Outstanding Levels of Performance in Scholarship
Outstanding performance in scholarship is achieved by producing four scholarly works (publicly shared, peer reviewed, able to be built upon by others) during the period between earning Associate Professorship and standing for Full Professor. Two of these four scholarly or creative works must also meet the criteria for ‘meritorious’ scholarship as defined by my department; while I was hired into a tenure-track position prior to Spring 2013, I choose the department-specific criteria developed in 2010, inserted below.
This application for promotion covers the years from Spring 2012-to Fall 2017. Over the past six years, as indicated in my list of Publications and Presentations, I have produced a total of fifteen (15) scholarly products considered meritorious, and thirteen (13), ordinary, exceeding our scholarly requirements. In the interests of space and simplicity, I will describe a subset of these scholarly works here, chosen as representatives of my range.
Department Scholarship Criteria
Meritorious Scholarship
As explained in our scholarship criteria, "The Department of Literature and Languages defines meritorious scholarship as research that visibly positions our faculty as active scholars who are up-to-date in their discipline and that is open to peer review." Meritorious work "would have a significant impact on the discipline or be viewed by a national or international audience." While I have created a number of meritorious scholarly products and presentations, indicated with an asterisk in the Presentations and Publications page, I will here focus on six that showcase the variety of my scholarly endeavor (two are required for Outstanding achievement in scholarship). Please note that in humanities fields, it is much more challenging to measure "impact," as these metrics are often designed for scientific journals and implemented with only those journals.
1. Currently in manuscript preparation, my solicited chapter in Approaches to Teaching Eliza Haywood will be published by the Modern Language Association of America, in a December 2017 collection edited by Dr. Tiffany Potter. Here is notice that the collection has been approved for publication by the MLA, and here is the table of contents for the volume as a whole. My essay, entitled “Non-Fatal Inquiry: Love in Excess, Print, and the Internet Age,” explores three interrelated and low-stakes digital projects that intersect with the history of printing and bear specifically on the material contexts that shape how women speak in public. These are projects that can be scaled up and adapted for a variety of other contexts; I routinely incorporate them into EN340: Major Women Writers and some iterations of EN490: Major Authors. This forthcoming publication is meritorious not only because it merges my interests in eighteenth-century studies and digital humanities with hands-on scholarship of teaching, but it will also be published as part of the influential and widely-read Approaches to Teaching series. Any scholar or teacher of literary or cultural studies is very familiar with this series, and it is an honor indeed to be invited to contribute.
2. Also in the area of eighteenth-century studies, my scholarly journal article “’All deformed Shapes’: Figuring the Posture-Master as Popular Performer in Early Eighteenth-Century England" was published by Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies in 2012. This article is also meritorious; JEMCS is published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, in existence since 1890. According to the PennPress website, "The University of Pennsylvania Press exists to publish meritorious works that advance scholarly research and educational objectives." In this article, I offer the first historical exploration of the eighteenth-century contortionist, a well-known figure on the paratheatrical stage and an important conceptual touchstone for aesthetic, political, and cultural discourses. Drawing on newspaper data and other primary source materials, I trace the careers and performance practices of these artists in flesh. JEMCS peer reviews by sending the work first to the editorial board, which assesses its suitability in both content and scholarship, and then the editorial board identifies typically two reputable scholars with similar expertise who conduct a thorough review. Here is a communication about some of this process with the managing editor, and here is one of the peer reviews I received.
