdman’s text feature as an introduction to historicist approaches to Blake, it also contains several of Blake’s own often complicated reflections on the writing of history.

2. Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s by Jon Mee (1995). Mee’s historical introduction to religious enthusiasm and radical politics in the 1790s contains one of the two best accounts of the bourgeoisie revolutions of the late eighteenth century and the enthusiasts, proto-Marxists and religious prophets who wanted to use these revolutions to bring about a New Jerusalem. Mee’s study also includes an amazing section on the radical antiquarian scholar Joseph Ritson.

3. William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s by Saree Makdisi (2003). Makdisi’s prose is intoxicating in this book as he attempts, and largely succeeds, to open Blake studies to philosophers as diverse as Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. While this book has been criticized by several academics as too naive in his supposition that Blake avoids Orientalism and Anglocentrism, Makdisi’s invocation of “impossible history” adds an indispensable nuance to earlier versions of historicist and formalist criticism by showing how these competing strands can work together.

4. Visionary Physics: Blake’s Response to Newton by Donald Ault (1968). Ault weaves a spectacularly nuanced approach to Blake’s rejection of Newton, suggesting that the prevailing assumption that Blake reacted negatively to Newton’s form of materialism is wrong-headed. Ault’s focus on close-reading is unmatched by any Blake scholar from the past or present and, in fact, forms the center of his follow-up Narrative Unbound Re-Visioning Blake’s The Four Zoas (1987). Visionary Physics is particularly important for Romanticists or Blake scholars interested in science studies.

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