Lara Karpenko | Carroll University (original) (raw)

Center for Humanities Work by Lara Karpenko

Research paper thumbnail of Humanities Center Work

In 2017, I was elected to revive the Carroll University Center for the Humanities. Under my leade... more In 2017, I was elected to revive the Carroll University Center for the Humanities. Under my leadership, we rewrote the mission statement and reorganized the Center to focus on public engagement. The Center supports Humanities-based inquiry by promoting a model we call “Lean In/Push Out”: a two-fold process that encourages scholars and students to “lean in” to contemplative practices and then to “push out” their research and insights to the public.

Working with University leadership and fellow faculty, I created and run several program at Carroll University. Please click the attachment or the link below to read more:
https://www.carrollu.edu/academics/humanities

Books by Lara Karpenko

Research paper thumbnail of The Vampire in Nineteenth Century Literature: A Feast of Blood. Brooke Cameron and Lara Karpenko, eds. and introduction. Routledge Press, 2022.

Research paper thumbnail of Strange Science: Investigating the Limits of Knowledge in the Victorian Age. Lara Karpenko and Shalyn Claggett, eds. and introduction, University of Michigan Press, 2017.

https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/166/oa\_edited\_volume/chapter/1986582, 2017

Table of Contents appears in attachment. Please go here for open access version of full text: htt... more Table of Contents appears in attachment. Please go here for open access version of full text: https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/id/2c87463a-3fae-4f25-8102-928148a60dd6/625286.pdf

Description
The essays in Strange Science examine marginal, fringe, and unconventional forms of scientific inquiry, as well as their cultural representations, in the Victorian period. Although now relegated to the category of the pseudoscientific, fields like mesmerism and psychical research captured the imagination of the Victorian public. Conversely, many branches of science now viewed as uncontroversial, such as physics and botany, were often associated with unorthodox methods of inquiry. Whether ultimately incorporated into mainstream scientific thought or categorized by 21st century historians as pseudo- or even anti-scientific, these sciences generated conversation, enthusiasm, and controversy within Victorian society.

To date, scholarship addressing Victorian pseudoscience tends to focus either on a particular popular science within its social context or on how mainstream scientific practice distinguished itself from more contested forms. Strange Science takes a different approach by placing a range of sciences in conversation with one another and examining the similar unconventional methods of inquiry adopted by both now-established scientific fields and their marginalized counterparts during the Victorian period. In doing so, Strange Science reveals the degree to which scientific discourse of this period was radically speculative, frequently attempting to challenge or extend the apparent boundaries of the natural world. This interdisciplinary collection will appeal to scholars in the fields of Victorian literature, cultural studies, the history of the body, and the history of science.

For complete Table of Contents, please see attachment.

Guest Editor by Lara Karpenko

Research paper thumbnail of Edited and introduced a special issue of The Victorian Review: "'Is Victoria Actually Human?’: Posthuman (Pre)histories”, vol. 48, no. 1, 2022, pp 45-52.

This introduction presents an overview of the contents of this special issue while also complicat... more This introduction presents an overview of the contents of this
special issue while also complicating posthuman chronologies, making
a case for the importance of the Victorian period in understanding
posthumanism. The introduction focuses on the myriad and complex
ways Victorians thought through material (the human body, printing
presses) and immaterial (love, sympathy, desire) phenomena, inviting
readers to consider how the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries
remain in conversation, defying a strict chronological progression.

Research paper thumbnail of Edited and introduced a special issue (with Lauri Dietz) of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies: “Bridging the Divide: Teaching Nineteenth-Century Literature and Gender in the Twenty-First-Century Classroom", vol. 11, no. 4, 2016.

https://www.ncgsjournal.com/issue122/issue122.html

This issue provides nineteenth-century teacher-scholars with essays specifically geared towards t... more This issue provides nineteenth-century teacher-scholars with essays specifically geared towards their specialized interests.The essays in this issue consider a myriad of topics—ranging from masculine representations of the feminine to global feminist dynamics to the gendered implications of syllabus construction—in order to showcase the conceptual range that gender studies broadly conceived can inspire in our teaching. By providing “a serious literature about the teaching of literature” (to use Levine's words) that centers on nineteenth-century gender studies, this issue not only widens the possibilities of what can be considered legitimate academic scholarship in our field but also demonstrates that such scholarship can be finely focused and theoretically informed.

