My research is driven by the desire to expand the study of digital text cultures through the consideration of old and new objects with old and new methods of inquiry. I combine archival & textual studies and critical making with modernism and environmental humanities.
The archive is of central importance to the future of digital humanities in three ways: 1) prototyping the past, 2) macroanalysis through network analysis and modeling, 3) preserving imperiled material and making it newly accessible to ever broader publics.
For example, my work in Modeling and Prototyping is oriented by a fascination with the ways in which new print technologies borrow from old print technologies. Critical making is a method grounded in the argument that handmaking the unmade object is a form of reading the past. For instance, just as modernist poets embraced the invention of new materials like plastic, they also linked their inventions in poetic form with older forms of craft making. My article “Prototyping Mina Loy’s Alphabet” (Feminist Modernist Studies, 2018) discusses the implications of using 3D printing technologies to prototype the diagrams of a proposed but never constructed plastic segmental alphabet letter kit –– a game designed by Mina Loy for F.A.O. Schwarz. Through the process of drawing the letters in sketchup software and playing with the printed toy, it becomes clear that Loy’s toy is actually a poem in its own right. It physically articulates a theory of language as kinetic and open to mutation. You can read more about the project here.
I am completing a book manuscript, Modernizing Nature: Modernist Poetry, Gender, Race, and Civic Space which reveals early twentieth-century poetry’s interest in the ideological and material importance of the civic role of gardens. Discussing a range of writers from Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, H.D., Amy Lowell, Richard Aldington, Langston Hughes, Harriet Monroe, and Gwendolyn Brooks to less well known or entirely undiscussed magazine poets alongside a broader field of ladies’ gardening journals, press about suffrage activity, and newspaper reports about public park activities, Modernizing Nature traces intertwined civic and environmental feeling through geographical, print, gendered, class-specific, and racial networks. Modernizing Nature demonstrates that modernist poets were actively engaged with with early twentieth century civic debates about “naturalness.” Chapter Two “The Revolutionary Gardens of Imagism” is forthcoming in Modernism/modernity. To complement the book, a forthcoming co-edited (with Julia Daniel) collection Modernism in the Green: Green Spaces in Modern Literature and Culture, (Routledge) explores a trans-Atlantic fascination with modern green spaces and the varied ways communities built, managed, and consumed them, along with the often subversive manner in which modernists represented them.