English Research Works

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    Review of Milton and the New Scientific Age: Poetry, Science, Fiction
    (Wiley, 2023-05-04) Simon, David Carroll
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    “The Year of Jubilee is Come”: Black Millerites and the Politics of Christian Apocalypticism
    (Cambridge University Press, 2023-07-28) Baker, Benjamin
    This article explores the experiences of black people who accepted the teaching of William Miller that Christ would return to the earth in 1843–1844. Heretofore, black Millerites have been almost completely ignored in the substantial historiography of Millerism, millennialism and apocalypticism, and black religion. In this article, I argue that the black experience in Millerism deserves to be studied because it articulates the central concerns of blacks at a critical juncture in antebellum America. I show that enslaved and free blacks embraced Miller's doctrine because of the failure of America, particularly its politics and churches, to provide them the basic human right of freedom. As they did in the Christian churches they joined during the Awakenings, blacks fashioned Millerism in their image, using it for purpose, empowerment, expression, community, and liberation. This exploration of black Millerites contributes to broader discussions on the motivations of marginalized people who gravitate toward the eschatological and the impact the apocalyptic has on real-world engagement.
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    When There is No Air, The Cradle Will Fall: A Narrative Review of Tobacco-Related Content Across Infant Safe Sleep Interventions
    (Frontiers, 2022-12-05) Jawed, Aysha; Jassal, Mandeep
    Sudden Unexpected Infant Death (SUID) from sleep-related causes is a leading cause of infant mortality worldwide. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) is one of the primary causes of SUID attributed to one or more environmental or behavioral determinants surrounding safe sleep practices among infants. The focus of many interventions on mitigating sleep-related infant deaths have addressed visible determinants pertaining to bed sharing, safe sleep surfaces, and removal of blankets, toys and other choking or strangulation hazards. Tobacco reduction and cessation have not been at the heart of any infant safe sleep interventions although addressing tobacco exposure is one of the primary safe sleep recommendations of the American Academy of Pediatrics. To date, there has not been a comprehensive review published on tobacco-related components across safe sleep interventions to reduce the risk of SIDS and SUID as the basis to contribute towards decreasing the rate of infant mortality. This review synthesizes the best practices, strategies, education, and additional interventions centered on addressing tobacco exposure as a risk factor for sleep-related infant deaths. Ten peer-reviewed studies were identified between 1995 and 2021 and integrated into this narrative review. There were three cross-sectional studies, three campaigns, one multi-center case control study, two randomized controlled trials, and two group comparison studies. Strengths and limitations of each approach are delineated followed by recommendations for future campaign, research, program, and practice endeavors to account for the totality of pertinent modifiable risk factors that contribute towards heightened infant mortality from sleep-related causes.
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    Books.Files: Preservation of Digital Assets in the Contemporary Publishing Industry
    (2020-04) Kirschenbaum, Matthew
    The book industry is an important social, cultural, and economic institution whose records deserve to be preserved for the public good. Books.Files was an exploratory project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation aimed at assessing the archival value of digital assets in the contemporary publishing industry for stakeholders in the cultural heritage sector (libraries, archives, and academia) as well as in the industry itself. The report addresses the changing technological and organizational circumstances in the creation and collecting of publishers' archives, with an emphasis on the enumeration of the types and variety of digital assets that may form the primary basis for such archives in the future. It emphasizes the extent to which every book published (not just ebooks as such) is in fact "born-digital," and the implications of this shift for future historical and bibliographical scholarship. It concludes with a set of recommendations.
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    Nat Turner after 9/11: Kyle Baker's Nat Turner
    (2015) Bruno, Timothy
    Scholars have thoroughly questioned what Nat Turner meant to others in the past; in this article, I question what he means today. Reversing William Andrews's injunction to read “Prophet Nat's” 1831 insurrection through the US's encounter with religio-political terrorism on 9/11, I instead examine the effect September 11th has had on the rebel slave's contemporary afterlife. Ultimately this article asks what cultural work Nat Turner now performs, what his most recent depictions tell us about the racial formations of the present. Drawing on comics theory, I parse the visual rhetoric of Kyle Baker's popular and increasingly studied comic Nat Turner, in which Baker tropes Nat Turner as Christ just as Nat Turner himself did in his Confessions. Baker produces an inviolably iconic black hero, one who is visually antithetical to racist images of “the terrorist" circulating in post-9/11 discourses on national belonging. By doing so, Baker effectively safeguards not only Nat Turner but US "blackness" from Islamophobia during the age of the Global War on Terror. Finally, by reading Baker's comic alongside other recent, unexamined depictions of the rebel slave, this article critically intervenes by updating the archive on Nat Turner and complicating the political possibilities that inhere in other sites of memory.