Research & Innovation

This collection provides new readings of Frankenstein from a myriad of established and burgeoning theoretical vantages including narrative theory, cognitive and affect theory, the new materialism, media theory, critical race theory, and queer studies.

Demonstrating how the literary power of Frankenstein rests on its ability to theorize questions of mind, self, language, matter, and the socio-historic that also drive these critical approaches, this volume illustrates the ongoing intellectual richness found both in Mary Shelley's work and contemporary ways of thinking about it.

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Published in Written Communication.

Abstract: Scholarship has shown that writing groups are important sites of authority negotiation for student writers, yet little empirical research has examined how groups negotiate authority through conversation or how these negotiations influence students’ developing expertise. Drawing on observations and interviews of an undergraduate thesis and a graduate dissertation writing group, I use the concept of “presentification” to analyze conversational moments in which group members referenced advisors, “making present” advisor authority to influence group collaborations. Specifically, I analyze these moments to show how writing groups can serve as low-stakes communities in which students negotiate their emerging sense of authority. I found that whereas less experienced writers looked to advisors to solve writing problems and used advisor authority to stand in for disciplinary expertise, more experienced writers voiced advisor guidance to help pose writing problems and negotiate their own stance as disciplinary experts. This study thus theorizes one process through which student writers negotiate emerging authority across sites of literate practice and in collaboration with others who may not themselves be members of the same disciplinary community.

Co-authored with Brian Richardson.

Read The Spirit of History here.

At the end of the iconoclastic era, we find two distinct approaches to rhetorical argumentation in the commentaries on Hermogenes’ On Stases. They indicate a high level of learning and suggest there was no radical break in the continuity of rhetorical education during the so-called Byzantine “dark age.”

American Literary History 32.4 (Winter 2020): 723-754.

Abstract

This essay mines the earliest and most influential of African American literary magazines, the Boston-based Colored American Magazine (CAM) (1900–09), and its southern rival, the Atlanta-based Voice of the Negro (1904–07), to investigate how black writers and activists addressed the links between US race relations, settler colonialism, and empire in the Pacific. Spanning these two periodicals, Pauline Hopkins’s work as an editor and contributor grappled with the question of how to represent, engage, and position Black Americans in a globalizing world that was at once becoming more vast, heterogeneous, and integrated. Race remained a powerful structuring principle, yet it accrued dynamic new meanings in the era of new imperialism. Along the way, the essay investigates an unexplored facet of Hopkins’s authorship and compositional style. It speculates that Hopkins may have published under another as yet unattributed pen name. The enigmatic S. E. F. C. C. Hamedoe was one of the most significant of regular CAM contributors. Before disappearing from print history, Hamedoe published a four-year-long series that mapped the political contours of the emerging Global South, crisscrossing continents and oceans. The extensive connections between Hamedoe’s writings and Hopkins’s final known completed series beg the question of whether they were one and the same.

“An Unexpected Direction: Pauline Hopkins, S.E.F.C.C. Hamedoe, and the ‘Dark Races of the Twentieth Century'"

Has postcolonial literary criticism been affected by the postcritical antihistoricist turn? The short answer is no. It is hard to imagine what an antihistoricist postcolonial literary criticism might look like, since any investment in the term postcolonial assumes a simultaneous commitment to history and politics. While the term from its inception has been subject to criticism, it continues to hold its own despite more recent terms like global and world. While they may signal a post-postcolonial turn, a term initially used by Erin O’Connor (2003) to critique postcolonial analyses of Victorian novels, the use of and engagement with the postcolonial still provide a methodological challenge to modes of criticism advanced under the global and the world. Postcolonial literary criticism remains attuned to questions of aesthetics and ethics.

Find the Volume 81 Issue 4 here. 

Coeditor, Special Issue of ELH, The English Institute Conference on “Truth Telling.”  87:2 (2020).

“Introduction to ‘Truth Telling,’” ELH,  87: 2 (2020) 293-299.

Rooted in the Stuart ambition to raise the status of England through two crucial investments—global traffic, including the slave trade, and cultural sophistication—this intensified global orientation led to the creation of global mercantile networks and to the rise of an urban British elite who drank Ethiopian coffee out of Asian porcelain at Ottoman-inspired coffeehouses. Restoration drama exposed cosmopolitanism's most embarrassing and troubling aspects, with such writers as Joseph Addison, Aphra Behn, John Dryden, and William Wycherley dramatizing the emotional and ethical dilemmas that imperial and commercial expansion brought to light.

Altering standard narratives about Restoration drama, Laura J. Rosenthal shows how the reinvention of theater in this period—including technical innovations and the introduction of female performers—helped make possible performances that held the actions of the nation up for scrutiny, simultaneously indulging and ridiculing the violence and exploitation being perpetuated. In doing so, Ways of the World reveals an otherwise elusive consistency between Restoration genres (comedy, tragedy, heroic plays, and tragicomedy), disrupts conventional understandings of the rise and reception of early capitalism, and offers a fresh perspective on theatrical culture in the context of the shifting political realities of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain.

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