Papers by Lara Karpenko

Research paper thumbnail of “‘A Financial Vampire’: The Aesthetics of Repetition in Eric Stenbock’s Studies of Death.” Written with a team of six undergraduates. The Vampire in Nineteenth Century Literature: A Feast of Blood. Brooke Cameron and Lara Karpenko, eds and introduction. Routledge Press, 2022, pp. 139-153.

Focusing on the story’s relationship to the collection, we argue that in Studies of Death, Stenbo... more Focusing on the story’s relationship to the collection, we argue that in Studies of Death, Stenbock critiques Victorian capitalist exploitation by deploying, what we term, an aesthetics of repetition. By insistently, almost hypnotically, repeating themes, plots, and character names, Stenbock establishes a clear pattern to and between the stories in Studies of Death, blurring the generic boundary between short story collection and novel. While repetition buttressed Victorian time discipline in order to establish know-ability and predictability, Stenbock inverts this trend, using repetition to introduce an uncanny sense of cyclicality. Stenbock’s aesthetics of repetition allows him to disrupt the linear sense of time that characterizes much of Victorian storytelling, highlighting the temporal exploitation that underpins the capitalist enterprise. In this sense, Stenbock adopts what Elizabeth Freeman describes as a “queer” temporality, an understanding of time that resists the chrononormative and hints at the possibility of an alternate model of community. But in Studies of Death, these alternate, queered community bonds almost never endure and instead disintegrate as the text repeatedly emphasizes isolation, destruction, and loss, suggesting the inescapability of the vampiric demands of time discipline.

Research paper thumbnail of “‘The inanimate becomes animate’: Loie Fuller, Speculative Feminist Aesthetics, and Posthuman Embodiment.” Nineteenth- Century Contexts, 2019: vol. 41, no. 5, pp. 565-584.

This essay focuses on the work of Loie Fuller (1862-1928), the transatlantic celebrity famous for... more This essay focuses on the work of Loie Fuller (1862-1928), the transatlantic celebrity famous for her experimental dancing. Transforming herself into a living film screen, Fuller creates what I’m calling, adapting a phrase from Donna Haraway, a speculative
feminist aesthetic. I focus on two major aspects of Fuller’s aesthetic: her construction of a cyborg-like techno-body and her unapologetic display of the human form. I argue that Fuller’s speculative feminist aesthetic offers a radical version of posthuman embodiment that is prosthetic, boundless, and technologically connected but that is also pleasurably, nearly brazenly, visceral.

https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/EUZSSHUUMVR6RFPTDPQN/full?target=10.1080/08905495.2019.1669370

Research paper thumbnail of “'So Extraordinary a Bond': Mesmerism and Sympathetic Identification in Charles Adams’s Notting Hill Mystery.” Strange Science: Investigating the Limits of Knowledge in the Victorian Age, edited by Lara Karpenko and Shalyn Claggett, University of Michigan Press, 2017, pp. 145-163.

https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/166/oa\_edited\_volume/chapter/1986591

Please note that the attachment only include the introduction to this essay. Please go here for f... more Please note that the attachment only include the introduction to this essay. Please go here for full article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1qv5ncp.12?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

Abstract follows below.

In this essay, I read Charles Adams’s Notting Hill Mystery (1862), (perhaps most famous for Julian Symons declaration that it functions as the first English detective novel), through the lens of the mesmerism movement. I argue that Adams makes fictional use of the fading strange science in order to warn against the seductive powers of sympathetic identification and by extension against the embodied pleasure and sympathetic reading that sensation fiction explicitly encouraged. In a decade when readers eagerly sought out fictional experiences that would inspire them to mimic the nervous, excited, and panting bodies represented in the pages of a novel, mesmerism supplied Adams with a convenient device for casting sympathy as a destructive and invasive force.

Research paper thumbnail of "'A nasty thumping at the top of your head': Muscularity, Masculinity, and Physical Reading in The Moonstone." The Victorian Review, vol. 38., no. 1, 2012, pp.133-154.

Research paper thumbnail of "'Printed Words that Gave . . . Pain': Physiological Response and Deformito-Mania in The Old Curiosity Shop." Nineteenth Century Studies, vol. 24, 2010, pp. 37-53.

