Animal Bodies, a new website I am working on, draws inspiration from the epilogue of my dissertation, Strange and Unstable Bodies: Shifting Materialities in Early American Natural History Networks.

The website examines the re-creation and digitization of animal bodies...

This website is the product of an independent study in Spring 2013. I designed and built the website from scratch using HTML and CSS, and I collaborated with Shewanda Riley in creating its content.

The aim of this website is to promote an increased knowledge of how race...

Click here for a sample transcription of the first issue of The School Gazette.

Hartford Female Seminary’s Handwritten Newspapers are eighteen handwritten newspapers – the first sixteen are The School Gazette, the last two are The Levee Gazette. The School Gazette was w...

While working on a project in a graduate course taught by Dr. Cedrick May in Fall 2011, I discovered a previously unknown and unpublished poem by Jupiter Hammon. Together with Dr. May, we visited Yale University’s Manuscripts and Archives to see the poem in person an...

Originally posted on April 23, 2012 on English Matters: The UTA Department of English Blog.
 

During a round of late night research several weeks ago, I somehow ended up on a Wikipedia page listing all feature length stop motion animation films including The Tale of the...

Originally posted on my WordPress blog.

In Chapter 1 of American Curiosity, Susan Scott Parrish writes that in the 16th and 17th centuries “the English began to mythologize the plantation of ‘vegetable gold’ as the more virtuous form of colonization once they realized...

Originally posted on my WordPress blog.

American Curiosity is an excellent and fascinating book that brings together an impressive amount of primary texts that speak to how people experienced and represented nature in early America. Parrish argues against the tradition...

Originally posted on my WordPress blog.

Philip Gould, in his article “Race, Commerce, and the Literature of the Yellow Fever in Early National Philadelphia,” analyzes the intertwining of sentiment and the capitalist market in texts about the Philadelphia Yellow Fever e...

Originally posted on my WordPress blog.

In Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson writes in Query VI:

The bees have generally extended themselves into the country, a little in advance of the white settlers. The Indians therefore call them the white man’s fly, and co...

Originally posted on my WordPress blog.

When reading Crecevcoeur’s Letters this week, I was drawn to Crevecoeur’s use of the word sagacity at multiple points in the text. I liked the sound and look of the word, but I didn’t have a clear sense of what it meant. I looked...