Curriculum Vitae

Posted on by

700-B Rockcreek Road
Charlottesville, VA 22903
434-547-9524
colibri.alex@gmail.com

Digital Scholarship Coordinator
Columbia University
309 Butler Library
535 West 114th Street
New York, NY 10027

Education

  • Ph.D., English Language and Literature, University of Virginia, 2012
  • Ancien Pensionnaire, Ecole Normale Supérieure, 2007
  • M.A., English Language and Literature, University of Virginia, 2005
  • B.A., English, Florida International University, 1999

Honors and Prizes

  • HASTAC fellow, 2011-2012.
  • Scholars’ Lab Praxis Program Cohort, 2011-2012.
  • University of Virginia Library Scholars’ Lab Fellow, 2010-2012.
  • NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship) Fellow, summer-fall 2010; fall 2011-spring 2012
  • SHANTI (Sciences, Humanities & Arts Network of Technological Initiatives) Cohorts Fellowship Program to provide programming assistance for the Et les chiens se taisaient digital archive, 2009-2010.
  • University of Virginia ENS Fellowship to cover a year of study at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. 2006-2007.
  • Graduate Research Assistant Fellowship to cover one year of work as Project Manager for the Caribbean Literature Archive project with a leave of absence from the English Department, awarded by the Dean of Arts & Science. 2005.
  • Rockefeller Foundation /Bellagio Study Center Conference Grant. Awarded for a one-week stay at The Bellagio Study Center in Italy (Caribbean Literature Archive team, planning conference). June 21-28, 2004.
  • Robert J. Huskey Travel Fellowship awarded by the Graduate School of Arts and Science, University of Virginia. May 2004.
  • T.A. of the Year. The Declaration (Student-run newspaper at the University of Virginia). Dec 5, 2002.
  • Dean of Arts and Science Travel Grant. Used for travel to Cuba to aid in Callaloo’s “Cuban Issue” and to carry out preliminary research for the Caribbean Literature Archive, December, 2001.

Dissertation

Migrant Textuality: The histories of Aimé Césaire’s Et les chiens se taisaient.

Committee: Jahan Ramazani, dir., Jerome McGann, Anna Brickhouse and Bethany Nowviskie.

With the discovery of the earliest known manuscript version of Et les chiens se taisaient, we learn that Césaire had started thinking about the theater earlier than had been assumed, and most importantly, that he had originally envisioned this work as a historical drama based on the Haitian Revolution. “Migrant Textuality” explores the several witnesses of the play—from the manuscript to its last authorial instantiation in Œuvres Complètes in 1976—in order to shed light on the author’s troubled relationship with historical particularity, and to outline a topology of the many migrations of text and documents in this monumental work. The first chapter reconstructs the genesis of the manuscript by careful analysis of the textual and material evidence. The second places the first generic shift evinced by the work, from manuscript to the first published version in the poetry collection Les Armes miraculeuses, in the context of authorial responses to shifting editorial environments in the American hemisphere. The third chapter, “Legology,” departs from the particularity of the text to theorize textual blocks in general. The fourth chapter advocates for a form of reading that oscillates between macro- and microscopic approaches, using the topologies created in the previous chapter as proof-of-concept. The critical/digital work of the dissertation lays the foundation for a future digital edition of Césaire’s powerful poetic study of the radical anti-colonial rebel.

Peer-Reviewed Publications

  • “The Migrant Text: Aime Cesaire’s Hemispheric Push and the Editorial Blind-Spot” Perspectives on the ‘Migrant Cosmopolitans’: Narratives of Contemporary Postcoloniality. Edited by Nirmala Menon and Marika Preziuso. New York: Peter Lang, 2012 (forthcoming)
  • “Juxta: An Introduction, a Case Study, and a Development Roadmap” Poetess Archive Journal. (forthcoming)
  • “La Représentation en profondeur d’Et les chiens se taisaient d’Aimé Césaire : Pour une édition génétique en ligne.” Genesis 33. Paris (2011)
  • “La critique génétique appliquée au Cahier d’un retour au pays natal et à Et les chiens se taisaient d’Aimé Césaire.” (Co-written with James Arnold). Actes du colloque international « Génétique des textes et des formes », sous la direction de Pierre-Marc de Biasi, Anne Herschberg Pierrot et Déborah Boltz. Paris, 2011.
  • “Bridging the Middle Passage: The textual (r)evolution of Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature. 38.1 (March 2011): 40-56
  • “La découverte d’un tapuscrit d’Et les chiens se taisaient.” Aimé Césaire à l’œuvre: Actes du colloque international, sous la direction de Marc Cheymol et Philippe Ollé-Laprune. Paris: Editions des archives contemporaines, 2010.
  • “White Egrets: A Review.” Review Literature and Arts of the Americas (November 2010)
  • “Review of Alfred Lopez’s Posts and Pasts: A Theory of Postcolonialism.” The Comparatist, Vol. XXVIII (May 2004): 158-159.
  • “Man, Woman, Hunger: A Translation of Daina Chaviano’s El Hombre, la Hembra y el Hambre.” The Yalobusha Review. University of Mississippi Press (May 2003): 63-67.

