American Studies Program Presents:
The Gamble Room, Rush Rhees Library 3rd Floor
Friday, September 14, 2018
12:00PM- 1:30PM
Presentations by:
Edward Larkin, University of Delaware
Elizabeth Dillon, Northeastern University
Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva, University of Rochester
INTRODUCING THE PRESENTERS:
Edward Larkin presenting, Mapping the Chronotopes of Empire in the Early American Novel.
The early American novel, from Charles Brockden Brown and Susanna Rowson to Royall Tyler and Leonora Sansay, sprawls the Atlantic World, and even stretches into the South Pacific. Until recently, nationalist narratives of the history of the novel and the American Revolution, respectively, worked together to obscure the geographic reach of the form. Using mapping tools to generate a visualization of Rowson's Reuben and Rachel (1799), I suggest that the novel foregrounds how a new organization of space and time fundamentally shapes the Anglo-American project of empire.
Edward Larkin is a Professor of English and Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware. He is the author of Thomas Paine and the Literature of Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and The American School of Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Currently, he is working on a digital mapping project designed to explore how space and time shaped the early history of the British and American novel.
Elizabeth Maddock Larkin presenting, The Colonial Archive and Digital Remix in American Studies
These remarks will focus on the coloniality of the early American archive and the extent to which the affordances of the digital archive may enable possibilities for decolonization.
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon is a Professor of English at Northeastern University where she is Founding Co-Director of the NULab of Maps, Texts, and Networks and teaches in the field of eighteenth-century transatlantic literary studies, with a focus on early American and the Caribbean. She is also the co-director of the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College. She is the author of New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1659-1859 (Duke University Press, 2014), which received the Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research from the American Society of Theatre Research, and The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (Stanford University Press, 2004) which won the Heyman Prize for Outstanding Publication in the Humanities at Yale University. Together with Michael Drexler, she is co-editor of The Haitian Revolution and the Early U.S.: Histories, Geographies, and Textualities (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). Her work in the field of digital humanities includes projects involving text-mining and mapping of early African American texts and slave narrative, digital archival work in early Caribbean texts, and work mapping the reprinting of materials in nineteenth-century U.S. newspapers. She is one of the founders of the award winning Our Marathon Project: a crowd-sourced archive of the Boston Marathon bombings.
Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva presenting Captives in a Digital Diaspora: 21st-century Searches in 17th-century Documents
Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva is assistant Professor of History at the University of Rochester. He is the author of Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico: Puebla de los Àngeles, 1531-1706 (Cambridge University Press, 2018). He has recently received a NEH fellowship for a new, book-length research project, Mexican Atlantic: Contraband, Captivity and the 1683 Raid of Veracruz.