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