I also had a dog dealing with multiple health issues, including glaucoma. Lots of visits to the veterinarian, especially in the spring. In the end, our dog Bernie did end up going blind! He is still a happy dog and a very good boy, though the days of off-leash romps through the woods are over for him. Here is a picture of him from last year (before the glaucoma); he was in need of a little grooming.
Despite the challenges, I did have a fair amount of time and mental energy to focus on my scholarly work alongside dealing with real life. I am proud of what I accomplished.
Publications
I've had a pretty productive couple of years. Between 2024-2025 I have seven publications either in print or likely to be published. You'll see a pattern -- quite a lot on African American literature!
"African American Poetry of World War I" (completed, under submission to a Cambridge anthology as of November 2025). (Relevant slides here)
"'Brown Skin' Beauty and Black Identity in the Harlem Renaissance." (completed, under submission to a journal as of November 2025)
“Frances E.W. Harper’s Afropessimist Poetics.” Book chapter in a volume edited by P. Gabrielle Foreman and Sherita Johnson of Penn State University. For University of Pennsylvania Press. (Forthcoming, 2026)
“Anthology, Archive, Corpus: The Design and Implications of African American Poetry: A Digital Anthology.” For Archiv Journal, February 2025. Published Fall 2025. (Abstract here)
“Amputate the Problem, Band-aid the Solution: Censoring Toni Morrison.” Chapter in Sam Cohen, Ed. Banning Books in America: Not a How-To. Bloomsbury, Forthcoming February 2026. (Based on a talk given at MLA 2024)
"The Modernist Archive Gap: Black Writers and Canonicity in the Digital Era." In Jamie Callison, Ed. Bloomsbury Handbook of Modernist Archives. Bloomsbury Press, 2024. (Introduction here)
"Catachresis at the Origin: Names and Power in Toni Morrison's Fiction.” South Central Review 41:1, Spring 2024, pp. 28-45. (Abstract here; Project Muse link here)
New Digital Projects; Update on ongoing projects
I have two new digital projects I'm excited about this fall. One is Adivasi Writers: An Introduction to India's Indigenous Literature. This is a project I worked on in collaboration with Srishti Raj, a graduate student in English. We worked on it through much of the summer of 2025, with support from a small internal grant from the English department that paid Srishti a stipend.
I have also been working on a Textual Corpus of Early 20th Century literature (or a "modernism corpus"). That's still in progress, though I posted some comments on the project here. I'll have more to say about this project as it continues to grow and mature, probably next year. Essentially, I started with the corpora on African American literature and Colonial literature of South Asia I started building back in 2020, and added a substantial quantity of writings by mainstream Euro-American modernists as well as genre fiction (detective fiction, science fiction, westerns, adventure fiction, romance fiction, etc.).
The actual collection of texts in the corpus might not be that important by itself (most have already been digitized in one way or another), though I think the metadata should be of interest to other scholars. I think I will have to explain why and how that is next year...
African American Poetry: A Digital Anthology has some new additions this year, the most notable of which might be a digital edition of Nella Larsen's Passing I put together as the book went out of copyright this past January. Analytics tells me that that page is one of the most often visited pages on the site, with more 30,000 users for the year. Overall, usage of the site as a whole has been strong, with 25,000-30,000 users per month during the academic year.
Work with the University Press of Florida
I have been working with the University Press of Florida as a series editor for a new book series on Queer Feminist Modernities. It's been an exciting new chapter for me; I'll probably have more to share about this as the series begins to publish some books!
Conference Talks
For 2025 alone, I gave ten conference talks and scholarly presentations; I also did an invited talk at the University of Washington.
I have gotten in the habit of posting slides for my various talks on the blog, so if you just scroll the main feed of the blog you'll see a lot of them. I spoke at the MLA, NAVSA, MSA, SALA, The Space Between, the ALA, the Toni Morrison conference at Cornell, and the Frances E.W. Harper Conference at Penn State. There was also a Humanities AI conference at Lehigh where I gave a talk. So I got around quite a bit! Happily, a number of these events were within driving distance and a couple were online, so in some cases I could just hop in my car and go.
I also posted some brief reflections on some of these conferences; you might want to check out my reflections on the Humanities AI conference here and the MSA here. My notes on MLA back in January were also pretty extensive; you can find them here.
Both my MSA talk on Richard Bruce Nugent and Wallace Thurman and my talk at the ALA on The Saturday Evening Quill could probably become publishable essays with some additional work.
Next year is probably going to be quieter in terms of conferences. I'm not going to MLA in January, and probably will only attend the MSA in the UK in early summer virtually.
Teaching
I have been on sabbatical this fall, so I haven't been teaching anything new. In the spring of 2025, I taught a first-year writing course (Writing 011) and a digital humanities graduate seminar.
I posted the detailed syllabus for the course here with links.
The main novelty in the DH class was the attempt to introduce students to coding in Python, using Melanie Walsh's Cultural Analytics With Python online textbook in the Google Colab environment. The results of this were a bit mixed; if I do it again, I'll probably have students do all quantitative work using Python packages, and spread the 'coding' component throughout the term -- so it doesn't feel quite so strange.
For my Writing class, I used two textbooks. One is an online textbook called How Arguments Work: A Guide to Writing and Analyzing Texts in College, by Anna Mills. I also used Samuel Cohen's 50 Essays: A Portable Anthology, which contains a really good sampling of examples of effective writing in different modes. The coupling seemed to work pretty well and I would probably do a version of it again.
It was the first time I was teaching first-year writing after the advent of generative AI platforms, and I was aware of how the availability of those tools poses a challenge to students in the class as well as to me as a teacher. For this iteration of the course, I focused a lot on scaffolding -- what are the elements of effective writing? Let's build it one piece at a time. If you do that, the thinking is, students will have less incentive to ask the machine to write it for them, and in any case the machine won't do as good a job doing an annotated bibliography with my exact specifications. I will have to continue to evolve how I respond to generative AI as the culture around the technology changes.