 |
| Katherine Ellison |
Digital Defoe, an online, peer-reviewed journal, premiered on June 1 with an array of scholarly and pedagogical texts on eighteenth-century culture, including an essay by Illinois State PhD candidate Beyazit Akman. Katherine Ellison, assistant professor of English, is co-editor and designer of the first issue. The journal is part of the open access movement and focuses on Daniel Defoe, perhaps most well known as the author of Robinson Crusoe but also an innovator of the novel, prolific poet, political pamphleteer, and even secret agent, and other authors and topics of the early eighteenth century. Ellison’s project is the first peer-reviewed web forum for scholars and educators of eighteenth-century culture to share their work in multimedia as well as showcase new teaching methods, works in progress, and student voices.
Ellison notes, “I had four goals when I agreed to create an annual for the Defoe Society: to raise the bar for online educational content in history with high quality scholarly work that has gone through a rigorous review process and is absolutely free to the public, to bring student voices into the conversation with experts in the field, to emphasize the multicultural, global interests at stake in studying this period, and to provide a place to showcase as well as critique multimodal scholarship in the field.” The journal accepts submissions of textual articles as well as multimodal material for their themed and open issues. Ellison adds that “The response we have received since June 1 has been overwhelming. It seems that the field was really ready for this, as were interdisciplinary and even independent scholars looking for an open access resource.” Ellison is also the director of the Island 18 Historical and Digital Literacy Project, a 3D replica of eighteenth-century London that interactively introduces students to history. To view the first issue of Digital Defoe, please visit http://www.english.ilstu.edu/digitaldefoe