Public Writing and New Media

Conferences and Unconferences

  • “Legology: Of Blocks and Paths.” The Textual Studies and Digital Humanities Center. Loyola University. Chicago, IL. February 2013.
  • “Notes on a Global Digital Humanities.” MLA 2013. Boston, MA. January, 2013.
  • “The Underground Library as Marginal Archive: Circulation and Preservation in the Shadows.” MLA 2013. Boston, MA. January, 2013.
  • “Two Steps and a Leap: Textual Scholarship, Digital Humanities and building the Caribbean digital archive.” INKE Havana Gathering 2012: Research Foundations for Understanding Books and Reading in the Digital Age: E/Merging Reading, Writing, and Research Practices. Havana, Cuba. 2012. (also served as organizer and translator)
  • MITH Topic Modeling Workshop 2012. University of Maryland, 2012
  • HathiTrust Research Center UnCamp. Indiana University, 2012.
  • “What can American Studies offer Digital Humanities, and vice versa.” American Studies Association, 2012, Puerto Rico.
  • “Towards a Transnational Multilingual Caribbean Digital Humanities Lab.” ADHO’s Digital Humanities 2012, Hamburg, Germany.
  • “Négritude’s Legos: Transposition, iteration and the migrant text.” Society for Textual Scholarship 2012, The University of Texas at Austin.
  • “Introducing Césaire’s 1st Haitian Drama” Caribbean Studies Association 2012, Le Gosier, Guadeloupe.
  • “New Currents in Caribbean Digital Humanities.” Panel chair. Caribbean Studies Association 2012, Le Gosier, Guadeloupe.
  • “Migrant Textuality: Mapping Textual Difference in the Hemispheric Caribbean.” Caribbean Studies Association 2012, Le Gosier, Guadeloupe.
  • THATCamp Caribbean 2012. Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. (main organizer)
  • “Collecting Archipelagos: The use of the peer-reviewed aggregation model for Caribbean preservation and scholarly communications.” 54 International Congress of Americanists 2012, Vienna, Austria. (accepted)
  • “Legology: The (Pseudo-)Science of Textual Difference.” MLA 2012, Seattle, WA
  • “The Derrida Code: The Algorithmic Nature of Criticism.” MLA 2012, Seattle, WA (co-written with Michael Fox)
  • “Los poetas de la negritud: Aimé Césaire y Léopold Senghor en contexto.” Instituto de Enseñanza Superior en Lenguas Vivas, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2011.
  • “Livisibilité and Deep Representation: Design in Scholarly Editions Online.” Association for Documentary Editing 2011 Conference, Salt Lake City, Utah
  • “The Text in Diaspora: The Many Places of Aimé Césaire’s poetry.” 96th Annual ASALH Conference, Richmond, VA, 2011.
  • “On the Fringes of the Digital Archive: The Role of the Modern Library in the future of Africana and Caribbean Studies.” Caribbean Philosophical Association 2011 Conference, Rutgers University, New Jersey.
  • THATCamp CHNM 2011. Center for History and New Media, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, 2011.
  • “Towards a Caribbean Aggregator: Past, Present and Future of the Caribbean Digital Archive.” Caribbean Studies Association Annual Conference, Curaçao, 2011
  • “The Mirror and the Rocket: Why Data is not Text… at least not yet.” Scholars’ Lab Digital Therapy Series, Charlottesville, VA, 2011
  • “From Analysis to Representation: What Do We Want from the Editorial Machine?” Society for Textual Scholarship, 16th Biennial International Interdisciplinary Conference, Penn State University, University Park, PA, 2011.
  • “Vers une édition génétique de Cahier d’un retour au pays natal et Et les chiens se taisaient d’Aimé Césaire: des premiers manuscrits à l’édition de 1956.” (co-prepared with James Arnold) La génétique des textes et des formes: l’œuvre comme processus, Cerisy, FRANCE, 2010
  • THATCamp Virginia 2010, Charlottesville, VA, 2010
  • “Cahier d’un retour au pays natal : de la genèse à nos jours” (co-presented with James Arnold) Séminaire Manuscrit francophone 2009 – 2010, ITEM, Paris, FRANCE, 2010
  • “Textualité et le jeu génétique chez Aimé Césaire : le cas d’Et les chiens se taisaient” Collectif de chercheurs francophones sur les littératures au Sud, Paris, FRANCE, 2009
  • “How to spot a Ghost Ship in the Cahier d’un retour au pays natal: A reading of the 1939 text.” New World Studies Colloquium at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, 2009.
  • “Screwing Cuba: Henry James and the Spanish-American War.” Talk presented to the English Department at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, 2005.

