Abstract: How should humanities scholars, and especially their educational and research institutions, deal with the digital transformation of their libraries and publishing venues? Although posed repeatedly for about twenty-five years, especially since 1992, the question has become more clearly focused with the rapid expansion of IT resources and infrastructure. The National Digital Public Library initiative, launched in 2010, is a decisive event that allows us to reflect on the early history of digital technology in the humanities. Most pressing is the need for the profession at large to become an informed and active player in the transformation of postsecondary education and scholarship. (JM)

Abstract: Evaluating new forms of scholarship for tenure and promotion requires taking those forms, and the methods of peer review they bring with them, on their own terms. Even more, it requires exercising the critical judgment on which our profession relies instead of outsourcing that judgment to others. Such evaluation requires reading both the work and the available evidence of the ways that scholars have responded to that work. (KF)

Abstract: Current debates over the disciplinary categories of comparative literature and world literature provide an occasion for rethinking the governing taxonomies of literary study. This article offers an overview of important recent books by David Damrosch, Pascale Casanova, and Franco Moretti and builds on their arguments to propose an alternative framework for classifying literary works that foregrounds their mobility, capacity for regeneration, and functional diversity. (DP)

Abstract: The authors take up the call from the MLA’s Report to the Teagle Foundation on the Undergraduate Major in Language and Literature “to engage students with faculty scholarly interests and the issues and arguments debated in the discipline” and make recommendations on ways undergraduates may conduct research in the field. While English departments have been slow overall to engage students in undergraduate research as popularized in other fields by the Council on Undergraduate Research, the National Conferences on Undergraduate Research, and professional organizations, the authors believe that students have the potential to contribute to knowledge in the field. Invigorating undergraduate research in English studies may benefit all, students and faculty members alike, as well as the field itself. The essay concludes with practical advice to effect change. (JK and LG)

Abstract: Nonfictional witness narratives and literary testimony travel together. Although such accounts spring from diverse experiences, they increasingly take the form of neoliberal narratives of resilience and redemption. This essay examines how Jamaica Kincaid’s practice of literary witness contests this emerging norm in the humanitarian and philanthropic archive. Her autobiographical fiction refuses a script of suffering and overcoming as the basis for eliciting readerly empathy. Kincaid creates female protagonists who do not conform to gender norms, including selfless mothering, heterosexual virtue, and faith in Western-style education and empowerment. In so doing, she exposes the ambivalences with which testimony can be met when victims are not properly sympathetic. I argue that we should trace the itineraries of the ethical across nonfictional and fictional practices of witness in order to challenge the neoliberal requirement that all victims must tell the same story in order to be heard. (LG)

Abstract: This essay attempts to open up the amorphous parts of a story enveloped by secrets and the noise of gossip and innuendo. Considering the complex circumstances of a young Jewish refugee woman’s life—the extraordinary times in which she fell in love, fled Austria to Bolivia to marry a man who offered to save her parents, divorced, and then died in 1943, perhaps by suicide—the essay highlights the vulnerability of lives on the verge of catastrophe. Such a telling engages what Carolyn Steedman designates as “dust”: both the “obdurate set of beliefs” that construct an official story and the ephemeral affective dimensions that persist in the interstices of the small archive left behind. It shifts the temporality of testimony from the aftermath to the before, not to find a point of origin but to listen for the resonances and reverberations enabling a multiplicity of meanings to emerge. (MH and LS) Permission: Excerpt from Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History, by Art Spiegelman, copyright © 1973, 1...

Abstract: “Embedded Lives: The House of Fiction, the House of History” tells how a historical event became narrated through different media and disciplinary discourses by a number of participants, through many years and in different spaces. It takes the 1977 eviction of a group of elderly Filipinos from the International Hotel in San Francisco, and the protests against that eviction, as a starting point of a series of imbricated stories that lead up to today. It argues for the importance of collective voice. (DP-L)

Abstract: This essay provides a brief history of human subject research, with an emphasis on the challenges its protocols pose for humanities researchers. Life narrative writers, critics, and theorists have necessarily thought more about the ethics of human subject research than most of their colleagues, although for biographers in particular this issue can seem to be more an annoyance or obstacle than a benefit. The essay surveys a few projects now emerging from language and literature graduate programs that require human subject research of various kinds, then concludes by suggesting that thinking even harder about what we talk about when we talk about asking permission should be leading us toward forms of research now largely unfamiliar to many humanities departments. (CH)

Abstract: What is the place of friendship in the field of life writing? Does friendship have a plot that illuminates a life story? Returning to Virginia Woolf’s famous invention of Chloe and Olivia as the central pair of characters in a new literature by women, this essay focuses on the role played by the bonds of friendship—here between women who are also writers—in shaping biographical identity and sustaining creativity over the course of a career. (NKM)

Abstract: To understand the historical dynamics of the cosmopolitan Indian Ocean region requires a comparative engagement with both the notions of cosmopolitanism and creolization. Although both presuppose patterns of movement and degrees of mixing, the nouns cosmopolitan and Creole and the realities they connote are likely to be seen as polar opposites, belonging to incommensurable coordinates of time and space. The challenge is to bring into dialogue intellectual histories that have been viewed as distinct, since the idea of the cosmopolis evokes a highly literate, urbane, and enlightened polity, whereas the oral cultures of a Creole world tend to be associated with superstition and primitive rituals. If we rethink cosmopolitanism and creolization from the perspective of the insular regions of the Indian Ocean, new possibilities emerge for comparison and redefinition of what it means to be a Creole cosmopolitan who participates actively in the construction of cultural meanings through technologies of oral, print,...

Abstract: As more and more scholarship is digital, we need to develop a culture of conversation around the evaluation of digital academic work. We have to be able to evaluate new types of research, like analytic tools and hypermedia fiction, that are difficult to review. The essay surveys common types of digital scholarly work, discusses what evaluators should ask, discusses how digital researchers can document their scholarship, and then discusses the types of conversations hires and evaluators (like chairs) should have and when they should have them. Where there is a conversation around evaluation in a department, both hires and evaluators are more likely to come to consensus as to what is appropriate digital research and how it should be documented. (GR)

Abstract: This article offers a critical survey of the rhetoric and realities of contemporary institutional struggles to come to terms with multimedia scholarship. As richly mediated and computationally enabled scholarship—frequently but not exclusively under the banner of the digital humanities—struggles to gain acceptance in higher education, what standards, values, and best practices can ensure the rigor of emerging scholarly modes? Building on their work as coeditors of the online journal Vectors, the authors put forward requirements that are essential to the future of emerging scholarship: respect for experimentation and emerging genres, appreciation for transdisciplinary and collaborative work, the updating of models of citation and peer review, rewards for openness and contribution to a public commons, and valuing the development of tools and infrastructure. The article concludes with the scholarly resource Critical Commons as a provocative example of the movement toward researching in public. (SA and TM)

Abstract: In assessing digital humanities scholarship for purposes of tenure and promotion, committees must focus as much on process as on product, because digital work is situated in especially complex and collaborative networks of production and reception. Necessary shifts in evaluative practice require us to rethink internalized notions of solitary authorship, develop new standards for attribution, and revise institutional policies that govern intellectual property. This essay offers a set of preconditions for the evaluation of digital projects and argues that fair and full acknowledgment of the work of others (including non–faculty members and alternative academic contributors) will contribute to a scholarly communications ecosystem in which new work in the humanities is better fostered, designed, distributed, and preserved. (BN)