The Trouble with Genre
Jacques Derrida famously asked in “The Law of Genre” (1980), “Can one identify a work of art…if it does not bear the mark of a genre?” As metadata elements, genres are both highly useful and highly unstable; the field lacks consistent and widely agreed-upon definitions of genres, and texts can evince traits of many genres in different ways and to different degrees. Based on a preliminary survey of recent literature, this poster identifies four common issues around the use of genre in digital libraries and identifies potential avenues for future research. Presentation available here.

University of Michigan Press
This is a collection of three press kits for titles released by the Press in Fall 2017. I wrote and designed these press kits as the marketing and outreach intern for the Press. While working for the Press, I also conducted market research, created data visualizations, and composed blog entries, including a series of entries marking the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 Detroit riots:

  1. “Before the whole damn studio went up in flames”: Motown at the start of the 1967 riot
  2. “Be calm and as quiet as possible”: Rebellion on the television
  3. “Serving their interests and needs”: The failures of Detroit’s public institutions
  4. “A striking ambiguity”: Race, labor, and radical politics before and after the riot
  5. “All that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth”: Detroit since the riot

Guide to Teaching First-Year Writing Requirement Courses
This is an online training program for graduate students teaching courses that fulfill the University of Michigan’s first year writing requirement for the first time. I developed this program with several other lecturers at the Sweetland Center for Writing in the summer of 2015.

Genre Evolution Project
This is a collaborative research project that was run by English Professor Eric Rabkin and Statistics Professor Carl Simon from 1999 to 2013. An early digital humanities project, the GEP coded features of a representative sample of science fiction short stories and maintained a relational database of the codings for the purposes of quantitative and longitudinal analysis. As a member of the project from 2007 to 2013, I participated in the recoding of stories and the creation of a database to code magazine covers.