Literature
The highlights of 2000-2001 included two new appointments, a promotion and several faculty awards. Dr. William Uricchio, former Director of the Media Center at the University of Utrecht, was appointed Professor of Comparative Media Studies beginning July 2000. Noel Jackson, whose field is British Romanticism, was appointed Instructor of Literature beginning July 2001. Associate Professor Christina Klein was promoted to Associate Professor, beginning July 2001. Professsor Peter S. Donaldson was selected as the Class of 1961 Fellow, and Associate Professor Shankar Raman received the Wade Award. Academic year 2000-2001 also saw the graduation of the first class in the Masters of Science program in Comparative Media Studies. The Comparative Media Studies program is directed by Professor Henry Jenkins and is a joint program of Literature, Foreign Languages and Literatures and the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies.
Academic Program and Student Enrollment
During the past year, 1000 undergraduates enrolled in Literature subjects, eight were registered as Literature majors, 25 as minors, and 144 concentrators in Literature. A number of Literature seminars were revised and new topics offered this year: American Orientalism (21L504) taught by Professor Klein; Herman Melville and Toni Morrison (21L702) taught by Lecturer Wyn Kelley; Renaissance Drama: Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (21L703) taught by Professor Raman; Tom Stoppard/Caryl Churchill (21L703, Spring Term) taught by Associate Professor Diana Henderson; Spenser/Milton (21L704) taught by Professor Mary Fuller; George Eliot (21L705, Fall Term) taught by Professor James Buzard; Geoffrey Chaucer (21L705, Spring Term) taught by Associate Professor James Cain; Concepts of Love and Sex in the Western World (21L707) taught by Professor Irving Singer (Philosophy).
Research and Publication
Professor Donaldson completed several articles on Shakespeare on film and a multimedia essay on the Ian McKellen Richard III, parts of a larger project on Shakespeare film in the context of media history. Professor David Thorburn is co-editing the Media in Transition Reader for publication by MIT Press. Professor Ruth Perry contributed an article to Women and Literature in Britain 1700-1800, ed. Vivien Jones. Professor Stephen Tapscott's edition of Pablo Neruda's 100 Sonnets of Love has gone into a new edition. Professor John Hildebidle published poems in Poetry Ireland and the Dan River Anthology. Professor Henry Jenkins published a regular column on media in Technology Review and an article in Independent School. His work also appeared in the collected volume American Cultural Studies, ed. Roberta Pearson and John Hartley, and in Reinventing Film Studies, ed. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams. Professor Uricchio published articles on film history in Storio del Cinema, ed G.P. Brunetta, and in KINtop: Jahrbuch zur Erforschung des fruhen Film, and is completing his book on German television during the Third Reich. Professor Fuller is working on a study of Hakluyt's Principal Navigations and published reviews in Terrae Incognitae and Shakespeare Quarterly as well as an article in Travel Knowledge, ed. Ivo Kamps and Jyotsna Singh. Professor Buzard published reviews in Victorian Studies and elsewhere and continues work on his book on autoenthnography in British fiction. Professor Henderson published four articles, including contributions to A Companion to English Literature and Culture, Shakespeare and his Contemporaries in Performance, British Writers and The Wit to Know: Essays on English Renaissance Literature for Edward Tayler. Professor Raman published a review in Renaissance Quarterly, an article in Travel Knowledge, and continues work on his book on representation in early Modern England. Professor Klein is making final revisions on her book Cold War Orientalism, to be published by the University of California Press. Professor Cain completed an article for Exemplaria and is preparing his book on 12th century statecraft and the performance of gender for publication.
Electronic Projects
Professor Donaldson's work under the MIT-Microsoft iCampus Alliance continued this year with the first deployment of the Shakespeare Video Annotation System (SVAS) in MIT Shakespeare classes and in a distance seminar under the auspices of the Shakespeare Association of America. Funding for SVAS has been renewed for the coming year, and the system will be used to support remote collaboration with faculty and students at Cambridge University. The Metamedia project, which will create a number of "mini archives" to support multimedia teaching across a broad range of humanities subjects was funded this year by the d'Arbeloff Fund for Education. Professor Jenkins will serve as PI for this effort, and Professor Donaldson, Lecturer Kelley and other Literature faculty will participate. Professor Buzard, as co-editor of the international Monuments and Dust project on Victorian England, is editing 19th century issues of Punch for digital publication. Professor Thorburn is editor-in-chief of the Media in Transition website and directs the MIT Communications Forum which this year began webcasts of its proceedings. In addition, a number of Literature faculty including Professors Donaldson, Thorburn, Cain and Lecturer Kelley participated in the Electronic Arts Creative Leaders workshops held at MIT and in California, at which MIT humanities faculty joined with creative leaders in the game industry to explore connections between traditional narrative and expressive forms and the emerging genre of electronic games. Professor Uricchio produced Analysing Images, an interactive CDROM for film study funded by the Dutch Ministry of Education. Professor Klein began work on a web-based collaborative distance course on U.S.-Asian Transnational Cultures with colleagues in Singapore and Bangladore, India.
