Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia, this essay argues that modernism was a heterotopic movement, in which the creation of alternative social environments (such as Gertrude Stein’s atelier or the writers’ colony), and the imagination of alternative forms of social life in literature, were mutually informing, and inext…[Read more]

Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938) has found unusual currency of late. In 2011, the play lent its name to a major funding program launched by the National Endowment for the Arts; in 2017, it appeared in the center of a popular podcast and was revived by a British theater company in the wake of a terrorist attack. These productions recognize what t…[Read more]

In the Arab world, Beckett’s plays or their adaptations have not only been popular with audiences and directors but have also inspired other literary and media genres. The Beckettian wait itself has become synonymous with the condition of the Arab person. It is a wait that offers an unrealized potential of hope that reverberates with the d…[Read more]

This article discusses the confluence of the war on drugs and the war on terror with an analysis of the novels of Elmer Mendoza, (Balas de plata, Prueba de ácido, Nombre de perro, Besar al detective) Don Winslow (The Power of the Dog, The Cartel) and Mohsin Hamid (The Reluctant Fundamentalist)

Three faculty members from UMass Boston’s English Department—a team responsible for the department’s M.A. course on the Teaching of Literature and for the training of novice teachers of literature—examine the complex process of reading texts that they teach as if they are encountering them as their students do, for the first time. Accepting the p…[Read more]

My latest book publication, due from U of Tennessee P in 2020.

As advocacy to increase tenure-track academic career opportunities for PhD recipients and reverse institutions’ abuse of an immiserated class of adjunct instructors has long deplored, the portion of the faculty with tenure or on the tenure track has declined to under a third of the academic workforce, while the segment with part-time appointments…[Read more]

Drawing on Arabic textual traditions and foregrounding the liminal time and space of administrative detention, of the expired visa, of deportation, and of repatriation, Muslim slave narratives deserve recognition as generative forebears of transnational, multicultural literature in both England and the United States. Yet these forebears were…[Read more]

This essay reexamines the figure of Franz Kafka (1883–1924) in light of his largely ignored, recursive links to circum-Caribbean and Black Atlantic processes of racialized exploitation and corporal punishment. When we centre Kafka’s extensive biographical and literary engagements with these processes, the persistent debate over Kafka’s statu…[Read more]

As the digital humanities have rapidly gained prominence and attention over the last decade, learning has shifted from individual experiences at training environments such as THATCamps and Institutes to more formal institutional instruction. This means that the number of people teaching digital humanities (DH) has had to increase. Who are these…[Read more]

Introduction to four poems written by Langston Hughes during the Spanish Civil War, published in the Little-Known Documents section of PMLA.

The introduction alongside the text of the four poems can be found on the PMLA’s site: https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2019.134.3.562.

This article seeks to explore into the impact of 9/11 tragedy on the private lives of ordinary people and individuals and into the associated theme of identity crisis, as reflected in four important post-9/11 poems – “Someone Says They Looked Like Cartwheeling Birds” by Lyn Lifshin, “Making Love After September 11, 2001” by Aliki Barnstone…[Read more]

This article seeks to explore into the impact of 9/11 tragedy on the private lives of ordinary people and individuals and into the associated theme of identity crisis, as reflected in four important post-9/11 poems – “Someone Says They Looked Like Cartwheeling Birds” by Lyn Lifshin, “Making Love After September 11, 2001” by Aliki Barnstone…[Read more]