Research paper thumbnail of "Purchasing Largely: Trilby and the Fin de Siècle Reader.” Victorians Institute Journal, vol. 34, 2006, pp. 215-241.

Research paper thumbnail of "Thinking as a Student: Stimulating Peer Education with an Undergraduate Teaching Assistant in the Humanities Classroom". Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, vol. 17, no. 3, 2017, pp. 124-135

https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/josotl/article/view/22158/29444

In this article, I argue that peer educational experiences should be incorporated into the underg... more In this article, I argue that peer educational experiences should be incorporated into the undergraduate humanities classroom by providing a case study of a successful Undergraduate Teaching Assistant (UTA) pilot. In keeping with Topping & Ehly's (2001) criteria for successful peer education, I assigned the UTA a significant role in direct instruction. Partly owing to the UTA's active classroom role, the experience enhanced learning for students and helped me create a dynamic, critically-engaged class environment. The experience also provided an opportunity for the UTA to engage in deep learning and develop a professional identity; near the end of this article, the UTA shares his reflection about the experience.

Research paper thumbnail of "The 21st Century Digital Student: Google Books as a Tool in Promoting Undergraduate Research.” Lara Karpenko and Lauri Dietz: Journal of Effective Teaching 13.1 (2013): 89-106.

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1092104.pdf

Other by Lara Karpenko

Research paper thumbnail of 00-a-note-from-jurh-founding-editors-issue1.pdf

Journal of Undergraduate Research in the Humanities (JURH), 2024

I am incredibly proud to launch the inaugural issue of the Journal for Undergraduate Research in ... more I am incredibly proud to launch the inaugural issue of the Journal for Undergraduate Research in the Humanities (JURH). The website is jurh.net. Please click around, read the amazing work produced, and get us some clicks. Again, it's jurh.net!

This journal was created and edited by an incredible Undergraduate Editorial Team. The fourteen essays that we published represent four countries (USA, Canada, Netherlands, Hong Kong, China) and five states (Wisconsin, Rhode Island, Illinois, California, Texas.) The issue also showcases the full range of Humanities scholarship, and our essays cover literature, history, television studies, game studies, linguistics, cultural studies, and musicology etc. Please check it out at jurh.net!

Research paper thumbnail of Humanities Center Work

In 2017, I was elected to revive the Carroll University Center for the Humanities. Under my leade... more In 2017, I was elected to revive the Carroll University Center for the Humanities. Under my leadership, we rewrote the mission statement and reorganized the Center to focus on public engagement. The Center supports Humanities-based inquiry by promoting a model we call “Lean In/Push Out”: a two-fold process that encourages scholars and students to “lean in” to contemplative practices and then to “push out” their research and insights to the public.

Working with University leadership and fellow faculty, I created and run several program at Carroll University. Please click the attachment or the link below to read more:
https://www.carrollu.edu/academics/humanities

Research paper thumbnail of The Vampire in Nineteenth Century Literature: A Feast of Blood. Brooke Cameron and Lara Karpenko, eds. and introduction. Routledge Press, 2022.

Research paper thumbnail of Strange Science: Investigating the Limits of Knowledge in the Victorian Age. Lara Karpenko and Shalyn Claggett, eds. and introduction, University of Michigan Press, 2017.

https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/166/oa\_edited\_volume/chapter/1986582, 2017

Table of Contents appears in attachment. Please go here for open access version of full text: htt... more Table of Contents appears in attachment. Please go here for open access version of full text: https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/id/2c87463a-3fae-4f25-8102-928148a60dd6/625286.pdf

Description
The essays in Strange Science examine marginal, fringe, and unconventional forms of scientific inquiry, as well as their cultural representations, in the Victorian period. Although now relegated to the category of the pseudoscientific, fields like mesmerism and psychical research captured the imagination of the Victorian public. Conversely, many branches of science now viewed as uncontroversial, such as physics and botany, were often associated with unorthodox methods of inquiry. Whether ultimately incorporated into mainstream scientific thought or categorized by 21st century historians as pseudo- or even anti-scientific, these sciences generated conversation, enthusiasm, and controversy within Victorian society.

