My stock answer for how I became an eighteenth-centuryist is that I followed my journalistic career backward. It was great to have the opportunity to explain that thought a bit more in The Washington Post!
I'm very excited that my panel for the Samuel Richardson Society will be included at the 2015 ASECS Annual Meeting in LA! Proposal below. “New Directions in Epistolary Studies” (Roundtable) (Samuel Richardson Society) Rachael Scarborough King, Dept. of English, U. of California, Santa Barbara, Mail Code 3170, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3170; Tel: (646) 508-4162; E-mail: rking@english.ucsb.edu Recent work on eighteenth-century epistolarity has often taken a materialist bent, but...
The New York Times had an article today on the planned publication of Robert Frost's letters, arguing that the forthcoming volumes "could soften a battered image" and re-humanize Frost. The article sets up a familiar dynamic, pitting the biographers offering "their" versions of Frost's life against the letters, which, the article assumes, will show the "real" Frost. The collected correspondence, the author writes, will "offer the most rounded, complete...
On the eve of World Post Day, it's interesting to note that during this government shutdown debacle there has been no discussion about shutting down the U.S. Postal Service: it's just assumed that it will continue to run as usual. This appears to be so taken for granted that there are very few news articles even answering the question about whether mail delivery will continue, despite the fact...
"The opening of ... mail, like the revelations that the N.S.A. has been monitoring telephone, e-mail, and Internet use, illustrates the intricacy of the relationship between secrecy and privacy. Secrecy is what is known, but not to everyone. Privacy is what allows us to keep what we know to ourselves. ... As a matter of historical analysis, the relationship between secrecy and privacy can be stated in an axiom:...
The new digital exhibit "What Jane Saw," reconstructing Jane Austen's 1813 visit to a show of Sir Joshua Reynolds' paintings, has been getting a lot of attention, including a splashy feature in the Times. The exhibit shows off some of the best of the digital humanities, incorporating an aesthetically pleasing presentation that both offers real new knowledge for scholars of the period and reaches out to members of the public in...
