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Edward Hermon Papers 

The Edward Hermon papers provide a wealth of detail about British society in the second half of the nineteenth century, and are of great value to any historian of British architecture, game sports, and psychiatry. Edward Hermon (1821?-1881) was an entrepreneur in the cotton industry of Lancashire, and served as the managing partner of Horrocks, Miller & Company. Hermon became the conservative M.P. for Preston (1868-1881) as well as an eminent art collector, sportsman, philanthropist, and builder. His papers, dating between 1864 and 1867, cover a variety of topics, but for the most part deal with the building of Wyfold Court, his hunting preserves in Scotland, the division of the Hermon estate, and the mental health of his wife, Emily Hermon.

Correspondence for the years 1872 to 1876 concerns the construction of Hermon's country house, Wyfold Court. This mansion is still unique today for its size, style, and construction. Hermon also had an abiding interest in game sports, and there is considerable material about the game preserves in Scotland, including a series of sketches, expenditure statements, and maps. Edward Hermon died in May 1881, and his death and the distribution of his property is are the main subjects of the letters after that date. The correspondence regarding Hermon's wife Emily, is of unique value for the study of Victorian psychiatric practices. Mrs. Hermon developed a serious mental condition, most likely due to lead poisoning, that required her to be institutionalized in 1869. The correspondence includes medical reports of her condition and letters from concerned family and friends, both before and after Edward Hermon's death.

Image: Detail from "Correspondence 1872" from Edward Hermon Papers

Georgetown University Faculty Handbooks

Georgetown University produced its first faculty handbook in 1957 as a means of informing faculty about University objectives, organization, policies, benefits, and grievance procedures. Many of the handbooks also include a campus map and the constitution of the Faculty Senate.

Image: Detail of Cover, Faculty Handbook 1971 (1976 Reprint) 

Fall 2018 ETDs (Electronic Theses and Dissertations)

The DigitalGeorgetown Institutional Repository is a service of the Georgetown University Library that preserves and makes available scholarly research by Georgetown's faculty, staff, and students. The open access repository includes conference papers, images, peer-reviewed scholarly articles, technical reports, theses and dissertations, working papers, and more.

Image: Fall 2018 ETD logo

Featured Scholarly Publications

The Art of Ecological Selfing: Speculative Ecobildungsromane in Cloud Atlas and Never Let Me Go

This thesis explores how contemporary clone narratives explicate human-made ethical dilemmas, and how the nonhumans seem to stay in the periphery even if they appear human-like. Central to this thesis is the idea of an Ecobildungsroman: a development narrative which focuses on nonhuman subjects rather than human ones. I examine David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go in order to detail how both novels critique the traditional genre of the Bildungsroman in order to show how the category of personhood needs to be challenged in order to permit space for nonhuman personhood.

Desegmenting a Gameworld: The Super Mario Series

Throughout game studies scholarship, the term “gameworld” has often been used to contain two notions simultaneously: the navigable virtual space of a videogame and the collection of characters, settings, and events represented by a videogame’s audiovisual output. Resisting this haphazard use, this study closely examines five videogames in the Super Mario series and presents its findings in context of two theories of gameworld: Seth Giddings’s theory of gameworld and Kristine Jørgensen’s theory of gameworld interfaces. This study employs two methods of analysis: iterative game analysis, a method that strategically utilizes the save state affordance of console emulators, and comparative game analysis, a method that uses a wide range of analytic tools across sets of other media forms and videogames. Chapter 1 offers an analysis of Super Mario World, the most salient feature of which is its interface metaphor: the world map. Chapter 2 investigates techniques used to segment gameplay, space, time, challenge, and narrative across Super Mario Bros. 1, Super Mario Bros. 2, Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, and Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island. By investigating techniques of segmentation across a range of games that constitute the same gameworld, a method of analysis I am calling “desegmentation,” this study aims to make more robust the theorization of gameworld and future study of videogames.