Headshot

Cassidy Holahan is is an Assistant Professor of English at University of Nevada, Las Vegas specializing in British literature of the long eighteenth century. She is currently working on her first book, project—tentatively titled Dramatizing the Novel: Transmedial Exchange in the Long Eighteenth Century. Drawing on digital humanities, material text studies, and media studies methodologies, the project tracks the influence of the theater on the rise of the eighteenth-century novel by arguing that the period's diverse theatrical mediascape -– from costumes to stage scenery -- influenced the development of the novels' literary elements, including character and plotting. In doing so, the project paints a picture of a far more experimental eighteenth-century novel, one which was not necessarily working towards the realism standards of the nineteenth-century novel.

Dr. Holahan also specializes in digital surrogates and the digital remediation of archival material. Her recent article, "Rummaging in the Dark: ECCO as Opaque Digital Archive”, published in August 2021 in Eighteenth-Century Studies, considers how the presentation of digitized archival material in large-scale databases can lead to false assumptions about comprehensiveness, which in turn obscures archival decisions about intellectual order and scope. The article was the Rare Books School’s Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography essay prize and received an honorable mention for the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies’ James L. Clifford Prize.

Holahan is involved in numerous Digital Humanities projects, which can be found on the "Digital Projects" page. She has published two interactive editions that offer insights into histories of reading. A digital edition of Richardson's 1755 print commonplace book, Collection of Moral Sentiments, illuminates how Richardson employed proto-digital methods to parse and catalogue his popular novels. Reading the Commonplace, an edition of a Romantic-era commonplace book, uses digital mapping tools to trace the sources of its literary quotations, revealing commonplacing as an agential, even authorial activity. Holahan is also a project member on the collaborative project Romantic Melodrama, a five-year research project funded by The British Academy and sponsored by Queen Mary University of London, which aims to document every recorded performance of a melodrama in Britain between the 1793 and 1843.

She has work forthcoming in the the collection Futures of Digital Scholarly Editing with the University of Minnesota Press.