ditorial theory and practice have been areas of significant strength in the department for at least 50 years. Once looked upon as largely practical, editing acquired major status and visibility during the past decades as scholars began to draw on the vast untapped potential of its fundamental questions: Under what precise circumstances and in what precise forms has information been embodied and transmitted in the past? And how should it be transmitted in the future? English Department faculty at the University of Rochester have been at the forefront of these developments, helping to illuminate the way editorial decisions involve basic issues in the nature, shape, transmission, and preservation of information–nothing less than the organization of knowledge. Departmental research and teaching in this area contribute to our understanding of how different media–oral, visual, aural, dramatic, cinematic, electronic–distinctively shape the "messages" that English delivers to its audiences. The astounding literary achievements of the last 500 years in printed stories, poems, plays, and novels have sometimes obscured the role of other media of communication and preservation: oral song; scripted and improvised performance; drawn, engraved, and digitized images; and recorded, filmed, videotaped, and digitized composites. Current approaches combine new technologies with broad aesthetic, cultural, and historical interests. Crossover work of this kind opens new engagements with, for example, African American and Native American narrative traditions and their place within living communities; the effect of etched, hand-colored amalgams of text and image produced by multimedia artists such as William Blake; the narrative and technical elements that contribute to the appeal of genre films such as science fiction; or the function of visual materials in medieval and early modern literature.
The English department boasts considerable resources in this area. The Medieval English Text Series edited by Russell Peck, the Chaucer Bibliographies edited by Thomas Hahn, and two electronic thematic research collections, the Camelot Project edited by Alan Lupack and the William Blake Archive edited by Morris Eaves, are major scholarly enterprises that involve profound editorial issues across a range of media and historical conditions. These are all well-established, highly collaborative projects that have attracted participation and recognition from international scholarly communities as well as substantial grant support; they have also provided both research opportunities and financial support for graduate students. They are usefully complemented by a long history of faculty involvement in other kinds of editorial projects (see individual faculty pages).
English department faculty have major research interests in media studies, media history, and the history of technology (orality and literacy, the history of the book, film history, digital media, etc.); stage performance; film studies; authorship, copyright, and intellectual property; and experimental hypermedia.
This array of endeavors is supported by significant local resources: within the university, by the
University of Rochester Press, the
Memorial Art Gallery, the Multimedia Center, the
Film and Media Studies program,
Rare Books and Special Collections, the Koller Collins Library, and the
Educational Technology Center; off campus by Writers and Books, the Visual Studies Workshop, and the film and photography archives of
George Eastman House and the International Museum of Photography. Graduate students working in this area have unique opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration through the university's graduate programs in Visual and Cultural Studies, which has close ties to English, and through the considerable resources of the Eastman School of Music.
