Categories
Announcements

Sarah Faulkner Hosts Book Talk

If you recall our post in August 2022 about Recent Publications by Textual Studies Students & Alumni, TXTDS graduate certificate alum Sarah Faulkner (English PhD, 2020) was invited to write the introduction to Flame Tree Publishing’s Collector’s Edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus in 2020. In her introduction, Faulkner highlights the historical and literary context for the novel as well as its multimedia afterlife. She concludes with a new reading of the monster as a touchstone for conversations about sexual violence, the climate crisis, and other current issues.

Tomorrow, Wednesday, December 7, 2022, the UW Alumni Book Club is sponsoring a virtual conversation about Frankenstein with Faulkner. For more information and to sign up for the event, see the UW Alumni Association event page.

Categories
Announcements Research Students

Recent Publications by Textual Studies Students & Alumni

We recently checked in with our Textual Studies graduate certificate alumni and are pleased to share news of several publications over the past year.

Cover of Frankenstein

Following her work co-organizing the bicentenary of Frankenstein at UW in 2018, Sarah Faulkner (English PhD, 2020) was approached by Flame Tree Publishing (London) in 2020 to write an introduction to their Collector’s Edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. In her introduction, Faulkner highlights the historical and literary context for the novel as well as its multimedia afterlife. She concludes with a new reading of the monster as a touchstone for conversations about sexual violence, the climate crisis, and other current issues. You can find the edition at most bookstores, including the Lake Forest Park Third Place Books.


Cover of George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies

Three Textual Studies students contributed to the most recent volume of George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies (vol. 73, no. 2), published in late 2021, a special issue containing the proceedings from the Middlemarch 150th Anniversary Symposium at the University of Washington.

Nikita Willeford Kastrinos and Francesca Colonnese (English PhD candidates) wrote “Coreading Middlemarch in Pandemic Times: Using Digital Humanities to Build Community at a Distance.” This article, written in the context of remote teaching and learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, defines the practice of ‘coreading,’ a collective form of reading that uses Manifold digital annotation tools. In doing so, they explore decentering traditional forms of knowledge production in favor of crowd-sourcing to build connection and community from a distance.

Matthew Poland (English PhD, 2022) contributed the article “Middlemarch in Melbourne,” which examined the underexplored serialization of George Eliot’s Middlemarch in Melbourne’s Australasian newspaper using a global media history approach anchored by a southern-hemispherical perspective. This approach permits the canonical British novel to be recontextualized within the flows of transnational circulation, and decenters Eurocentric forms of thinking about imperial literary culture and realist aesthetics.


Cover of Journal of Victorian Culture

Matthew Poland also wrote “Commemorative Print: Serialized Monuments during the Shakespeare Tercentenary Debates,” published in the Journal of Victorian Culture. The article concerns Victorian debates about how best to commemorate the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth in 1864, comparing the success of Staunton’s serialized facsimile of the First Folio and the National Shakespeare Committee’s failed proposal for a Shakespeare statue. Both the statue’s 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.


Are you a program alum and have news to share with us? We would love to highlight your accomplishments! Email us at text@uw.edu.

Categories
Research Students

Graduate Certificate Capstone 2022

On June 3, 2022 Francesca Colonnese and Nikita Willeford Kastrinos gave their presentations as part of the capstone for completion of the Graduate Certificate in Textual and Digital Studies.

Christina Rossetti's poem in a newspaper
Rossetti’s poem in the Dallas Daily News
Francesca Colonnese presenting at Capstone event

Francesca Colonnese, PhD student in English, presented “When I am Read: The Temporality of Christina Rossetti in the Newspaper.” Colonnese looked at posthumous reprints of Christina Rossetti’s poem “Song [When I am Dead]” in a number of different American newspapers and examined the temporality of the poem both in its lyrics as well as the experience of reading it, both in its original form in a collection of poems versus its appearance in the dense and chaotic newspaper page. Using TEI text encoding to apply structured metadata to the content, her project, she writes, “explores the spatiality of newspaper pages to ask questions about readerly attention and whether or not the periodical context alters the reader’s temporal experience.” The impact of attention on reading was further emphasized by Colonnese in that she came to this work via the limitations of conducting research remotely during the university’s physical closure due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nikita Willeford Kastrinos presenting at Capstone

