My intellectual project focuses on promoting human and societal flourishing through a relational view of literature, education, and technology adoption.
Journal Articles
Abstract
This chapter responds to the recent crisis surrounding developments in large language models and generative AI with a relational view of education informed by the emerging world-centered approach to education and a synthesis of personalist character formation with feminist care ethics. It proposes that the instinct to manage student use of generative AI with carceral practices, characterized by surveillance and control, undermines the project of forming students as whole persons who can evaluate and use or reject emerging technologies in a mature way. The chapter concludes with practical suggestions for the classroom that can be aligned with institutional strategic plans.
Abstract
Explore the digital unessay in different classes across multiple disciplines (sociology, criminal justice, literature, and digital humanities). Each assignment participates in the following definition of the Unessay: a non-traditional assessment that meets learning outcomes by maximizing student choice and agency. Each piece offers multiple assignments as open educational resources and synthesizes theories about promoting student agency and control while emphasizing digital humanities values of equity and experimentation.
Abstract
To support faculty as they remained civically engaged during the pandemic, the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of South Dakota (CTL) launched a training series on public scholarship partnering with facilitators from Emory, Baylor, and Harvard. Core outcome of the series were for faculty to find a home for themselves in public engagement and to support students in their own public-facing work. The series introduced faculty to public scholarship as a dialogical partnership and offered workshops on facilitating public-facing student work and organizing virtual conferences, concluding each term with a panel featuring academics who promote the common good in different ways. This article explains the development of this series with the theoretical underpinnings that guided it and concludes by proposing a definition of public scholarship that includes student voices and repositions universities within the communities they inhabit.
The Compromised Chronotope of Christminster: Hardy and Hopkins’s Medieval Oxford. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, vol. 9, no. 1, March 2018, 72-87.
Abstract
Centered on the unique chronotope of Oxford, this essay traces the ways Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Hardy invoke and compromise our ability to relate past to present. In the sonnet, ‘Duns Scotus’s Oxford,’ and the novel, Jude the Obscure, Hopkins and Hardy respectively present the city of Oxford as a central confluence of medieval and early modern pasts with a Victorian present. To further link past and present, the poet and novelist both enter into the medieval conceit of the wind, wherein a lover gains intimacy with the beloved through mutually shared breath, but they do so for cross-purposes. Whereas a connection to the past is preserved in Hopkins’s sonnet by a theological understanding of the ether, any such connection is a dangerous illusion in Hardy’s novel. Yet, even with this divergence Hardy, like Hopkins, still leads the reader into a shared sacramental intimacy suggested through medieval influences on the novel.
A beautifully written essay uncovering interesting tropes these two astonishing minds share in their revision and invention of the medieval past.
Judge for postmedieval’s Michael Camille Essay Contest
Innovation: Integration of Random Variation and Creative Synthesis. Academy of Management Review, vol. 40, no. 3, July 2015, 461-464. (With Jiyao Chen).
Abstract
Sarah Harvey has developed an important model called creative synthesis for the use of dialectical reasoning in creative endeavors. This model is put in direct opposition to the evolutionary model called random variation, which, according to Harvey, promotes incremental innovation, while creative synthesis promotes radical innovation. In emphasizing the affirmative stage of the dialectical process, creative synthesis offers a description of how groups can be consistently successful in creative endeavors through collective attention, enabling ideas, and building on similarities. We propose that creative synthesis is not a rival to but an extension of random variation and that the same dialectical reasoning used by Harvey allows us to integrate the two models into a more versatile hybrid: evolutionary synthesis. We contend that the hybrid model better reflects the complexity of reality and avoids the problem of routinization.
In their dialogue piece Chen and Adamson provide a superb illustration of creative synthesis in action by integrating the thesis of evolutionary theory with the antithesis of dialectic theory to develop a newly synthesized construct, “evolutionary synthesis.” Their extension of the creative process is exciting, raising both new insights and new questions for group creativity research.
