Jennifer Howard recently wrote an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education on “Building a Better University Press.” She mentioned Mark Sample’s recent challenge for a group of scholars to create their own university press. She also quoted from my THATCamp proposal, which was inspired by the challenge:

Inspired in part by a Twitter discussion of some of Sample’s ideas, Roger Whitson, a postdoctoral fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has now proposed a session for the upcoming THATCamp at George Mason University. (THATCamp stands for The Technology and Humanities Camp, which operates on a free-wheeling, participant-led unconference model.) This year’s unconference will take place June 3-5—the same time as the AAUP gathering up the road in Baltimore.

On the THATCamp planning blog, Whitson explained what he has in mind.  “I’d like to use the THATCamp spirit (hacking before yacking, collaboration, digital forms of communication) to try to imagine what a digital indie academic press (or UnPress) would look like,” he wrote. “Would it feature articles? Online conferences? Hacking sessions? Multimodal presentations? Could we institute peer-to-peer review? When would we publish?” He said he hoped participants would leave the session with “the beginnings of a plan” for some kind of THATCamp-affiliated indie press.

Georgia Tech’s college newspaper, Technique, ran an article about the Atlanta Comics Symposium for their April 15th issue. Here’s a little quote from me, on how to teach comics in a writing course:

“You’re writing all the time, but then when you present someone with the final comic book, the writing is actually embedded in the way you describe the story and illustrations [posted on their blogs] and getting people together,” Whitson said. “I feel like, ultimately, the students produced really great comics.”

You can find the article here.

Here I am with Vinicius Navarro at the 2011 James Dean Young Award Dinner. I was obviously pretty happy to win the 2011 Writing and Communication Award for Pedagogy.

Visualizing Nineteenth-Century British Poetry

The literature and arts of the nineteenth century were highly engaged in questions of vision and visuality. In this course, students will study poets and artists who contributed to the evolution of British visual culture, from the poetry of the picturesque and the sublime to the poetry of decadence and the grotesque. Along the way, we will examine how various visual artists imagined the poetry of the nineteenth century.  Projects will include a visual picturesque narrative, a multimodal analysis of poems and their illustrations, and a video reimagining a single poem from the course.

 

Here’s a video of a talk I gave at Emory University last December. Walter Reed invited Jason Whittaker and I to talk about how William Blake is adapted by artists in the Twentieth Century. I’m also archiving this video on my “video” page and hope to have more videos very soon!

On Wednesday, December 8 2010, students from my comics and graphic novels course held a comic fair for the Georgia Tech community. Participants were able to pick up two free comics created by my students. We had a HUGE turnout, around 200-300 people in the three hours we held the fair. Check out some images from the event!

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Here’s the poster for the 2010 Georgia Tech Comic Fair. If you are in Atlanta, come on by and get some free comics!

Cross-posted at Zoamorphosis: a Blake 2.0 blog

Queer Blake. Helen P. Bruder and Tristanne Connolly. Palgrave, 2010. pp. 264. $80. ISBN: 978-0230218369

Helen Bruder and Tristanne Connolly’s collection presents, for the first time, an encounter between queer theory and Blake studies. While authors have explored Blake’s relationship to masculinity, Steve Clark’s Sordid Images: The Poetry of Masculine Desire (1994); to homosexuality, Christopher Hobson’s Blake and Homosexuality (2000); to androgyny, Tom Hayes’s “William Blake’s Ego-Ideal;” and to gender, Helen Bruder’s collection Women Reading William Blake (2007) and Magnus Ankarsjo’s William Blake and Gender (2006); no monograph or collection about Blake has focused exclusively on queer theory. On the one hand, readers of Blake’s work are convinced in a vision of Blake’s marital bliss, perhaps punctuated by the story Thomas Butts told of Catherine and William reading Milton’s Paradise Lost in the nude. On the other hand, scholars rightly point out that Blake includes scenes of sexual violence, repression, even rebellion in many of his prophetic books. “The whole situation is queer” say Bruder and Connolly, and I am convinced they are right (4).

Luckily for readers of Queer Blake, Bruder and Connolly boldly venture into the closet of queer Blakean sexuality. They suggest that Blake’s status as a masculine ideal in many readers, the “healthy, macho, rough and ready, ‘typical’ English working class” vision of a “William Bloke,” too often obscures the queer relationships formed between Blake and his contemporaries and even Blake and his academic readers (5). “Queer is for poofy-toffs; transgender softness for bleeding-heart liberals” (6). So, was Blake a normative sexual conservative, confining his sexuality to the marital bed; or was he a sexual libertine who explored beyond the safe “free-love” clichés given to most Romantic authors? There is enough evidence to titillate and suggest, if not prove, a queer Blake. In particular, Bruder and Connolly mention Blake’s description of Gothic artist Henry Fuseli. Blake describes Fuseli as “The only Man that eer I knew / Who did not make me spew” (E 507). They call the statement “as curious as it is hiliarious, expressing attraction by denying repulsion, in abject terms of bodily fluids (if he didn’t spew, presumably he swallowed)” (10).

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You can find more posters for the course on my poster page.