February 17, 2012 —Alison Booth, an English professor in the University of Virginia's College of Arts & Sciences, and Washington & Lee University English professor Suzanne Keen will present a workshop Feb. 24, from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Scholars' Lab in Alderman Library.

The workshop will offer a hands-on demonstration of Biographical Elements and Structure Schema, or BESS, an XML standoff markup schema designed as part of Booth's Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities Fellowship to analyze narrative structure.

The workshop is co-sponsored by IATH and will draw from Collective Biographies of Women, a study of biographical narrative, narrative theory and methods of digital literary interpretation developed at IATH and the Scholars' Lab.

Workshop participants will become familiar with the Collective Biographies of Women project, and will learn how concepts of narrative theory and cultural criticism, genre and social history might be brought to life in the classroom or by teams of digital editors.

Keen will also participate in the Peters Rushton Seminar series on Feb. 23 from 4 to 6 p.m. Her presentation, "Narrative and the Emotions," based on her article of that name in Poetics Today, will focus on emotions, narrative theory and "intersectional" models that acknowledge a flesh-and-blood reader, relating to a current interest in affect and cognitive approaches to narrative. She will also meet with graduate students over bagels and coffee on Feb. 24, from 10 to 11:45 a.m. Both events will occur in the English Department faculty lounge on the second floor of Bryan Hall.

Keen is Thomas H. Broadus Professor and chair of English at Washington & Lee, and author of "Empathy and the Novel" (Oxford University Press, 2010), "Narrative Form" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), "Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction" (University of Toronto Press, 2001) and "Victorian Renovations of the Novel" (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

– By Rob Seal