Nikita Willeford Kastrinos, PhD student in English, followed with “Intimate Threads: Text and Textile in the Pages of Pamela.” Kastrinos’ paper explored “the expansive material textuality of Samuel Richardson’s eighteenth-century novel Pamela by investigating the connections between bodies, clothing, and texts present in the novel’s rag pulp paper.” Kastrinos wove together a narrative of the titular character’s garment construction, letter writing, and the sewing together of the two, as well as the extreme popularity of Richardson’s novel leading to its reading and handling by multiple readers, and the role and presence of rag paper production in those readers’ daily lives.

Quote about text by D.F. Mckenzie
Slide from Nikita Willeford Kastrinos’ presentation

Congratulations to our 2022 graduate certificate recipients and thank you to those who attended the event to support!

Categories
Announcements Research Students

2022 Capstone Event for Textual Studies Graduate Certificate

Textual and Digital Studies Capstone Presentations
Friday, June 3, 3-4:30pm
Simpson Center, CMU 202

On June 3, Francesca Colonnese and Nikita Willeford Kastrinos will be giving short presentations as part of the capstone for completion of the Graduate Certificate in Textual and Digital Studies.

The TDS certificate is open to any student enrolled in a graduate program at the UW interested in the history of texts from antiquity to today, including any and all aspects of the creation, publication, editing, reception, circulation, adaptation and materiality of texts. You are especially encouraged to attend if you are interested in the program.

Francesca Colonnese, English
“When I am Read: The Temporality of Christina Rossetti in the Newspaper”

Christina Rossetti’s morbid little poem “Song [When I am Dead]” experienced a second life on the American Newspaper page, being reprinted numerous times in different papers. This eschatological lyric itself evokes temporality and yet what does it mean to alter its medium from printed collection to the densely printed periodical? This project explores the spatiality of newspaper pages to ask questions about readerly attention and whether or not the periodical context alters the reader’s temporal experience.

Nikita Willeford Kastrinos, English
“Intimate Threads: Text and Textile in the Pages of Pamela

This paper explores the expansive material textuality of Samuel Richardson’s eighteenth-century novel Pamela by investigating the connections between bodies, clothing, and texts present in the novel’s rag pulp paper. Recuperating the extensive material literacies of its eighteenth-century readers, this paper argues for a renewed attention to the interactions of text and textile in the novel and the primacy of touch in reading practices of the rag paper period.

Categories
Announcements Courses Faculty & Staff Research

Recent Italian and Textual Studies Scholarship by Professor Beatrice Arduini

In Autumn 2021, Associate Professor of Italian Studies Beatrice Arduini published several new works in Italian and Textual Studies, including scholarship that connects with her work supported by the Simpson Center’s Digital Humanities Summer Fellowships earlier that year.

In collaboration with Jelena Todorović, Professor Arduini co-wrote “Biscioni’s Dante,” published in Textual Cultures, vol. 14, no. 1. This essay focuses on the 1723 edition of two of Dante Alighieri’s “minor texts,” the Vita Nova and the Convivio, both of which had troubled editorial histories, within the volume Prose di Dante Alighieri e di Messer Gio. Boccacci prepared for the Tartini press in Florence by Anton Maria Biscioni. In intervening in the texts of both works in unique ways, this edition sought to return to Dante’s original intentions when writing them. This essay argues that Anton Maria Biscioni’s work offers modern readers a unique glimpse into the workshop of an editor of this eighteenth-century edition of Dante’s texts, an editor who details all the facets of the editorial process, from the collation of manuscripts to the hard choices determined by that collation and by the current practices of the editorial trade. The authors argue that main achievements of this 1723 edition can be seen in its editor’s promotion of bibliographical studies.

