This article explores the author’s journey to understand the value and history of digital scholarship as he considers charting his on course to pursue digital scholarship in connection with institutional requirements for scholarly and creative publication activity.

The purpose of this website is to provide readers the opportunity to learn about African American history and culture.

“Answering the Call of the Severed Head,” Heads Will Roll: Decapitation Motifs in Medieval Literature, ed. Larissa Tracy (Leiden: Brill, 2012)

This essay considers the user experience of Google Earth, comparing the world it presents with other world views including static print maps, medieval mappaemundi, and Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. It also considers the scopic environment of Google Earth in relation to Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a theoretical prison design int…[Read more]

Medieval Christian mapmakers represented a range of peoples, animals and monsters against which they defined their place what they believed to be God’s divine plan. Rooted in earlier anti-Semitic tropes, the detailed world maps of the thirteenth/early fourteenth centuries contain multiple problematic representations of Jews, perceived at once as d…[Read more]

An account of why I am a strong advocate for collaborative writing, and why I seek co-authors as often as I do.

Book review. Marcin Moskalewicz and Wojciech Przybylski “Understanding Central Europe,” Routledge, 2017.

A series of sketches written in 1924 during an ocean crossing from New York to Tilbury, “Passage to England” was published only in 1998 by the Thomas Wolfe Society and is hardly Wolfe’s most popular or most accomplished work. Nonetheless I always felt that Passage to England had something unique and idiosyncratic and that despite a certain a…[Read more]

An archaeological field research database that can be used for different projects poses an advanced technical problem. It does not only have to deal with different needs of a variety of disciplines and methods like excavation and survey but also be usable for architectural or object studies. Therefore, a generic data model is required that can…[Read more]

Seung-Hui Cho, the mass murderer who called himself Question Mark, left a lot of questions behind him. One of them obviously speaks for itself: what motivated him to kill thirty-three strangers at Virginia Tech? Another question almost goes without saying: why do we seek refuge behind moral explanations? Like ‘the question mark kid’ the adult…[Read more]

Print-friendly remediation and backup copy of my course site for “Digital Public Humanities,” part of the Spring 2016 offerings in the Public Humanities MA program at Brown University. Course web site can be found here: http://digitalpublichumanities.jimmcgrath.us/. While not the first DH course offered at Brown or the first course in Public…[Read more]

PDF of syllabus for Brown University Leadership Institute course on media literacy. Course was taught over two weeks on Brown University campus in the summer of 2018. “Leadership” language and “Action Plan” part of Institute branding and course requirements. Syllabus may be of interest to students and instructors interested in high school /…[Read more]

A manifesto for a radically open publishing commons; an expansion of remarks originally presented on a panel devoted to independent open-access academic publishing at the 2nd Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group (Boston, Massachusetts, 20-22 Sep. 2012).

An expanded version of a talk presented at the Sub-conference of the Modern Language Association, “The Public and Its Privates,” Cheer-up Charlie’s, Austin, Texas, 7 January 2015, that ruminates both the difficulties of collective work as well as how various scholarly collectives create spaces of radical hospitality within which individual perso…[Read more]

An Open Letter & petition, with signatures, from punctum books to The New Press and Verso Books (UK), relative to their recent compilations (in print and e-book form) of Aaron Swartz’s selective collected writings, “The Boy Who Could Change the World,” in which the undersigned ask Verso and The New Press to reverse and repair this unfortunate…[Read more]

An exhibition catalog from Living by the Book: The Jewish Bible and the Everyday Power of Text at UC Berkeley’s Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life. Bringing together scrolls, ritual objects, clothing, furniture, ephemera, and tourist memorabilia, the exhibition showcased the ways the Bible serves as an archive and a powerful platform for s…[Read more]

This essay outlines five goals of publicly engaged humanities work. It was originally published in 2018 on the Humanities for All website, an initiative of the National Humanities Alliance Foundation. With the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Humanities for All documents and promotes publicly engaged humanities work in U.S. higher…[Read more]

This essay outlines five types of publicly engaged humanities work. It was originally published in 2018 on the Humanities for All website, an initiative of the National Humanities Alliance Foundation. With the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Humanities for All documents and promotes publicly engaged humanities work in U.S. higher…[Read more]

This is the submission (unedited) version of the article published in Times Higher Education on April 11, 2019, which argues that the market-based competition that fuels so much of academic life is doing us all far more harm than good.