A paper describing an undergraduate course on science and literature in the Italian cultural tradition.

A challenge for Graphic Medicine is its being juxtaposed alongside biomedical and scientific fields of work that operate largely in the realm of statistics and quantifiable analytics. Often, the scholarship in Graphic Medicine comes without numbers. It is anecdotal, experiential, aesthetic/literary, or theoretical, customarily, and only…[Read more]

In this introduction to the digital humanities (DH), we will approach the field via a Caribbean Studies lens, exploring how an understanding of the digital based in the growing area of digital Caribbean studies might shape the larger field of DH.

The course aims to provide a landscape view of DH, paying attention to how its various approaches…[Read more]

Prendendo spunto dal sonetto 94 delle Rime di Gaspara Stampa, il mio saggio si propone di analizzare l’atteggiamento di sottomissione nei confronti dell’amato da parte della poetessa, contrastandolo con i momenti in cui Stampa ricatta l’amato, minacciando di offuscarne la gloria grazie al proprio ruolo di autrice. A partire da queste dichi…[Read more]

Composed during the most difficult years of Ludovico Ariosto’s relationship with the Este court, the Satire are known for presenting a picture of their author as a simple, quiet-loving man, and also as a man who can speak only the truth. However, the self-portrait offered by the Satire of the author as a man incapable of lying stands in direct c…[Read more]

From Michel de Montaigne’s essay “Of Friendship” to Jacques Derrida’s rearticulation of the former in The Politics of Friendship, scholars both early modern and modern have sought ways to address the fluid co-mixture of bodies from which the discourse of friendship can and does emerge. More recently still, new materialist thinkers of ontolog…[Read more]

A reading of Shakespeare and Deleuze on the subject of Anthropocene air. Keywords: endurance, climate change, fossil capitalism, carbon ghosts, Hamlet.

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]

In this essay Queen Margaret’s curses in Richard III become part of a feminist ethics on the early modern stage. As a parrhesiast, in Foucault’s terms, Margaret speaks truth to power and claims a right of citizenship. That Margaret elicits universal revulsion from the other characters while also holding a unique, though not untroubled, pos…[Read more]

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]

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.

This essay offers a critique of the vitalist turn in queer and ecological theory, here represented by the work of Karen Barad. Whereas Barad advances an image of life geared towards meaningful connection with others, human and nonhuman, Deleuze advances an a-signifying ontology of self-dismissal. The point of this essay isn’t to separate their t…[Read more]

How does a woman become a whore? What are the discursive dynamics making a woman a whore? And, more importantly, what are the discursive mechanics of unmaking? In Women and Shakespeare’s Cuckoldry Plays: Shifting Narratives of Marital Betrayal, Cristina León Alfar pursues these questions to tease out familiar cultural stories about female se…[Read more]

This article reviews With Great Power Comes Great Pedagogy: Teaching, Learning, and Comic Books, edited by Susan E. Kirtley, Antero Garcia, and Peter E. Carlson (University Press of Mississippi, 2020). The book covers a wide range of approaches, pedagogical techniques, and uses of comics and graphic novels, as well as making comics, in the…[Read more]

This paper interrogates the connection between entities that hover in the liminal state between life and death (such as vampires and spirits) and the manner in which these entities relate to Alaya Dawn Johnson’s conjurings of alternate political structures and hierarchies in her Spirit Binders series. Johnson’s alternate hierarchies are com…[Read more]