Dr CLAPP, Jeffrey Michael    博士
Associate Professor
Department of Literature and Cultural Studies
Contact
ORCiD
0000-0002-3242-6300
Phone
(852) 2948 7835
Email
jmclapp@eduhk.hk
Address
10 Lo Ping Road, Tai Po, New Territories, Hong Kong
Scopus ID
57197781111
Research Interests


-Twentieth and twenty-first century literature in English

-Literature in the United States

-Autobiography, autofiction, life-writing, memoir

-Poetry and poetics

-Cultural studies, film studies, media studies

-Digital humanities

-Social annotation technology

External Appointments

Hong Kong Education Bureau Curriculum Development Council / Examinations and Assessment Authority, Committee on Literature in English, 2019-2021.

Personal Profile

Dr. Jeffrey Clapp focuses on literature in English, and is writing a book about contemporary literature in the United States. His previous writing has appeared or will appear in College Literature, Contemporary Literature, Critique, Life Writing, Partial Answers, Post45, Textual Practice, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, and elsewhere. He is the co-editor of a collection of essays entitled Security and Hospitality in Literature and Culture.

Dr. Clapp is director of the large-scale community reading project 我城我書 / One City One Book Hong Kong and general editor of Xi Xi City, a digital humanities project that celebrates the work of Hong Kong's most delightful writer.

Dr. Clapp has been exploring the capacities and affordances of social annotation technologies for tertiary pedagogy. A first set of results has appeared in Arts and Humanities in Higher Education.

His office is B3-1/F-33.

Research Interests


-Twentieth and twenty-first century literature in English

-Literature in the United States

-Autobiography, autofiction, life-writing, memoir

-Poetry and poetics

-Cultural studies, film studies, media studies

-Digital humanities

-Social annotation technology

External Appointments

Hong Kong Education Bureau Curriculum Development Council / Examinations and Assessment Authority, Committee on Literature in English, 2019-2021.

Research Outputs

Scholarly Books, Monographs and Chapters
Chapter in an edited book (author)
Clapp, J. (2019). "The Unique Identity Project: Surveillance Society and Democratic Culture in Aravind Adiga's India". Wasihun, B., Narrating Surveillance--Überwachen erzählen (143-168). Würzberg, Germany: Ergon Press.
Clapp, J. (2018). "Hong Kong's Edward Snowden / Edward Snowden's Hong Kong". In Polley, Poon, and Wee (eds)., Cultural Conflict in Hong Kong: Angles on a Coherent Imaginary. (131-148). London: Palgrave.
Clapp, J. (2017). "Surveilling Citizens: Claudia Rankine, From the First to the Second Person". In Mackay, A & Flynn, S, Spaces of Surveillance: States and Selves (169-184). London: Palgrave MacMillian.
Clapp, J. (2016). "Safe from His Readers: Interpretation as Inhospitality in Cold War America". Clapp, J. and Ridge, E., eds., Security and Hospitality in Literature and Culture. (175-189). New York: Routledge.
Clapp, J., & Ridge, E. (2016). Introduction: Risking Hospitality. in J. Clapp, & E. Ridge (Eds.), Security and Hospitality in Literature and Culture: Modern and Contemporary Perspectives (1-16). New York: Routledge.
Edited book (editor)
Clapp, J., & Ridge, E. (Eds.). (2016). Security and Hospitality in Literature and Culture: Modern and Contemporary Perspectives. New York: Routledge.

