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• Brittain Fellow Rebekah Fitzsimmons Publishes Article on Teaching Digital and Archival Research Methodologies

  January 8, 2019

  This article details an undergraduate student research project titled “The Possibly Impossible Research Project,” a collaborative effort between the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature at the University of Florida and the Writing and Communication Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The article outlines the pedagogy behind a multimodal digital research project that provided Georgia Tech students with in-depth instruction into archival research processes while improving the Baldwin’s annotated bibliography. The article then details the process of teaching the course and how students responded to the project both during and after the course. This assignment also offered students an opportunity to uncover and make meaning as researchers in their own right, and to distribute that new knowledge through public facing digital platforms such as Twitter and Wikipedia. The authors conclude that the collaborative project had meaningful impacts on the undergraduate students, the course instructor, the curator of the Baldwin Library, and the larger academic community; further, it can serve as a model for engaging undergraduate students with archival research, analysis, and dissemination. This article outlines the assignment in detail, including the interactive digital scaffolding assignments. The article cites student research journal tweets and final reflective portfolio essays to demonstrate the successful fulfillment of the student learning outcomes.

• Brittain Fellow Rebekah Greene wins 2019 Joseph R. Dunlap Memorial Fellowship Award

  December 19, 2018

  Greene's research project, "William Morris and The Dawn: Ideas for “The Society of the Future” " investigating the impact of Morris on the brief revival of the Christian Socialist movement in the US during the 1890s has been honored as the winner of the 2019 Joseph R. Dunlap Memorial Fellowship Award.

• WCP Lectuer Tobias Wilson-Bates Publishes Article in Acta Neophilologica

  November 21, 2018

  Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure has frequently been read as Hardy›s social critique of marriage, class, and systemic education. Readings of the novel in this critical tradition have a tendency to simplify the text into an allegory emergent from Hardy’s own biography. I seek to destabilize these readings by instead engaging with the text as one not concerned with institutions but rather the underlying social codes that give them coherence. By pairing Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of speech and counter speech with Lee Edelman’s queer critique of child-centered futurity, I offer a new reading of the novel that privileges codes and legibility as central to the novel’s critical project.

• Brittain Fellow Andrea Rogers Patton Nominated for 2018 Pushcart Prize

  November 12, 2018

  Announcement is here: http://www.gimmickpress.com/blog/2018/11/11/pushcart-nominations?fbclid=IwAR0Ardvzj71f-5gJxgf-wxEL5WSshCFrdpPudnjotRTVA4G--TNjvCH_rx0

  Poem is here: http://www.gimmickpress.com/worthless-treasures/2018/3/5/two-poems-by-andrea-rogers

• Brittain Fellow Courtney Hoffman Publishes Chapter on Theatre Productions of Frankenstein

  November 7, 2018

  The 2011 National Theatre stage adaptation of Frankenstein, written by Nick Dear and directed by Danny Boyle, highlights a construction of masculinity that relies on and normalizes violence against women. Though Shelley’s narrating scientist only briefly mentions his interactions with his female creature and brushes over his fiancée’s death, on stage, Victor performs necrophilic acts to taunt his creation/counterpart. Later, he and the audience watch while the creature rapes and then murders Elizabeth in a brutal simulacrum of sexual climax. These scenes of violence against women, performed frankly, do not allow for the possibility of emotional recovery or resolution on the part of the audience, but instead become a parody of desire and agency. They thus reinforce violent stereotypes as the basis of toxic masculinity.