Shinjini Chattopadhyay is a PhD candidate in English and a Gender Studies and Irish Studies minor at the University of Notre Dame. She explores the construction of urban space in global modernist literature through genetic textual studies.
Shinjini Chattopadhyay
Contributions
In Search of Multivocality: Periodical Studies and a Humanities Lab in Practice
As a field Periodical Studies is particularly well-suited to encourage innovative and interdisciplinary methodologies not only among experts but also among young scholars encountering the discipline for the first time. Periodicals are diverse, multi-authored visual and textual objects that when taught effectively can improve students’ close reading and distant reading skills, demand their equal attention toward art and advertisement, and teach them how to imagine the audience of a different historical time and place. They also invite digital humanities work that can enrich students’ critical methods and put their traditional modes of analysis in dialogue with other skills. At a broader theoretical level, the careful study of a periodical’s lifespan encourages students to recognize multivocality within a complex, evolving, and highly collaborative medium.