3. Linking my research in eighteenth-century studies, my scholarship of teaching, and my interests in digital humanities, I have also developed Novels in Context, a database and front-end application that offers a selection of excerpted and annotated primary source materials for the critical study of the eighteenth-century novel in English. I developed the tool using the eXist-db open-source native XML (eXtensible Markup Language) software, and much of my development process is recorded online, in keeping with the ethos of trial, error, collaboration, and transparency that marks my pedagogy. According to our scholarship criteria, "development or co-development of an innovative scholarly digital tool, platform, or software that is open to peer-review by scholars" is an example of meritorious scholarship, and this project clearly fits that description. The eighteenth-century English-speaking world was characterized, broadly, by rising literacy rates and a vibrant, growing marketplace of print that supported the development of a public sphere accessible to more people, if not everyone. This is a crucial historical framework for our current educational moment. We face a significant challenge, as teachers and scholars, of making distant material relevant for students raised in an environment of standardized, workforce-oriented learning. This challenge is amplified by the rising costs of tuition, skepticism about the value of humanities-driven education, and the proliferation of digital materials of questionable provenance and editorial quality. Novels in Context seeks to address each of these challenges in a way that strives for transparency in the act of conscious, public, deliberative making. The project is intended as a pedagogical tool with public scholarly significance focusing on the construction of knowledge within a material context. Over time, students and faculty work together to add new items to the collection, transcribing them from first editions, acquiring page images of early editions, researching concrete references and identifying important contexts, and annotating those texts in a dynamic multimedia fashion. This project is currently full-text searchable, and will allow teachers to collaborate with students to create their own user-generated print anthologies or coursepacks, bypassing the planned obsolescence of the textbook publishing industry (note that the upload feature is currently in construction). This project is meritorious because it visibly positions my interdisciplinary work in the public sphere, and is open for peer review, collaboration, and continued growth. As evidence of the significant and public nature of the database application, please note that I have since collaborated with a colleague working on a similar project at the University of Virginia on an essay, "Open Anthologies and the Eighteenth-Century Reader," in the public humanities resource 18th-Century Common, and we have also co-authored a National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Level 2 Advancement Grant. This grant application is currently under review by the NEH, and is supported by (among others) Joseph Locke, co-author of The American Yawp; and Laura Mandell, author of Breaking the Book: Print Humanities in the Digital Age. I have collaborated with several students at Marymount, including Rongling Tang and Elizabeth Ricketts on content, and Dan Rudd, Nigel Patterson, and Greg Arfuso on the backend. This student mentorship is explored in more detail in the Outstanding Teaching section of my application.
4. The Department of Literature and Languages recognizes "peer-reviewed paper[s], peer-reviewed poster presentation[s] and/or peer-reviewed reading [s] of one’s own creative work at national or international or significant meeting of an academic or professional organization" as meritorious scholarship. While I have presented numerous scholarly works at significant national professional organizations, I will here only note my 2015 presentation of Novels in Context at the annual international Digital Humanities conference, held that year in Sydney, Australia. Digital Humanities is the annual international conference of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organization (ADHO), described on their website as "an umbrella organisation whose goals are to promote and support digital research and teaching across arts and humanities disciplines, drawing together humanists engaged in digital and computer-assisted research, teaching, creation, dissemination, and beyond, in all areas reflected by its diverse membership." In 2015, the acceptance rate for presentations was 52%. Submissions go through a rigorous peer-review process, and my presentation received three positive reader responses. Additionally, I was encouraged to offer a response to the reviewers. This meritorious scholarly presentation played an integral role in developing the project and locating collaborators. (Incidentally, the man standing to the left in the image above is Martin Holmes, of the University of Victoria's Humanities Computing and Media Centre.)
5. To indicate the range of my scholarly interests and the variety of ways I approach them, I also recently contributed my expertise in a significant way to the creation of How to Give Birth to a Rabbit, a musical song cycle performed at the 2016 Capital Fringe Festival. The show tells the story of Mary Toft, an illiterate mother living in poverty outside of London in the early eighteenth century, who perpetrated an extravagant hoax on the the newly-modern world 0f which she was a part and for which she was a sign. Her act of early modern performance art involved fraudulently giving birth to almost twenty rabbits over the course of a few months. Her act caught the attention of the class-climbing medical men eager to make their marks, as well as a public avidly consuming the details of her story as it unfolded in the newspapers of the day. As dramaturg and co-producer, I both provided notable expertise and represented Marymount University while doing so. With my collaborator Jon Gann (Founder, DC Shorts), we proposed the play, developed the arc of its narrative, wrote several songs, worked closely with performers to achieve our vision, promoted it via both print and electronic means, and held five performances throughout the festival at the 284-seat Sprenger Theater, a state of the art black-box in the Atlas Performing Arts Center. As dramaturg, I brought the true history of Mary Toft into focus for the actors, the musicians, and the director, drawing on prior scholarship on the subject; I also wrote the program notes and surtitles. As co-producer, I auditioned performers, worked with the director to shape the play in rehearsal, locate rehearsal space, manage the audio technician, liaise with the lighting and costume designers, and control the lights and surtitles for each show. The play was reviewed positively by DC Metro Theater Arts and DC Theater Scene; one reviewer described it as "a tale that is not only compelling in its own right, but, as we are reminded in the program notes, resonates forcefully today with its emphasis on 'spin, celebrity, and agenda." As a second reported, "I left the Atlas feeling like I witnessed the birth of something that has the potential to be great."
