English

This book is a joy, well written, well argued and solidly researched. It is sadly not often that a monograph is such a pleasure to read. It is also important for provoking thought on this unexamined topic. Casteel charts a clear path but always gesturing towards a complex understanding of this nexus of imaginative spaces. A great example of this is the illustration on the cover, "Koo, Koo, or Actor Boy," by Isaac Mendes Belisario, a nineteenth-century Jewish-Jamaican artist, and the subject of critiques by both Stuart Hall and Rex Nettleford. Hall positions Belisario as a member of the merchant/professional class, and thinks he erases the violence of slavery and African presence, whereas Nettleford accepts that Belisario's parents and grandparents were involved in the slave trade as part of the normality of those times and sees him as a significant Jamaican national figure. Casteel wisely points to this disagreement as evidence of "the ambiguous position of Caribbean Jews," (33) and goes on to map her book as providing "more ambivalent" literary subjects and a range of representations summed up as "nuanced," "more idealized," "unsettling of master/slave opposition," "allies of the slave." The range of Casteel's authors/texts is impressive and functional, because collectively they represent multiple Caribbean languages and Caribbean countries (including

Focusing on the Windrush writers who arrived in London in mid-20 th century, J. Dillon Brown offers a thorough-and exhaustively researched-background into the key literary figures of this group. In so doing, he exposes the often rejecting reception of these writers by remnants of the imperial notion that remained in solidarity after the war: namely, those canonical English writers who make up The Movement (most notably, Kingsley Amis). While the book focuses on London in the 1950s, it does not delve into the treatment of the city and the space it provides for these marginalised writers. However, Dillon offers keen insights into the Modernist underpinnings of the emergent generation of Windrush literary figures. Dillon begins with an exposé of The Movement's shunning of Modernism and explains how these celebrated writers revert to the literary mind-set of imperial England. From this point, he goes on to provide close readings of Edgar Mittelholzer, George Lamming, Samuel Selvon and Roger Mais and concludes with a chapter on Kamau Braithwaite, Wilson Harris and V. S. Naipaul as they mark a shift in voices from West Indian writers to the Caribbean Artists Movement in a defining moment in Great Britain's relationship with immigrants, the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act. As Dillon suggests, through a largely European concept, then, Anglophone Caribbean literature conveys an anticolonial message.

The Ed.D. program in Heritage Leadership for Sustainability, Social Justice, and Participatory Culture at the University of Missouri-St. Louis helps students cultivate the mindsets and skill sets required to sustain, pluralize, and enliven heritage in the public sphere. Although the program primarily meets synchronously online, the January 2020 "Wintercession" field trip to heritage sites in Montgomery, Alabama, provided an opportunity for face-to-face interactions, deep conversation, and reflection. Curricular, conversational, and collaborative inquiry deepened awareness and activated activism toward issues of racial justice. The use of high-impact practices (Kuh, 2008) allowed the cohort and faculty mentors to delve further into heritage leadership themes, including: confronting difficult emotions, recognizing sanctified space, facilitating group bonding and trust building, identifying models for activism, and moving forward in activism. We argue that the emergence of these themes demonstrates the value of immersing students and faculty in a shared, high-impact experience that focused on awareness, remembering, and wondering-the process of imagining the not yet (Keenan-Lechel et al., 2019)-as a means to "activate activism" in a cohort-based Ed.D. program.

Examining the Antonio plays by John Marston, I argue that the metaphors used to portray familial emotions reveal the ideologies that underpin both excessive and normative versions of familial relationships; these metaphors reveal the pressures placed on family emotions by economic and political ideologies. While critics have traditionally read instances of family breakdown in plays as moments that violate kinship norms, I argue that such moments of violence are caused by ideologies associated with inheritance structures which underpin descriptions and experiences of normative familial emotions. A travers l’examen des pièces de théâtre d’Antonio de John Marston, je soutiens que les métaphores employées pour représenter les émotions familiales font apparaître les idéologies qui sous-tendent tant des versions excessives que des modèles normatifs pour lees relations familiales. Ces métaphores révèlent la pression que font subir aux émotions familiales les systèmes de pens...

While numerous literary scholars have raised concerns about the capacity of computational methods to reveal unrecognized features of literary form and content, few have explored the approach of interpreting these methods in relation to historical antecedents (such as the eighteenth-century subject index) that were similarly designed for comprehending and representing large amounts of text in easily intelligible formats. This essay compares methods of mapping the contents of texts from different historical periods by examining Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) from two perspectives: that of its 1784 index and that of a topic model generated from the text. We contend that this sort of comparative interpretation of models demonstrates a new way to consider computational methods not as heralding a break from print genres like the index but, instead, as participating in a longer tradition of practices that have sought to make massive amounts of text accessible for readers, whether they are human or machine.

