Friedman receives award for innovative course design

Emily C. Friedman, associate professor of English, has been named one of the 2021 winners of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies', or ASECS, Innovative Course Design competition. The ASECS Innovative Course Design competition has been recognizing exceptional eighteenth-century studies pedagogy since 1985.

The award recognizes Friedman's course, "Let people tell their stories their own way": Tristram Shandy as Novel, Provocation, Remix," offered in fall 2019 as an undergraduate course and fall 2020 as a graduate seminar. Students read the nine-volume novel across the semester, alongside competing novels, parodies, spin-offs that appeared during the novel's publication (1759-1767). The course includes hands-on experiences of the technological innovations author Laurence Sterne used, including paper marbling and typesetting.

Friedman is a scholar of the long eighteenth century, using book history and digital practices in her classroom and in her research. She is particularly interested in recovering the lived experiences of readers and writers: from the ways they understood scent to the notebooks they used, to the effects of changing market pressures and technologies on the experience of literary exchange. She is the director of 18thConnect.org, a peer-reviewed aggregator for digital projects, and Manuscript Fiction in Age of Print, a small-scale digital project that describes, transcribes, and encodes fiction that survives in manuscript from between 1750-1900. Her next book, A Literary History of Alternative Circulation in the Age of Print, tells the long history of fiction shared and read outside of commercial print, from the eighteenth-century to the present. She is also at work planning her next innovative course, on narrative structures in video, board, and roleplaying games, to be offered in fall 2021.