Shawna Ross
  • Associate Professor
Scholars@TAMU
Research Areas
  • 18th and 19th Century British Literature and Culture
  • Transnational Literatures
  • Digital Humanities
  • The Novel
  • Environmental Humanities

Research Interests

  • Transatlantic modernism
  • Digital humanities
  • History of the novel
  • Space theory
  • History of leisure
  • Henry James
  • Digital pedagogy

 

Research Areas

  • 18th and 19th Century British Literature and Culture
  • Transnational Literatures
  • Digital Humanities
  • The Novel
  • Environmental Humanities

Educational Background

  • Ph.D., The Pennsylvania State University, 2011
  • M.A., The Pennsylvania State University, 2007
  • B.A., The University of Tennessee, 2005

Awards & Honors

  • AFS Teaching Award: Association of Former Students Distinguished Achievement Award for Teaching (College-Level), 2021-22.
  • Honorable Mention, Sonya Rudikoff Award for Best First Book in Victorian Studies, 2020, Northeast Victorian Studies Association. For Charlotte Brontë at the Anthropocene.

Selected Publications

  • Reading Modernism with Machines - RossReading Modernism with Machines. Palgrave, 2016. Co-edited with James O’Sullivan.

    This book uses the discipline-specific, computational methods of the digital humanities to explore a constellation of rigorous case studies of modernist literature.

    From data mining and visualization to mapping and tool building and beyond, the digital humanities offer new ways for scholars to questions of literature and culture. With the publication of a variety of volumes that define and debate the digital humanities, we now have the opportunity to focus attention on specific periods and movements in literary history. Each of the case studies in this book emphasizes literary interpretation and engages with histories of textuality and new media, rather than dwelling on technical minutiae. Reading Modernism with Machines thereby intervenes critically in ongoing debates within modernist studies, while also exploring exciting new directions for the digital humanities—ultimately reflecting on the conjunctions and disjunctions between the technological cultures of the modernist era and our own digital present.

    Charlotte Brontë at the Anthropocene (SUNY Press, 2020; paperback 2021) Humans at Work in the Digital Age: Forms of Digital Textual Labor (Routledge, 2019; paperback 2021), coedited with Andrew Pilsch Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom: A Practical Introduction for Students, Teachers, and Lecturers (Bloomsbury Academic, second edition, 2022), cowritten with Claire Battershill

    Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom - RossUsing Digital Humanities in the Classroom. Bloomsbury, 2017. Co-written with Claire Battershill.

    Rooted in the day-to-day experience of teaching and written for those without specialist technical knowledge, this book is the first practical guide to using digital tools and resources in the humanities classroom.

    Taking a step-by-step approach to incorporating digital humanities tools into your teaching, the book is also supported by a companion website, including tutorials, sample classroom activity prompts and assignments, and a bibliographic essay for each book chapter.

     

    Special Issues

    • “Anxious Pedagogies.” Under review at Pedagogy 19.3 (October 2019).
    • Cluster on “From Practice to Theory: A Forum on the Future of Digital Humanities and Modern Studies.” Modernism/modernity, PrintPlus Platform. Forthcoming, 3.2. (Summer 2018).

     

    Articles

    • “Remembering the 1824 Crow Hill Bog Burst: Patrick Brontë as a Science Writer.” Brontë Studies 46.3 (Summer 2021): 228-240.
    • “Disconsolate Tenants of the Metabolic Rift: An Anthropocene Feminist View of Farming in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.” Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature 138 (Winter 2020): 268-289.
    • “Sightseeing the Anthropocene: Tourism, Moorland Management, and The Hound of the Baskervilles.” In “Placing the Author: Ecologies of Literary Tourism,” ed. Amber Pouliot and Joanna Taylor. Nineteenth Century Contexts 42.4 (Fall 2020): 1-17.
    • “Guest Editors’ Introduction.” Pedagogy 19.3 (Fall 2019): 509-512.
    • “Teaching in Stormy Weather.” Pedagogy 19.3 (Fall 2019): 513-517.
    • “Toward a Feminist Modernist Digital Humanities.” Forthcoming, Feminist Modernist Studies 1.3 (October 2018)
    • “The Last Bluebell: Anthropocenic Mourning in the Brontës’ Flower Imagery.” Forthcoming, Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature 134 (Winter 2018): 218-233.
    •  “Ocean Liner Cutaways, Diagrams, and Composites: Technical Illustration as Mass Aesthetic in Popular Mechanics and The Illustrated London News.” The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 8.1 (2017): 1-33.
    • “The (Meme) Master: James’s Afterlives in Viral Satire.” The Henry James Review 38.3 (Fall 2017): 289-301.
    • “A Bechdel Test for #MLA16: Gendered Acts of Care on Academic Twitter.” Journal of Interactive Pedagogy, issue 9 (Summer 2016). https://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/a-bechdel-test-for-mla16-gendered-acts-of-care-on-academic-twitter/
    •  “Hashtags, Compression Algorithms, and Henry James’s Late Style.” The Henry James Review 36.1 (Winter 2015). 24-44.
    •  “This Wild Hunt for Rest: Working at Play in The Ambassadors.” Journal of Modern Literature 37.1 (Fall 2013): 1-20.

