Natalie M. Houston

Productivity Coach | Assoc Prof of English

[Selected items from my academic CV.  Full version available in PDF.]

Academic Employment

Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Massachusetts Lowell, 2015 to present.
Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Houston, 2004 to present.
Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Houston, 1998-2004.

Education

Duke University, Ph.D. in English Literature, 1998.
University of Chicago, M.A. in English Literature, 1990.
University of Virginia, B.A. in Comparative Literature, with highest distinction, 1989.

Research

Current Work in Progress

  • The Visual Page as Interface. Computational analysis of graphical meaning in digitized page images.
  • The Field of Victorian Poetry 1840-1900. Network analysis of poet-publisher interactions.
  • Understanding Victorian Poetic Style. Development of stylistic measures for poetics.
  • Digital Reading: Poetry and the New Nineteenth-Century Archive.  Book manuscript.
  • Co-Director and Technical Director, Periodical Poetry: an Index of Poetry in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals. Bibliographic research database.
  • Augusta Webster Archive. TEI-conformant digital textual edition.

Book

  • Lady Audley’s Secret.  By Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Ed. Natalie M. Houston. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2003. (A critical edition for Broadview’s Literary Texts series.)

Articles

  • “Reading the Visual Page in the Digital Archive.” In Research Methods for Reading Digital Data in the Digital Humanities. Ed. Gabriele Griffin and Matthew Hayler. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. (Forthcoming)
  • “Visualizing the Cultural Field of Victorian Poetry.”  In Virtual Victorians: Networks, Connections, Technologies. Ed. Veronica Alfano and Andrew Stauffer. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 121-141.
  • “Imposter Phenomenon.” In How to Build an Academic Life in the Humanities: Meditations on the Academic Work-Life Balance. Ed. Greg Colon-Semenza and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 73-81.
  • “Towards a Computational Analysis of Victorian Poetics.” Victorian Studies 56.3 (Spring 2014): 498-510.
  • “VisualPage: Towards Large Scale Analysis of Nineteenth-Century Print Culture”  (co-authored with Neal Audenaert). 2013 IEEE International Conference on Big Data.  October 2013. 9-16. DOI: 10.1109/BigData.2013.6691665.
  • “Bibliographic Databases and the ‘Golden Stream’: Constructing the Periodical Poetry Index (co-authored with Lindsy Lawrence and April Patrick). Victorian Review 38.2 (2012): 69-80. DOI: 10.1353/vcr.2012.0038
  •  “Teaching and Learning with the Periodical Poetry Index.” (co-authored with Lindsy Lawrence and April Patrick). Victorian Periodicals Review 45.2 (Summer 2012): 224-227.
  • “Newspaper Poems: Material Texts in the Public Sphere.” Victorian Studies 50.2 (Winter 2008): 233-242.
  • “Order and Interpretation in Augusta Webster’s Portraits.” Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 47 (August 2007).  DOI : 10.7202/016701ar.
  • “Towards a New History: Fin-de-Siècle Women Poets and the Sonnet.” In Victorian Women Poets, ed. Alison Chapman. Essays and Studies vol. 56.  Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2003. 145-164.
  • “Affecting Authenticity: Sonnets from the Portuguese and Modern Love.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 35.2 (Fall 2002): 99-121.
  • “Anthologies and the Making of the Poetic Canon.”  In The Blackwell Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed.  Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Antony H. Harrison. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. 361-377.
  • “Reading the Victorian Souvenir: Sonnets and Photographs of the Crimean War.” Yale Journal of Criticism 14.2 (2001): 353-383.
  • “Valuable by Design: Material Features and Cultural Value in Nineteenth-Century Sonnet Anthologies.”  Victorian Poetry 37 (Summer 1999): 243-272.
  • “Arabella Shore and Louisa Shore.” In Victorian Women Poets, ed. William B. Thesing.  Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol 199.   Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1999.  259-268.
  • “George Eliot’s Material History: Clothing and Realist Narrative.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 29.1 (Spring 1996): 23-34.

Reviews

  • Rev. of Stefanie Markovits, The Crimean War in the British Imagination.  Victorian Studies 52.4 (Summer 2010): 636-37.
  • Rev. of Margaret Stetz and Cheryl Wilson, eds., Michael Field and Their World. Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 16.2 (2007): 129-34.
  • Rev. of John Holmes, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Late Victorian Sonnet Sequence. Review of English Studies 57 (2006): 553-54.

Editorial and Reference

  • Co-Editor, with Margaret Beetham. Special issue: Tradition and the New. Victorian Periodicals Review 47.4 (Winter 2014).
  • “Augusta Webster.” Blackwell Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature.
  • “Alma Strettell.” The Yellow Nineties Online.  Entry published 2013.
  • Contributor, Routledge Annotated Bibliography of English Literature, 2008-2011.
  • At-large editor, English and Dutch-Speaking Regions. Vol 2 of A History of Literature in the Caribbean, ed. A. James Arnold.  A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages Vol 15. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2001.
  • At-large editor, Cross-Cultural Studies. Vol 3 of A History of Literature in the Caribbean, ed. A. James Arnold.  A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages Vol 12. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997.
  • At-large editor, Hispanic and Francophone Regions. Vol 1 of A History of Literature in the Caribbean, ed. A. James Arnold.  A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages Vol 10. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1994.

Recent Invited Lectures                                                                      

  • “Reading Victorian Poetry in the New Nineteenth-Century Archive.” Reflecting Past and Present: 19th Century Humanities in a Digital Age. Center for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities, Iowa State University, October 2015.
  • “Material Form: Explorations Towards a Sociological Poetics.” Cultural Analytics: Computational Approaches to the Study of Culture. University of Chicago, May 2015.
  • “A Change of Scale: Reading Victorian Poetry in the New Scholarly Archive.” The Way We Read Victorians Now. CUNY Graduate Center, May 2015.
  • “Poetry in the Digital Age: Reading in the New Scholarly Archive.” Conversations in Digital Humanities. Cornell University, April 2015.
  • “The New Nineteenth-Century Archive: Reading Poetry in the Digital Age.” Presidential Dream Course lecture. Oklahoma University, February 2015.

Recent Refereed Conference Presentations

  •  “What Makes This a Pre-Raphaelite Poem? An Experiment in Classification.” North American Victorian Studies Association, University of Western Ontario, November 2014.
  • “The Place of Poetry in Periodicals of the 1860s.” Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, University of Delaware, September 2014.
  • “Enjambment and the Poetic Line: Towards a Computational Poetics.” Digital Humanities 2014, University of Lausanne, July 2014.
  • “What Does Style Really Mean? A Comparative Analysis of the Poetry of Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.” Modern Language Association, Chicago, January 2014.
  • “Alt.”  Part of the roundtable session “Teaching outside the Classroom through Digital Humanities: Alt-Academic Feminism.”  Modern Language Association, Chicago, January 2014.
  • “Towards a Computational Analysis of Victorian Poetics.”  North American Victorian Studies Association, University of Southern California, October 2013.
  •  “Reading the Visual Page of Victorian Poetry.” Digital Humanities 2013, University of Nebraska, July 2013.
  • “Understanding Bibliography Differently Through Data Visualization.” Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, University of Salford (UK),  July 2013.
  • “New Tools for Understanding Victorian Poetry as a Cultural Field.”  Victorian Poetry: Forms and Fashions, West Virginia U, April 2013.