Kari Kraus
Kari Kraus, a doctoral student in English at the University of Rochester, is interested in the changes that texts, paintings, other artifacts, and their reproductions undergo in the transmission through time and space. Extensions of that interest are the various techniques—ranging from capricious guesswork to textual stemmatics to state-of-the-art image processing advances—that have evolved over thousands of years to deal with information loss and gain. Conjectural criticism, the subject of her dissertation, is the attempt to reconstruct what an object once was or predict what it might be in the future. The dissertation in part takes a case study approach, examining the conjectural tradition in the history of Blake editions and reproductions.