Alan Liu

“The Big Bang of Online Reading.” mediations speaker series, Faculty of Information and Media Studies, University of Western Ontario, 31 March 2014.

“A story and statement about the importance of the humanities in today’s world by Alan Liu, an English professor who started out a chemistry major. Video created in connection with the DHMakerBus and 4Humanities “The Humanities Bus Tour” project, 2014.”

• Video (5 min.)

“Digital Humanities: An Introduction.” Panel on IT Research Methods, Center for Information Technology and Society, University of California, Santa Barbara, 11 March 2014.

5 March 2014

My friend and first editor, Helen Tarter — Editorial Director of Fordham University Press and formerly editor at Stanford University Press — died in a car accident on March 4th, 2014. (Fordham UP announcement) Helen was a formative influence on my writing and career who took a gamble on my sprawling first book Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford UP, 1989) and nurtured it into print. I will always remember her support, the discipline she inspired rather than required, and the fluid, sparkling stream of her conversation (carried out in a voice so soft that I hear it in my mind whenever I reread Wordsworth’s “Nutting” and come to the line on “the murmur, and the murmuring sound”).

The following is excerpted from the beginning of the Acknowledgments in my second book (my first book “after Helen”):