RESEARCH INTERESTS
I recently finished a dissertation project that analyzes the interplay of alternative forms of literature and alternative practices of circulation in the protest movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In my project, I explore how shifting ideas of medium and material came to influence transformations in the production, circulation, and consumption of alternative literature such as pamphlets, posters, and graffiti. These shifts often happened in intriguingly alternative ways that require us to re-question the interactions of political public action and political publication.
As a whole, my research interests combine literary studies with material and visual studies. In one project, I am looking at the intersection of public surfaces like walls or streets and tropes of writing that play out on and around them. Another future avenue of research will address the visual and material history of passwords as they appeared in literature and film in the nineteenth and twentieth century. By tracing the role that passwords played in forming—and delimiting—personal identity, I want to show how technologies and cultural practices left a mark on philosophical tropes of subjectivity, public sphere, and freedom.
In addition to pursuing academic interests, I am a contributor to the Goethe Institute Canada's #artbits photography team and recently finished a piece on stickers and street protests in contemporary Germany, which will appear in the Goethe Institute Canada Culture Magazine in November 2018.
Here is a cursory overview of past academic work:
a) I helped digitize and catalogue early twentieth century German-language cinema and media journals in conjunction with the Moving Image Research Lab.
b) In the final group project for a Digital Humanities seminar, my colleagues Adam Kitchen, Olesya Ivantsova, and I set out to assemble online tools that could be used to expand on conventional textual or literary comparisons of authors. One cartographic strategy we mapped out introduced an alternative literary encounter between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky on an interactive ArcGIS map.
c) At the 2012 Canadian Association of University Teachers of German (CAUTG) conference at Waterloo, Ontario, my talk, Excavating Eisenstein and (d)as Kapital, focused on Alexander Kluge's cinematic representation of Sergei Eisenstein's attempt to create a film based on Karl Marx's Das Kapital. As I argued, Kluge's notion of archeology uncovered several key aspects of contemporary cinema by reflecting on its rich layering of history, interview, media, stone, and dirt.
d) In my 2011 CAUTG paper, titled: "Movement in 'Heimkunft': A Poetic Plight," I examined the notion of homecoming in Hölderlin's elegy "Heimkunft." In particular, I expounded on Heidegger's interpretation of "Heimkunft" by suggesting that his spatial analysis of the elegy did not account for the poetic movement of the poem, which offers a decisively alternate understanding of how Hölderlin's poetry pushed language to its philosophical limits.
In addition to pursuing academic interests, I am a contributor to the Goethe Institute Canada's #artbits photography team and recently finished a piece on stickers and street protests in contemporary Germany, which will appear in the Goethe Institute Canada Culture Magazine in November 2018.
Here is a cursory overview of past academic work:
a) I helped digitize and catalogue early twentieth century German-language cinema and media journals in conjunction with the Moving Image Research Lab.
b) In the final group project for a Digital Humanities seminar, my colleagues Adam Kitchen, Olesya Ivantsova, and I set out to assemble online tools that could be used to expand on conventional textual or literary comparisons of authors. One cartographic strategy we mapped out introduced an alternative literary encounter between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky on an interactive ArcGIS map.
c) At the 2012 Canadian Association of University Teachers of German (CAUTG) conference at Waterloo, Ontario, my talk, Excavating Eisenstein and (d)as Kapital, focused on Alexander Kluge's cinematic representation of Sergei Eisenstein's attempt to create a film based on Karl Marx's Das Kapital. As I argued, Kluge's notion of archeology uncovered several key aspects of contemporary cinema by reflecting on its rich layering of history, interview, media, stone, and dirt.
d) In my 2011 CAUTG paper, titled: "Movement in 'Heimkunft': A Poetic Plight," I examined the notion of homecoming in Hölderlin's elegy "Heimkunft." In particular, I expounded on Heidegger's interpretation of "Heimkunft" by suggesting that his spatial analysis of the elegy did not account for the poetic movement of the poem, which offers a decisively alternate understanding of how Hölderlin's poetry pushed language to its philosophical limits.
LINKS
1) MIRL (Moving Image Research Lab): http://mirl.lab.mcgill.ca/
2) Mapping Dosteovsky and Nietzsche ArcGIS, Digital Humanities Seminar 2012:
- Click here for access to the map's functions on ArcGIS and Esri.
- Click here for the original map interface and instructions (see: "Details" in the upper left-hand corner of the map)
- Click here for the guided tour through the map (Silverlight Download necessary for dimensional viewing)
- Click here for the basic guided tour (regular viewing)
3) Excavating Eisenstein Prezi presentation: https://prezi.com/fxsjqfilu9zm/excavating-eisenstein/
1) MIRL (Moving Image Research Lab): http://mirl.lab.mcgill.ca/
2) Mapping Dosteovsky and Nietzsche ArcGIS, Digital Humanities Seminar 2012:
- Click here for access to the map's functions on ArcGIS and Esri.
- Click here for the original map interface and instructions (see: "Details" in the upper left-hand corner of the map)
- Click here for the guided tour through the map (Silverlight Download necessary for dimensional viewing)
- Click here for the basic guided tour (regular viewing)
3) Excavating Eisenstein Prezi presentation: https://prezi.com/fxsjqfilu9zm/excavating-eisenstein/