Journal Publications
Publication in refereed journal
Clapp, J. (2020). Jeff VanderMeer, or the Novel Trapped in the Open World. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 62(4), 414-427. Doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2020.1816890.
Clapp, J., DeCoursey, M., Lee, S. W. S., & Li, K. (2020). “Something fruitful for all of us”: Social annotation as a signature pedagogy for literature education. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 20(3), 295-319. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1474022220915128
Clapp, J. (2020). "Undisguised Alter Ego: Mary McCarthy's Autofictional Career". Life Writing, 17(1), 27-43.
Clapp, J. (2019). "The 'Along Comes' Device: Surveillance Capitalism and the Space of Appearance in Lyn Hejinian's Twenty-First Century Writing". College Literature, 46(3), 712-740.
Clapp, J. (2018). "Robert Lowell, Richard Nixon, and Surveillance Culture". Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 60 (1), 1-31.
Clapp, J. (2015). "Nicotine Cosmopolitanism: From Italo Svevo's Trieste to Art Spiegelman's New York". Partial Answers, 13 (2), 311-336.
Clapp, J. (2013). "From Signing to Strangling: Arthur Miller and the National Security State". Textual Practice, 28 (3), 365-384.
Clapp, J. (2011). "Richard Wright and the Police". Post45, ., 1-21.

Conference Papers
Invited conference paper
Clapp, J. (2020, 5). Surveillance in Contemporary American Autofiction. Departmental Seminar of the English Department of City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
Clapp, J. (2019, 4). Surveillance, Democracy, and American Autofiction. Keynote at 1st Annual Heterotopic Junctions Postgraduate Conference, Hong Kong.
Clapp, J. (2015, 5). Hospitality, Hong Kong, and the Culture of Total Information Awareness. Paper presented at Departmental Seminar, Hong Kong.
Clapp, J. (2014, 10). Surveillance and Privacy in U.S. Law and Literature. Law and Literature Colloquium of the City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
Clapp, Jeffrey (2013, 10). "Rooted Cosmopolitan: Art Spiegelman in New York, circa 9/11/01". Chinese University of Hong Kong English Department, Hong Kong.
Clapp, Jeffrey (2013, 10). "Rooted Cosmopolitan: Art Spiegelman in New York, circa 9/11/01". Chinese University of Hong Kong English Department, Hong Kong.
Refereed conference paper
Clapp, Jeffrey (2013, 1). “U.S. Sovereignty and International Law in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and The Border Trilogy”. American Comparative Literature Association Conference, Toronto.
Clapp, Jeffrey (2012, 5). “Art, the State, and Ectoplasm: Arthur Miller’s The Archbishop’s Ceiling”. American Literature Association Conference, San Francisco.
Clapp, Jeffrey (2011, 1). “Author or Authoritarian? Nabokov’s Realities and Cold War Confessional Discourse”. Modern Language Association Conference, Los Angeles.
Other conference paper
Clapp, J. (2019, 6). We are Data!: Twee Surveillance in Miranda July and Sheila Heti. Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, Tai Kwun, Hong Kong.
Clapp, J. (2019, 5). The Strength of Weak Ties: One City One Book Hong Kong as Neighborhood. Hong Kong Studies Symposium, Hong Kong.
Clapp, J. (2018, 10). Inverting Infrastructure in Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy. Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, New Orleans.
Clapp, J. (2018, 6). Reading Claudia Rankine Empathetically. Modernism and Empathy, Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
Clapp, J. (2018, 1). Data Exhaust: Tao Lin’s Quotation Marks and Surveillance Capitalism. Modern Language Association Convention, New York.
Clapp, J. (2017, 6). Memoir against Metafiction: David Foster Wallace and the Internal Revenue Service. The American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting, Utrecht.
Clapp, J. (2016, 12). Post-Paranoid David Foster Wallace. Surveillance, Form, Affect. Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
Clapp, J. (2016, 5). Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness: Surveillance, Algorithms, and the Forms of Contemporary American Fiction. Literary Form and Reform, Fudan University, Shanghai.
Clapp, J. (2016, 4). Surveillance and Transparency in Claudia Rankine’s American Lyric. The Joint Conference of the Irish and British Associations for American Studies, Queen's University, Belfast.
Clapp, J. (2016, 3). Surveilling Citizens: Claudia Rankine, from the First to the Second Person. American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting, Boston.
Clapp, J. (2015, 6). Monuments to Information: Kenneth Goldsmith and Maya Lin. Between Monumentalism and Miniaturization: Thinking Big and Small in Contemporary Culture. Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
Clapp, J. (2015, 4). Technooriental Hong Kong, from William Gibson to Edward Snowden. International Conference on the History of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
Clapp, J. (2015, 3). “Hospitality and Dataveillance”. American Comparative Literature Association Conference, Seattle.
Clapp, J. (2014, 1). Smoking on the Streets of New York: Art Spiegelman as ‘Rooted Cosmopolitan’ in the Shadow of September 11. Modern Language Association Conference, Chicago.