Also with Jelena Todorović (Associate Professor of Italian, University of Wisconsin Madison), along with Isabella Magni (Postdoctoral Fellow at the HathiTrust Research Center, HTRC, and Indiana University Luddy School of Informatics), Arduini co-edited as well as contributed an article to the volume, Interpretation and Visual Poetics in Medieval and Early Modern Texts: Essays in Honor of H. Wayne Storey, published by Brill in October.

Arduini explained, “I wanted to edit (and contribute) to this festchrift to honor the work and the career of our advisor and mentor, H. Wayne Storey. This is a tradition that lives very much in the Italian academic world, and many of Wayne’s friends, colleagues and former students were delighted to participate. Therefore, the project is intended for an academic audience interested in medieval and early modern Italian and French studies, textual studies and material culture. We wanted to delineate new research directions and opportunities in our fields of medieval studies, textual studies and digital humanities, based on and inspired by Wayne’s work, hence the word ‘new’ in the title of the volume. Accordingly, many contributions in the volume offer new paths of scholarly exploration that stem from his research. In line with this aim, we divided the essays into two parts, ‘Materiality and Visual Poetics’ and ‘Hermeneutics and Literary Criticism,’ reflecting a range of source texts and approaches that have common roots in two distinct but inseparable strains of Wayne’s scholarly legacy, which are also central to our own research, material studies and hermeneutics.”

Arduini’s article in the volume, ” ‘Dolente me/ son morto ed ag[g]io vita!’ The sonnet corona of ‘disaventura’ by Monte Andrea da Firenze,” examines how Monte presents himself as an emblematic example of misfortune and a poet of bad luck, illustrating with bitterness and tragic realism the precarious economic situation that condemned him to a marginal role in society after his bankruptcy. It is an uncommon characterization of poverty for the Italian 13th century: it moves away from its view as shame and disgrace to hint to a larger social problem, but also refuses the Christian ideal of poverty, which dictates to devalue worldly (i.e., economic and political) success to glorify a more transcendent vision, as presented in the Franciscan tradition and in Dante. The article includes translation of six sonnets, and is part of a larger book project on representation of poverty and suffering, tentatively entitled Suffering Sonnets: The Physicality of Love and Poverty in Monte Andrea (Florence, second half of the 13th century). Arduini started working on a virtual database and digital companion to her book project in summer 2021 thanks to the generous support of one of the Simpson Center DH Summer Fellowships.

Professor Arduini will be examining these themes of poverty as well as incarceration and slavery in her upcoming Spring 2022 class, ITAL 354 A: Travels, Migrations, and Exile: Encounters with the Other in Textual and Digital Archives (offered jointly with C LIT 361 A). Taught in English, the five-credit course has no prerequisites and satisfies both the Diversity (DIV) and Visual, Literary, and Performing Arts (VLPA) GE requirements.

Categories
Faculty & Staff Research

Geoffrey Turnovsky & Anna Preus on Digital Humanities, Data Science, and TEI

Assistant Professor Anna Preus (Department of English, Humanities Data Science) and Associate Professor Geoffrey Turnovsky (Department of French & Italian Studies, Textual Studies Program) are the latest guests on the English department’s “Literature, Language, Culture” series, where they discuss the value of Digital Humanities with host C. R. Grimmer (Department of English, Simpson Center for the Humanities). Their conversation includes how instructors and students make use of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) in their classrooms, their learning, and in the practice of archiving. In this episode you can expect to develop a working understanding of TEI and how it shapes classroom practices and can be a form of hope when considered in and outside of classroom settings. This conversation is available as a video on YouTube and as a podcast.

Anna Preus is a new member of the University of Washington community and joined the English department this academic year as both an Assistant Professor of English and interdisciplinary Humanities Data Science. Geoffrey Turnovsky is French & Italian Studies’ chair, Associate Professor of French, and co-lead of the Textual Studies Program.

This video/podcast is both part of public scholarship dialogue series “Literature, Language, Culture” from the University of Washington (Seattle Campus) Department of English, as well as the Annual Lee Scheingold Lecture in Poetry & Poetics.