On Tuesday, March 14, MITH is very pleased to welcome two very distinguished guests, Johanna Drucker and Jerome McGann, both of the University of Virginia. Professors Drucker and McGann will be in MITH between 11:00 and 12:00 for a warm up conversation about the future of the digital humanities (bring an early lunch if you like . . .) and will then conduct on a seminar on the current state of the digital humanities from 12:30-2:00 in 3105 Susquehanna Hall. Both events are open to all. Their visit is co-sponsored by MITH and the English department.

Johanna Drucker is the Robertson Professor of Media Studies and was the first director of the Media Studies program which she created at the University of Virginia on arrival in 1999. She has a PhD in Ecriture (University of California, Berkeley, 1986) and has been on the faculty of Yale University, Columbia University, the University of Texas at Dallas, State University of New York at Purchase, and Harvard University where she taught art history, theory, and practice. Her publications have been in the field of 20th-century art history, the history of writing and the alphabet, artists’ books, experimental typography, and visual and concrete poetry. Her most recent publication is Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity (University of Chicago Press, 2005). Her other scholarly titles include: Theorizing Modernism (Columbia University Press, 1994), The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art (University of Chicago Press, 1994), The Alphabetic Labyrinth (Thames and Hudson, 1995) and The Century of Artists’ Books (Granary Books, 1996). She is also internationally known for her work as a book artist and writer and has been publishing experimental editions since 1972; her most recent titles include Figuring the Word (Druckwerk 1998), Narratology (Druckwerk, 1994), and Nova Reperta (in collaboration with Brad Freeman, JABbooks, 1999), Night Crawlers on the Web (2000), A Girl’s Life (Granary, 2001), Quantum (2002), Damaged Spring (2003), and From Now (Cuneiform Press, 2005). She is currently working on a large-scale digital project, Artists’ Books Online, and is helping in the planning and development of the MA in Digital Humanities, to be launched at the University of Viriginia in Fall 2007.

Jerome McGann, John Stewart Bryan University Professor at Virginia, has had a major influence in half a dozen fields, from Romantic and Victorian literature to contemporary poetry and poetics to textual scholarship. McGann’s work in digital media is just part of his larger, abiding interest in the material conditions of textuality. Projects like The Rossetti Archive are, among other things, textual-critical experiments in the uses of markup and data-processing environments for the embodiment, transmission, and ongoing dialogic interpretation of imaginative texts. He has recently extended these experiments, exploring the ways digital media might enable collaborative game-play and “deformance” as scholarly and pedagogical activities. Some of these matters are taken up in his book on literary studies after the World Wide Web, Radiant Textuality: Literary Studies After the World Wide Web (Palgrave/St. Martin’s Press, 2001).

This is a superb opportunity to find out what’s on the mind of two of the most active individuals shaping the future of the digital humanities.