James E. Dobson
Lecturer, Department of English and Creative Writing
I am a literary and cultural critic who specializes in intellectual history and U.S. autobiographical writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I use formalist, theoretical, and digital humanities approaches to answer persistent intellectual problems. My broader intellectual interests include phenomenological accounts of lived experience and how early psychology, sociology, and historiography contributed to and were influenced by literary accounts of the self. My first book, Modernity and Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century America: Literary Representations of Communication and Transportation Technologies (Palgrave, 2017), concerned the relation between autobiographical writing, modernity, and technology in the work of Henry James, Theodore Dreiser, and Henry Adams. My most recent book, Critical Digital Humanities: In Search of a Methodology (Univ. of Illinois Press, forthcoming), establishes a new theoretical paradigm for the digital humanities through a reading of new computer-aided techniques that are increasingly used in the humanities, including machine learning and text mining, in relation to literary hermeneutics and critical theory. My next book project is titled "The Awkward Age of Autobiography" and it examines the partial, repetitive, and nonlinear forms taken by American fin-de-siècle autobiography and the relationship between these formal shifts to questions of historiography within the period. I have published essays related to this area of interest on major figures including Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, and Lucy Larcom. In past years I have taught courses on the digital humanities, the historical representation of interiority and theories of mind, the history and culture of the university, (A) Game of Thrones, nineteenth-century American literature, modern American drama, and several courses on Dartmouth, including one titled "Dartmouth Fictions."
Department:
English
Institute for Writing and Rhetoric
Master of Arts in Liberal Studies
Education:
B.A. University of Massachusetts, Amherst
A.M. University of Chicago
Ph.D. Indiana University
Courses
Related Links
Selected Publications
Critical Digital Humanities: The Search for a Methodology (Univ. of Illinois Press, forthcoming)
Modernity and Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century America: Literary Representations of Communication and Transportation Technologies (Palgrave, 2017)
"Autobiography, Modernity, and Biopolitics: Individuality and Writing the Self at the Fin-de-Siècle." Arizona Quarterly (forthcoming)
“Narratives of the Later Lives of Frederick Douglass: Old-Age Autobiography Before Senescence” Common-place 17, no. 2 (2017).
"Knowing and Narration: Shirley Jackson and the Campus Novel." In Shirley Jackson: Influences and Confluences, edited by Melanie R. Anderson and Lisa Kröger, 123-141. New York: Routledge, 2016.
"Lucy Larcom and the Time of the Temporal Collapse." Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 33, no. 1 (2016): 82-102.
"Can an Algorithm be Disturbed? Machine Learning, Intrinsic Criticism, and the Digital Humanities." College Literature 42, no.4 (2015): 543- 564.
"Bits of Autobiography: Radical Deindividualization and Everydayness." Arizona Quarterly 71, no. 1 (2015): 83-99.
"What does the ‘Temporal Turn’ Mean for Autobiography? Mark Twain, Memory, and the Failures of Historicism." The Mark Twain Annual 11 (Fall 2013): 62-76.
Pandey, S., Voorsluys, W., Rahman, M., Buyya, R., Chiu, K., and Dobson, J. “A Grid Workflow Environment for Brain Imaging Analysis on Distributed Systems." Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience 21, no. 16 (2009): 2118-2139.
Pandey, S., Voorsluys, W., Rahman, M., Buyya, R., Chiu, K., and Dobson, J. “Brain Image Registration Analysis Workflow for fMRI Studies on Global Grids," Proceedings of the 23rd IEEE International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications (AINA-09), Bradford, UK, (May 2009).
Van Horn, J.D., Dobson, J.E., Woodward, J., Wilde, M., Zhao, Y., Voeckler, J., Foster, I. “Grid-Based Computing and the Future of Neuroscience Computation.” In Methods in Mind, edited by Carl Senior, Tamara Russell and Michael S. Gazzaniga. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.
Dobson, J.E,Woodward, J., Schwarz, S.A, Marchesini, J.C, Farid, F., and Smith S., “The Dartmouth Green Grid,” ICCS 2005 Conference Workshop on HPC in Academia (2005).
Van Horn, J.D., Wolfe, J., Agnoli, A., Woodward, J., Schmitt, M., Dobson, J.E., Schumacher, S., and Vance, B. “Neuroimaging Databases as a Resource for Scientific Discovery,” International Review of Neurobiology 66C (2005): 55-87.
Zhao, Y., Dobson, J.E., Foster, I., Moreau L., Wilde, M. “A Notation and System for Expressing and Executing Cleanly TypedWorkflows on Messy Scientific Data,” ACM SIGMOD Record 34 (2005): 37-43.
Zhao, Y., Wilde, M., Foster, I., Voeckler, J., Dobson, J.E., Gilbert, E., Jordan, T. and Quigg, E. “Virtual Data Grid Middleware Services for Data-intensive Science.” Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience 18, no. 6 (2004): 595-608.
Zhao, Y., Wilde, M., Foster, I., Voeckler, J., Jordan, T., Quigg, E., and Dobson J.E, “Grid Middleware Services for Virtual Data Discovery, Composition, and Integration,” MGC ’04 Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Middleware for Grid Computing (2004): 57-62.
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Speaking Engagements
“Moonbit.” HaPoP 2018: Fourth Symposium on the History and Philosophy of Programming. Oxford, UK. March 2018.
"The Cultural Signficance of kNN" Plenary Talk, Futures of American Studies Institute. Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH. June 2017.
"Digital American Cultural Studies." DH101. MLA Convention, Philadelphia, PA. January 2017.
"The Exorbitant Question of (Digital) Method," Plenary Talk, Futures of American Studies Institute. Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH. June 2016.
Roundtable Participant. "Visionary Compacts at Thirty: Literature, Politics, and the Field(-Imaginary) of American Studies'" MLA Convention, Philadelpha, PA. January 2017.
"How Literature Became a Problem: The History of Autobiography in Psychology." 28th Annual Arizona Quarterly Symposium. University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ. April 2016.
"Machine Learning, Distant Reading, and American Literature,” NeMLA, Hartford, CT. March 2016.
"Narratives of the Later Life of Frederick Douglass: Old Age Autobiography Before Senescence," C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, State College, PA. March 2016.
"Teaching Literature in Public: Large-Scale Online Teaching and Reading." Organizer and Presider. MLA Convention, Austin, TX. January 2016.
"Amateur Theory," American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA). Seattle, WA. March 2015.
"The Value of Old Criticism: Periodization and Passé Critique." Panel: Here and After: Periodization and American Literary Studies. MLA Convention, Vancouver, BC. January 2015.
"The Telephonic Self: A Non-Systemic Systems Theory of Autobiography." American Circuits, American Secrets. Banff, Alberta. September 2014.
Panel Chair. "American Traumas: History, Memory, Violence." International Conference on Narrative. Cambridge, MA. March 2014.
“What does the ‘Temporal Turn’ Mean for Autobiography? Mark Twain, Memory, and the Failures of Historicism” Center for Mark Twain Studies, Elmira College, Elmira, NY. October 2012.
"Newer New or Coming After?: Americanist Literary Criticism at the Present Moment" Organizer and Presider. MLA Convention, Chicago, IL. January 2014.
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Works in Progress
"Inaugurating the American Renaissance as a Massive Open Online Course" (in prep)
“How Literature Became a Problem: The History of Autobiography in Psychology” (in prep).
"Critical Code Commentaries" (under review)
“Amateur Anxieties: Jack London, Theodore Roosevelt, and Turn-of-the-Century Professional Culture” (under review)