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: English Language and Linguistics, History and culture of the Canadian Arctic, Victorian visual culture, Media Studies. For details, please visit my online curriculum vitae.
Course Websites
English 460: Victorian Spectacles (Fall 2008)
ARTM 542 Media Culture (Spring 2008)
ENG 264H: Northern Exposures (Spring 2008)
English 332 - History of the English Language / EN 433 Modern Grammar (Fall 2008)
Research Interests
1. Arctic History / Inuit 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 drop by the website for my new book, Arctic Spectacles: The Frozen North in Visual Culture, 1818-1870, which has just been published by the University of Washington Press.
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've contributed a number of articles to Postmodern Culture, including "Edward Schizohands: The Postmodern Gothic Body" (1992), as well as review essays of the work of Paul Gilroy, Tricia Rose, and Georges Bataille.
I also have an online review essay of Stephan
Oetterman's book, The Panorama:
History of a Mass Medium (Zone, 1997), which appeared in
the first issue of a new online art journal, Iconomania.
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 �lan.
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.
