Dr CLAPP, Jeffrey Michael

Democratic Formalism and Literary Theory

The project explores the relationship between the novel and the actual forms of democratic governance. Political scientists and non-governmental organizations track many such formalisms. This project will explore two: “representative government” and “impartial administration” (to use the terminology of the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance). In each of the texts explore here, literary authors consider these forms in sustained ways, often by representing traduced elections or the flouting of the rule of law. Exploring such representations across a series of global contexts, the project argues that the contemporary world novel dwells with surprising regularly on democratic deficits—not in order to offer a critique of democracy, as some literary theorists would have it, but instead to forward the cause of global democratization.

Project Start Year : 2020

Chief Investigator(s) : CLAPP, Jeffrey Michael

“One City One Book Hong Kong, 2018-19: Shaun Tan’s The Arrival.”
This project funds Hong Kong's first ever One City One Book, a community wide reading initiative with research, teaching and knowledge transfer elements.
Project Start Year : 2018

Chief Investigator(s) : BANERJEE, Bidisha   (Dr CLAPP, Jeffrey Michael as Co-Investigator)

Open Annotation and Humanities Education
Open annotation takes something that academics do habitually—annotating books and papers, often by writing in their margins—and makes it a collaborative, open-source project. Applications of open annotation are being actively explored in various fields (like computer programming) and in various contexts (like peer review). This project proposes that the open annotation tools now becoming available have a special relevance to humanities education. Despite the field’s diversity, humanistic disciplines are fundamentally centered on examining the structures and details of complex texts like novels, histories, philosophies, and archives. While annotation has long been something that readers do alone, this project will show the powerful impact on learning that can be produced when students and instructors annotate together, reimagining the margins of texts as spaces of collaborative, engaging learning and teaching. It will explore how instructors can annotate digital texts in ways that are visible to students, and how students can respond to their instructors and to one another if everybody is looking together at the same digital documents. Finally, by exploring open annotation across disciplines, in different contexts, and with varied assessment strategies, this project identifies open annotation as a key to integrating blended learning into humanities education.
Project Start Year : 2018

Chief Investigator(s) : CLAPP, Jeffrey Michael

Whitman on the Grid: Surveillance, Democracy, and the Autobiographical Moment in Contemporary American Literature
A literary history, based in part on archival research.
Project Start Year : 2017

Chief Investigator(s) : CLAPP, Jeffrey Michael

Overhearing American Literature: Surveillance, Democracy and the State
In this archival research project, I will visit the archives of the University of Texas at Austin to study the papers of David Foster Wallace, a key figure in the composition of my book about surveillance, democracy, and the state.
Project Start Year : 2015

Chief Investigator(s) : CLAPP, Jeffrey Michael

Security, Privacy, Hospitality: New Literary Perspectives
An edited volume of essays on the interrelations between security and hospitality in modern and contemporary literature.
Project Start Year : 2014

Chief Investigator(s) : CLAPP, Jeffrey Michael