In a book review of Story of O, part of which appeared on the cover of early paperback editions, Eliot Fremont-Smith wrote that its publication in 1965 marked “the end of any coherent restrictive application of the concept of pornography to books.” This essay explores the implications of that significant shift in censorship policy for lib…[Read more]

This chapter argues that the sexy librarian stereotype emerged at the end of the twentieth century from the confluence between sexual liberation, free speech movements and print pornography. It focuses on a series of librarian themed pornographic paperbacks published in the 1970s and 1980s by Greenleaf Classics. These stories, although flimsy…[Read more]

The book examines little known and forgotten writings by Magnus Hirschfeld, the influential sexologist who is best known today for his homosexual activism, transgender work and founding of the world’s first Institute of Sexual Science in 1919. Arguing that negative experiences, as much as affirmative subculture formation, shaped a collective sense…[Read more]

The book examines little known and forgotten writings by Magnus Hirschfeld, the influential sexologist who is best known today for his homosexual activism, transgender work and founding of the world’s first Institute of Sexual Science in 1919. Arguing that negative experiences, as much as affirmative subculture formation, shaped a collective sense…[Read more]

A contribution to the Editors’ Forum on Queer Form, edited by Kadji Amin, Roy Pérez, and Amber Musser, for ASAP/Journal.

A contribution to the Editors’ Forum on Queer Form, edited by Kadji Amin, Roy Pérez, and Amber Musser, for ASAP/Journal.

Review of López-Morillas, Consuelo, ed. El Corán de Toledo. Oviedo: Trea, 2011. Originally published in Calíope 18.3 (2013): 129-131. https://ssl.uh.edu/class/spanish/caliope/

Review of Decter, Jonathan. Iberian Jewish Literature: Between al-Andalus and Christian Europe. Indiana UP, 2007. Originally published in Calíope 14.1 (2008): 139-42. https://ssl.uh.edu/class/spanish/caliope/

Review of Maravillas, peregrinaciones y utopías: literatura de viajes en el mundo románico. Ed. Rafael Beltrán. Valencia: Universitat de Valencia, 2002. Originally published in Bulletin of Spanish Studies 80.6 (2003): 743-44.

Review of Mocedades de Rodrigo. Ed. Leonardo Funes, with Felipe Tenenbaum. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Tamesis. 2004. Originally published in Bulletin of Spanish Studies 83.8 (2006): 982-83.

Review of Barletta, Vincent. Covert Gestures: Crypto-Islamic Literature as Cultural Practice in Early Modern Spain. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Originally published in Hispania 89.1 (2006): 50-52.

Review of Young, Douglas C. Rogues and Genres: Generic Transformation in the Spanish Picaresque and Arabic Maqāma. Newark: Delaware: Juan de la Cuesta, 2004. Originally published in Aljamía 19 (529-531).

Review of Szpiech, Ryan. Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic (Middle Ages Series). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Orignially published in Speculum 88.3 (853-855).

Review of Hook, David, ed. The Arthur of the Iberians: The Arthurian Legends in the Spanish and Portuguese Worlds. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2015. Orignally published in Arthuriana 26.4 (2016): 78-81.

Review of Robinson, Cynthia. Imagining the Passion in a Multiconfessional Castile: The Virgin, Christ, Devotions, and Images in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013. Originally published in Revista Hispánica 69.1 (109-112).

Review of Tabea Linhard’s ‘Jewish Spain: A Mediterranean Memory’ (2016): “These essays are nothing short of a manifesto of new Spanish Jewish cultural studies, an area that has long been wanting a champion. In this sense, Jewish Spain is an exciting departure in the study of the Jewish experience and memory in modern Spain.”

Zadie Smith’s novel On Beauty confirms that the fiction of the second generation Caribbean diaspora has indeed arrived on the international scene, if indeed any confirmation was required after the phenomenal success of Smith’s first novel
White Teeth. The status of Smith’s fiction in the Euro-American academy, which is also the setting of O…[Read more]