Teaching

 

I’m a passionate and committed teacher; I consider teaching integral to my well-being as a researcher and as a person. I enjoy teaching across the breadth of my research interests, from book, material, and political history, to the digital liberal arts and the digital humanities, whether introductory or more advanced, as well as the rise of the novel, seventeenth- and eighteenth- century literatures, visual satires, media shift, and critical theory.

Selected teaching experience:

  • Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature

  • Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama 

  • Introduction to Digital Humanities, or, New Ways to Read Tristram Shandy 

  • Introduction to Digital Humanities (both at grad and undergrad)

  • History of Text Technologies: From Cuneiform to Twitter 

  • Writing in the Major

  • Shakespeare

  • British Literature 1300-1550

Research

 

My research clusters around questions of form, historical poetics, disciplinary formation, digital humanities and material history. 

My next book project addresses the history of data in the eighteenth century, particularly the vexed relationship it has with materiality. The transition from material being data’s form to merely being its vector draws together book-historical landmarks like the Dunciads and Clarissa, as well as visual/haptic printed satires that work through the consequences of trompe l’oueil in sexual and philosophical contexts, and the work of John Locke, Mary Astell, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, David Hume and Adam Smith.

My completed book project, Literary Authority, a Genealogy, draws on all these components to offer a model by which authors appropriate pre-existing genre structures in order to establish their literary authority.  Elaine Treharne and I cowrote Text Technologies: a History (Stanford University Press). We address the very long history of media shift from cuneiform to Web 2.0 and beyond. The book is designed to enable a range of research and pedagogical approaches.

I have a variety of digital projects underway, from a distant reading project on possible horizons of expectations for early eighteenth-century readers of prose, to an effort to bring together Pope's manuscripts online, to a digital prosopography of the English enlightenment.