Sarah Harvey, “Synthesis in Action: Response to Chen and Adamson”
Current Research Projects
Echoes of Gerard Manley Hopkins in the Poetry of Jane Greer and Samuel Hazo
Gerard Manley Hopkins echoed himself in his last moments, reportedly saying “I am so happy.” Samuel Hazo ends his most recent collection with a poem that draws on these same last words: “Dying of fever, Hopkins / repeated, ‘I am so happy.’” But the speaker in Hazo’s poem does not share the ecstatic theophany expressed in Hopkins’s words. Instead, Hazo continues the meditation on mortality present throughout his work, adopting a form of Pascal’s wager so that he can “wage against uncertainty.” Published in the same year, Jane Greer’s newest collection, Love Like a Conflagration, often echoes Hopkins’s poetry in the same vein as Hazo. The echo may be a few words, such as when an experience of “dappled undergrowth” and “stippled shade” suggests “loss and discontent” rather than delight in “all things counter, original, spáre, strange.” In the same collection, the echo of “leafmeal” links an aging poet losing her memory as she refines her craft to the young Márgarét who grows to Margaret through emotional identification with “leaves, like the things of man.” Most telling, Greer’s poem “Because God Wanted It” ends with a nearly identical quote from “God’s Grandeur” including the enjambed line break: “because the Holy Spirit over the bent / world broods.” Rather than the consolation that “nature is never spent” as in Hopkins’s sonnet, Greer’s poem ends with a speaker who was “redeemed impenitent.”
Two living poets echo the poetry of Hopkins in books published in the same year. Perhaps this should come as no surprise since each writes from the same intellectual tradition as Hopkins and speaks highly of him in interviews and prose. And yet, they appropriate Hopkins’s poetry in ways that not only extend but also run counter to the source poems. In this project, I propose that this form of appropriation is even more Hopkinsian in nature following Francis Fennell’s understanding where the source poet’s “words become part of the general furniture of the reader’s mind, part of his or her ways of looking at, and of being in, the world.” These Hopkinsian echoes in Hazo and Greer’s recent poetry arise from internalized intimacy with the Victorian poet. Just as the word despair redounds from the stone of the well to return as “Spare?” in “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo,” the internalized words of Hopkins redound from the modern poet’s circumstances, repeating with a difference. In the midst of that difference, however, the same brooding God is acting within these poetic worlds.
“A Sacramental Moment”: Liturgy and Time in the Victorian Reception of the Past
What is time? Following Boethius, Chaucer contrasts time with an eternity understood as the “perfect possession of interminable life.” In Hardy’s poetic cosmos, time is a monster that reduces everything to dust and “devour[s] our prime.” Subjective experience of time can be one of drudgery and antagonism, an inescapable phenomenon that is always less than an imagined eternity. When reading these same authors with the insights of liturgical theology, however, we find that time is the medium of encounter composed of George Eliot’s “sacramental moment[s]” where we are invited to greet the human other with love.
My interpretive framework draws out theological implications contained in liturgical allusion. Often, we read liturgical allusions as giving a sense of the sacred, profaning the sacred in a subversive way, or merely reminding the reader of religious practice for an affective purpose. Each of these readings is accurate and productive, but I propose that we need to read more deeply by turning toward the underlying ritual purpose that enables these other readings. A funeral or wedding from a specific ritual tradition carries the liturgical theology of that tradition with it, perhaps even more strongly when the ritual is rejected rather than revived. When a poet incorporates a liturgical echo into a text, whether as a parody or straightforward allusion, the function of that liturgy and its temporal assumptions influence the text.
This project examines the importance of ritual in the Victorian reception of the medieval past. Specifically, I focus on how the Victorian obsession with liturgical structures and objects for literary purposes reveals the nature of their view of time. I examine liturgical usage in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Thomas Hardy’s poetry and Tess of the d’Urbervilles, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, and the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. I begin with a chapter presenting Chaucer as a medieval model of liturgical time that endures through the Victorians, and end questioning how the central purpose of a liturgy (communion with the divine other through a human community) both remains consistent and changes through use by secular Victorian writers. Understanding the use of liturgical forms in Victorian texts enables a more nuanced view of literature than the secularization narrative provides and informs the way we currently receive the Victorian past or wield medieval discourses ourselves.