Bio Katherine D. Harris

tri / prof / tri

trying to be a professor and a triathlete

Though I often tweet (@triproftri) about triathlon training, cycling, crashes, run times, races, cats, cooking, and dinner parties, this blog is only for my various hats of research and teaching.

No tarts here.

Official Bio

Katherine D. Harris, Director of Public Programming for the College of Humanities and the Arts; and a Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, San José State University, specializes in Romantic-Era and 19th-century British literature, women’s authorship, the literary annual, 19th-century history print culture and history of the book, textuality, editorial theory, Digital Humanities, and Digital Pedagogy. She is currently the Director of Public Programming for the College of Humanities and the Arts and created/manages all of the initiatives associated with H&A in Action. Her work ranges from pedagogical articles on using digital tools in the classroom to traditional scholarship on a “popular” literary form in 19th-century England. She chronicled her teaching adventures in the March 2011 blog, A Day in the Life of Digital Humanities, along with 200 other participants which turned into a plenary address for the 2012 Re: Humanities and an article about the successes and failures of teaching with digital tools, “TechnoRomanticism: Creating Digital Editions in an Undergraduate Classroom” (Journal of Victorian Culture April 2011). Because of this work, Harris was named to the Council on Digital Humanities for the National Institute of Technology in Liberal Education and co-taught a week-long seminar in Digital Pedagogy at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, University of Victoria. In January 2012, she represented Digital Pedagogy as a panelist at the DHCommons pre-conference workshop, “Getting Started in Digital Humanities,” at the 2012 Modern Language Association Convention. Harris wrote about her pedagogical adventures over at FairMatter.com, a blog hosted by W.W. Norton Publishers. Her most recent article on digital pedagogy was published in Fall 2013 for Polymath.

The latest experiment, along with co-editors Rebecca Frost Davis, Matthew K. Gold, and Jentery Sayers, involves open peer review, GitHub, and establishing a digital pedagogy collection of peer-reviewed teaching materials, Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities published by the Modern Language Association (2020) and involving more than 700 authors in an effort to #citepedagogy. See more about this massive and extensive project from “Making Digital Pedagogy Count with Open Scholarship,” a five-minute prerecorded talk introducing the innovative pedagogy available in Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities for Open Social Scholarship, an INKE- and CAPOS-hosted gathering held on 8 December 2020. A 2020 MLA Convention Roundtable lead Harris, Davis, and Gold to invite provocations on “The State of the Syllabus” and turn that into a special edition for Syllabus (published Spring 2020). Along with Davis and Gold, our keynote talk for the Digital Humanities Summer Institute 2021 about the lengthy production and importance of Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities turned into an article for IDEAH, “Network + Publication + Ecosystem: Curating Digital Pedagogy, Fostering Community“(2023). This work has translated into Harris being invited to mentor nascent Digital Humanists for the Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium (a Mellon Foundation-funded initiative) 2021-2023 and to tackle the out-sized job of creating DH@CSU, a consortium between Ethnic Studies and Digital Humanities at all 23 California State University campuses by leading a steering committee through the process of establishing infrastructure in mutual program development through peer-to-peer and collegial relationships.

In keeping with the spirit of her work in Digital Humanities, Harris chaired the California Open Educational Resources Council, a state-funded initiative to promote adoption of open educational resources textbooks in the University of California, California State University, and California Community College segments (113 campuses). After 3 years of state-funded work, that initiative has been converted to a program supporting adoption of OER materials on individual campuses throughout the CCC and CSU (AB 798 [Bonilla 2015]). The Council’s work culminated in a series of helpful OER resources:

Council members, including Harris, submitted journal articles to publicize their findings — with a published article by Hanley & Bonilla which presents initial findings based on surveys, focus groups, and a pilot project conducted on CCC, CSU, and UC faculty and students as well as the infrastructure of the CA-OER Council. In addition, Harris published a co-authored article with Council members, Guthrie and Krapp, “Adoption of Open Educational Resources in California Colleges and Universities.” The Council’s work concluded with new CA State Legislation, grant funding, and a CSU-wide initiative, Affordable Learning Solutions, that continues to be successful on all 23 CSU campuses

In her scholarly adventures, Harris’ research on 19th-century British literary annuals resulted in a literary history of annuals: Forget Me Not: The Rise of the British Literary Annual (1823-1835) (Ohio UP, 2015), a monograph based on her articles, “Feminizing the Textual Body: Women and their Literary Annuals in Nineteenth-Century Britain” (Publications of the Bibliographical Society of America 99:4) and “Borrowing, Altering and Perfecting the Literary Annual Form – or What It is Not: Emblems, Almanacs, Pocket-books, Albums, Scrapbooks and Gifts Books” (Poetess Archive Journal 1:1).

