La Camelias de Amelia (written in Spanish) is a 2009 collection of short stories about Puerto Rico and its people. Its author, Zoé Jiménez Corretjer, forms part of the Puerto Rican writers called ‘La Generación de los 80’ (authors writing in Spanish from the island and not in English from US territory.)
This review only analyzes the work as a u…[Read more]

discussion of the may 2004 issue of pmla that treated science fiction as a scholarly genre. my question was, instead of writing strung-out, dystopian lit, why not ask what will be the level of consciousness of an individual human biped in a galactic economy of quadrilions and quintillions of people, each utilizing near- infinity numbers of…[Read more]

In the last six years, scholars have engaged with the effects of globalization on the study of collective memory, emphasizing the de-territorialization, de-nationalization of memory cultures. While being attentive to the global circulation and transformation of collective memories, authors in this issue seek to revisit and critique some…[Read more]

Shakespeare’s three political tragedies―Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear―have numerously been presented or adapted on film. These three plays all involve the recurring trope of madness, which, as constructed by Shakespeare, provided a wider canvas on which to detail those materials that could not be otherwise expressed: sexual desire and exp…[Read more]

Shakespeare’s three political tragedies―Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear―have numerously been presented or adapted on film. These three plays all involve the recurring trope of madness, which, as constructed by Shakespeare, provided a wider canvas on which to detail those materials that could not be otherwise expressed: sexual desire and exp…[Read more]

This essay describes and illustrates the activities associated with the University of California at Berkeley’s Shakespeare Program, over the last forty years, covering teaching innovations, numerous research publications, multiple productions and videos of Shakespeare’s plays, and creation of websites, Shakespeare’s Staging and Milton Revealed.

Between 1988 and 1994 American comic books engaged the politics, problematics, and crises of the AIDS epidemic by injecting the virus and its social, cultural, and epidemiological effects on gay men into the four-color fantasies of the superhero genre. As the comic-book industry was undergoing major internal changes that allowed for more mature,…[Read more]

The humanities must work together with STEM if we are to succeed in articulating relevant, historically informed, and culturally nuanced responses to grand challenges.

On many occasions cinema has chosen to shoot movies in locales other than the ones in which the events of the films are supposed to take place in. This could be due to various reasons, namely cheaper production costs, or inability to gain access to the original place. The choice of location, however, tries to provide a mirror image of the…[Read more]

Media representations of Arabs and terrorists.

n her treatise on abjection, Julia Kristeva argues that the abject is located outside the self, remaining in a state of repulsion that threatens to destroy the self. Abject representations are prevalent in the way terrorists have been portrayed in the Western news media post-September 11, 2001. These images of abjection are problematic, as they…[Read more]

n her treatise on abjection, Julia Kristeva argues that the abject is located outside the self, remaining in a state of repulsion that threatens to destroy the self. Abject representations are prevalent in the way terrorists have been portrayed in the Western news media post-September 11, 2001. These images of abjection are problematic, as they…[Read more]

Code switching is a practice exercised by multilingual speakers. Linguists define the term as the simultaneous use of more than one language. Code switching is prevalent in postcolonial countries in which the colonial language has continued to exist alongside the native language. In the past, code switching in the Arab world has been confined to…[Read more]

The changes that have been witnessed by media in the Arab world have redefined media’s initial role as a source of information. With the advent of satellite television new realities, namely the dismantling of communication boundaries, have emerged. At first, such advancements posed a challenge to government bodies, specifically in the Arab region;…[Read more]

“Expository Writing” is crafted to help students learn to write and think critically. In an effort to hone our critical minds and strengthen our writing, we will focus on the learned skills of summarizing, paraphrasing, quoting, evaluating, analyzing, and synthesizing. In addition to several short essays, you will also be writing a mul…[Read more]

A video essay about title sequences from films by Alfred Hitchcock and David Fincher. An exploration of motion graphic design from analog to digital.

My talk at the round table on Service Learning in Literary Studies about the necessity of failure in experiential learning.

This primer in “cognitive cultural studies” explores the cultural fantasy of perfect access to mind through body. It shows that different genres and media—movies, novels, classic Chinese operas, medieval ribald tales, musicals, paintings, documentaries, stand-up comedy, and photography—have different strategies for making us think that we have ju…[Read more]