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Publications

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

"Developing Research through Podcasts: Circulating Spaces, A Case Study," Digital Humanities Quarterly 15.3 (Fall 2021).

 

In this article, the authors contend that the podcast serves as an alternative method of conducting and pursuing academic research in an increasingly collaborative, increasingly global era. Circulating Spaces: Literary and Language Worlds in a Global Age, a podcast series created, produced, and published by the authors, acts as case study. The podcast models a complex network of relations by highlighting topics and featuring guests who co-exist within academic and “public” (often understood as non-academic) spaces. These networks help to reshape our understanding of the “publics” of academia by breaking down the binary between the public and academic. They point toward ways in which more nuanced networks of affinity between the academy and the public may be constructed and negotiated by embracing the digital and the open. This piece was co-authored by Christian Howard-Sukhil, Samantha Wallace, and Ankita Chakrabarti. The article is openly accessible.

"Sebald’s Agenda: Picturing Ethics and Translating Authenticity," Contemporary Literature 60.1 (Spring 2019): 72-97.

 

The German writer W.G. Sebald provides a rare opportunity to examine collective experience as a unifying factor of the nationless, for he is well-known for his exploration of identity, history, and memory. Questions of identity are textually embodied in Sebald’s work through the inclusion of photographs and other images, which serve as remnants of the characters’ past lives and become relics that anchor the fictional world to the real. Yet even as his writing style is celebrated for its incorporation of material sources of the past, so too has this technique led to ethical debates about Sebald’s right to use such images. Sebald has defended his work through his authenticity and fidelity to the real, which is predicated on his very use of these relics and images. This essay argues that Sebald deliberately courts (mis)translation and plays with (in)authenticity in order to create a pervasive sense of displacement within his readers and exemplify universal historical experiences through an ethics of fact. This claim is supported through close readings of both the images and text of Sebald’s 1992 work, Die Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants), as well as a careful examination of Sebald’s involvement with the English-language edition of this work.

"Studying and Preserving the Global Networks of Twitter Literature," Post-45 (Sept. 2019).

 

The amateur writing community on Twitter, which is comprised of a transitory and shifting group of global writers and readers, is developing a literary form that is self-identified by its creators through the use of hashtags related to literary genre. While this literature may not align with literary forms defined by the academic community, the amateur writing community on Twitter is nonetheless creating a global network of literary output on a hitherto unprecedented scale, and the literature produced by this community is worth being preserved and studied by literary scholars. This article examines how such changes in literary output are affecting — and have been affected by — the alternative networks of circulation within these digital spaces.

"Recreating Faulkner's Fictional World: The Publication of the Chronology and Genealogy in Absalom, Absalom!" The Faulkner Journal 30.2 (Fall 2016): 83-99. [Published Summer 2018]

William Faulkner included an appendix to Absalom, Absalom! consisting of a chronology, genealogy, and map; this was the only one of his novels originally published with such an appendix. Most scholars have regarded these end materials as supplementary materials, yet such views derive largely from editorial decisions, which have relegated the end materials to “mer[e] aids to the reader” rather than “modern adjuncts to the novel,” as Noel Polk puts it. Nonetheless, upon examining Faulkner’s correspondence with his editors housed in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia, I reassess the hitherto supplementary status of these end materials. Rather than assessing them in terms of accuracy or inaccuracy, I argue that we should consider their content and form, free of the assumption that they are merely readerly “aids.” To this end, I offer a parallel between these end materials and Biblical chronologies and genealogies, which offer a viable means of understanding the operation of the chronology and genealogy within Faulkner’s storyworld.

Refereed Encyclopedia Entries & Other Short Works

"Twitterature: Mining Twitter Data," dh+lib review (October 2018).

 

Christian Howard (University of Virginia) details her work on using Twitter for literary research. Howard uses Python to scrape and visualize Twitter data about the usage of the term #twitterature.

"'Gothic DH' at Washington and Lee," dh+lib review (March 2017).

 

A reflection of a course collaboration between Christian Howard (University of Virginia) and Taylor Walle (Washington and Lee University) in the English 232 class, "Frantic and Sickly, Idle and Extravagant: The Gothic Novel, 1764-2002." Their collaboration centered on exploring distinctions between "highbrow" and "lowbrow" literature.

"Mascha Kaléko." In Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism (REM). Ed. Stephen Ross. London, Routledge, 2016.

 

Mascha Kaléko was a transnational Jewish German-language poet and one of the few female representatives of the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit).

