In this article I ask what happens if we consider Jewett, who spent most of her adult life at the epicenter of New England intellectual culture, as a pivotal figure in the Western history of theorizing sexuality, and her 1884 novel, A Country Doctor, as a significant document in the history of theorizing sexual and gender deviation, perfectly…[Read more]

This class asks what sex looked and felt like before the instantiation of modern identity categories such as homosexuality or heterosexuality—before, that is, our desires became an index to our souls. To this end, we’ll examine texts by nineteenth-century American writers that represent the experiences and expressions of what we now call sex…[Read more]

Wacks, David A. “Romance of Evast and Blaquerna by Ramón Llull (Review).” La corónica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, vol. 47, no. 1, 2018, pp. 122–24. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/cor.2018.0022.

The Iberian Peninsula during the Latin Middle Ages was home to large populations of Muslims and Jews. During the period we like to call the Middle Ages, much of the Iberian Peninsula was under Muslim rule. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the entire peninsula was under Christian rule, and Judaism and Islam were officially banned.…[Read more]

This essay explores how Pierre Nora’s sites of memory work a specific cultural function through what Melvin Dixon refers to as “a memory that ultimately rewrites history.” I look at two of the most well-known poems of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and Countee Cullen’s “Heritage,” one of which reveals a…[Read more]

IMC paper for panel 374 Medieval Futura 1: Now, sponsored by the Medieval Studies Institute, Indiana Univ.–Bloomington and organised by Dr Andrea Whitacre.