Conferences and Invited Addresses
Professor Donaldson delivered the Hudson Strode Memorial Shakespeare lecture at the University of Alabama, chaired the distance seminar on Shakespeare on Film at the annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America meeting in Miami, co-chaired the Shakespeare and Film session at the International Shakespeare Association meeting in Valencia, Spain, and organized a series of workshops at MIT and Cambridge University on Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama in Performance, in which Professors Fuller and Henderson also participated. Professor Alvin Kibel presented papers at the Mediterranean Studies Conference at Aix-en-Provence, at the University of York (UK), and at the International Conference on the History of Technology in Prague. Professor Perry spoke at the Jane Austen Society in Boston, at the New England Eighteenth Century Society meeting in Portland, Maine, participated in a panel at the Association for Eighteenth Century Studies in New Orleans, and spoke at the Huntington Library, and at the University of the West Indies, Barbados. Professor Jenkins spoke at SIGGRAPH; at the American Library Association; at the Casey School of Journalism (University of Maryland); at the University of Southern California; at the Game Developers Conference in San Jose, CA; at the Technical College of British Columbia; at Melbourne University; at the University of Sydney; at the University of South Australia (Adelaide); at the University of Brisbane; at Canterbury College (Christchurch, NZ); at the Maine Librarians' Association in Portland, Maine; at the Electronic Entertainment Exposition in Los Angeles; and at the Society for Cinema Studies in in Washington DC. Professor Uricchio spoke at the Electronic Arts Workshop in Walnut Creek, CA; at the Historical Art and Culture Center at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, NL; at the Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum, Germany; at the University of Paderborn, Germany; at the European Science Foundation meetings in Bilbao, Spain and Palermo, Italy; at the Bauhaus University, Weimar; at the Center for Documentary Films in Berlin; at the Groningen Museum of Art; at Ben Gurion University in Israel; at the University of Stockholm Sweden; at the Cinémathèque québécois in Montreal and at the Royal Dutch Acadermy of Science in Amsterdam. Professor Buzard spoke at MLA, at the Northeast Conference on British Studies, at the University of North Carolina, at the Dickens Project Conference at the University of California-Santa Cruz, at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, at the City University of New York, at Indiana University, at the Travel and Nation Conference in London, and organized a panel at the Locating the Victorians Conference at the University of London. Professor Fuller led a seminar on travel literature at the World Shakespeare Conference in Valencia, Spain; participated in the panel on Early Modern Orientalism at the Shakespeare Association of America meeting in Miami; and spoke at the British Academy and the Florida Institute of Technology. Professor Henderson spoke at the Group for Early Modern Culture Studies in New Orleans, at the Renaissance Society of America in Chicago, at the Mediterranean Studies Association at Aix-en-Provence, at the World Shakespeare Congress, at the the Universities of Pittsburgh and New Hampshire, and chaired a panel at the Shakespeare Association of America in Miami. Professor Klein presented new work on transnationalism at Boston College. Professor Raman presented papers at the World Shakespeare Congress, the Renaissance Society of America meeting in Chicago, at the Mediterranean Studies Conference in Aix-en-Provence, at the Postcolonial Studies Conference in Kracow, Poland, and at the MLA meeting in Washington DC.
Awards, Service and Grants
Professor Donaldson was appointed Class of 1961 Fellow for a period of three years. Professor Raman received the Wade Award for his proposal "Crises of Representation in Early Modern Europe." Professor Perry received the American Society of Eighteenth Century Studies award for outstanding women in eighteenth century studies.
Professor Jenkins served as Director of Comparative Media Studies and as Housemaster of Senior House and as a member of the Creative Arts Council. Professor Donaldson served on the Council for Educational Technology and the Provost's Committee on Intellectual Property. Professor Fuller served on the MIT Faculty Committee on Nominations. Professor Buzard served as chair of the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences Overview Committee (HOC). Professor Henderson served on the editorial board for Renaissance Quarterly and Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies. She also serves as Shakespeare Delegate to the MLA General Assembly and co-chairs the seminar of Women and Culture in Early Modern Europe at the Harvard Humanities Center. At MIT she serves on CUP and on the Edgerton Prize Committee.
More information about the Literature section can be found online at http://web.mit.edu/lit/www/.