To date, scholarship addressing Victorian pseudoscience tends to focus either on a particular popular science within its social context or on how mainstream scientific practice distinguished itself from more contested forms. Strange Science takes a different approach by placing a range of sciences in conversation with one another and examining the similar unconventional methods of inquiry adopted by both now-established scientific fields and their marginalized counterparts during the Victorian period. In doing so, Strange Science reveals the degree to which scientific discourse of this period was radically speculative, frequently attempting to challenge or extend the apparent boundaries of the natural world. This interdisciplinary collection will appeal to scholars in the fields of Victorian literature, cultural studies, the history of the body, and the history of science.

For complete Table of Contents, please see attachment.

Research paper thumbnail of Edited and introduced a special issue of The Victorian Review: "'Is Victoria Actually Human?’: Posthuman (Pre)histories”, vol. 48, no. 1, 2022, pp 45-52.

This introduction presents an overview of the contents of this special issue while also complicat... more This introduction presents an overview of the contents of this
special issue while also complicating posthuman chronologies, making
a case for the importance of the Victorian period in understanding
posthumanism. The introduction focuses on the myriad and complex
ways Victorians thought through material (the human body, printing
presses) and immaterial (love, sympathy, desire) phenomena, inviting
readers to consider how the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries
remain in conversation, defying a strict chronological progression.

Research paper thumbnail of Edited and introduced a special issue (with Lauri Dietz) of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies: “Bridging the Divide: Teaching Nineteenth-Century Literature and Gender in the Twenty-First-Century Classroom", vol. 11, no. 4, 2016.

https://www.ncgsjournal.com/issue122/issue122.html

This issue provides nineteenth-century teacher-scholars with essays specifically geared towards t... more This issue provides nineteenth-century teacher-scholars with essays specifically geared towards their specialized interests.The essays in this issue consider a myriad of topics—ranging from masculine representations of the feminine to global feminist dynamics to the gendered implications of syllabus construction—in order to showcase the conceptual range that gender studies broadly conceived can inspire in our teaching. By providing “a serious literature about the teaching of literature” (to use Levine's words) that centers on nineteenth-century gender studies, this issue not only widens the possibilities of what can be considered legitimate academic scholarship in our field but also demonstrates that such scholarship can be finely focused and theoretically informed.

Research paper thumbnail of “‘A Financial Vampire’: The Aesthetics of Repetition in Eric Stenbock’s Studies of Death.” Written with a team of six undergraduates. The Vampire in Nineteenth Century Literature: A Feast of Blood. Brooke Cameron and Lara Karpenko, eds and introduction. Routledge Press, 2022, pp. 139-153.

Focusing on the story’s relationship to the collection, we argue that in Studies of Death, Stenbo... more Focusing on the story’s relationship to the collection, we argue that in Studies of Death, Stenbock critiques Victorian capitalist exploitation by deploying, what we term, an aesthetics of repetition. By insistently, almost hypnotically, repeating themes, plots, and character names, Stenbock establishes a clear pattern to and between the stories in Studies of Death, blurring the generic boundary between short story collection and novel. While repetition buttressed Victorian time discipline in order to establish know-ability and predictability, Stenbock inverts this trend, using repetition to introduce an uncanny sense of cyclicality. Stenbock’s aesthetics of repetition allows him to disrupt the linear sense of time that characterizes much of Victorian storytelling, highlighting the temporal exploitation that underpins the capitalist enterprise. In this sense, Stenbock adopts what Elizabeth Freeman describes as a “queer” temporality, an understanding of time that resists the chrononormative and hints at the possibility of an alternate model of community. But in Studies of Death, these alternate, queered community bonds almost never endure and instead disintegrate as the text repeatedly emphasizes isolation, destruction, and loss, suggesting the inescapability of the vampiric demands of time discipline.

Research paper thumbnail of “‘The inanimate becomes animate’: Loie Fuller, Speculative Feminist Aesthetics, and Posthuman Embodiment.” Nineteenth- Century Contexts, 2019: vol. 41, no. 5, pp. 565-584.

