War Culture and the Contest of Images analyzes the relationships among contemporary war, documentary practices, and democratic ideals. Dora Apel examines a wide variety of images and cultural representations of war in the United States and the Middle East, including photography, performance art, video games, reenactment, and social media images.…[Read more]

This essay examines select visual representations of refugees and migrants as embodied subjects in photography, art, and video. It focuses on American asylum politics and explores the questions of free movement, the right to have rights, and the ethics and efficacy of border walls. I argue that the catastrophe of global forced displacement makes…[Read more]

Johannesburg is a landlocked city, famously the largest human concentration in the southern hemisphere not located on a river. What opportunities does it afford for hydrocolonial analysis, given Isabel Hofmeyr’s anchoring of that term in oceanic studies? How might a hydrocolonial orientation defamiliarize the relations between surface and depths…[Read more]

The spread of the Omicron variant this winter was met with renewed calls for the UK Government to fund the arts and culture through the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic and beyond. ‘We are in crisis mode’, Nicolas Hytner, former artistic director of the National Theatre, told the BBC’s Newsnight programme. ‘We need to see short-term finance, we need to see loa…[Read more]

An innovative account that brings together cognitive science, ethnography, and literary history to examine patterns of “mindreading” in a wide range of literary works.

Part of a collaborative commission between the National Humanities Alliance, the Federation of State Humanities Councils and Routledge, Taylor and Francis. Pieces in this collection offer reflections and insights on the state of public humanities ahead of the National Humanities Conference in November 2022 and are referenced in “Exploring What’s…[Read more]

Part of a collaborative commission between the National Humanities Alliance, the Federation of State Humanities Councils and Routledge, Taylor and Francis. Pieces in this collection offer reflections and insights on the state of public humanities ahead of the National Humanities Conference in November 2022 and are referenced in “Exploring What’s…[Read more]

Part of a collaborative commission between the National Humanities Alliance, the Federation of State Humanities Councils and Routledge, Taylor and Francis. Pieces in this collection offer reflections and insights on the state of public humanities ahead of the National Humanities Conference in November 2022 and are referenced in “Exploring What’s…[Read more]

Part of a collaborative commission between the National Humanities Alliance, the Federation of State Humanities Councils and Routledge, Taylor and Francis. Pieces in this collection offer reflections and insights on the state of public humanities ahead of the National Humanities Conference in November 2022 and are referenced in “Exploring What’s…[Read more]

Part of a collaborative commission between the National Humanities Alliance, the Federation of State Humanities Councils and Routledge, Taylor and Francis. Pieces in this collection offer reflections and insights on the state of public humanities ahead of the National Humanities Conference in November 2022 and are referenced in “Exploring What’s…[Read more]

Part of a collaborative commission between the National Humanities Alliance, the Federation of State Humanities Councils and Routledge, Taylor and Francis. Pieces in this collection offer reflections and insights on the state of public humanities ahead of the National Humanities Conference in November 2022 and are referenced in “Exploring What’s…[Read more]

This syllabus for Major Authors: Anonymous serves as one of the capstone seminar options for our English Majors and Minors. In overhauling our curriculum to make the English BA represent more literature, we removed Single-Author-Named courses & replaced them with Major Authors. Each faculty who teach this course make an argument for the various…[Read more]

The Gulf Stream gained scientific prominence in the nineteenth century as a test case for theories about the dynamics of ocean currents and the equilibrium of transatlantic climate. Discourse about the current supplied descriptions, analogies, and myths that persist into the present. Triangulating oceanic, ecological, and transatlantic approaches…[Read more]

A sharply critical response to Shelby Steele’s first book, The Content of Our Character.

This essay focuses on Olive Schreiner’s personal correspondence and the allegories collected in Dreams (1890) to explore her complicated relationship to late-Victorian Decadence. I argue that Schreiner modified Decadent writers’ use of intersensoriality and synaesthesia to educate her readers into a new kind of common sense, one aligned with her…[Read more]