Proposing an alternative phraseology of “unbecoming” to accent the risky, tentative, epigenetic processes of human development.

Proposing an alternative phraseology of “unbecoming” to accent the risky, tentative, epigenetic processes of human development.

contribution to roundtable on “Becoming Human” co-sponsored by the Middle English and Chaucer forums

contribution to roundtable on “Becoming Human” co-sponsored by the Middle English and Chaucer forums

Read 8 January 2016 in Austin, TX, at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, session number 218, “Quantity in English Verse: Linguistic and Neuroscience-Based Challenges to the Accentual Paradigm.” This short historiographical paper was the half-time show in our roundtable—an interlude between the session’s more substantive linguis…[Read more]

The ad hoc Committee on Diversity and Tolerance was formed in response to a motion passed by the Delegate Assembly in 1999 calling for the reconstitution of what had been the Task Force against Campus Bigotry. The new committee was to be charged with “working to establish a climate in which all students, faculty, and other college employees, no m…[Read more]

This presentation explored the implications of constraints on due process and academic freedom in light of contingent faculty hiring.

Early American studies scholar and feminist literary critic, Annette Kolodny, offers three projects that she would take on if she were not now retiring from the profession. These three projects include a feminist analysis of women’s interactions on the earliest contact and frontier landscapes; the development of a cross- and inter-disciplinary…[Read more]

This article shows how Rachna Mara’s collection of short stories Of Customs and Excise puts forth a cosmopolitan feminism that reveals the losses and gains of diaspora in an arena of partiality and relationality.

Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is reflection of Pakistani masculinity in a metamorphosed state. A disturbingly masculine vocabulary frames the appearance and actions of the female characters. In contrast, the speech and thought of the male characters is minified in words of loss and regret. Their material ambitions and the r…[Read more]

This dissertation examines post-Holocaust, Jewish American novelists that utilize messianism in their narratives to negotiate ambivalence about Zionism. Studying novels from the mid-1980’s to 2013, I look at the triangular relationship between Jewish American identification, the Holocaust, and Israel, to explore major topics in contemporary J…[Read more]

Muslim women’s perspective on liberatory Islamic orality (or empowerment via the oral traditions within Islam) is vastly accentuated in Fatema Mernissi’s and Leila Ahmed’s examinations of the harem structure. These harem narratives celebrate Sufism, a mystical Islamic theosophy that foregrounds orality and invites a constant search toward divine…[Read more]