Dr%20Nicholas%20Gaskill: List of publications

Most of us experience the real world as colorful. Apples are red or green; the sky is blue or grey; your shirt is white or striped. The mundane objects of our lives come to us with and through their colors. It comes as a surprise, then, that realism – the literary style credited with having a fidelity to the real world – should be so lacking in colors, at least compared to its counterparts at the turn of the twentieth century. Scan the works of Henry James and Edith Wharton for color terms, and you’ll get the occasional description of an outfit, a room, a landscape. But these won’t be dwelt upon. This is due in part to the fact that the reality that realism commits itself to describing is, at heart, social reality rather than physical or even perceptual reality. If you search James and Wharton for “color” itself, you’ll mostly turn up instances of that preeminently social use of the term: Winterbourne “colors” when Daisy Miller bluntly invokes her “reputation”; Lily Bart’s “color deepens” when Selden suggests she come up to his room at The Bendick. And so on.

The first major literary and cultural history of color in America, 1880-1930 Chromographia tells the story of how color became modern and how literature, by engaging with modern color, became modernist.

Once largely ignored, the speculative philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead has assumed a new prominence in contemporary theory across the humanities and social sciences. Philosophers and artists, literary critics and social theorists, anthropologists and computer scientists have all embraced Whitehead's thought, extending it through inquiries into the nature of life, the problem of consciousness, and the ontology of objects, as well as into experiments in education and digital media.The Lure of Whitehead offers readers not only a comprehensive introduction to Whitehead's philosophy but also a demonstration of how his work advances our emerging understanding of life in the posthuman epoch. Contributors: Jeffrey A. Bell, Southeastern Louisiana U; Nathan Brown, U of California, Davis; Peter Canning; Didier Debaise, Free U of Brussels; Roland Faber, Claremont Lincoln U; Michael Halewood, U of Essex; Graham Harman, American U in Cairo; Bruno Latour, Sciences Po Paris; Erin Manning, Concordia U, Montreal; Steven Meyer, Washington U; Luciana Parisi, U of London; Keith Robinson, U of Arkansas at Little Rock; Isabelle Stengers, Free U of Brussels; James Williams, U of Dundee.