Research & Innovation

Peter Witte is unsure whether the killing of a sentient being is problematic, but he wishes that bacon, one of his favorite foods, could exist without all the suffering.

Commissioned and peer reviewed for the Map of Early Modern London web project, University of Victoria, ed. Janelle Jenstad, July 2015.

View the project.

Consider, for instance, William Gibson’s recent promotional activities and tour in support of The Peripheral, published for North American audiences on October 28, 2014. (The Peripheral is not an entirely arbitrary choice, given the prevalence of surveillance technologies in both of its near-future settings, but I believe I could tell similar stories about most any other A-list author; that this particular one is the godfather of cyberspace is really not much to the point.)

Sam Lattimore meets Elizabeth Church in 1970s Halifax, in an art gallery. Their brief, erotically charged marriage is extinguished with Elizabeth’s murder. Sam’s life afterward is complicated. In a moment of desperate confusion, he sells his life story to a Norwegian filmmaker named Istvakson, known for the stylized violence of his films, whose artistic drive sets in motion an increasingly intense cat-and-mouse game between the two men. Furthermore, Sam has begun “seeing” Elizabeth—not only seeing but holding conversations with her, almost every evening, and what at first seems simply hallucination born of terrible grief reveals itself, evening by evening, as something else entirely.

Each year on on April 25 my mother calls to remind me that it’s the anniversary of my father’s death, so I should take a moment to think about him.

Publishing, Editing, and Reception is a collection of twelve essays honoring Professor Donald H. Reiman, who moved to the University of Delaware in 1992.

Casey’s scholarship focuses on the creative arts through fiction writing.

In their applications, scholars should make a strong case for their proposed topic’s importance, its relevance to a field of study broadly supported by the Folger Library’s collections and programs, and the originality and sophistication of its approach.

Primarily a work of cinema history, it also draws on the insights of the history of science. Beginning around 1903, a variety of producers made films about scientific topics for general audiences, inspired by a vision of cinema as an educational medium. This book traces the development of popular-science films over the first half of the silent era, from its beginnings in England to its flourishing in France around 1910.

A comprehensive assessment of the role of early science films in shaping debates about scientific discovery, commercial entertainment, innovations in education, and intertexual cultural production, Gaycken considers 300 films and offers a comparative stylistic analysis that establishes both the unique formal properties of the genre as well as the antecedent sources upon which it drew. The volume features case studies on British and French natural history filmmaking, American distribution, and French crime melodramas.