News

The NVS Moves into English Department at A&M and Welcomes Two New Editors

The New Variorum Shakespeare project has officially moved into the English Department! The NVS dates back to 1871, when Horace Howard Furness published the first New Variorum Edition of Romeo and Juliet. Furness and his son continued working on editions until the MLA acquired the project in 1933, printing editions through 2020. In 2019 the MLA began the process of moving the project to A&M, where the Center of Digital Humanities Research has been printing new editions digitally, beginning with two open access digital editions of The Winter’s Tale and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. With plans to expand the project by executing 19 contracts with editorial teams for forthcoming editions of 16 plays, the NVS project has moved into the English Department and added two new digital editors to the team. Dr. Dorothy Todd and Dr. Kris May joined digital editor Dr. Katayoun Torabi as associate digital editors. Thanks to the efforts of the English Department, CoDHR, the NVS General Editors and Board of Directors, and Dr. Maura Ives (CoDHR Director), the NVS will remain in the English Department and plans to add a new principal investigator, starting in the Fall 2024 semester. More to come!

The NVS Receives Funding for Undergraduate Professional and Research Experience Program (UPREP)

Each semester, the Department of English selects 5-7 faculty projects for the UPREP program, which pairs undergraduate English majors with faculty members on selected projects outside of the classroom. Student involvement can range from working as an editorial or research assistant to aiding in the preparation for an academic conference. The Undergraduate Studies Committee voted on and approved funding for the NVS research proposal titled “Building Digital Editions of the New Variorum Shakespeare.” Grace Hoelscher will be working with Dr. Kris May, Dr. Katayoun Torabi, and Dr. Dorothy Todd on all aspects of digital editing for the NVS project during the Spring 2024 semester. 

NVS General Editor Dr. Eric Rasmussen Featured in First Folio PBS Documentary

NVS General Editor, NVS Hamlet Volume Editor, and Regents Teaching Professor and Foundation Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno Dr. Eric Rasmussen appears in the PBS documentary "Great Performances - Making Shakespeare: The First Folio,” which airs in College Station on November 17, 2023. Click on the above image to watch the trailer and access the episode Here.

The Christian Science Monitor Interviews NVS General Editor Dr. Eric Rasmussen

To celebrate the 400th anniversary of the printing of Shakespeare's First Folio, the Christan Science Monitor interviewed NVS General Editor Dr. Eric Rasmussen, in an article titled "Uncovering Shakespeare’s rare First Folios – paw prints and all." Eric Rasmussen who has been called "the Robert Langdon of the Shakespearean world" by the Washington Post "has traveled the globe to investigate and authenticate Shakespeare First Folios." His work has been featured the New York Times, USA Today, The Guardian, NPR, CNN, the BBC, and will be showcased in an upcoming PBS Great Performances documentary later this month. To learn more about some of Eric's most interesting finds, read the article Here.

Dr. Scott Kleinman Joins the NVS Team as Associate Technical Editor

Scott Kleinman, Professor of English at California State University, Northridge joins the NVS team as Associate Technical Editor in order develop visualization tools for the NVS. Scott specializes in Old and Middle English literature and the Digital Humanities. His Digital Humanities work includes the NEH-Funded Lexomics Project, which studies literature using digital methods and produces the computational text analysis tool Lexos. Scott will work with NVS Technical Editor Bryan Tarpley to integrate Lexos so that users can produce word clouds, bubble graphs, word counts, dendrograms, and similarity queries within and across NVS plays. Click Here to read learn more about the Lexomics project.

NVS Team Update

The New Variorum Shakespeare project welcomes two new student researchers to the team for this academic year, Andrew Hoyt (Applied Mathematics with a Computer Science emphasis, Undergraduate) and Fernando Gonzalez Torres (Industrial Engineering, Undergraduate), and welcomes back Jade Gooden (Anthropology, Undergraduate). The NVS team wishes to thank outgoing student researchers, Mounika Balivada (CS, Graduate) and Shyam Prasad Nagulavancha (CS, Graduate), who will be starting new positions in their department as graduate research assistants. 

2023-24 English Department Tenure Track Search to Include Position for New NVS PI

As part of the English Department’s effort to build a strong early modern program at A&M, two assistant professors in early modern studies will be hired for tenure track positions that begin next fall. One of the two positions requires specialization in early modern drama studies with particular interests in Shakespeare and/or digital humanities in order to serve as the New Variorum Shakespeare project’s Principal Investigator (PI). The new PI will publicize and build a scholarly community around the NVS and its development of both open-access texts and open-source digital tools and will work closely with the Digital Editor of the NVS to raise visibility and increase the scholarly impact of the project. Read more about the positions Here.

NVS Board of Directors: Dr. Laura Mandell

Dr. Laura Mandell, who was instrumental in bringing the New Variorum Shakespeare project to Texas A&M will continue as a member of the NVS Board of Directors where she will guide the project as the team publishes NVS volumes online and directs new editors in building born-digital volumes. The NVS team is fortunate to have Dr. Mandell on the Board of Directors and will benefit from her expertise in the Digital Humanities and her experience as a prominent scholar and professor of English. She is the author of Breaking the Book: Print Humanities in the Digital Age (2015), Misogynous Economies: The Business of Literature in Eighteenth-Century Britain (1999), and, recently, “Gendering Digital Literary History: What Counts for Digital Humanities,” in the New Companion to Digital Humanities (Blackwell 2016). She is Project Director of the Poetess Archive, an online scholarly edition and database of women poets, 1750-1900 (http://www.poetessarchive.org), Acquisitions Editor of 18thConnect (http://www.18thConnect.org), and Director of ARC (http://www.ar-c.org), the Advanced Research Consortium overseeing NINES, 18thConnect, and MESA. She spearheaded the Early Modern OCR project or “eMOP” (http://emop.tamu.edu), a project concerned with improving OCR for early modern and 18th-c. texts via high performance and cluster computing and is currently at work on a text-mining project to discover emergent genders in essays and novels comprising the Feminist Controversy debates in England, 1788-1810. If you wish to learn more about the NVS Board of Directors, please see our NVS Contributors Page.

Bringing The New Variorum Shakespeare Online

DH 2023, Graz

Katayoun Torabi presented a short paper titled “Bringing The New Variorum Shakespeare Online” on the front- and backend features of the Digital NVS at this year’s Digital Humanities conference, in the Literary Challenges session on July 14th. The paper was co-authored by Laura Mandell and Bryan Tarpley and published in the Book of Abstracts.

The Digital NVS Presented at ACH 2023 in Virtual World

Katayoun Torabi presented the New Variorum Shakespeare project in a virtual poster session hosted by Work Adventure at the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) on July 1, 2023. The poster presentation included the NVS promotional video and the NVS website.