English

Research Interests
My research interests focus on issues surrounding the learning of English as a second/additional language, particularly issues regarding identity construction in and through language learning, power dynamics, and language ideologies. I investigate how these social dynamics are constituted in/as interaction, using fine-grained discourse analysis

Research Projects
Past
Close analysis of discourse involving adult immigrants to the U.S.

Current
I am creating a searchable database comprised of texts and video-recorded interactions produced by members of the Integrated Network for Social Sustainability (INSS). I will then conduct linguistic analysis of how INSS members define social sustainability, focusing on word frequencies, word strings, metaphoric characterizations of social sustainability, nominalizations, clause transitivity, among other linguistic features.

Teaching Projects
Current
ENGL 3162 Language and the Virtual World

In preparation
ENGL 4267 Identity, Social Interaction and Community in Digital Spaces

Research Interests

Critical Digital Literacies; Technology in Teacher Education & Professional Development; Literacy Identities & Digital Storytelling.

Research Projects

Current

I’m currently studying a critical digital literacies project (currently in its second year of data collection) in my teaching methods courses with pre- and in-service English teachers and analyzing data from a study at ImaginOn.

Past

I’ve done research projects on digital storytelling at five different sites with elementary and secondary school students in both schools and after-school programs (some of which I’ve published). I’m co-editor of Critical Digital Literacies as Social Praxis: Intersections and challenges, and have also published on digital literacies and the Common Core English/Language Arts State Standards.

Teaching Projects

Current

I’m currently teaching “Communities & Identities in Digital Worlds.” I’m also continuing to collect data in my methods courses (mentioned in the current research projects section).

Past

I think you may want to know how I use digital technologies in the classroom. I use them extensively. My course website is here: http://webpages.charlotte.edu/~atoscano/.

Research Interests

Modernism and Poetry; American Literature and Culture; Theories of Gender and Sexuality; Digital Humanities

Research Projects

Current

I am a research associate on a grant application to the Canadian SSHRC for a project that aims to create scholarly editions of the four long poems H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) wrote in her late career. This project will produce an edition with both print and electronic components.

I am on the Advisory Board of the Emily Dickinson Archives project.

Past

In graduate school, I managed a large website called the Emily Dickinson Archives, supervising undergraduate and graduate students who worked with me on the site. I also advised faculty in a number of disciplines on their digital humanities projects.

After graduate school, I held a postdoctoral fellowship on a project entitled Cultural Heritage Language Technologies. For this project, I was co-investigator on an NEH Preservation and Assess grant.

During my tenure at UNCC, I published a co-edited electronic scholarly edition of Emily Dickinson’s correspondence with the University of Virginia Press, as well as an article on electronic editing in the Blackwell Companion to Emily Dickinson. At UNCC, I also served on the Humanities and Technologies task force, and I worked with the Center for Humanities, Technology, and Science, and later with the Complexity Institute.

Teaching Projects

Current

Past

One of my 4000/5000-level courses, entitled “American Poetry: Text and Image,” incorporates units on poetry in an electronic environment, including the digitized manuscripts of Walt Whitman’s “Song of MySelf” and Emily Dickinson’s verse as well as contemporary poetry that is born-digital.

Research Interests

Rhetoric, Composition, Technical Communication/Writing, Science and Technology Studies, Gender Studies, Popular Culture Studies, New Media Video Game Studies

Research Projects

Current

In Progress

• Cultural History of Videos Games (1980-2004)
• Service Learning, Hegemony, and American Exceptionalism: Motivations behind why our pedagodies are “good”

Conference Presentations

• Not-so-Alternative Families: A look at heteronormativity on Television
• Outsourcing Technical Writing: Multiple Technical Writing Futures

Past

Book

Marconi’s Wireless and the Rhetoric of a New Technology

Articles

• “Tony Soprano as the American Everyman and Scoundrel:How The Sopranos (re)Presents Contemporary Middle-Class Anxieties.”
• “Enacting Culture in Gaming: A Video Gamer’s Literacy Experiences and Practices.”
• “Using I, Robot in the Technical Writing Classroom: Developing a Critical Technological Awareness.”
• “Rethinking Online Space: Encouraging Student Immersion for Online and Hybrid Courses.”
• “Experimenting with Multimodality.” Multimodal Composition: Resources Book for Teachers.

Teaching Projects

Current

I teach a course called “Information Design and Digital Publishing.”
I want to incorporate more multimodal assignments into my classes–having students use video, audio, images, and text to convey an argument.

Past

Research Interests

• Language aggression and conflict
• Im/politeness models and theories
• Genre theory
• Identity construction
• Traditional and digitally mediated communication

Research Projects

Current

• Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict
• Understanding the evolution of conflict: private to public
• Diaspora and hybrid identity construction on-line: the Latino case

Past

• Interaction on YouTube’s textual facility
• Reality television: aggression and identity construction
• Proposing a integrative im/politeness model
• Reconceptualizing face and identity
• New (digital) genres of political discourse.

Teaching Projects

Current

New concentration on language and digital technologies – preparing new, core course for the concentration: ENGL 4168 Multimodality and texts.

Past

Research Interests

children’s literature; digital humanities; fan studies; reception studies; narrative theory; television studies; early modern fiction; nineteenth century fiction

Research Projects

Current

1. Fan Fictions and Continuations: A Literary Genre from 1590 to 2010 (Book project)
2. Reading Digitally: Participatory Culture and the Book (Essay project)
3. Creative Criticism (a peer-reviewed journal in which fiction, games and video would function as scholarship.)

Past

Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers (2013)

Teaching Projects

Current

Past

Research Interests

History of the Book-Print to Pixel; Journal Editing/New Media and the Future of Publishing;
Cultural Studies of Science; History of Science; Encyclopedias & 19th C. Culture; Children’s Literature; Intellectual History; Gender & Science; Scientific and Technical Communication;
Victorian Literature; Romanticism; Sociology of Knowledge; Animals & Society.

Research Projects

Current

“Ecce Emendator” — The Editor in an Technological Era; History

Series Editor – Intersections in Literature and Science (U. Wales Press)

Past

Dolphin – A Book in the Animal Series (Reaktion/U. Chicago)
Useful Knowledge (Duke University Press)
England in 1815 (Palgrave)

Teaching Projects

Current

See above

Past

Research Interests

• Modern and contemporary Anglophone fiction
• Postcolonial and global studies
• Environmental studies
• Digital humanities
• World and comparative literature
• Translation
• Comics and graphic novels
• Film studies
• Nationalism

 

Research and Professional Activity

• I am co-editor of H-Empire, an interdisciplinary H-Net network.One of my projects investigates the construction of discourses of dissent in Anglophone literature.
• I am also exploring issues of foreignness, internationalism, and transnationality in world fiction and film in another project.
• “Comics in translation.” This project aims at pushing the boundaries of the notion of translation to engage not only with the traditional notion of “language-to-language” translation, but also “medium-to-medium” forms of translation such as text and image, on an online platform that facilitates the transference between languages, media, other platforms, etc. Project in its developing stages.

 

Teaching Projects

• In my literature courses, I incorporate electronic texts such as poems annotated in online platforms, which is aimed at transforming students’ experience of reading literature.
• I incorporate discussions on what digital readership communities are and how they operate in my courses.
• I offer students avenues to reflect on the cultural, historical, and geographical implications of digital communication and information access in the current global era.