     

    Book Chapters

    • “Landslide at the Pension Bertolini: Anti-tourism versus Groundless Transculturalism in E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View.” Hotel Modernisms, 1890-1950. Ed. Anna Despotopoulou, Vassiliki Kolocotroni, and Efterpi Mitsi.
    • “Labor, Alienation, and the Digital Humanities.” Cowritten with Andrew Pilsch. I am first author and did 55% of the work. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Digital Humanities, ed. James O’Sullivan. Bloomsbury Academic, Nov. 2022. Chinese translation forthcoming, 2024. 327-337.
    • “Networks: Modernism in Circulation, 1920-2020.” Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology, edited by Ian Whittington and Alex Goody. Edinburgh UP, Sept. 2022.
    • “Digital Theme Analysis: Revitalizing Traditional Methods.” With Randa El-Khatib. Digital Humanities for Literary Studies: Theories, Methods, and Practices. Ed. Ray Siemens and James O’Sullivan. Forthcoming, The Pennsylvania State Press, 2018.
    •  “Chapter 1: Introduction,” Reading Modernism with Machines, edited by Shawna Ross and James O’Sullivan (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016): 1-13.
    • “Toward a Digital Henry James.” Henry James Today, ed., John Carlos Rowe. Cambridge Scholars Press, November 2014. 141-170.
    • “‘Mystery, History, Leisure, Pleasure’: Evelyn Waugh, Bruno Latour, and the Ocean Liner.” Literary Cartographies: Spatiality, Representation, and Narrative, ed. Robert Tally. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 111-126.
    •  “The Two Hotels of Elizabeth Bowen: Utopian Modernism in the Age of Mechanized Hospitality.” Utopianism, Modernism, and Literature in the Twentieth Century, ed. Nathan Waddell and Alice Reeve-Tucker, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 148-167.

     

    Book Reviews

    • Review of Climate Change, Interrupted: Representation and the Remaking of Time. ISLE, Summer 2023.
    • Review of Modernism in the Metrocolony: Urban Cultures of Empire in Twentieth-Century Literature.
    • Forthcoming, The Space Between.
    • “Modern Literature: General,” The Year’s Work in English Studies. Invited review essay. Oxford UP, vol. 101: 2022.
    • “Modern Literature: General,” The Year’s Work in English Studies. Invited review essay. Oxford UP, vol. 100: 2021.
    • Review of Charlotte Bronte, Embodiment, and the Material World. Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, 17.2 (Summer 2021).
    • “Modern Literature: General,” The Year’s Work in English Studies. Invited review essay. Oxford UP, vol. 99: 2020.
    • Review of Generous Mistakes: Incidents of Error in Henry James. Forthcoming, the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America.
    •  Review of Katherine Mansfield and the Bloomsbury Group. Forthcoming, Modern Language Review 114.1 (January 2019).
    •  Review of From Page to Place: American Literary Tourism and the Afterlives of Authors. SHARP News, 28 April 2018. https://www.sharpweb.org/sharpnews/2018/04/28/jennifer-harris-hilary-iris-lowe-from-page-to-place/.
    •  “Digital Modernism as Method: Recent Publications in Digital Humanities.” Review essay. Journal of Modern Literature 39.3 (Spring 2016): 163-182.
    • “Close Rereading: A Review of Jessica Pressman’s Digital Modernism.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 9.1 (2015). http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/9/1/000207/000207.html
    • “In Praise of Overstating the Case: A Review of Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 8.1 (2014). http:///www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/8/1/000171/000171.html
    • “Katherine Mansfield: An Anxious Legacy.” Review of Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism. Journal of Modern Literature 36.4 (Summer 2013): 177-182.

     

    Non-Refereed Publications

Scholars@TAMU