PMLA Forum piece that argues for the direct and indirect value of the scholarly enterprise to the sacred art of teaching.

If Jane Austen had wanted to write about zombies, what might she have known about the walking dead in the early nineteenth century? In this 2010 presidential address for EC/ASECS, subsequently published in the society’s newsletter, I examine this question and take a look at Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.

This is a longer version of my conference paper, in which I provide some ideas on how to merge scholarship on 18th-c France, especially the revolutionary period, with the kinds of advocacy promoted by the MLA. I foreground exciting new work done by colleagues in the US, UK, and Italy, and provide a “sneak peek” at materials to be included in the…[Read more]

In this free workshop, children and preteens (age 8-12) creatively explore and expand their sense of self by thinking and writing about their life – past, present, and future. Group activities, games, solitary writing, and illustrating provide for a fun and productive setting. Students will receive individual attention and gradually realize how…[Read more]

“The Lore and Lure of the Academic Job Market” is an MLA 2016 special session in which panelists consider how discipline-specific “lore” continually lures graduate students and contingent and full-time faculty members into an already overcrowded job market. Instead of providing advice about getting a job, participants evaluate that advice and gen…[Read more]

The “modern university” is the social institution that has grown beyond the confines of brick and mortar to become a certifying body granting approval to those subjects who pass through its machinery, typically operating under the regulation and supervision of a government-sanctioned system of formalized accreditation. The modern university is ine…[Read more]

At the height of their popularity, performing animals appeared in over half of all big-time vaudeville bills and were highly significant to its business model. They were booked to draw children and their mothers to matinee performances and, as consistent sources of novelty, to create crucial word-of-mouth interest in the bill’s weekly line-up. V…[Read more]

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

.Using the concept of “third culture” from social theory, this article examines Charles Kingsley’s use of displacement in his children’s book The Water Babies (1863). In trying to portray the site of moral formation, Kingsley displaces his central character Tom – the new, interstitial “third culture” subject. Through Tom’s displacement, Kingsle…[Read more]

This article examines Allen Say’s use of cultural displacement in his books Tree of Cranes and Grandfather’s Journey. Allen Say is an award-winning, Japanese-American, picture book author and illustrator.

In this essay, I argue for the benefits of Suzanne Gossett’s reading of Pericles over the Oxford’s 1986 reconstructed Pericles, looking specifically at Act 3, Scenes 1 and 2. Gossett argues that Cerimon’s “rough and woeful music” is not a scribal error in the quarto, a doubling of Cerimon’s “rough” in 3.2.78-79, but perhaps intentional on…[Read more]