Brian Croxall

Associate Research Professor

1163D JFSB

(801)422-7425

Research Areas: , , ,

Teaching Experience

Put simply: in each class I teach, I want my students to wrestle with questions that I do not yet know the answer to. We experiment by mapping novels, looking at every frame of a film at once, or counting character interactions within 18 thousand comic strips. And then I try something else.

I am fanatic about improving as a teacher, and I hold myself accountable for past performance by publishing every teaching evaluation I’ve ever received.

Research

My research falls into a broad range of activities called digital humanities. I tell people this means that I use a computer to read poems, map novels, and understand network relations in comic strips. But it also means I think about computers, computational processes, and computational culture (from social media to memes, from games to GIFs) using the tools and patterns of thought that we often bring to literature, filmed, and art.

I collaborate with faculty across the College of Humanities. To cite three examples, this means collecting oral histories of the survivors of the Cambodian genocide; exploring depictions of the Wounded Knee massacre by Native American journalists; searching through 100 years of French linguistics to understand what “standard French” might be.

My most recently published co-edited book considers digital humanities pedagogy, and my previous co-edited volume was about steampunk, a science fiction subgenre that imagines computers were invented in the nineteenth century. I am now working on a co-edited volume about the intersections of teaching and text encoding.

Selected Publications

Edited Books

Edited Issues

  • “Looking for Signposts,” #Alt-Academy: Alternative Academic Careers, MediaCommons, 2014-2015, mediacommons.org/alt-ac/cluster/getting-there-2.
  • “Steampunk, Science, and (Neo)Victorian Technologies,” Neo-Victorian Studies 3.1, 2010

Chapters

  • Failure,” co-authored with Quinn Warnick, Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, eds. Rebecca Frost Davis, Matthew K. Gold, Katherine D. Harris, and Jentery Sayers, Modern Language Association, 2020,
  • “How to Not Read Hemingway,” Hemingway in the Digital Age: Reflections on Teaching, Reading, and Understanding, ed. Laura Godfrey, Kent State University Press, 2019, 57-91
  • “Exploring How and Why Digital Humanities is Taught in Libraries,” co-authored with Hannah Rasmussen and Jessica Otis, A Splendid Torch: Learning and Teaching in Today’s Academic Libraries, eds. Jodi Reeves Eyre, John C. Maclachlan, and Christa Williford, CLIR Report 174, 2017, 69-88

Articles

Service

Universities grew out of medieval monasteries and convents, which might explain why so many academics like being left alone. To resist this, I dedicate significant time connecting with and enabling the work of others in my field.

Over the last decade, I served on the boards of the Modern Language Association (MLA), the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH), and the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO). Locally, I help organize the annual Digital Humanities Utah.

Citizenship assignments

– Secretary (elected), Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (2017-2021)
– Program Committee (appointed), Modern Language Association (2019-2022)
– Delegate Assembly (elected), Modern Language Association (2018-2021)
– Executive Council (elected), Modern Language Association (2014-2018)
– Executive Council (elected), The Association for Computers and the Humanities (2013-2017)
– Committee on Information Technology (appointed), Modern Language Association (2011-2014)

Professional Website

https://briancroxall.net