Morris Eaves

Morris Eaves

  • Professor of English
  • Former Director, A.W. Mellon Graduate Program in the Digital Humanities
  • 1944-2024

PhD, Tulane University

Web Address
Website

Curriculum Vitae

Research Overview

Morris Eaves's research has been principally concerned with literature and the visual arts and with the cultural contexts of British Romanticism, especially the interlocking histories of technology and commerce. His current project, Posterity, is a speculative study of editorial theory and practice in terms of the audience's historical power to preserve, alter, and abandon its objects of interest. From this angle he is exploring the social role of editing and its product, the edition, in connection with such issues as censorship, plagiarism, and intellectual property. Eaves wants to understand "editing" in its broad, fundamental connections with communication, information control, and cultural memory across a range of arts and media. His interests in multimedia editing, media history, and British Romanticism are combined in his work as co-editor of The William Blake Archive, the online digital edition of Blake's literary and artistic work, sponsored by the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, the University of Rochester, and the Library of Congress; and as the former director of the Mellon Graduate Program in the Digital Humanities at the University of Rochester.

Research Interests

  • British Romanticism
  • Media history and theory
  • Editorial theory
  • William Blake Archive Project

Selected Publication Covers

Selected Publications

  • William Blake's Theory of Art, Princeton 1982
  • The Counter-Arts Conspiracy: Art and Industry in the Age of Blake, Cornell 1992
  • Foreword, Annotated Bibliography, and Index. A Blake Dictionary, by S. Foster Damon, Dartmouth-New England 2013 (new print and electronic edition)
  • "The End? Remember Me!" in Re-Envisioning Blake, ed. Angus Whitehead, Troy Patenaude, and Mark Crosby, Palgrave Macmillan 2012, 225-31
  • "Picture Problems: X-Editing Images 1992-2010," in Digital Humanities Quarterly 3.3 (summer 2009)
  • "Multimedia Body Plans: A Self-Assessment," in Electronic Scholarly Editing, Modern Language Association-Text Encoding Initiative 2006
  • "Crafting Editorial Settlements," in RoN: Romanticism on the Net [now RaVon] 41-42 (February-May 2006)

Editor

  • The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, Cambridge 2003
  • The William Blake Archive, with Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi, 1996-present
  • The Early Illuminated Books of William Blake, with Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi, Blake Trust/Tate/Princeton 1993
  • Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism, with Michael Fischer, Cornell 1986

Forthcoming

  • William Blake Archive editions
  • “The Editorial Void: Notes toward a Study of Oblivion.” For a special issue of Huntington Library Quarterly, forthcoming.
  • “Making a New Four Zoas.” For the tenth anniversary issue of 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long 19th Century. Article written in collaboration with members of the UR Blake Archive team.
  • “Afterword:  Blake’s Future Contexts.” For William Blake in Context, ed. Sarah Haggarty, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.

Teaching

  • Digital Media Studies Seminar (ongoing, Mellon Digital Humanities Program)
  • British Romantic Literature (spring 2013)
  • Maximum English (fall 2012)
  • Media ABC: The Future of Reading (spring 2011)
  • Radical Romantic Artistic Theory (spring 2013)
  • Text and Medium (spring 2011)
  • Romantic Literature Seminar (spring 2010)

Honors

  • Prize for a Distinguished Scholarly Edition (Modern Language Association) for The William Blake Archive
  • Best Special Issue Award (Conference of Editors of Scholarly Journals) for Romantic Texts, Romantic Times
  • William Riley Parker Prize, Modern Language Association
  • Presidential Professor of English, University of New Mexico
  • Guggenheim Fellowship
  • National Humanities Center Fellowship
  • Associate Fellow, Institute of Advanced Technology in the Humanities
  • Editorial Board, Eighteenth-Century Studies
  • Steering Committee, Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship (NINES-9s)
  • Advisory Board, Art Gallery, in preparation for Romantic Circles
  • Selection Committee, ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship, term 2010-12
  • Publications Committee, Modern Language Association, term 2011-13