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The James G. Kenan Distinguished Professor of English
I am co-editor/creator with Robert Essick and Morris Eaves of the William Blake Archive, a hypertext of Blake's poetry and art transferred to digital form, which to date contains over 6300 images from 38 contributing institutions and collections. Conceived and designed in 1993-95, and a free site on the World Wide Web since 1996, the Archive is an international public resource that provides unified access to major works of visual and literary art that are highly disparate, widely dispersed, and often severely restricted as a result of their value, rarity, and extreme fragility. The archive is sponsored by the Library of Congress and supported by the Carolina Digital Library and Archives at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Past support includes the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, the Getty Grant Program, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Preservation and Access Division of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Sun Microsystems, and Inso Corporation.
The editors have designed the Archive for use by a broad audience of scholars and students in classrooms and museums. In 2003, the editors received the Prize for a Distinguished Scholarly Edition, awarded every two years by the Modern Language Association - and the first time it has been awarded to an electronic edition. In 2005 the Blake Archive was designated An Approved Edition by the MLA Committee for Scholarly Editions, making it the first electronic edition so designated. In 2006, I received the Knowledge Trust Exploration Award for my work on the Blake Archive."In 2010, the editors were awarded a three-year National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research Grant, and in 2011 received a MERLOT [Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching] Award."
The structure and rationale of the Archive grew out of my earlier editing projects for the Blake Trust (vols. 3 and 5 of William Blake's Illuminated Books, Tate Gallery/Princeton U. P, 1993) and my Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton UP, 1993). I continue to examine the various ways in which Blake's techniques and the idea of creating figure into his poetry and designs, and to examine the development of watercolor painting, print technology, and lyrical poetry in the Romantic period, focusing on works by major and minor figures, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Turner, Constable, Cozens, and Gilpin.
- ENGL 121 Introduction to British Literature
- ENGL 437 The Chief English Romantic Writers
- HNRS 355 / ENGL 351 Revolutions in Romantic Art and Literature
- ENGL 390 Blake 2.0
- ENGL 637 The Chief English Romantic Writers
- ENGL 841 Seminar on William Blake and Hypertext
- ENGL 841 Seminar in Romantic Art and Literature
- ENGL 841 Seminar in Humanities Computing and Digital Editing
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Hypertext edition of Jerusalem, The Emanation of the Giant Albion, plates 15, 35, 53, 94
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Representation: La Condition Magritte. Oil paint and oil stick on paper, 90 x 42 inches. Institute for the Arts and Humanities, UNC-Chapel Hill, 2003.
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An Island in the Moon. Video, introduction, photographs, and text of 1983 Cornell University theatrical production, with music by Margaret LaFrance, 2003.
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Scrapyard: "Take me to the River," performed at Cat's Cradle with Brennan O'Donnell on bass, Michael Schaefer on guitar and vocals, Billy Hooper on Sax, Keys, vocals, Ted Johnson on guitar, and Joe Viscomi on drums. (See file attachment below)
Hire Date: 1984
Ph. D., Columbia University, 1980
M.Phil., Columbia University, 1978
M.A., Columbia University, 1974
Ph.B., Monteith College, Wayne State University, 1973
jsviscom@email.unc.edu
(919) 962-8764
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| take me to the river.spec_.m4a | 6.36 MB |
