Leeann Hunter and I will be joining the faculty of Washington State University this coming fall!
Apr 012012
Sep 162011
A few updates since I last posted:
- I accepted the Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Digital Scholarship Commons (DiSC) at Emory University. I’ll be working on creating digital projects and establishing a digital humanities center in the middle of the Robert W. Woodruff Library. Thus far, the job has been really great.
- I was interviewed by Cristina Merrill of the International Business Times about the new Justice League comic. Here’s a selection from the article:
Fan and comic book scholar Roger Whitson, 33, has used comics extensively in his teaching and research. He noted how the first issue of the Justice League relaunch began with two characters that are familiar thanks in part to fairly recent movies.
“So people kind of know these characters,” he said.
Whitson is hoping the series will take a more philosophical approach, as he is interested in comics that make him think.
“I hope it presents a kind of fresh vision of these characters that can challenge people to think in a different way,” he said. “We live in an era where people who make a lot of money tend to get away with a lot. If you look at the politics of the last few years it looks like these multi-billionaires are becoming more untouchable.”
I’ve also been working on the Blake 2.0 Meme Project, and hope to have a first project online in the coming weeks.
Oct 162010
I’m busy busy busy!
- Jason Whittaker and I just turned in the proposal for our collaborative book project entitled Zoamorphosis: William Blake and Media Studies 2.0. The project combines work in the reception of Blake’s work from the Victorian period to the present with research methods enabled by social media: digital pedagogy, digital ethnography, and digital image rendering. These methods, we argue, reveal a William Blake heavily invested in collaboration, whose work invites - even demands - creative responses.
- TECHStyle recently completed their coverage of Georgia Tech’s Future Media Fest conference. I included three articles on the startup and technology showcase, the social media and collective intelligence panel, and the digital media skills panel. I conclude my portion of the coverage with a recap about the need for further reflection on the future of citizenship in a world of social marketing and continuing incursions into individual privacy.
- I also joined the Romantic Circles Teaching Romanticism group blog. My first two posts, archived on my personal website, explored ways of historicizing Romantic collaboration in classes and the need to consider objectives for Romantic courses that aren’t limited to period surveys.
Aug 242010
It’s a little late, but here’s an update for my research and teaching in August.
- I finished my summer project, a social network and group blog for my Department called TECHStyle. We already have a few articles on the website. Check it out!
- I’m rewriting my Byron article to connect to my current interests in Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology. Originally, I had based my article on a re-reading of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and accounts of Byron’s corpse after his death. Now, I’ve started to focus on what I notice to be Coetzee’s remarkably realist orientation to animals, postcolonialism, and existence in general to herald a different way of approaching Romantic Ideology. Instead of an epistemological or historical critique of RI, as McGann and other New Historicists have attempted, I’m going to offer a realist account of Romantic objects in the novel.
- I’m also writing up two book proposals. One of these is for my dissertation, The Romantic Mediology, in which I argue that Mediology (coined by Regis Debray but, for me, filtered through the realist accounts of ontology offered by thinkers like Graham Harman and Levi Bryant) can give us a different understanding of how Romantic ideology persists beyond the Romantic period. I’m looking specifically at the 1970s to the present, but my argument could be extended beyond that time period. My second book proposal is a co-written monograph with Jason Whittaker on using Social Media to teach and research William Blake. Whittaker is specifically interested in using digital ethnography to understand how people are really quoting, citing and using William Blake on the web. I’m interested in designing a meme network of Blakean projects where artists, filmmakers, students, and the public at large respond to a series of what I call challenges by Blake. The first of these, I’m hoping, is focused on the Ghost of the Flea. I’ll keep you posted.
