Undergraduate Office
Undergraduate Office
- Sean Silver
- Director of Undergraduate Studies
- Associate Professor
- Unit: Undergraduate Office
- Click for Personal Website
- Curriculum_Vitae_Silver.pdf
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. - Office: 43 Mine Street, Room 202, College Ave Campus Murray Hall, Room 104
- Office Hours:
On Leave 2023-24
- Primary Areas of Specialization: Literature and Science; Craft Knowledge; Critical Making; Complex Systems; Cognitive Studies; Material Culture; Museum Studies
- Field of Interest: Book and Media History, Restoration & Eighteenth Century, Theory
- About:
I teach the literature and culture of the British Restoration and eighteenth century, with an eye towards the material affordances of things like books. Related interests include complex systems, the history of science, and the history of ideas, but especially craft practices, the history of books, and the making of things. I am the author of The Mind Is a Collection, which traces the history of our most prevalent mental models. The book is the exhibit catalogue of a virtual museum, www.mindisacollection.org, which argues that all our mental models are based on spaces in which we work, and things we do with our hands. I am now working on a book on the history of decorative papers, focusing especially on one page in Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. The project begins with an accurate reconstruction of the marbled page in Sterne's book-- the "motley emblem of my work," he calls it-- but expands through that reconstruction to tell the story of the emergence of the first maritime global empire. Some discussion of the project is at www.motleyemblem.org.
So much of our life is virtual. Reading a book shouldn't be. I'm committed to making literature present in all sorts of ways, including by making it-- from dyes, inks, and pigments, to paper, printed pages, and bound books. Part of that commitment is in a course I lead on critical making; part is in the letterpress studio. Reach out if you'd like to discuss more.
- Biography:
For ten years, I taught courses in literature, critical making, and the digital humanities at the University of Michigan; for the past five, I have been at Rutgers, so: from one Big 10 school to another. Before joining the academy, I was what they call a “joiner,” a maker of cabinets and other furniture. My last project was The Mind is a Collection, a born-digital museum of eighteenth-century cognitive models. My current project, the Motley Emblem, combines my interests in artisanal craft and eighteenth-century literary history in a different way, recovering the global-sized practices embedded in one, vanishingly small instance of an art.
- Other Publications:
"Sentiment Analysis and the Sentimental Novel: A Literary Approach to Computational Criticism." With Andrew Franta. Critical Inquiry (2024).
"Fielding's Prepositions: Historiography and the Novel." ELH (2023).
"Hogarth's Networks and the 18th-century 'Graphic' Novel." Novel (2023).
"Literature and Philosophy." Eron and Kaul, eds., The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literature. Routledge (2023).
"Gilbert Ryle's Jane Austen: Character, Concept, and Thick Description." Studies in the Novel (2022).
“The Emergence of Texture.” Journal of the History of Ideas 81.2 (2020): 169-94.
“Satirical Objects.” Oxford History of Eighteenth-Century Satire. Edited by Paddy Bullard. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2019).
“Information and Irony.” Early Modern British Literature in Transition, 1660-1714. Edited by Elizabeth Sauer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2018).
“What Do We Mean by ‘Material’?” Afterword to Material Fictions, a special double issue of Eighteenth-Century Fiction, ed. Eugenia Zuroski-Jenkins and Michael Yonan (2018).
“Making Weather: Communication Networks and the Great Storm of 1703.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction (2018).
“Practice and Production.” The Cultural History of Hair: The Age of Empire. Edited by Joseph Roach and Margaret Powell. London: Bloomsbury (2018).
“Contingency in Philosophy and History: 1650-1800.” Textual Practice 32.3 (2018): 419-36. "The Material of Material History: John Evelyn and Numismata," Word and Image, 2015. "Hooke, Latour, and the History of Extended Cognition," Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 2016. "The Prehistory of Serendipity: Bacon to Walpole," Isis, 2015 "Pale Fire and Johnson's Cat: The Anecdote in Polite Conversation," Criticism, 2011. "The Rape of the Lock and the Origins of Game Theory," Connotations, 2011. "Visiting Strawberry Hill: Horace Walpole's Gothic Historiography," Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 2009. "Locke's Pineapple and the History of Taste," Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 2008.
