Literature
The highlights of 2001-2002 included the appointment of a new member of the faculty, Assistant Professor Noel Jackson, a specialist on romantic literature whose PhD was awarded by the University of Chicago, and the promotion of Christina Klein to associate professor without tenure (both appointments took effect on July 1, 2001).
Associate Professor Shankar Raman's book Framing India: The Colonial Imaginary in Early Modern Culture was published by Stanford University Press, and he was promoted to tenure beginning July 1, 2002.
Lecturer Wyn Kelley was appointed senior lecturer, also to begin July 1, 2002.
Associate Professor Diana Henderson was awarded the Levitan Prize, and the administrative, development and support staff team for Comparative Media Studies (Janice Ellertsen, Literature administrative officer; Chris Pomiecko, CMS program administrator; Alex Chisholm, director of communications; and R.J. Bain, Douglas Purdy, Brad Seawell, support staff) was awarded the MIT Excellence Award for Building Bridges.
Professor David Thorburn was appointed MacVicar teaching fellow.
Academic Program and Student Enrollment
During the past year, 1,038 undergraduates enrolled in literature subjects, 13 were registered as literature majors, 25 as minors, and 108 as concentrators in literature. A number of literature subjects and seminars were revised and new topics offered this year, including American Authors: The American Poetic Tradition (21L.512), taught by Professor John Hildebidle; and Popular Narrative (21L.430), which offered two new topics, Popular Culture in an Age of Media Convergence (Professor Henry Jenkins) and Masterminds (Professor Hildebidle).
Professor Klein offered a revised version of 21L.707 U.S. and Asian Transnational Cultures, which included distance collaboration with the National University of Singapore and the graduate Centre for Historical and Cultural Studies, Bangalore, India.
Lecturer Kelley, in conjunction with the MetaMedia Project supported by the D'Arbeloff Fund, created Midnight, Forecastle, an innovative collection of image, text and film materials for use in teaching multicultural aspects of Moby-Dick, which she used for the first time in The American Novel (21L.504).
Professor Henderson offered Literary Studies: The Legacy of England (21L.420) for the first time. This subject introduces students to literary interpretive and scholarly methodologies through the study of major works of English literature, and is intended to anchor our development of the major program in literature.
Undergraduates Joyce Lee and Lianne Habinek were jointly awarded the Eloranta Fellowship this year and will pursue doctoral study in literature at UCLA and Cambridge University, respectively.
Research and Publication
Current research by MIT Literature Faculty includes research on the novel, drama, poetry, film, television and new media, with special strength in the literature of travel and exploration, gender studies, and cross-media studies.
Professor Peter Donaldson published an article on Baz Luhrmann's Romeo+Juliet in Shakespeare after Mass Media, ed. Richard Burt, and created two new multimedia essays, "Game Space/Tragic Space: Julie Taymor's Titus" and "British Shakespeare in the Digital Age," as part of an ongoing project on Shakespeare film in the context of media history.
Professor Alvin Kibel's current research is in literature and ethical theory and literature and science.
Professor Thorburn is co-editor with Professor Jenkins of Rethinking New Media and Democracy and New Media, forthcoming from MIT Press.
Professor Jenkins has also contributed a monthly column on new media to Technology Review and has completed seven articles on new media, film and video games this year which are forthcoming in journals and collected volumes.
Professor Ruth Perry completed a major study of the family in the English novel, Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in Eighteenth Century England, which will be published by the University of Chicago Press. Professor Perry has also begun a new project on English and American ballads, folksongs, and the history of their preservation and transmission.
Professor Stephen Tapscott's From the Book of Changes (poems) was published in a new edition by Carnegie Mellon University Press in the Contemporary Classics series; he completed his translation and edition of Gabriela Mistral: Selected Prose and Prose-Poems, to be published by University of Texas Press, and he published articles in Agni and in Theory and Praxis of Postmodernism, ed. T. Rachwal.
Professor Hildebidle's "Letters from Ireland" is forthcoming in Imported Bread: Literature of Cultural Exchange, and he is revising his book of poems, Signs, Translations, and has started a new project, "Does Poetry Matter," a collection of contemporary poets' writings interwoven with his own commentary.
Professor William Uricchio published articles on film and media history in Oesterreichische Zeitschrift fur Geschichtwissenschaften, in Archive fur Mediengeschichte-Mediale Historiographien and in The Moving Image: Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists. In addition he has completed fifteen other articles for publication and is completing his book on German television during the Third Reich.
Associate Professor Mary Fuller is working on a study of Hakluyt's Principal Navigations and published an article in Decentring the Renaissance: Canada and Europe in Multi-Disciplinary Perspective, ed. Germaine Warkentin.
Professor James Buzard published several chapters in edited collections, including Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siecle, ed. Amanda Anderson and Joseph Valente, Being Elsewhere: Tourism, Consumer Culture and Identity in Modern Europe and North America, ed. Shelley Baranowski and Ellen Furlough, and "Perpetual Revolution: an article on the legal, cultural and narrative history of the revolving door in Modernism/Modernity.
Professor Henderson published an article on Shakespeare and the culture of theme parks in Shakespeare after Mass Media, ed. Richard Burt, and is completing her book Collaborating with Shakespeare.
Professor Raman's Framing India: The Colonial Imaginary in Early Modern Culture was published by Stanford University Press this year. He is completing a second book, Untimely Meditations: Early Modern Crises of Representation, and an article on John Donne's love poetry appeared in Criticism.
Professor Klein is making final revisions on her book Cold War Orientalism, to be published by the University of California Press, and is working on a new book on Asian martial arts in American culture.