"Franz Werfel." In Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism (REM). Ed. Stephen Ross. London, Routledge, 2016.

 

Franz Viktor Werfel was a Jewish-born Austrian novelist, poet, and playwright best known for his works of historical fiction, including The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (1933) and The Song of Bernadette (1941).

Refereed Book & Conference Reviews

"Refiguring Cognitive Narratology: Digital Literature and Representations of the Mind in David Ciccoricco’s Refiguring Minds." Review of Refiguring Minds in Narrative Media, by David Ciccoricco. DIEGESIS 5.2 (2016): 118-122.

 

Augmenting the current trend to enhance narrative theory through more interdisciplinary considerations, David Ciccoricco’s Refiguring Minds in Narrative Media combines fields of media studies and theory of mind.

Review of The Great American Novel, by Lawrence Buell. Modern Fiction Studies 62.3 (Fall 2016): 545-547.

 

The Dream of the Great American Novel develops both a history and argument around the changing concept of the great American novel since its inception following the Civil War.

Review of Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology, ed. Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan-Noël Thon. Style 49.4 (2015): 542-544.

 

A new edition to the University of Nebraska’s Fields of Narrative Series, Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan-Noël Thon’s Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology clarifies and advances questions of trans-media storytelling.

Review of Introducing Comparative Literature: New Trends and Applications, by César Domínguez, Haun Saussy, and Darío Villanueva. Review coauthored with Naomi Fukuzawa. Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation Review.

 

The first English-language critical introduction to the field of comparative literature since the 1990s, César Domínguez, Haun Saussy, and Darío Villanueva’s Introducing Comparative Literature: New Trends and Applications provides a much-needed outline of the extent and approaches of comparative literature while simultaneously tracing developing movements within the discipline.

Conference Review, "Beside the Rivering Waters of Charleston: The XXIII North American James Joyce Conference, College of Charleston, SouthCarolina, 11-15 June 2013," James Joyce Quarterly 49.2 (Winter 2012): 223-226.

 

A review of the 2013 James Joyce Conference that took place at the College of Charleston, South Carolina.

Refereed Conference Proceedings

"Project Twitter Literature: Scraping, Analyzing, and Archiving Twitter Data in Literary Research," Digital Humanities 2020, Book of Abstracts. Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (July 2020).

 

Project Twitter Literature (TwitLit), seeks to address a growing gap in the literary-historical record by establishing a consistent, rigorous, and ethical method for scraping and cleaning up Twitter data for the use of humanities scholars. In particular, this project explores the growing community of amateur writers who are using Twitter as a means of publication and dissemination for their literary output. There are three parts to Project TwitLit: the research findings related to the global literary community on Twitter, the tools and resources developed as part of the project and made openly available to other scholars, and partnership with a university library to ensure the long-term preservation of the collected data.

Christian Howard-Sukhil and Rennie Mapp. "Enhancing Community through Open DH Website Design," Digital Humanities 2020, Book of Abstracts. Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (July 2020).

 

This talk offers solutions to some shortcomings in communication about DH projects and undertakings on university campuses, particularly through the development of institutional DH websites. By an “institutional DH website,” we mean a community website, hosted by a given university or institution, that is explicitly devoted to the advancement, support, and promotion of DH work collectively. More than merely providing a definition of DH and a set of resources for those interested in the field, institutional DH websites can beneficially act as community hubs for DH practitioners by showcasing live projects and encouraging interdisciplinary collaboration. While there is no one-size-fits-all solution, an open development process can help scholars and DH staff who face long-standing DH challenges around methodological innovation, data reproducibility, reinvention of the wheel, and the balance of technical and humanistic priorities.

Christian Howard, Monica Blair, Spyros Simotas, Ankita Chakrabarti, Torie Clark, and Tanner Greene. "Augmenting the University: Using Augmented Reality to Excavate University Spaces," Digital Humanities 2018, Puentes-Bridges: Book of Abstracts. Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations
(June 2018): 600-601.

 

Using augmented reality (AR) applications, the 2017-2018 UVA Praxis Team created the project titled UVA Reveal: Augmenting the University to augment spaces and locations on the University of Virginia (UVA) campus. UVA is a southern historic campus with an enrollment of 22,000 students; given its history and recent spotlight in the news, UVA’s campus is ripe for the historical inquiry and narrative intervention that our project proposes. In augmenting UVA’s campus, we hope to expose the historical, cultural, (inter)national, (trans)sexual, and (dis)ability-related “archeology” of objects, places, and events.

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