Trish Bredar is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at the University of Notre Dame. Her work focuses on issues of gender and physical mobility in nineteenth-century British literature.
Trish Bredar
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.