This article collides St. Apollonia’s medieval passion narratives – manuscript illustrations, church screens, and paintings by Francisco De Zurbarán and Carlo Dolci – with A.L. Kennedy’s contemporary short story “Story of My Life” to find out what happens when we move beyond the theoretical violence imposed by traditional approaches to gothic studies.

An examination of the cyborg potential of wearable technology as located in dress-body-technology assemblages and a call for public humanities work, such as Fashioning Circuits, that extends the Quantified Self to think instead about the Quantified Other or the Quantified Self-in-kinship.

This essay argues that despite its significance within the history of bibliotherapy, Samuel McChord Crothers’s 1916 essay “A Literary Clinic” – in which the term “bibliotherapy” was coined – is a stranger point of origin than proponents have realized, one with implications for conceptualizing reading and its reparative uses more broadly.

What are the topologies of fugitive/narrative, whether as a matter of experience, theory or fiction? This essay follows a number of trajectories in addressing the question. In part the exploration is prompted by the refugee crisis in many places around the world, yet the issue of the “fugitive” is not exactly identical with that. Moreover, the…[Read more]

Uniting literary analysis, theories of emotion from the sciences and humanities, and a deeply archival account of Tudor history, Emotion in the Tudor Court freshly examines how literature reflects and constructs the dynamics of emotional life in the Renaissance courtly sphere. Spanning the 16th century — with chapters on Cardinal Thomas Wolsey…[Read more]

The STC Macbeth’s setting and predominantly multiethnic cast brought to mind Orson Welles’s landmark 1936 Macbeth which was set in Haiti and featured an all-black cast. In both cases, the ethnicity and race of the cast matched that of the characters and cultures in the adaptation’s respective universe. Tommy’s production engaged in two models…[Read more]

This Blog covers a new approach to culture via literary analysis. The hypothesis is that distance from dirt is a key aspect of culture that cuts across ideologies. To begin this work, we will use Big Data to study (content analysis) themes and characters in US novels from the 19th C. to the 21st C. Theory for this analysis will be Joel Kovel’s…[Read more]

The Jewish ‘question’ is treated in the Recherche by way of the Dreyfus Affaire, which is not spoken of but scattered in the discourses of different characters. Definitions, opinions, even facts are, therefore, spread in the ubiquity of social instability, so that it is impossible for the reader to identify any of Proust’s ideologies.In our paper…[Read more]

This essay responds to recent exigencies that ask scholars to honor histories of cultural rhetorics, engage in responsible and responsive cultural rhetorics conversations, and generate productive openings for future inquiry and practice. First, the authors open by paying homage to scholarship and programs that have made cultural rhetorics a…[Read more]

In a 1972 poem about Vancouver Island, Mexican writer José Emilio Pacheco wonders, “Acaso fue el Aztlán de las mexicas / De allí partieron siete tribus.” Though Pacheco spent several years living in Vancouver during the late 1960s and early 1970s—and was published in a 1971 anthology of poetry “From Canada’s Unofficial Languages”—h…[Read more]

This is the typescript of the Introductory chapter of the book, THE INVENTION OF RACE IN THE EUROPEAN MIDDLE AGES, published on March 8, 2018 by Cambridge UP (503 pp., 8 chapters, 10″ x 7″ format). The book discusses Jews, Muslims, Africans and blackness, Native Americans, Mongols, and the Romani (“Gypsies”) in 7 chapters, including a critical…[Read more]