In this essay, I argue that the post-war critical re-interpretation of Boccaccio’s oeuvre was central to the theory and practice of Italian Neorealism. What is more, I maintain that Neorealism significantly influenced Boccaccio studies, shaping critical approaches to Boccaccio for decades after 1945. Reading scholarly and critical studies of…[Read more]

This essay will examine the multiple performance texts that exist in Ivo Van Hove’s transcultural and transmedial performance event, The Roman Tragedies (which toured worldwide from 2007 to 2013) to suggest that, in today’s “spreadable” culture (to borrow from Henry Jenkins), appropriative use becomes the bridge that can unify ‘work’ and ‘event.…[Read more]

Can we imagine a Blue Humanities that takes the non-relation as a starting point for ecological thought? I believe we can. Following Shakespeare and Deleuze, this essay engages in a thought experiment that, if it is not too absurd, might, like the ship of fools of medieval times, unmoor the Blue Humanities from its current safe harbor by putting…[Read more]

This essay examines how the rhetoric of animalization in Shakespeare’s Othello compels us to think early modern categories of race in connection with early modern discourses of “human” versus “animal.” Beginning with Shakespeare’s representation of Iago, I suggest that it is the potential for sameness conditioned by Iago’s counterfactua…[Read more]

This book is the first full-length monograph to bring a range of computational methods to bear in a sustained fashion, on a single novel, at the micro-level. While most contemporary digital studies are interested in distant-reading paradigms for large-scale literary history – using their digital methods as a telescope – following calls by Alan Liu…[Read more]

This book is the first full-length monograph to bring a range of computational methods to bear in a sustained fashion, on a single novel, at the micro-level. While most contemporary digital studies are interested in distant-reading paradigms for large-scale literary history – using their digital methods as a telescope – following calls by Alan Liu…[Read more]

Final progress report about the California Open Educational Resources Council’s work with 3 representatives from each of the California State University, University of California, and California Community Colleges, to investigate the efficacy of implementing adoption of OER textbooks and to create a repository of OER textbooks for use in all 3 systems.

Based on its survey responses, the California Open Educational Resources Council identified several impediments to adopting OER textbooks and concluded that rigorous peer review was ultimately the first step towards advocating for adoption of OER textbooks. The Council quickly identified 50 highly-enrolled courses with expensive textbooks across…[Read more]

Syllabus for an upper-level English seminar at SUNY Cortland | Is Google racist? Is Wikipedia sexist? In this course, we will critically reflect on the digital tools and platforms that mediate so much of our daily lives. More specifically, we will explore how digital technologies can reproduce and challenge conditions of racial, class, and gender…[Read more]

Primo Levi, ‘La treva’

Review of Primo Levi, ‘Si això és un home’

Traditionally read as a poem about laboring subjects who gain power through abstract and abstracting forms of bodily discipline, John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, 1674) more compellingly foregrounds the erotics of the Garden as a space where humans and nonhumans intra-act materially and sexually. Following Christopher Hill, who long ago pointed t…[Read more]

Turning to Walter Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana (1596) and The History of the World (1614), I reframe such biopolitical factors as Ralegh’s “dissability” around a concept that has less to do with human world-making and more to do with the “states of exception” (Giorgio Agamben) under which inhuman agencies come to matter for world history (of…[Read more]

Apocalyptic themes handled by Spanish directors of the current century, including Jaume Balagueró, Paco Plaza, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, David and Álex Pastor, Álex de la Iglesia, Juan Antonio Bayona, Jorge Torregrossa, and Alfonso Cortés-Cavanillas, and F. Javier Gutiérrez.

The book publishing industry is an important social, cultural, and economic institution whose records deserve to be preserved for the public good. Books.Files was an exploratory project funded in part by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation aimed at assessing the archival value of digital assets in the contemporary publishing industry for stakeholders…[Read more]

Though the verbal icon has a long and robust multisensory history extending beyond Milton, my goal here is to challenge ableist readings of Milton’s poetry by linking his poetic ekphrasis to the politics and aesthetics of disability.

The matter of Troilus and Criseyde had been dealt in both England and Scotland in similar yet different ways from the late 14th to the early 17th century. In Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (ca. 1385), the conflict between worldly and heavenly love is depicted in a controversial way. Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid (ca. 1480) seems to give a Sco…[Read more]