Ever since its introduction to China in the early twentieth century, spoken drama (huaju) has been at the forefront of social and political changes. Its realistic portrayal of life and use of spoken dialogue made it an ideal vehicle to promote social reforms and to serve politics. This study investigates the relationship between politics and…[Read more]

Alfred Uhry’s Pulitzer Prize winning play, Driving Miss Daisy (1986) is examined as a site of memory including: Uhry’s own memories upon which the characters and the play itself are based; the role of memory stories, settings and objects in the unfolding of the relationship be-tween its main characters, Daisy Wertham and her chauffeur, Hoke Col…[Read more]

This chapter extends the focus of wartime trauma scholarship to recognise female
non-combatants’ variants of traumatic victimisation and agency, as presented in the
Middle Eastern and African contexts. The agency of such actors, who suffered
tragically from the traumas of war, was inexplicably overlooked in both Middle
Eastern and African l…[Read more]

Worldviews in Literature: An Anthology responds to UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova’s 2012 global initiatives for study of world literature for a “New Humanism” along with Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s directive for world literature “to discover what is universal across national literatures.” Worldviews includes fifteen authors fro…[Read more]

“The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages”—a two-part article—questions the widely held belief in critical race theory that “race” is a category without purchase before the modern era. Surveying a variety of cultural documents from the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries—chronicles, hagiography, literature, stories, sculpture, maps, canon l…[Read more]

“A colored spiral in a small ball of glass, this is how I see my own life,” writes Vladimir Nabokov in his memoir, Speak, Memory. In our course “What is Memory?” we read and write with Nabokov’s life story using our own form of Gregory Ulmer’s “mystory” mode of writing as a way to discover the life cycles of memories–ours and our students as well…[Read more]

Commedia dell’Arte was the most influential and widespread theatre movement in sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Europe. A considerable part of its popularity can be accounted for by its comic representation of stressful occurrences within everyday life in early modern Europe, including in its representation of the period’s widespread dis…[Read more]

This article reads South African science-fiction writer Lauren Beukes’s first novel, Moxyland (2008) set in a futuristic Cape Town, from the perspective of Lindsay Bremner’s notion of “citiness”– or how cities produce the modernity of the subjects who inhabit them. The novel is remarkable for its dependence on the social geography of the South A…[Read more]

Editorial response to “The Coddling of the American Mind” in the September issue of “The Atlantic”

Editorial response to “The Coddling of the American Mind” in the September issue of “The Atlantic”

These lesson plans and corresponding handouts introduce students to methods in digital humanities (distant reading, narrative mapping, and sentiment analysis). They are aligned with the K-12 Common Core State Standards and informed by university-level DH discourses. Developed in collaboration with high school English teachers, these materials are…[Read more]

Wikis have become enormously attractive to Internet users because they are open-access web pages or networks of web pages that can be modified by any interested editors, making them perpetual works-in-progress that evolve and change at the behest of their contributors. Wikipedia, the limitless fountain of collected, and sometimes inaccurate,…[Read more]

An examination of crime and criminality in colonial and postcolonial India through life-writing and the examples of Thugs and Phoolan Devi, the Bandit Queen.

Designed as a short introduction to academic literary studies of affect, Reading Affect in Literary Studies is a one-credit graduate seminar, offered in Spring 2014, that was framed by the question of how we might rethink our practice as scholars of literature to take our scholarship to publics beyond the academy. Readings included work by Rita…[Read more]

This article considers Marıa Lugones’s concept of faithful witnessing as a point of departure to think about the ethics and possibilities of faithful witnessing in literary contexts. For Lugones, faithful witnessing is an act of aligning oneself with oppressed peoples against the grain of power and recognizing their humanity, oppression, and re…[Read more]