Published in Cairo in 1892, the first issue of Jurji Zaydan’s Arabic journal al-Hilal contained a history of the Arabic press, including a list of the journals published in Beirut in the 1870s and 1880s, when Zaydan was a young waiter and finally a Syrian Protestant College medical student and leader of the 1882 protest. Listed too are the Arabi…[Read more]

ABSTRACT Theorizations of the female subject in Arabic literary criticism have long charted debates within Western feminism. This chapter invites a reading of Hanan al-Shaykh’s novel The Story of Zahra that would attend rather to the quiet narrative aporia surrounding a reticent Zahra, the challenge her will to be “look[ed] at [as] a woman in…[Read more]

ABSTRACT Serialized over the course of 1905 in the Arabic journal al-Muqtaṭaf, Ya‘qūb Ṣarrūf’s novel Fatāt Mişr [The Girl of Egypt] was avidly read by contemporary subscribers and then soon forgotten by Arabic’s reading public. Ṣarrūf came to despise Fatāt Mişr and all of his novels, finding that the market for the genre in Arabic fell far sh…[Read more]

ABSTRACT This paper reads narrative published in the journals of 1870s Beirut in the context of an emerging bourgeois readership and argues that the significance of this archive to modern Arabic fiction has been neglected by critics. Taking the intensification of the silk trade with France following the civil war of 1860 as a point of historical…[Read more]

ABSTRACT Cultural cold war played out in Arabic from the late 1950s into the early 1970s in the
conference halls, hotel lobbies, cafes, bars, magazine offices, publishing houses, kiosks,
and streets of Beirut and Cairo. Berlin, Paris, Tashkent, Khartoum, London, Baghdad1,
and Tunis all have their place in this built landscape of cultural cold…[Read more]

Abstract
In 1950, the United States Central Intelligence Agency created the Congress for Cultural Freedom,
with its main offices in Paris. The CCF was designed as a cultural front in the Cold War in
response to the Soviet Cominform, and founded and fiinded a worldwide network of literary
journals (as well as conferences, concerts, art exhibits…[Read more]

ABSTRACT

Extensively quoting from the archives of the International Association for Cultural Freedom, a Cold War organization founded as a CIA front in 1950, this chapter provides a history for their Arabic literary activities, including the journals Aṣwāt, Adab, and their best known work in the region: Ḥiwār (1962–67), edited by Palesti…[Read more]

Syllabus for ENGL 479P: BookLab, an upper-division undergraduate course at the University of Maryland. Taught with the resources and facilities of the Department of English’s BookLab, the course is a historical, imaginative, and experiential introduction to the multitudinous forms of what is not the oldest but is surely among the most enduring of…[Read more]

“Focus on ‘Henry V'” is a peer-reviewed, multimedia, digital Open Educational Resource co-authored and co-produced by faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates on the innovative digital publishing platform Scalar. Chapters include guides to early printed editions, sources, and performance and cinematic histories of the play, as well as…[Read more]

This essay considers the use that twenty-first-century fictionalized cancer narratives make of Shakespeare’s words, the Shakespeare industry, and editorial and textual apparatuses to trope the ambiguous status of the post-millennial cancer patient. In the so-called “women’s novel” The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown, the genre thriller What Time De…[Read more]

In this paper I argue that the flowering of adaptation and appropriation surrounding Shakespeare indicate not a holy “bard” who is the apotheosis of Western culture but an ambiguous Shakespeare who provides a creative space for artisans and artists (among whom, I will suggest, we can include critics and scholars). Having identified a “Sh…[Read more]

This essay explores the role of love, as defined by bell hooks, in pedagogy as well as how it plays into anxiety in our current moment.

This article edits and discusses a Latin love poem written by a previously unknown woman writer, Lady Elizabeth Dacre, in the 1550s.

On 12 July 1776, Captain James Cook and his crew left England in search of the famed
Northwest Passage. Spanish, French, and Russian explorers before him had set out to
find this Arctic waterway, which was thought to link the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans
and promised to open up a new, more direct trading route with Asia. After seven
months…[Read more]

My Ph.D. examination bibliography in the fields of Contemporary Southern Literature and Contemporary Book History and Print Culture

Black artists have created, modified, or otherwise treated the book as an object of aesthetic expression since at least the nineteenth century. African American artists’ production and circulation of friendship albums and scrapbooks, democratic multiples and artist publishing, accordion folds, enclosures, and fine printing editions, all work to…[Read more]

Slides from Renata Kobetts Miller’s (City College of New York) presentation as part of the panel on “The Problems and Possibilities of Parenting in the Academy.”

The article analyses the relationship between body, mind and soul in Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1767). Starting from a famous “sartorial” metaphor, in the third book of the novel, according to which the body-mind relationship is akin to that of a jerkin and its lining, the article deals with the m…[Read more]

The article analyses the relationship between body, mind and soul in Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1767). Starting from a famous “sartorial” metaphor, in the third book of the novel, according to which the body-mind relationship is akin to that of a jerkin and its lining, the article deals with the m…[Read more]