Creative and Literary Works, Consulting Reports and Case Studies
Translation of other's work
Au Chung-to, Jeffrey Michael Clapp, Loi Ho Man (2014). In Other Words : poetry in translation from HKIEd. Hong Kong: HKIED.

All Other Outputs
Review of books or of software
Clapp, J. (2022). Review of Training for Catastrophe: Fictions of National Security after 9/11. American Literary History (1718-1721). Doi:https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/34/4/1718/6820963.

Projects

Democratic Formalism and Literary Theory
The project explores the relationship between the novel and the actual forms of democratic governance. Political scientists and non-governmental organizations track many such formalisms. This project will explore two: “representative government” and “impartial administration” (to use the terminology of the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance). In each of the texts explore here, literary authors consider these forms in sustained ways, often by representing traduced elections or the flouting of the rule of law. Exploring such representations across a series of global contexts, the project argues that the contemporary world novel dwells with surprising regularly on democratic deficits—not in order to offer a critique of democracy, as some literary theorists would have it, but instead to forward the cause of global democratization.
Project Start Year: 2020, Principal Investigator(s): CLAPP, Jeffrey Michael null
 
“One City One Book Hong Kong, 2018-19: Shaun Tan’s The Arrival.”
This project funds Hong Kong's first ever One City One Book, a community wide reading initiative with research, teaching and knowledge transfer elements.
Project Start Year: 2018, Principal Investigator(s): BANERJEE, Bidisha (CLAPP, Jeffrey Michael as Co-Investigator)
 
Open Annotation and Humanities Education
Open annotation takes something that academics do habitually—annotating books and papers, often by writing in their margins—and makes it a collaborative, open-source project. Applications of open annotation are being actively explored in various fields (like computer programming) and in various contexts (like peer review). This project proposes that the open annotation tools now becoming available have a special relevance to humanities education. Despite the field’s diversity, humanistic disciplines are fundamentally centered on examining the structures and details of complex texts like novels, histories, philosophies, and archives. While annotation has long been something that readers do alone, this project will show the powerful impact on learning that can be produced when students and instructors annotate together, reimagining the margins of texts as spaces of collaborative, engaging learning and teaching. It will explore how instructors can annotate digital texts in ways that are visible to students, and how students can respond to their instructors and to one another if everybody is looking together at the same digital documents. Finally, by exploring open annotation across disciplines, in different contexts, and with varied assessment strategies, this project identifies open annotation as a key to integrating blended learning into humanities education.
Project Start Year: 2018, Principal Investigator(s): CLAPP, Jeffrey Michael
 
Whitman on the Grid: Surveillance, Democracy, and the Autobiographical Moment in Contemporary American Literature
A literary history, based in part on archival research.
Project Start Year: 2017, Principal Investigator(s): CLAPP, Jeffrey Michael
 
Overhearing American Literature: Surveillance, Democracy and the State
In this archival research project, I will visit the archives of the University of Texas at Austin to study the papers of David Foster Wallace, a key figure in the composition of my book about surveillance, democracy, and the state.
Project Start Year: 2015, Principal Investigator(s): CLAPP, Jeffrey Michael
 
Security, Privacy, Hospitality: New Literary Perspectives
An edited volume of essays on the interrelations between security and hospitality in modern and contemporary literature.
Project Start Year: 2014, Principal Investigator(s): CLAPP, Jeffrey Michael
 
Prizes and awards

Tony Hilfer Prize for Best Essay
Awarded for the essay "Robert Lowell, Richard Nixon, and the Poetics of Surveillance" (2018)
Date of receipt: 22/1/2019, Conferred by: Texas Studies in Literature and Language