Other Research Interests
My commitment to interdisciplinary inquiry—which arose out of my own history as a physics undergraduate—has allowed me to conduct research into the histories of many different disciplines, such as physics and biology, and technologies, such as optical toys and the telegraph. This approach frequently leads me to focus on the production and reception of less frequently studied genres of scientific writing, which are integral to the ways in which communities (centered on profession, nation, race, gender, etc.) form around the scientific and technological concepts. For instance, in a research project I have been completing on “Anecdotes of the Telegraph,” I write on the ways in which the anecdotes which circulated in the nineteenth-century press became a space in which African American and white writers contested whether people of color could be thought of as part of the telegraphic community created by the technology. Similarly, I have given conference presentations on the ways in which nineteenth-century mathematical word problems largely excluded people of color and women from their accounts of “real life.” In these works and others, digital humanities methodologies play an important role. Given these genres’ peripheral place in Victorian Studies, I find that methods of distant reading and data visualization are necessary to understand their characteristics and to contextualize the details which more traditional methods of critical inquiry, such as close reading, reveal.