Writing and Research
Summaries of my current works in progress and selected publications.
What to Do with News:
Media and the Making of
Anglo-America
The stories we tell ourselves about our nations are as deeply felt as they are fabricated and are as widespread as they are varied. Observing the ways in which national pasts are renarrativized for disparate political ends today, my current book project, What to Do with News, reflects back to the mid-nineteenth century to understand how, in a parallel period of rapidly changing media culture and transnational relations, news-making cycles constructed similar, rather than opposing, British and American national identities. I engage the fields of nineteenth-century transatlanticism and periodical studies as I investigate both the rhetorical and material choices made when representing national, racial, and ethnic identities across borders. Today’s post-truth moment, combined with ever-present fake news and subsequent national fragmentation, gives urgency to this work. My central thesis is that news remediation practices, more than conventional forms of politicking or writing, established a coherent Anglo-American transatlantic public. What was made with—or out of—a news report, I suggest, was even more consequential than what it said.
Printing New Religion: Transatlantic Movements of the Nineteenth Century
The nineteenth-century US saw a flood of emergent spiritualities and new religious movements which have had remarkable staying power in the years since. Forthcoming with the University of Illinois Press, my collection with Colby Townsend brings together experts in history, religion, and literature who argue that the making of new belief came as a result of the making and spreading of varied print materials. Such materials enabled Christian Scientists, Shakers, Seventh-Day Adventists, Latter-day Saints, Spiritualists, and beyond to transcend political borders despite severe pushback and imagine distant communities of like-minded followers across the transatlantic Anglo-American world. Whether via letters, tracts, periodicals, or novels, firestorms of religious print mediated new theologies and turned those theologies into mass sociopolitical practices. In this circular manner, print itself helped to make radically new beliefs, communities, and politics and opened up new possibilities for dissenting traditions.
"Nothing but a Humbug:
P.T. Barnum, Charles Dickens, and the Construction of National Identities in a Living Archive"
My essay in Victorian Review shows, through a new narrativization of the auction of Shakespeare’s birthplace in 1847, that the purportedly kitschy and fake aspects of Barnumesque, new-money America were paradoxically also constitutive of Britain’s own nationalism. In the spring of that year, newspapers advertised that Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon would soon go up for public auction. Rumours immediately began circulating that the American showman P.T. Barnum, who had recently barnstormed through England with the “Greatest Show on Earth,” was intent on purchasing the birthplace for his menagerie of cultural oddities. In opposition to this foreign threat, a full-blown rescue campaign, driven by British media fearmongering, was launched in order to save Shakespeare’s home “for the nation.” Soon, these efforts drew in Britain’s own showman of the 1840s, Charles Dickens. The nineteenth-century popular press’s mythologization of these events, and the myth’s subsequent recapitulation in the twenty-first century, is emblematic of the way national-infused archives wind and unwind in a double-spooled temporality. As I renarrativize archival materials associated with the auction of Shakespeare’s birthplace, I proffer a different model of American and British nationalisms that points to their symbiotic development and perpetual reinvention.
"Abolition's Scissors: George Thompson and the Life of the Clipping in Transatlantic Activism"
In this essay, which is under review at American Periodicals, I follow the transatlantic life of the news clipping in 1830s abolition activism. American newspapers on both sides of the debate relied on scissors-and-paste newsgathering, whereby exchange editors copied, condensed, and reprinted news from other outlets. Entering this rapid-fire media network on his 1834–35 US lecture tour, British abolitionist George Thompson quickly became a target. Pro-slavery papers across the North and South vilified him as a foreign fanatic and inspired mobs to gather at his lectures. My work is the first to reconstruct and analyze the media method which Thompson developed in response: he mirrored the newsgathering process as he collected thousands of hostile clippings in his personal scrapbooks, annotated and recontextualized them, and wielded them in front of crowds on both sides of the Atlantic as proof of slavery’s evils. His response to the violence against him was rhetorical as well as material; in observing the violence against him and the early abolitionists, he adopted American national narratives as his own; in Britain, he urged sympathy rather than condemnation for the nation’s younger cousin. Thompson’s private and public remediation cycle thus furthered, I argue, abolitionists’ vision of a fraternal, morally reformed ransatlantic public.