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Jonathan Najarian
Visiting Assistant Professor of Writing and Rhetoric
Department/Office Information
Writing and RhetoricContact
jnajarian@colgate.eduIn my research and writing, I bring a historical focus to issues that can seem decidedly contemporary, seeking to reveal how the present shapes our understanding of the past: how do contemporary developments in emerging technology clarify or complicate the study of media forms? How, for example, does social media bring the newspaper newly into focus as a media object, and what happens when we position the newspaper as one of the starting points for our contemporary digital culture? This question motivates my current book project, which is titled Comics Out of Context: Visual Rhetoric, Virtual Reality, and the Modern Body, 1890 to the Present. In this project, I position late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century newspapers, with their emphasis on emerging forms of visuality, reliance on radically new modes of technological production, and deep, convoluted connections with other media, as the starting point for our contemporary digital culture. I argue that our present-day tendency to see ourselves as both participants in and subjects of a robust mediaverse began not with the emergence of ubiquitous digital technologies, but rather the proliferation of printed media, and especially the familiar comics characters who escaped the context of the newspaper and peppered billboards and posters and merchandise, danced on vaudeville stages, and materialized as dolls. The comics specifically, and the newspapers broadly, invited readers to reimagine themselves鈥攖he physical presence of their own bodies鈥攁s actively engaged in a transmedia environment, or what we today might recognize as an early version of a virtual reality: not quite real, and yet not fully imaginary.
I am the editor of , and my essays and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Modernism/modernity, Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, American Periodical Studies, and Twentieth-Century Literature, as well as the forthcoming edited collections The Edinburgh Companion to Popular Modernism, The Politics of Intermedial Modernism, Teaching the American Essay, and Comics: A Companion.
I offer classes in generative A.I. and the history of text technologies, visual rhetorics and comics, and writing at both the introductory and advanced levels.