While reading several books about the evolution of British publishing during my Ph.D. coursework, I became intrigued to learn more about how and where the materials needed to produce books and periodicals were sourced. While reading Lee Erickson’s The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800-1850, I came across a passage that would set me on course to develop my digital map project and, ultimately, my dissertation:
Later, during the American civil war, when the Northern blockade of Southern ports effectively halted the export of cotton to textile mills in England, the price of paper rose, thus encouraging the development of new processes for making paper first from esparto grass and then from wood pulp, which effectively separated publishing from its link to the cotton and textile industries. (171)
As I kept reading, I waited for Erikson to delve deeper into my new pressing questions: which ports, what plantations producing what cotton, picked by which enslaved people, meant to supply which mill? And what of esparto grass – where was that from? Who discovered this technique, which made paper cheaper, disrupted entire industries, and impacted British literacy? When those answers were not forth-coming, I felt certain I knew the thrust of my dissertation.
“[T]he Observance of Trifles’: Mapping Imperial Assemblages in Nineteenth-Century British Serialized Crime Fiction” investigates representations of the ecological and Imperialist relationships in a selection of serialized crime fiction texts: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes adventures (appearing in The Strand Magazine: An Illustrated Monthly beginning in 1891). I examine serialized crime fiction published in the nineteenth century as a map of the ecological and Imperialist relationships established through the nineteenth-century British publishing industry. Serialized crime fiction was both popular and profitable, representing not only commercial success but one that tapped into the reading populace’s imagination. Readers craved serialized stories from Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, and Arthur Conan Doyle where installments tantalized the next issue even before the presses had begun to print. Research, like the seminal work of Hughes and Lund, has expounded upon the effects of reading and literacy on the middle class, as well as on the content of some of the more famous detective stories that appeared in periodicals. Taking that research into account, this study identifies and expounds on the effect of non-human matter (flora, fauna, waste, metals) on the methods of production, which in turn affect the narratives that appear in the periodicals. Each chapter maps three essential assemblages of the nineteenth-century publishing industry (paper, metal, and waste) and establishes the relational qualities that comprise them. Close readings of each of the serialized crime fiction texts— combined with explications of the three essential assemblage relationships — demonstrate where these relationships are present. I focus on the method of publication in addition to the stories themselves because the mode of delivery mimics the ecological and Imperialist assemblages at work during the time. The nineteenth-century British publishing industry, which produced these periodicals, was an assemblage of local and far-flung materials and smaller assemblages: rags, fibers, ink, stationers, waste, pollution, paper mills, miners, importers and exporters, enslavement in the American South, to name just a few. I focus on just three elements of this assemblage writ large (paper, metal, and waste) and use cartographic terms to map out the relationships that make them up, constitute them, and reconstitute them. Others have established how anxieties of empire and Imperialism appear in crime stories, most notably visible in Sherlock Holmes stories, in terms of straight plot and characters. I build off those analyses when I look beneath the overt characters and plots to unearth the interstitial moments of ecological and Imperial relationships in less overt textual moments, including the narrative structure. Finally, an Esri StoryMap (https://arcg.is/0ann4f0) animates the dynamic relationships, to further demonstrate the way these relationships are embedded in the text and further conversations about how literary analysis may be visualized and experienced. Employing the language of assemblage theory and new materialism, the study’s purpose is to demonstrate how a rhizomatic mapping framework is well-suited to explain the fragmented and volatile nineteenth-century British publishing industry and to analyze serialized crime fiction of the day. One of the broad primary interests of this study, therefore, is to accurately account for the environmental and Imperial factors that comprise the assemblages which press upon and affect the literature created. The project ends with an application of rhizomatic mapping to generative AI tool creation, indicating where this research will go in the future.
While I was working the first chapters of “The Observation of Trifles,” I believed that the next logical research step would be to take up the serialized publications being produced in India contemporaneously. When ChatGPT emerged as a free public tool in the fall of 2022, I realized I was seeing echoes of the same sentiments I had been reading in nineteenth century tomes. Thus, the final chapter of my dissertation, “Webs and Waste in the Tales of Sherlock Holmes and Beyond,” applies the same methodology to generative AI as a twenty-first century engine of destructive imperialism, and compares those findings to a similar analysis of Doyle’s stories. That chapter seeded the concept of a book, Generative AI and the Future of the Humanities, developed for the Palgrave Pivot series, due in print by the end of 2025.
I was fortunate to explore my teaching philosophy as undergirded by assemblage theory in a co-written chapter, “A Flat (Packed) Affect: Theorizing Pedagogies of Seriality in Unboxing and Assembly,” in Handbook of Curriculum Theory and Research (2024). With a cohort of two instructional designers and a research librarian, I have co-written two articles for EDUCAUSE Review, which focus on my interest in institutional policymaking regarding generative AI: “Cross-Campus Approaches to Building a Generative AI Policy (12 Dec. 2023), and “In the Room Where It Happens: Generative AI Policy Creation in Higher Education,” (29 May 2025).
My current projects include the preparation of two papers for MLA 2026, currently titled, “Expanding Our Reach: Student Scholars as Community Learning Ambassadors,” and “Rhizomatic Resistance: Close Reading OpenAI’s AI Action Plan.” In the future, I look forward to returning to my original concept of expanding the scope of my dissertation methodology and critical framework development to include the serialization productions in the colonial territories whose raw materials Britain confiscated.
Find my Generative AI publications by clicking here.