Margo Howard may not be a household name, but that’s because she comes from advice-column royalty. Advice columns are the realm of pseudonyms. Daughter of the original “Ann Landers” and…
Contemporaries Essays
The Participatory Cultures of Omenana: Reading and Writing on a Nigerian SF Website
For scholars working on African literature, the challenge in describing the “contemporary” moment very much lies in how to make sense of the impact that new digital technologies have had…
Multiplayer Lit/Multiplayer Crit
When scholars in the humanities try to imagine new scholarly practices — new forms of collaboration, new metrics of evaluation, and new modes of knowledge production — we are quick…
Web 2.0 and Literary Criticism
Web 2.0 is changing the literary. We all know this, and we have emergent fields of study based upon this knowledge: electronic literature, game studies, cultural analytics, digital humanities. Yet,…
Can Literary Theory be Participatory?
This cluster contemplates two core terms — contemporary literature and participatory culture — as they are influenced by web 2.0 platforms where they have flourished on a scale hitherto unseen…
A Creative Reading of Web 2.0 and Literary Criticism Using Voyant’s TermsBerry
To collect essays into a cluster, such as this one for Contemporaries, creates a casing for those essays to inhabit. Within this casing, the essays’s proximity to one another affects the…
Afterword: Tight Spots and Privileged Spaces
Soon after Bloomsday 2019, a spoken word poet in sparkling brown boots performed for an academic gathering in Dublin. Her lush Irish speech accented what she knows as a working-class…
The Public and Possible Institutions of Practice
Humanities in the Public In my research with literature festivals in India I ask: why have writers, translators, artists, academics, publishers, and concerned citizens come together to produce a network…
Why Write for the Public
1 There’s this quote from Borges I used to love. “I do not write for a select minority, which means nothing to me, nor for that adulated platonic entity known…
What Academic Humanists Can Learn from Nonprofits
“Tenure. Is. Over.” I recently attended a panel discussion about the future of public humanities. Afterward, I asked a question about how a presenter’s work might help rebuild tenure in…