This January, I will be presenting a paper at the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention for the first time. It won't be my first time at MLA (I've been before for job interviews), but it will be my first time navigating the convention's extensive line-up of panels, roundtables, &c.
To that end, I've compiled a list of sessions that constellate around my interests in book history, bibliography, remediation, and pedagogy. This list is not designed to be comprehensive but rather to give others who might be interested in similar fields a starting point for their own #mla16 itineraries.
Read moreI am pleased to say that "Deranged Verse: Inter-Media Arrangement in Seventeenth-Century England" has been accepted for MLA 2016 in Austin! Below you will find the proposal for this special session. If it piques your interest, I hope that you'll consider attending, or at least follow along on Twitter (#mla16 #s619) in January.
This special session explores the dynamic, interactive feedback loops between dramatic, musical, manuscript, and print media from Donne to Dryden. Focusing on how dramaturgical practices find their way into printed playbooks, how musical performance shapes the presentation of print authorship, and how informal manuscript gatherings lend structures to later volumes of lyrics, we aim to show the tentative, stop-gap, even improvisatory ways in which literary genres are fashioned through their media of transmission
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Last year, I started reserving a day in each of my Shakespeare courses for students to "make" quartos. I wrote at some length (almost exactly a year ago) about the experience of making Q1 Hamlet with my students at VCU and posted instructions, information about supplies for the activity, and a link to the sheets (which I made from EEBO printouts).
This semester, I'm teaching a senior seminar called "Early Modern Drama: Manuscript, Print, Performance" that focuses on the material-textual processes that facilitated the making of theatrical performance and printed texts of the plays. So far, my students have reverse-engineered scribal backstage plots of Doctor Faustus, performed a scene from the same play using cue scripts, and "made" quartos.