Professor James Cain is preparing his book on 12th century statecraft and the performance of gender for publication.
Professor Jackson's article on Coleridge and "self experiment" is forthcoming in English Literary History.
Lecturer Kelley contributed two articles to Melville among the Nation, ed. Sanford E. Marovitz and A. C. Christodoulou, published this year, and her article "'Lying in various attitudes': Melville's Pip in Digital Media" will be published in the conference proceedings of the 2001 Melville Society Conference.
Literature faculty have also been active in the research groups organized by the Comparative Media Studies Program. Professor Jenkins, program director of CMS, also heads the Games that Teach research group, Professor Donaldson heads the Transforming Humanities Education group, and Professor Uricchio heads the Globalization Studies group.
Electronic Projects
The Literature Faculty has been active in the projects sponsored by the MIT-Microsoft iCampus Initiative and by the D'Arbeloff Fund for Excellence in Education. Professor Donaldson's Shakespeare Project has been awarded a third year of iCampus funding to develop a DVD-based annotation system for Shakespeare films. Professor Jenkins is principal investigator for the Games for Learning Project, also funded by iCampus.
Games that Teach will enter its second year, expanding its prototype teaching modules from science and engineering subjects to humanities-based education. Professor Jenkins also serves as director of the MetaMedia Project, which is developing a framework for sharing and annotating multimedia materials for humanities classes in literature, film, foreign languages, anthropology and other subjects. Professor Donaldson is co-PI on this project, and Lecturer Kelley's Midnight, Forecastle project on Melville was the first new "mini archive" teaching module to be completed under this initiative.
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 web site and directs the MIT Communications Forum, which this year began webcasts of its proceedings.
Professor Klein organized 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 a plenary address, a multimedia essay on "British Shakespeare in the Digital Age," at the inaugural meeting of the British Shakespeare Association, and a plenary presentation at SCAENA, the International Conference on Shakespeare and His Contemporaries in Performance at St. John's College, Cambridge University. He also presented a multimedia essay on Julie Taymor's film of Titus Andronicus at the Modern Language Association conference in New Orleans, led a session at the British Council International Workshop on Shakespeare in Performance in Stratford-upon-Avon, and spoke at the Microsoft Faculty Summit in Redmond, Washington.
Professor Kibel presented papers at the International Conference on the History of Technology in Granada and the Europe in the Twenty-First Century Conference in Edinburgh.
Professor Perry delivered the plenary address at the North Eastern Society for Eighteenth Century Studies in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and spoke at a plenary panel at the Conference on the PhD in Women's Studies in Atlanta.
Professor Tapscott gave readings of his poetry in New York, London, Toulouse, Athens, Warsaw, and Timosoara (Romania).
Professor Jenkins spoke at the Console-ing Passions Conference in Bristol, UK, the University of the West of England, the Microsoft Faculty Summit in Redmond, at SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles, the Somerville Comics Festival, the Center for Cultural Policy at the University of Chicago, the National Scholastic High School Press Association in Boston, Princeton University, New York University, Harvard, the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, Boston College, the Society for Cinema Studies Conference in Denver, the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, the Singapore New Media Conference, and the Beijing Film Academy.
Professor Uricchio spoke at INPUT (International Association of Public Service Television Producers) in Rotterdam, the European Science Foundation in Copenhagen, and the Media and European Identity Conference in Brussels.
Professor Buzard spoke at the Victorian Institute, the University of North Carolina, the Northeast Conference on British Studies in Worcester, Massachusetts, the MLA in New Orleans, and the CUNY Graduate Center.
Professor Fuller spoke at the University of Michigan and the Florida Institute of Technology.
Professor Henderson spoke at SCAENA, the International Conference on Shakespeare and His Contemporaries in Performance at St. John's College, Cambridge, and the Institute for English Studies at the University of London.
Professor Raman spoke at the SCAENA Conference in Cambridge.
Professor Klein spoke at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association.
Professor Cain spoke at the University of Massachusetts and University of Illinois.
Lecturer Kelley conducted a day-long workshop at the NEH Summer Workshop on Melville and Multiculturalism for High School Teachers and presented her "Prototype for a Web-based Curriculum for Moby-Dick there. She also spoke at the John Hopkins University, Hofstra University, and the American Literature Association.
Service
Professor Donaldson serves on the steering committee of CMS and the Council for Educational Technology. Professor Kibel directs the MIT History and Literature Workshop. Professor Thorburn serves on the steering committee of CMS, directs the MIT Communications Forum and the MIT Pleasures of Poetry discussion series. Professor Perry serves on the Gender Equity Committee for SHASS, the MIT Corporation Joint Advisory Committee, and the advisory board of the Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies. Professor Hildebidle is undergraduate officer and a freshman advisor. Professor Jenkins serves as housemaster at Senior House and is director of Comparative Media Studies. Professor Fuller serves on the HASS Overview Committee and is a freshman advisor. Professor Buzard serves on the executive committee of the Division of Anthropological Approaches to Literature of MLA and is advisory editor for ELH. Professor Henderson served as acting director of Women's Studies (fall term), and on the Committee for the Undergraduate Program, the Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award selection committee, the Gender Equity Committee in SHASS, and the Graduate Admissions Committee of CMS. Professor Klein serves on the Austin Kelley Prize Committee and the Graduate Admissions, Curriculum, and Orientation committees of CMS. Professor Cain chairs the Literature Curriculum Committee. Professor Jackson is a planning member for the Midwest Faculty Seminars organized by the Teaching and Learning Center of the University of Chicago.
More information about Literature at MIT can be found on the web at http://web.mit.edu/lit/www/.