She created a legacy scholarly edition for the study of literary annuals, The Forget Me Not: A Hypertextual Archive, most of which has been re-coded into TEI and incorporated into the Poetess Archive Database edited by Professor Laura Mandell. Harris’ edited collection of Gothic short stories from the 1820s’ most popular annuals, with Zittaw Press (2012) was part of her plenary address at the Gothic Fiction Studies Conference in March 2012. Two talks that were offered during Spring 2014 at universities in New Zealand addressed some of the more interesting findings about the publishers, printers, and engravers in the business of literary annuals.

In January 2013, she returned to her textual studies foundation with her presentation, “Echoes at Our Peril: Small Feminist Archives in Big Digital Humanities” at the 2013 Modern Language Convention in Boston, a talk originally given in October 2012, Scripps College as part of their Humanities Institute lecture series. In February 2013, Harris spoke at the Mellon-funded Digital Humanities Colloquium, Austin College. In Spring 2014, she returned to the road with a talk focusing on the work of David C. Greetham at The Graduate Center, City University of New York being published in Textual Cultures 9.1 (2015). In Fall 2014, the travel continued with an invited talk on collaboration at the University of Alabama’s Digital Humanities Center and another on “archive” at the University of Tulsa, and then an appearance at the Modern Language Association Convention 2016 in Austin to co-preside over a digital pedagogy poster session.

As of Fall 2019, her promotion to Full Professor and ensuing sabbatical have offered an opportunity to dig deeply into the intellectual representations of British Romanticism to continue to investigate moving beyond the Big 6 of this literary period, including contributing the flash essay, “The Bengal Annual and #bigger6″ for a special issue “200 Years: 50 Voices” Keats-Shelley Journal. Her current project combines her work on SJSU’s “Deep Humanities & Arts” endeavors to conjoin Humanities and STEM curriculum on campus as well as continuing the commitment to publish in open access journals about the scholarship of teaching and learning as well as Digital Humanities project management. She has spent the last few years on community-building through the Humanities, especially with her talk to the both the Book Club of California and the San Jose Museum of Art and her work as the coordinator for the College’s Artistic Excellence Programming Grants initiative since 2018.

As of Fall 2020, the AEPG Coordinator role has been rolled into a larger, college-wide role for the Dean’s Office to coordinate student-oriented and public-facing programming; extend the integration of curriculum and programming around significant College themes (Borderlands, Deep Humanities & Arts, Sustainable Futures, The Inclusion Initiative); coordinate the current “Humanities and Arts in Action” initiative through Public Humanities and Arts offerings; and research, write, and submit grant proposals to acquire additional support for the broad category of Public Humanities, including the Abierto-Geography of Art initiative with the City of San Jose. Leveraging her experience with Digital Humanities, Digital Pedagogy, collaborative project management, high impact learning pedagogy, archival research, editing and editorial work, and two decades of teaching and service work in the largest, public university systems in the United States, Harris, in collaboration with the Dean’s leadership team, has elevated the visibility of Public Humanities and Arts by fostering community engagement, faculty collaborations, and cross-pollination among and between SJSU’s wide-ranging disciplines, colleges, institutes, and cultural centers. The Public Art as Resistance in San Jose project, under Harris’ leadership, demonstrates the gold standard for the College of Humanities & the Arts for the H&A in Action initiative with community, civic, and state sponsorship.

To see her upcoming talks, check this page. For past talks, see presentations (some with video).

For a full list of courses, syllabi, assignments, calendar, office hours, contact information, see Harris’ teaching page. For her full Curriculum Vitae, check the drop down boxes under Bio on this blog.

Contact Info: katherine [dot] harris [at] sjsu [dot] edu

A Note on Labor: In keeping with this blog’s intention, a word on the labor expectations of a tenure-line faculty member employed at a Master’s-granting, comprehensive, state university: Professor Harris often teaches four courses (some capped at 50 students) with four preparations, always one of them a new prep, with at least one writing course included in those preps. This workload, of course, impedes rate of research productivity. However, the students inspire and even encourage some forms of research, especially that on digital pedagogy and digital projects.

triproftri research blog writings by Katherine D. Harris is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.