Over the past year, artists, doctors, medical professionals, and international agencies such as the World Health Organisation have been using comics to communicate the risks of the SARS-CoV2 virus. The visual economy and a near-universal language of lines, balloons, and panels in comics makes them well suited to disseminate epidemic-related…[Read more]

In this paper, in a panel co-sponsored by the MLA Committee on Contingent Labor in the Profession and the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, I summarize some of the structural and practical problems that challenge contingent scholars when they try to publish their work in scholarly journals. I share the record of the online, multimedia,…[Read more]

Attention in the humanities has lately turned to the re-thinking of traditional modes of publishing. But is the academy prepared to assess work that deviates from the recognised forms and formats associated with ‘digging down and standing back’ (Felski 2015, p. 52)? This chapter investigates whether humanistic research, usually expressed in wor…[Read more]

It is well known that Walter Scott adapted the forms of sentimental fiction for his initial trilogy of novels on Scottish manners and that he drew on philosophical theories of sympathy when conceiving of his characters and placing them in historical relation to one another and to his readership. Scott’s adaptations of sentimentalism and of…[Read more]

The purpose of this essay is to better understand the motives of the real estate mogul and construction magnate -J.C.Nichols- responsible for the construction of the first non-centrally located shopping mall in the United States in Kansas City in the 1920s. Specifically, this study focuses on why and how Nichols resorted to a pastiche of…[Read more]

This essay compares the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic at two universities on opposite sides of the world: Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in the United States. It argues that the pandemic has revealed the extent to which campuses have reorganized their institutional…[Read more]

*Reading Mistress Elizabeth Bourne Marriage, Separation, and Legal Controversies,* Edited by Cristina León Alfar and Emily G. Sherwood, Routledge 2021, The Early Modern Englishwoman, 1500-1750: Contemporary Editions. “Reading Mistress Elizabeth Bourne tells the story of Mistress Bourne’s petition for divorce, its resolution, and her ongoing di…[Read more]