- Education: University of California, Los Angeles – Ph.D. in English Literature, August 2008 Claremont McKenna College, Claremont, CA – B.A. in Literature, May 1994
- Ryan James Kernan
- Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies
- Associate Professor of English
- Click for Personal Website
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. - Office: Murray Hall, Room 024, College Ave Campus
- Primary Areas of Specialization: African American & African Diaspora Literature, Postcolonial Literature, Literature of the Americas, Translation Studies
- Field of Interest: African-American & Diaspora, Critical Race Studies, Poetry & Poetics, Postcolonial, Theory, Translation
- About:
My comparativist approach to the literary production of the African Diaspora builds on the work of scholars who have been developing the field of African American Studies and Diasporic Studies within modern academia since the late 1960s. In the broadest sense of the term American, I aspire to contextualize and to treat African American literature with the care, respect, and depth accorded other “national” and “transnational” literatures. In pursuing this objective my principal intellectual foci have led me to a multi-disciplinary approach as African Americanist, comparativist, literary theorist and critic, focusing on Translation Studies, diaspora studies, and Literature of the Americas. My manuscript, New World Maker, employs this multidisciplinary approach to elucidate the key role that translation played in Langston Hughes’s creative processes and in the fomentatiion of black iinternationalism from 1930 to 1967.
I have come to understand my role in the classroom as one that capitalizes on the complementary relationship between the disciplinary drive to elicit complex interpretations from texts that draw from multiple perspectives and the academy’s growing commitment to undergraduate multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary education. I design my courses to stimulate an interactive learning environment in which students become deeply engaged with texts and develop capacities to formulate their own understandings of how works of literature convey meaning within an awareness of disciplinary expectations. I use my lectures as a means to model different critical approaches to textual analysis and draw from a wide variety of resources, ranging from canonical Western texts to artistic production in contemporary cultures the world over, with an eye to foment intellectually challenging discussions with and amongst my students.
- Book(s):
- Books (additional):
New World Maker: Radical Poetics, Black Internationalism, and the Translations of Langston Hughes (Northwestern University Press, Fall 2021) Justice in Time: Critical Afrofuturism and the Struggle for Black Freedom. eds., Ryan Kernan and Elizabeth Reich (in progress and under contract at University of Minnesota Press)
- Undergraduate Courses Taught:
- Awards:
2009- Affiliate Faculty Memeber in the Program of Comparative Literature
2011-2012 Faculty Fellow, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
2006-2007University of California President's Dissertation Fellowship
2005-2006 Graduate Research Mentorship,
2004 Graduate Research Mentorship
2001-2003 UCLA Eugene Cota Robles Fellowship
2000-2001 University of California Graduate Opportunity Fellowship
1998 Phi Beta Kappa; Summa Cum Laude, Princeton University
- Other Publications:
Selected Publications:
2010 “Story and Discourse,” The Encyclopedia of the Novel, edited by Peter Logan, Wiley Blackwell: Oxford (2010)
https://www.academia.edu/11168931/Story_Discourse
2010 “Author,” The Encyclopedia of the Novel, edited by Peter Logan, Wiley Blackwell: Oxford (2010)
https://www.academia.edu/11174643/Author
2011 “How it Feels to be Mulatto Me,” Phati’tude, Vol. 2 No. 4 (Winter 2011): 12, 20-23.
https://www.academia.edu/10780062/How_it_Feels_to_be_Mulatto_Me
2012 Langston Hughes’s Cuban Contacts: Translation, Complementary Conversation, and Inter-American Dialogue” Langston Hughes Review 24.25 (Fall/ Winter 2010/2011)
2014 “The Coup of Langston Hughes’s Picasso Period: Excavating Mayakovsky in Langston Hughes’s Verse” Comparative Literature, (Winter 2014)
Selected Reviews:
2017 Letters from Langston: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Red Scare and Beyond, eds. Evelyn Louise Crawford and Mary Louise Patterson (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 434 pp. ALH Online Review, Series https://academic.oup.com/DocumentLibrary/ALH/Online%20Review%20Series% 2010/Ryan%20 James%20Kernan%20Online%20Review%20X.PDF
- Membership Affiliations:
American Studies Association
American Comparative Literature Association Modern Language Association
Modern Language Association
- Education: A.B., Princeton University, Phi Beta Kappa; Summa Cum Laude, English Literature and Theater, 1998, Ph.D., UCLA, Comparative Literature, 2007 Dissertation: Lost and Found in Black Translation: Langston Hughes's Translations of French- and Spanish-Language Poetry, his Hispanic and Francophone Translators, and the Fashioning of Radical Black Subjectivities, July 1, 2007, Efraín Kristal and Richard Yarborough https://www.academia.edu/20592898/Lost_and_found_in_black_translation_Langston_Hughess_translations_of_French-_and_Spanish-lanugage_poetry_his_Hispanic_and_Francophone_translators_and_the_fashioning_of_radical_black_subjectivities
