Editorial Staff
Project Director
Jessica DeSpain is an Associate Professor of American literature at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. She studies nineteenth-century transatlantic reprinting and metaphors of embodied textuality. DeSpain is currently finishing her book manuscript Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Reprinting and the Disembodied Book, under contract with Ashgate Publishing. She started researching the transatlantic reprint history of The Wide, Wide World in 2006 as part of her Center for the Book final project at the University of Iowa. Since moving the project to SIUE in 2008, DeSpain has been working with a team of students each semester to complete the project.
Editorial Staff
Jill Anderson an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (on-track for tenure and promotion to Associate Professor in August 2013), specializes in the novel from the republican era to the antebellum period with an emphasis on transatlantic intertextuality and female heroines. Her recent scholarship comparing women’s texts in the early national period with mid-century novels will be paramount to the project’s contextualization of women’s writing both within and beyond the nation state and the nineteenth-century. The American Association of University Women recently awarded Anderson an American Summer/Short-Term Research Publication Grant (2012-2013) for her work on Catharine Maria Sedgwick, one of Warner’s significant predecessors. Anderson actively mentors English majors, and, in her role as the Secondary English Education program director, she works closely with English teacher candidates. Her supervisory role of the editorial team and her acumen with the detail-oriented labor of editing make her a valuable asset. In addition to helping supervise students on-site at SIUE and managing quality control of transcripts and TEI files, Anderson will work with the Constitution Island Association archivist Bryan Dunlap to study letters, biographies, and other literary works by Warner that highlight her negotiations with publishers.
Melissa White defended her dissertation in nineteenth-century American literature and textual studies at the University of Virginia. White won a Bibliographical Society student prize for her book collection of The Wide, Wide World,which shesubsequently donated to UVA’s special collections. From 2002 to 2005, White worked as a research assistant, then project manager, of the pioneering digital humanities project Rossetti Archive, and was a member of the initial NINES development group. White held a NINES fellowship 2008-9, and is the editor of the Norcross correspondence for the Dickinson Electronic Archive, on which she has published in the Emily Dickinson Journal. She is currently working on a TEI edition of the Huntington manuscript of The Wide, Wide World, and developing a book project from her dissertation on posthumous poetry editing in nineteenth-century America.
Jennifer Brady is currently a Lecturer in the Committee on Degrees in History and Literature at Harvard University. She received her doctorate in English and a Certificate in Women’s Studies from Emory University in 2010 and served as a Visiting Assistant Professor in their Department of English in 2010-2011 before joining Harvard in 2011. Her current book project, “Sentimental Reading in the Antebellum United States,” is a historical and theoretical investigation of the practice and imagination of sentimental reading in the nineteenth century. By examining a range of sources, including sentimental novels, dramatic readings, fan letters, and prescriptive discourses about novel reading, the project demonstrates how the widespread sentimentalization of reading practices in the antebellum United States suggested ways to define and organize its many reading publics. An essay drawn from this project titled “Theorizing a Reading Public: Sentimentality and Advice about Novel Reading in the Antebellum United States,” appeared in American Literature in December 2011, and another piece on fan letters and The Wide, Wide World was published in Common-place, the online journal of early American history, in October 2011.
Editorial Board
John Bryant is a full professor at Hofstra University and the author of The Fluid Text, the theory of editorial practice that underpins the design of this project. Bryant is the primary investigator for a NEH Scholarly Editions Grant that is supporting the development of The Melville Electronic Library.
Julia Flanders is the director of Brown University’s Women Writers Project (WWP), one of the most comprehensive digital collections of women’s writings available online, and an active member of the Text Encoding Initiative. Flanders is currently the primary investigator on a NEH Collaborative Research Grant, Cultures of Reception, that puts women’s writing in the context of transatlantic reception history through the editing of reviews, letters, and journals.
Andrew Stauffer is a professor at the University of Virginia, specializing in Romantic poetry. Stauffer is also the director of NINES a federated collection and peer-reviewing body for nineteenth-century digital humanities projects.
Current Project Team Members
Sarah Burt is an undergraduate at SIUE pursuing a double major of English and History. She is interested in a career in Academia, teaching, research, and writing. She began working for the project in the fall of 2017 and plans on using this project’s training in interdisciplinary Historical and Literature research to continue her academic career through graduate school and beyond.
Katie Knowles is the project manager for the SIUE IRIS Center. She graduated with her BA in English and Music from Hanover College in 2015, and she graduated from the University of Birmingham's Shakespeare Institute with an MA in Shakespeare Studies in 2016.
Ben Ostermeier is the technician for the SIUE IRIS Center. He graduated from SIUE with a major in Historical Studies, minors in Digital Humanities and Computer Science, and a German focus. He specializes in public history, incorporating the growing field of digital humanities. He began working for the project in the spring of 2014 and looks forward to applying the skills he has learned to his academic and professional future.
Jeri Reuter is an undergraduate at SIUE majoring in English with a Creative Writing minor. She is planning on pursuing a master’s in Library Science. She began working on the project in fall of 2018 and enjoys learning the details about nineteenth century publishing.
Allyson Taylor is an undergraduate at SIUE majoring in Secondary English Education, with a minor in Speech Communication Education and an endorsement in Middle School English Education. She is interested in teaching English/Language Arts in grades 5-12 upon graduation. She began working for the project in the fall of 2017, and enjoys learning about book history and documenting book data.
Past Project Team Members
Heather Asbeck, 2013 - 2014
Gabrielle Borders, 2014 - 2017
Carmen Connors, 2014
Brianne Foster, 2011 - 2013
Tiffany Fry, 2014
Anna Gaskin, 2018
Kayla Hays, 2011 - 2013
Despina Hartley, 2014
Michaela Justus, 2018
Consuella Kelly, 2011 - 2013
Christy Koester, 2011 - 2013
Elizabeth Korinke, 2014 - 2016
Jessalyn Ludwig, 2012 - 2013
Molly Marcum, 2013 - 2014
Kristin Mefford, 2012 - 2013
Kelly Pfaff, 2016 - 2017
Brianne Phillips, 2012 - 2014
Jennifer Phipps, 2012 - 2014
Kayla Smith, 2017 - 2018
Kelly Walsh, 2010 - 2012
Melissa White,
Kate Workman, 2013 - 2014
Wendy Wyrsotek, 2010 - 2011