While many in academia around the U.S. may anchor themselves in cynical opposition to the proliferation of neoliberal discourse and the policies that accompany, I propose that language departments are in a uniquely privileged position within the humanities to assert the value of our programs within the neoliberal paradigm. Specifically, the…[Read more]

This article reviews four crucial moments of the editorial life of Guaman Poma de Ayala’s “Nueva corónica y buen gobierno” [New Chronicle and Good Government], a 1189-page history of Peru before, during, and after the Spanish conquest. The chronicle includes 399 ink drawings made by the author. The essay also addresses unanswered questions…[Read more]

Invited contribution to the book-catalog “Libros y autores del virreinato del Perú (1542-1824)” [Books and authors of the Viceroyalty of Peru] that accompanies the one-year exhibit (same title as the book) at the Instituto Cervantes in Madrid (Spain). The exhibit can be visited from September 2021-September 2022. This chapter addresses the…[Read more]

Building on existing film and urban histories, this innovative volume examines Spanish cinema through contemporary interdisciplinary theories of urban space, the built environment, visuality and mass culture from the industrial through to the digital age. Architecture and the Urban in Spanish Film brings together the scholarship of an…[Read more]

How does one understand a filmmaker like José Antonio Nieves Conde, a Falangist whose films with strong neorealist tendencies were radically altered by the Francoist censors for being too critical of the economic injustices inherent to daily urban life after the Spanish Civil War? Many film critics have asked this question and this essay looks…[Read more]

This volume explores the history, evolution, and future of Luso-Hispanic Cultural Studies as a discipline, a pedagogical tool, and a set of working practices by bringing together a diverse group of renowned specialists to examine how the field has grown out of and radically reconsidered some of the basic premises of British Cultural Studies since…[Read more]

A teaching guide to accompany the East German film “Coming Out” (1989, directed by Heiner Carow).

Since the Intifada of 2000, living conditions in the Gaza Strip have progressively deteriorated, and when Hamas came to power in 2006–07, a complete blockade was enforced on the inhabitants by Egypt and Israel. In addition, five full-scale wars have been
waged on the Strip. Despite these conditions, Gazans remain resilient, as evidenced by s…[Read more]

A literary analysis and summary of John Burnside’s poem “The Painter Fabritius Begins Work on the Lost Noli Me Tangere of 1652” (2,570 words)

Israeli officials have long denied that rape was used as an instrument of war against Palestinians. Most of the files relating to the expulsion of Palestinians during the Nakba in 1948 and its aftermath remain sealed in Israeli archives and have been reclassified as top secret. Palestinian oral narratives have long been considered a poor…[Read more]

Attention in the humanities has lately turned to the re-thinking of traditional modes of publishing. But is the academy prepared to assess work that deviates from the recognised forms and formats associated with ‘digging down and standing back’ (Felski 2015, p. 52)? This chapter investigates whether humanistic research, usually expressed in wor…[Read more]

Abstracts for the Two-Panel Series “More Is More: Rules and Riddles of Nineteenth-Century Vielschreiberei.” MLA Annual Convention, Washington, D.C., January 6–9, 2022.

The purpose of this essay is to better understand the motives of the real estate mogul and construction magnate -J.C.Nichols- responsible for the construction of the first non-centrally located shopping mall in the United States in Kansas City in the 1920s. Specifically, this study focuses on why and how Nichols resorted to a pastiche of…[Read more]

This essay compares the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic at two universities on opposite sides of the world: Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in the United States. It argues that the pandemic has revealed the extent to which campuses have reorganized their institutional…[Read more]

In this article, I examine how Sissieretta Jones (frequently described as America’s first Black superstar, among other superlatives) strategically leveraged her European performance reviews in order to increase her listenership and wages in the United States. Jones toured Europe for the first (and only) time from February until November in 1895. A…[Read more]

In this short essay I discuss two new translations of Helmuth Plessner’s work, “Political Anthropology,” translated by Nils F. Schott (Northwestern University Press, 2018), and “Levels of Organic Life and the Human: An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology,” translated by Millay Hyatt (Fordham University Press, 2019).

First presented as a paper at the 2018 SAMLA Convention in Atlanta, this article will become a chapter of my book in progress on the photobooks of the 1930s and 1940s illustrated with the photographs of the Farm Security Administration.