Sunday, November 16, 2014

John Casey's Statement

John Casey is Lecturer in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  His research focuses on the legacy of the United States Civil War and representations of veterans in American culture.  He has published essays on these topics in American Literary Realism and Civil War History and has a book forthcoming in the spring of 2015 titled New Men: Reconstructing the Image of the Veteran in Late Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture (Fordham University Press).

Scholars in the fields of American and British literature are experiencing significant changes to the ways in which they research and teach their subject areas.  My own research would have been substantially more difficult were it not for the growing digital archive of newspapers and other periodicals from the nineteenth-century United States that helped open a window onto the cultural moment examined in my book.  These same digital resources have begun to alter the way I teach students in the classroom.  Increasingly our text is a hypertext with interactive components that not only explain the words on the page but bring the text to life.  Writing assignments have also begun to migrate online, forcing me to consider the next phase in the life of the college literature essay. 

If elected as American/British Literatures Director for NEMLA, I would advocate for panels that explore the impact of technological advancements on our profession.  How have online resources changed the ways in which you understand scholarly “research” in the fields of American and British literature?  What is the future of the literary essay in our classrooms?  What role does the “authoritative” text play in our teaching and research and how much longer can we count on there being such a thing?  How are developments in technology changing (or not changing) the way we present our research at scholarly conferences and why?  These questions are central to the future of our profession.  We should, therefore, be at the forefront of analyzing and directing this change.

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