Professor of English
Rhode Island College
Providence, Rhode Island
Education: Ph.D., Brown University; M.A., Syracuse University; B.A. The Evergreen State College.
Teaching areas: Media studies, Victorian literature and visual culture, History of Arctic exploration, Hip-hop culture, Linguistics, Literary theory. For details, please see my online curriculum vitae.
Current Courses
English 460: Victorian Spectacles (Spring 2010)
English 355: Literature of the Victorian Era (Spring 2010)
ARTM 542 Media Culture I (Spring 2010)
ARTM 543 Media Culture II (Fall 2009)
ENG 264H: Northern Exposures (Spring 2009)
Research Interests
1. Arctic History / Victorian Visual Culture
My website about Sir John Franklin's lost Arctic expedition of 1845 includes an on-line museum of images of Arctic exploration from the 1850's through the 1920's. You can also visit the website for my book, Arctic Spectacles: The Frozen North in Visual Culture, 1818-1870, (University of Washington Press) or drop by my blog, Visions of the North, where I post current news and reviews on Arctic exploration in books, films, and other media.
Looking for reviews of current books on Polar topics? Drop by the Arctic Book Review, which I edit.
For the latest news in the now self-governing territory of Nunavut, check out the current edition of the Nunatsiaq News.
2. Popular Culture / Music / Film
For a selection of my music reviews, images, and links to all kinds of music-related sites for all kinds of music -- Hip-Hop, Jazz, Funk, Folk, Reggae, Blues, and Techno -- check out my Music and Culture page.
]For informative, well-researched articles -- many with illustrations and animations -- on the early history of cinema, pre-cinema technologies (the panorama, diorama, cosmorama, etc.), and early radio and television, the best of the net is Dr. Russell Naughton's Adventures in Cybersound site in Australia.
3. Postmodern Theory
Postmodern Culture is an on-line journal, with recent issues in web hypertext. I contributed a number of articles to PMC in its early days, including "Edward Schizohands: The Postmodern Gothic Body" (1992), as well as review essays of the work of Paul Gilroy, Tricia Rose, and Georges Bataille.
4. Victorian Popular Culture / Web Biographies
The preliminary version of my site about the history of that uncanny behemoth, the Crystal Palace (1851-1936) is now online; it also includes my research page on television pioneer John Logie Baird, whose test transmissions originated from the South Tower of the Palace.
I'm currently putting together a series of small websites about various odd Victorian characters, among them the writer Henry Morley and Inspector Charles Frederick Field, as well as other figures from the history of Scotland Yard. I also have pages with short web biographies of other figures of particular interest, among them the scholar-mountaineer (and RIC alumna) Annie Smith Peck (1850-1935), Rev. Thomas H. Cocroft (an early Rector of the Church of the Messiah in Olneyville, whose Rectory, built in 1886, is my present home), as well as Garrett Augustus Morgan, the African-American inventor widely credited with inventing the automatic traffic signal and the gas-mask.
Friends and Colleagues
Michael Robinson's new blog, Time to Eat The Dogs, covers exploration, Arctic and otherwise, with élan.
Jonathan Dore, whose superlative copyediting has saved me from many a gaffe, has a page about his professional editorial services.
My friend and collaborator Huw Lewis-Jones has a page describing his current research here at the Scott Polar Research Institute.