About Me
I’m a Ph.D. Candidate in the University of Virginia’s English Department. I currently direct UVA’s Writing Center and I’m finishing my dissertation, “‘That Great Burning Day:’ Apocalyptic Antebellum Culture and Fiction.” It argues that the apocalyptic rhetoric of antebellum evangelical periodicals and sermons directly informs the fiction of writers such as Stowe, Melville, Hawthorne, Poe, and Lippard, shaping the ways they portray and interpret “signs of the times” in their fiction.
As an appendix to my dissertation, I’m curating a digital edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “The Celestial Railroad” that will aim to allow scholars, teachers, and students to follow the rich history of “The Celestial Railroad’s” publication and editing in American periodicals during the 1840s and 50s. This site will provide images and the text of each printing of the story, highlighting significant amendments or deletions, as well as any editorial introductions appended to the texts. I hope to build a web version of Juxta into the site, which will allow users to compare the text of reprintings on the fly and draw their own conclusions about the story’s reception and influence. I’m also hoping to build an interface to the texts that will incorporate timeline and geospatial data, so that users can correlate changes made to the story with its progress through the nineteenth century and across the United States. I maintain a “Celestial Railroad” development blog on which I report new historical and textual findings, discuss the technologies that I’m using to create the site, and update visitors on the project’s progress.
I also manage the Red Schoolhouse project, a new website that aims to supplement writing instruction at UVA and bring UVA’s Little Red Schoolhouse writing curriculum into high schools and colleges around the country.
I regularly post my thoughts on digital humanities (and life in higher education more generally) in my Twitter stream, which you can also view in the sidebar here.
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