Co-PIs
Lauren M. E. Goodlad is the Kathryn Paul Professorial
Scholar of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. As
director of the Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory from 2008 to 2014,
she organized yearly seminars and conferences on a wide range of
cross-disciplinary research topics, installed a new program for faculty
fellowships, and expanded the Unit's blog, Kritik, into the
discussion of serial television. Her publications on seriality include a
co-edited volume of essays on Mad Men with Duke
University Press, the Afterword for Television for Victorianists (a recent special issue of RaVoN); as
well as “Why We Love Mad Men,” an essay published in The
Chronicle of Higher Education and reprinted in The McGraw Hill
Reader (11th edition). She is the author of books including The Victorian
Geopolitical Aesthetic: Realism, Sovereignty and Transnational Experience (Oxford,
2015); the editor of Worlding Realisms,
a forthcoming special issue of Novel: a
Forum on Fiction; and is now at work on a new project that crosses between
literature, documentary, film and television, tentatively titled Genre
and the Longue Durée.
Elizabeth Massa Hoiem is Assistant Professor at the School
of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where
she teaches children’s literature and fantasy literature and media. Her forthcoming article “Radical Cross-Writing
for Working Children: Towards a Bottom-Up History of Children’s Literature”
locates an overlooked tradition of early-nineteenth-century writing for child
readers in working-class newspapers and broadsides. Her research with periodicals is part of her
book project, The Education of Things:
Mechanical Literacies in British Culture, 1760-1860.
Program Committee Members
In addition to the co-PIs, the following individuals are serving as Program Committee members for the workshop, and will contribute to the white paper and recommendations output:
Frank Kelleter is Chair of the Department of Culture and
Einstein Professor of American Cultural History at the John F. Kennedy
Institute for North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin (Germany). He was the initiator and director of the
Popular Seriality Research Unit, a six-year-long scholarly collective
consisting of thirteen subprojects centered on serial media since the
early-nineteenth century (2010-2016). His
main fields of interest include the American colonial and Enlightenment
periods, theories of American modernity, and American media and popular
culture. His most recent books are Serial
Agencies: The Wire and Its Readers
(Zero Books, 2014), David Bowie
(Reclam, 2016), and the edited volume Media
of Serial Narrative (Ohio State UP, 2017).
Helena Michie is the Agnes C. Arnold Professor in Humanities
and Professor of English at Rice University.
She is the author of five books on Victorian literature and culture and
on the history and culture of bodies and sexuality. Although her work is grounded in the Victorian
period, she has also written about contemporary popular culture. Her interest in seriality inflects her
teaching and her research: she is currently in the middle of writing a set of
linked essays on the idea of simultaneity, and on the twin axes of the serial
and the synchronic. As part of this
bigger project, she has developed, with Robyn Warhol, the idea of “synchronic
reading” or “synchronic viewing,” in an effort to explore the ways in which
readers/viewers consume different serials that appear, in their various parts,
at the same time. Professor Michie is
the winner of Guggenheim and NEH Fellowships, as well as numerous teaching
awards. Her latest book, Love Among the
Archives: Writing the Lives of Sir George Scharf, Victorian Bachelor (Edinburgh
UP, 2015), co-authored with Robyn
Warhol, recently won the 2015 Best Book of the Year from the North American
Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA).
Jason Mittell is Professor of Film & Media Culture and
American Studies, and Faculty Director of the Digital Liberal Arts Initiative
at Middlebury College. He is the author
of Genre & Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture
(Routledge, 2004), Television & American Culture (Oxford UP, 2009), Complex
Television: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling (NYU Press,
2015), The Videographic Essay: Criticism in Sound and Image (with
Christian Keathley; caboose, 2016), and co-editor of How to Watch Television
(with Ethan Thompson; NYU Press, 2013). He is project manager for [in]Transition:
Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies.
Sean O'Sullivan is Associate Professor of English at Ohio
State University, where he is also Director of Project Narrative and a member
of the Film Studies Program. He is the
author of Mike Leigh, a volume in the
Contemporary Film Directors series at University of Illinois Press. His articles and book chapters on serial
narrative and television include: The
Sopranos and episodic storytelling; modernist structure in Mad Men; poetic design and the serial
season; Deadwood and Charles Dickens;
third seasons; narrative satisfaction; and the showrunner Ingmar Bergman. His current book project is entitled The Sonnet-Season and the Transformation of American Television,
1999-2015. He received his Ph.D. in
English from Yale University, after studying theater, film, and television at
the University of Bristol (U.K.) as a Marshall Scholar.
Robyn Warhol is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor
of English at the Ohio State University, where she is Interim Chair of the
Department of English and a core faculty member of Project Narrative. She is the creator of
victorianserialnovels.org, “Reading Like a Victorian,” a website enabling
readers to experience installments of serialized Victorian novels
synchronically. Examples of her
decades-long work on serial form in TV and novels include Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Tears and Popular-Culture Forms (Ohio
State UP, 2003) and “Binge Watching: How Netflix Original Programs Are Changing
Serial Form.” Literature in Wissenschaft
und Unterricht, 47.1/2 (2014): 145-158.
Her most recent publications include Narrative
Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions, co-edited by Susan S.
Lanser (Ohio State UP 2015) and Love
Among the Archives: Writing the Lives of George Scharf, Victorian Bachelor, co-authored
with Helena Michie (Edinburgh UP, 2015) and winner of the NAVSA Best Book of
the Year for 2015. She is also co-author
of Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and
Critical Debates (Ohio State UP, 2012) and co-editor of the forthcoming Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary
Narrative Theories.
