A focus on Launcelot Gobbo as middleman and unfaithful servant enables an expanded reading of discourses of economics in The Merchant of Venice. In addition to the mercantile modes of Antonio and Shylock, the play also includes a transactional perspective in Launcelot as well as Portia’s fantasy of cornucopia. The chapter is part of Linda…[Read more]

In the 2018 MLA Convention, the Luso-Brazilian Forum organized a meeting to remember Professor Antonio Candido (1918-2017), on January 6, 7:15-8:30 PM. This posting collects most papers read at the meeting. Should you be interested in contributing your own remembrance, or reflections on Candido’s career, please send them to me on the Commons. I…[Read more]

Establishing a meaningful digital identity is essential to managing one’s scholarly and professional reputation. This workshop addresses ways to cultivate an online identity and offers guidance on “going public” using tools and strategies for building a community around your work. Topics include social media, writing for different audiences, perso…[Read more]

Establishing a meaningful digital identity is essential to managing one’s scholarly and professional reputation. This workshop addresses ways to cultivate an online identity and offers guidance on “going public” using tools and strategies for building a community around your work. Topics include social media, writing for different audiences, perso…[Read more]

In this essay I argue that the portrait of Arruntius as a passive Stoic is injudicious, and then I develop a new reading of Jonson’s depiction of Arruntius based on the textual evidence from both the quarto and folio editions of the play. The essay proceeds in three sections. In the first section, I question the commonly held view regarding A…[Read more]

This presentation explores ethical dilemmas for graduate school educators in programs that prepare M.A. students to teach English in community colleges. Such graduate programs attract students and produce strong, enthusiastic teachers, and university administrators value the programs because they draw tuition; however, the job prospects for…[Read more]

Slides accompanying a panel representing the Pittsburgh Bicentennial Frankenstein project to build a digital scholarly variorum edition that updates, bridges, and intersects multiple divergent editions of Frankenstein, including the manuscript notebook drafts of 1816, the 1818, 1823, and 1831 print editions, as well as the handwritten notes in the…[Read more]

The following is a response delivered at the end of the Critical Infrastructure Studies Panel, which took place at the January 2018 Modern Language Association Conference in New York City. This response argues that the call for critical infrastructure studies can ultimately help us mobilize a critically informed resistance to capital and set of…[Read more]

Looking from a distance, as a condition of knowledge, participates within a long-standing Western tradition of power relations. This article considers the use of “distant reading” as theorized by Franco Moretti in his book by the same title and suggests that the method of literary analysis that uses such a metaphor should be aware and critical of…[Read more]

This essay explores how the early American stage functioned as an incubator for ideas about national identity, artistic expression, and masculinity. Reading four plays from the early years of the Republic – Royall Tyler’s The Contrast, William Dunlap’s Andre´, John Augustus Stone’s Metamora, and Robert Montgomery Bird’s The Gladiator, I demonstrat…[Read more]

The Dialogus de appetenda gloria qui inscribitur Gonsalus (1523) is Juan Gine´s de Sepu´ lveda’s first reflection on the moral aspects of war. In it, he addresses whether it is morally licit for Christians to desire worldly honor and glory, a question that Christian mystics, Irenicists, and humanists like Desiderius Erasmus and Juan Luis Vives pos…[Read more]

The Dialogus de appetenda gloria qui inscribitur Gonsalus (1523) is Juan Gine´s de Sepu´ lveda’s first reflection on the moral aspects of war. In it, he addresses whether it is morally licit for Christians to desire worldly honor and glory, a question that Christian mystics, Irenicists, and humanists like Desiderius Erasmus and Juan Luis Vives pos…[Read more]

Feminist resistance has been crucial for Argentina’s recovery from the military dictatorship of 1976-1983. Alicia Partnoy was “disappeared” into one of hundreds of torture centers sardonically called “Little Schools.” After her release and exile to the United States, she published her poetic testimony, The Little School, with Cleis Press in 1986.…[Read more]