6. In 2015, I presented current scholarship on Isaac Fawkes, the first modern magician, at the national conference meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. This paper, entitled "Isaac Fawkes, Brand Image, and the Modern Entertainment Economy," argues that Fawkes used key elements of portraiture, becoming in the eighteenth century a more accessible commodity constructing bourgeois identity, to shape his performance persona. ASECS is the foremost disciplinary conference in my period discipline, and this presentation was peer reviewed. I was privileged to present on a panel with Barbara Benedict and organized by Darryl Domingo, two scholars whose work is closely related to my own, and whom I greatly admire.
Additional meritorious scholarly products are noted with an asterisk (*) in my List of Publications and Presentations.
Other Scholarship
According to the Marymount University handbook, I am required to have at least four (4) works of scholarship, two (2) of which must be meritorious and the remainder, ordinary. Among the variety of my other ("ordinary") scholarly works, listed in full in the Publications and Presentations page, I here single out the following six (6) for discussion.
In November 2016, I published an encyclopedia entry on Eliza Haywood in The Literary Encyclopedia. This 3500-word researched article provides a lucid, wide-ranging author introduction, in addition to an overview of her major works in many different genres as well as her work as a publisher. I wrote this biographical and work overview as part of my course preparation for EN340: Major Women Writers, in which I frequently teach two of Haywood's amatory works, "Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze" and Love in Excess. This was also preparation for my MLA Approaches to Teaching article, described above. I have an additional Literary Encyclopedia article on the single work, Love in Excess, coming out by the end of 2017. I frequently supply these materials to my students when we cover this material, and I also refer to it when we discuss the differences between summary, overview of the literature, and critical analysis.
With John O'Brien, I co-authored a public humanities article in The 18th-Century Common, entitled "Open Anthologies and the 18th-Century Reader." This article was the first formal entry in a collaborative grant application we subsequently (with Christine Ruotolo of the University of Virginia Libraries) submitted to the NEH.
Forthcoming in Fall 2017 is a review article, "Getting Lost in the Digital Archive," assessing the merits of Eighteenth-Century Drama: Censorship, Society, and the Stage, a primary source fulltext database from Cengage and Adam Matthews. This review will be published in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research, and represents my growing reputation as a peer reviewer of digital projects.
At the 2015 Aphra Behn Society conference, hosted at Seton Hall University, I was invited to co-lead a workshop about using Wikipedia to teach early modern women writers. This important invitation made the impression that resulted in the solicited chapter for the MLA Approaches to Teaching article, described above.
In April 2017, I presented "Unbearable Refusals: Resisting the Female Autonomy in Charlotte Lennox's Henrietta (1761)” at the annual Virginia Humanities Conference, hosted and juried by Shenandoah University, on current research detailing the role of narration in Charlotte Lennox’s mid-eighteenth-century novel, Henrietta. This paper represents one of two current scholarly projects, planned for submission to journals in the upcoming years; in particular, this is planned for submission to Women's Writing. In November 2014, I presented a paper entitled "Corpse Humor On and Off the 18th-Century Stage" at the regional East Central American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, hosted at the University of Delaware. This presentation is an extension of published work from 2011 on farce and performativity during the period, and it reflects an ongoing scholarly interest.