Teaching Experience

Teaching Interests

  • 20th Century otr-American and Caribbean Literature and Culture; Atlantic Studies.
  • Digital Humanities
  • History of the Book; Textual Criticism.
  • Postcolonial and Critical Theory; modernity/modernism.

Courses Taught

The University of Virginia, Media Studies Department

The University of Virginia, Department of English:

  • Digital Workshop (Project Tango), Fall 2010
  • Literature in English III (major level survey of modern and contemporary Literature), Fall 2010
  • Borders and other Figments (themed expository writing course), Fall 2010
  • Local Politics (themed expository writing course), Spring 2010
  • Apocalyptic Literature (themed expository writing course), Fall 2009
  • Globalization (themed expository writing course), Fall 2008-Spring 2009
  • Local Politics (themed expository writing course), Fall 2007-Spring 2008
  • Democracy (themed expository writing course), Spring 2006
  • In-Justice (themed expository writing course), Fall 2005
  • The History of Love (themed expository writing course), Spring 2004
  • Literature in English III (major level survey of modern and contemporary Literature), Fall 2003
  • Magic and The Psychology of Lying (themed expository writing course), Spring 2003
  • The Representation of Poverty (themed expository writing course), Fall 2002
  • Literature in English II (major level survey of literature between the English and American Civil Wars), Spring 2002

The University of Virginia, Department of French:

  • Contemporary Caribbean Culture and Literature (advanced course with a comparative approach), Fall 2004

The University of Virginia, Department of Spanish:

  • Intermediate Spanish II, Spring 2004
  • Intermediate Spanish I, Fall 2003

Related Experience

  • Chair, Digital Advisory Board, Caribbean Studies Association
  • Vice-Chair, Executive Council, GO::DH, ADHO
  • Consulting Visit, Florida International University, November 2012.
  • Guest Speaker, Occidental College, August 2012.
  • Critical Code Studies Working Group 2012.
  • Prism Tool: Development team, 2011-2012.
  • Reviewer for DH2012, 2012.
  • Reviewer for Research in African Literatures, 2011.
  • UVACSE Tiger Team, Approximate String Matching across literary corpora
  • THATCamp Diversity initiative, 2011-2012
  • -D Initiative to bring Digital Humanities instruction to the undergraduate curriculum at the University of Virginia, 2011.
  • Project Lead, Project Tango. (An initiative to bridge the gap between digital humanities training and out-of-print digital archiving). 2010-2011.
  • Co-Editor of the Edition critique de l’Œuvre complète d’Aimé Césaire (Critical edition of the complete works of Aimé Césaire). Presses AUF. 2009-present
  • Editor of the e-text edition of Alexander Exquemelin’s Bucaneers of America. UVa e-text center. 2005
  • Translator for the Student Interpreter Service Initiative at the UVa Hospital, Fall 2004.
  • Translator for Callaloo’s “Cuban Issue.” December 2000
  • Founder and President of the Florida International University Poetry Club, 1998

Memberships

  • Modern Language Association (MLA)
  • American Studies Association (ASA)
  • Caribbean Studies Association (CSA)
  • Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO)
  • Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC)
  • Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH)
  • Society for Digital Humanities/Société pour l’étude des médias interactifs (SDH-SEMI)
  • Australian Association for Digital Humanities (aaDH)
  • Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes (ITEM)
  • Society for Textual Scholarship (STS)
  • Caribbean Philosophical Association (CPA)
  • Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH)
  • Association for Documentary Editing (ADE)

Languages and Specialist Skills

Human: Mastery of Spanish, French and Italian. Reading knowledge of German, Portuguese and Kreyol.

Code: Ruby, Python, HTML5, CSS/SASS, XSLT, XML/TEI, PHP, SQL, JavaScript/JQuery/CoffeScript, UNIX shell, et al.

Platforms/Software: Windows/Linux/MacOS, Ruby on Rails, Github, Omeka, WordPress, Drupal, Jekyll, Juxta, ArcGIS, et al.

References

  • Barbara Rockenbach, Director of Humanities And History Libraries, Columbia University
  • Jerome J. McGann, University Prof & John Stewart Bryan Prof Of English, University of Virginia
  • Bethany Nowviskie, Director of Digital Research & Scholarship, University of Virginia Library
  • Jahan Ramazani, Edgar F. Shannon, Jr. Professor of English, University of Virginia
  • Anna Brickhouse, Associate Professor of English, University of Virginia
  • A. James Arnold, Professor Emeritus of French, University of Virginia
  • Michael Levenson, Professor of English, University of Virginia
  • Mrinalini Chakravorty, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia
  • Andrew Stauffer, Associate Professor of English, University of Virginia
  • Siva Vaidhyanathan, Chair, Media Studies Department, University of Virginia
  • Rafael Alvarado, Associated Director, SHANTI, University of Virginia
Twitt