¶ Publications
“Middlemarch in Melbourne,” George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies (forthcoming 2022).
Although it is noted in bibliographies and databases, the serialization of Middlemarch in the Australasian newspaper of Melbourne in 1872-3 has received little critical attention. The essay makes a preliminary effort to redress this knowledge gap using a global media history approach anchored by a southern hemispherical perspective, permitting this canonical British novel to be recontextualized within the flows of transnational circulation. So doing decenters Eurocentric forms of thinking about imperial literary culture and realist aesthetics. Unexpectedly, as a fragmented colonial newspaper serial, Middlemarch – a provincial novel at the center of modern scholarship about European realism and totality – generates a new cultural field in which to theorize global reception history, transimperial culture, and the dialectic between realism and its remediation in, and between, print forms.
“Commemorative Print: Serialized Monuments during the Shakespeare Tercentenary Debates,” Journal of Victorian Culture 26.2 (Spring 2021), 172-193. https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcaa027.
This essay concerns Victorian debates about how best to commemorate Shakespeare at the tercentenary of his birth in 1864. Victorian enthusiasm for Shakespeare was all but ubiquitous, but it evolved in unpredictable ways. The National Shakespeare Committee’s proposal for a Shakespeare statue, for instance, ended in controversy and failure. By contrast, alternative forms of commemoration enjoyed notable success, such as Howard Staunton’s serialized facsimile of the First Folio (1864-66). Both the controversy and its potential resolution in Staunton’s Folio are revealed in essays published in the Reader, a short-lived literary weekly. Staunton’s facsimile came to be regarded by the Reader and commentators in other periodicals as the most apposite of tercentenary monuments. It remade the First Folio for middle-class Victorian readers, trading on the prestige of the First Folio and remaking a high-end book version of Shakespeare in the image of ‘shilling monthly’ serial literature. Taken together, the Tercentenary monument controversies and the Staunton Folio show the Victorian relationship to Shakespeare to be less settled than we have previously appreciated.
¶ Dissertation
My research and teaching focus primarily on Victorian literature and is based, conceptually and methodologically, in the intersection between print culture studies, literary history, and archival/media studies. My dissertation, “The Global Remediation of Charles Dickens and George Eliot,” explores the transnational and transtemporal circulation of Victorian fiction through books, newspapers, and archives.
¶ Other Projects
Digital Humanities
I am a contributing editor to At the Circulating Library: a Database of Victorian Fiction, 1837-1901.
Reviews
- Clare Pettitt, Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815-1848 (Oxford, 2020). Review in Review 19 (March 2021).
- Lindsay DiCuirci, Colonial Revivals: The Nineteenth-Century Lives of Early American Books (Penn, 2019). Review in Jahrbuch für Kommunikationsgeschichte 22 (2020).
- Jesse Zuba, The First Book: Twentieth Century Poetic Careers in America (Princeton, 2016). Review in SHARP News (Feb. 2017).
RSVP
In 2019-21, I am the North America grad student rep for the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals. If you’re a grad student who thinks nineteenth-century periodicals are neat and has ideas for RSVP events and ways to make it more representative for grad students, please email me.
I also serve on RSVP’s Digital Events Committee, and have organized events about decolonizing periodicals studies and DH, among other topics.
18/19
I co-organize the University of Washington Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century graduate research cluster, a grad student-led working group for students and and faculty from across UW departments and the PNW region who research aspects of global middle modernity. We have frequently collaborated with the V21 Collective to organize events. More at http://uw1819.org.