F or all the talk about how computers allow for new levels of scale in humanities research, new debates over institutional structures, and new claims to scientifi c rigor, it is easy to lose sight of the radical diff erence between the way human beings and computer programs "read" texts. Topic modeling, one of the most touted methods of fi nding patterns in large corpora, relies on a procedure that has little resemblance to anything a human being could do. Each text is converted into a matrix of word frequencies, transforming it into an entirely numerical dataset. Th e computer is directed to create a set of probability tables populated with random numbers, and then it gradually refi nes them by computing the same pair of mathematical functions hundreds or thousands of times in a row. Aft er a few billion or perhaps even a few trillion multiplications, additions, and other algebraic operations, it sutures words back onto this numerical structure and presents them in a conveniently sorted form. Th is output, like the paper spit out by a fortunetelling machine, is supposed to tell us the "themes" of the texts being analyzed. While some of the earliest computational text-analysis projects, like Father Roberto Busa's famous collaboration with IBM on the Index Th omisticus, began by attempting to automate procedures that scholars had already been doing for centuries, topic modeling takes us well beyond the mechanical imitation of human action (Hockey). When we incorporate text-mining soft ware into our scholarly work, machines are altering our interpretive acts in altogether unprecedented ways.

Word-search technologies have played a significant role in literary scholarship for decades, yet they have received little attention from literary theorists. This paper considers how we might more thoughtfully approach the use of search in navigating cultural material from the nineteenth century. Taking the writings of Walt Whitman as both an example and a theoretical foil, I argue that the use of these tools can amplify historical differences in word use that are relatively unimportant to close reading, influencing what sorts of texts we read in ways that are not immediately apparent. I suggest that if we as literary scholars are to use word search in our research, we should approach it from a philological point of view, actively exploring the limits of our knowledge about the linguistic practices of the past and considering the effects of technological mediation on our encounters with historical texts.

From the N.S.A. scandal to Google Ngram and the Digital Humanities, debates over the transformative power of "Big Data" are all the rage at the moment. While the mass collection and deployment of "data" made possible by new technologies has been alternately hyped, hailed, and criticized in the media and research, few contest that "[t]he era of Big Data has begun" (boyd and Crawford, 2012). The aim of this workshop will be to explore how it began. By turning to a period in U.S. literary history that coincided with the radical expansion of quantitative methods into social and psychological phenomena, we will examine what role fiction played in the construction, circulation, and negotiation of data as a form of social knowledge. While literature is usually considered antagonistic to quantification, naturalist writing in the late nineteenth-and early twentieth centuries was not only sympathetic to scientific methods but was even conceptualized by Zola as an instrument for the generation of social data on its own accord. How did American literary naturalism reflect the contemporaneous zest for numbers: for counting, measuring, classifying, and categorizing? How did the logic of aggregation in the social sciences influence narrative strategies in naturalist texts? And to what extent did such strategies function to interrogate or disseminate a modern epistemology of data? Addressing these questions and others that bear on the relationship between data and fiction, the goal of the workshop will be to shed light on the literary and social fictions underlying the construction and application of "data" in society.

Single Lives 2017 is an interdisciplinary conference on Singleness taking place at University College Dublin 13-14 October. A public keynote by Rebecca Traister will take place at the National Library of Ireland on Friday, Oct. 13th, at 6:30 pm. Reservations are required, by email.

This conference will explore literature and popular media by, about, and for single women from the last 200 years in relation to aesthetics and form, politics, race, sexuality, class, space, reproductive rights, and the economy. What singles do and mean is both an academic field and a popular obsession that investigates what it means to be a socially, politically, and sexually active single person.

Single Lives 2017 will also launch a research cluster housed at UCD and helmed by Dr. Kate Fama and Dr. Jorie Lagerwey. If you’re interested in being affiliated with that research group, please contact us at [email protected]

This Dublin session of the Konstanz Humanities Pedagogy Workshop will focus on teaching strategies for employing material and textual archives in the university classroom. Three seminars, led by Drs. Lucy Collins, Sara Ebrahimi, and Kelly Fitzgerald, will focus on teaching with local digital, textual, and architectural archives.

April 27-28, 2018
University College Dublin

Although the relationship between the ‘native’ and the ‘foreign’ has been a longstanding, evolving site of contention in American cultural history, the Trump presidency has brought both terms (and their histories) to a new level of exposure and debate. The assumptions about ‘foreign bodies’ that fuelled the recent election and its aftermath—from the ‘wall’ to the travel ban— invite sustained analysis, especially in relation to the construction of a seemingly antithetical body of ‘native sons’ that invokes superficial concepts of white working-class masculinity. The divisions and fault lines such constructions facilitate within the American ‘body politic’, in relation to race, ethnicity, sex-gender, class and sexuality, inform debate about contemporary American culture and form the basis of the conference. Although drawing on contemporary formulations of both concepts, the conference also welcomes papers offering an historical perspective on a particularly American etymology of ‘foreign’ and ‘native’ bodies.

The Alan Graham Memorial Lecture will be delivered by Dr Sue Currell (University of Sussex). The title of Dr Currell’s lecture is “Good Genes, Great Genes and Smart Genes: Popular Eugenics and the American Body Politic.”

Organizers: Katherine Fama (University College Dublin)
Anne Fogarty (Irish Literature, University College Dublin)

Invited Participants: Victoria Rosner (Comparative Literature, Columbia University)
Kirin Makker (Art and Architecture, Hobart and William Smith Colleges)

Recent years have witnessed an exciting range of scholarship engaging literary and spatial modernism. Our seminar will explore the reciprocal relationship between modern architectural and narrative forms, practices, and aesthetics. We invite consideration of spatial representation and resistance in modernist fiction, and engagement with public, professional, and domestic designs and structures. The seminar takes a broad perspective on architectural actors, including writers, activists, architects, planners, and occupants. We view as central the ways that critical theories of race, gender, class, sexuality, and disability inform these intersections.