This essay focuses on the work of Loie Fuller (1862-1928), the transatlantic celebrity famous for... more This essay focuses on the work of Loie Fuller (1862-1928), the transatlantic celebrity famous for her experimental dancing. Transforming herself into a living film screen, Fuller creates what I’m calling, adapting a phrase from Donna Haraway, a speculative
feminist aesthetic. I focus on two major aspects of Fuller’s aesthetic: her construction of a cyborg-like techno-body and her unapologetic display of the human form. I argue that Fuller’s speculative feminist aesthetic offers a radical version of posthuman embodiment that is prosthetic, boundless, and technologically connected but that is also pleasurably, nearly brazenly, visceral.

https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/EUZSSHUUMVR6RFPTDPQN/full?target=10.1080/08905495.2019.1669370

Research paper thumbnail of “'So Extraordinary a Bond': Mesmerism and Sympathetic Identification in Charles Adams’s Notting Hill Mystery.” Strange Science: Investigating the Limits of Knowledge in the Victorian Age, edited by Lara Karpenko and Shalyn Claggett, University of Michigan Press, 2017, pp. 145-163.

https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/166/oa\_edited\_volume/chapter/1986591

Please note that the attachment only include the introduction to this essay. Please go here for f... more Please note that the attachment only include the introduction to this essay. Please go here for full article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1qv5ncp.12?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

Abstract follows below.

In this essay, I read Charles Adams’s Notting Hill Mystery (1862), (perhaps most famous for Julian Symons declaration that it functions as the first English detective novel), through the lens of the mesmerism movement. I argue that Adams makes fictional use of the fading strange science in order to warn against the seductive powers of sympathetic identification and by extension against the embodied pleasure and sympathetic reading that sensation fiction explicitly encouraged. In a decade when readers eagerly sought out fictional experiences that would inspire them to mimic the nervous, excited, and panting bodies represented in the pages of a novel, mesmerism supplied Adams with a convenient device for casting sympathy as a destructive and invasive force.

Research paper thumbnail of "'A nasty thumping at the top of your head': Muscularity, Masculinity, and Physical Reading in The Moonstone." The Victorian Review, vol. 38., no. 1, 2012, pp.133-154.

Research paper thumbnail of "'Printed Words that Gave . . . Pain': Physiological Response and Deformito-Mania in The Old Curiosity Shop." Nineteenth Century Studies, vol. 24, 2010, pp. 37-53.

Research paper thumbnail of "Purchasing Largely: Trilby and the Fin de Siècle Reader.” Victorians Institute Journal, vol. 34, 2006, pp. 215-241.

Research paper thumbnail of "Thinking as a Student: Stimulating Peer Education with an Undergraduate Teaching Assistant in the Humanities Classroom". Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, vol. 17, no. 3, 2017, pp. 124-135

https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/josotl/article/view/22158/29444

In this article, I argue that peer educational experiences should be incorporated into the underg... more In this article, I argue that peer educational experiences should be incorporated into the undergraduate humanities classroom by providing a case study of a successful Undergraduate Teaching Assistant (UTA) pilot. In keeping with Topping & Ehly's (2001) criteria for successful peer education, I assigned the UTA a significant role in direct instruction. Partly owing to the UTA's active classroom role, the experience enhanced learning for students and helped me create a dynamic, critically-engaged class environment. The experience also provided an opportunity for the UTA to engage in deep learning and develop a professional identity; near the end of this article, the UTA shares his reflection about the experience.

Research paper thumbnail of "The 21st Century Digital Student: Google Books as a Tool in Promoting Undergraduate Research.” Lara Karpenko and Lauri Dietz: Journal of Effective Teaching 13.1 (2013): 89-106.

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1092104.pdf

Research paper thumbnail of 00-a-note-from-jurh-founding-editors-issue1.pdf

Journal of Undergraduate Research in the Humanities (JURH), 2024

I am incredibly proud to launch the inaugural issue of the Journal for Undergraduate Research in ... more I am incredibly proud to launch the inaugural issue of the Journal for Undergraduate Research in the Humanities (JURH). The website is jurh.net. Please click around, read the amazing work produced, and get us some clicks. Again, it's jurh.net!

This journal was created and edited by an incredible Undergraduate Editorial Team. The fourteen essays that we published represent four countries (USA, Canada, Netherlands, Hong Kong, China) and five states (Wisconsin, Rhode Island, Illinois, California, Texas.) The issue also showcases the full range of Humanities scholarship, and our essays cover literature, history, television studies, game studies, linguistics, cultural studies, and musicology etc. Please check it out at jurh.net!