First presented as a paper at the 2018 SAMLA Convention in Atlanta, this article will become a chapter of my book in progress on the photobooks of the 1930s and 1940s illustrated with the photographs of the Farm Security Administration.

A brief talk for a roundtable on the centenary of Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.”

This course is a study of the literature of the U.S.-Mexico border from the 1980s to the present. We begin with Gloria Anzaldúa’s foundational texts, Borderlands / La Frontera, and her landmark feminist anthology, co-edited with Cherríe Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Radical Writings by Women of Color. We then consider the legacies and aft…[Read more]

This course is a study of Latinx literatures and cultures produced in the last two decades. We will concentrate our attention on how contemporary art works represent and participate in the upheavals of the twenty-first century—9/11, global economic and ecological crisis, mass migration and mass deportation, political and social mobilization, s…[Read more]

The syllabus for science fiction course offered Spring 2021 in the English Department at Davidson College.

The syllabus for science fiction course offered Spring 2021 in the English Department at Davidson College.

Birds are everywhere in nineteenth-century American literature, including the work of Emily Dickinson. Women poets often referred to their poems in terms of making songs. This essay rethinks the birds in Dickinson’s letters and poems. It suggests that Dickinson’s birds, and their songs, show her awareness of business. They exist within com…[Read more]

This autoethnographic exploration, describes and reflects upon my attempt to crowdsource a modern myth on the origins of racism in America. It draws on my work in narrative studies with a special focus on stories and their role in human development. Part one is analysis of the ‘functions’ of story as both plot variables and sociological act…[Read more]

This autoethnographic exploration, describes and reflects upon my attempt to crowdsource a modern myth on the origins of racism in America. It draws on my work in narrative studies with a special focus on stories and their role in human development. Part one is analysis of the ‘functions’ of story as both plot variables and sociological act…[Read more]

In 1970, a television-show dance contest in a small California town ended abruptly when the studio was briefly plunged into darkness because of an apparent power failure. The media coverage of the event eventually helped uncover criminal activity at the studio; over the course of this reporting, the narrative was accompanied by select genres of…[Read more]

In this paper we examine the representation of crafts in video games, particularly in “crafting systems” – collections of mechanics that are described as crafting within a game’s narrative. Real world crafting practitioners value creativity, expression, and mastery of material, but the act of crafting itself is often viewed by society as repro…[Read more]

Often described as an open-air prison, the citizens of the Gaza Strip have long resisted a subaltern existence. Conditions in Gaza, and specifically since the Second Intifada of 2000, have increasingly worsened. With the advent of Hamas in 2006-2007, a complete blockade was imposed on the Strip. A deafening silence by the world has resulted in…[Read more]

Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” is known for its seductive writing despite its destructive subject matter. How does this novel accomplish such a juxtaposition? How does the novel keep the reader interested despite Humber blatantly attacking Dolores Haze? This essay explores critically explores the technical method which Nabokov uses in “Lolita.” The…[Read more]

Global studies enable us to examine deceivingly harmonious images of Shakespeare. This chapter focuses on the modern period and introduces readers to a number of key concepts in Shakespeare and global studies, namely censorship and redaction, genre, gender, race, and politics of reception. Performing Shakespeare not only creates channels between…[Read more]

In conjunction with the Popular Culture Association (PCA) holding their 2021 conference in Boston, contributors and attendees of the New England Graphic Medicine (NEGM) Virtual Summit are proposing a slate of programming that now is welcoming additional participants.

Shakespeare scholarship has long been interested in the temporal dynamics of The Winter’s Tale, and has often turned to melancholic or traumatic time frames to explain the thematic persistence of lost time in Shakespeare’s romance. In this chapter, I argue that dance provides a key interpretive framework for understanding the play’s interest in bo…[Read more]

The introduction to a special issue of Studies in Documentary Film I co-edited with Sarah Hamblin on “Radical Documentary in the Globalized Age of New Media”

Susan B. Anthony declared in 1896 that the bicycle “has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.” The comparative study of ‘Whale Rider’ (2002) and ‘Wadjda’ (2012) demonstrates that this liberating effect of the basic tool of transportation is being reinforced in the new millennium. The analysis further situates two con…[Read more]