An essay written for “Neuroscience and Fiction,” a special issue of SubStance guest-edited by Pierre Casso-Nogues

The attached syllabus was written for my undergraduate seminar “Renaissance Media” (ENGL 281) taught Spring 2016 at UNC Chapel Hill. The learning objectives for the course were as follows:
“During this course, students will:
* learn the basic history and culture of media technologies in England during the early modern period (roughly 150…[Read more]

Abstract: This article poses a challenge to contemporary historicist tendency to silence significant semantic threads within Hamlet, attempts to restore our critical interest in the age-old problem of delay of the protagonist, and thus distinguish the text in itself from its historicised version. In doing so, my over-all argument proposes an…[Read more]

What are digital video’s functions? How can those functions be best facilitated in the field of Shakespeare studies when the disciplinary boundary between text and performance is blurred by virtual performative texts? This article surveys the state of global Shakespeare and analyses the implications of digital video in scholarly and pedagogic practice.

In 2003, David Mitchell’s editorial contact at the US branch of Random House moved from the publisher, leaving the American edition of Cloud Atlas (2004) without an editor for approximately three months. Meanwhile, the UK edition of the manuscript was undergoing a series of editorial changes and rewrites that were never synchronised back into t…[Read more]

At a time when Shakespeare is becoming increasingly globalized and diversified it is urgent more than ever to ask how this appropriated ‘Shakespeare’ constructs ethical value across cultural and other fault lines. Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation is the first book to address the intersection of ethics, aesthetics, authority, and authenticity.

Visual Ethnography, Stereotypes, and Photographing Algeria

Būqālah refers both to a ceramic pitcher as well as to poems ritually embedded in the traditional, favorite, divinatory pastime associated with women city dwellers of specific Algerian towns such as Blida,Cherchell, Tlemcen, Constantine, and Algiers. This essay considers the shift from orality to a written archive of French and Algerian c…[Read more]

Touring theatre is a place where theatre studies and globalization come into contact. The year of 2012 was a year of global festivities in which Shakespeare’s works played a major part. Through their exemplary power, the intersections of world cultures and Shakespeare provide a set of important issues for repositioning theatre studies in the w…[Read more]

Although “fabulous” animals tend to be thought of as, say, unicorns, for early modern and medieval natural history, as well as the developed attention to gender and reproduction in twenty-first century science, the “fabulous” animal might be the one next door, like, say, squirrels.

Embedded masques or masques within plays exploited an audience desire to witness elite bodies, dress, and behavior in theatrical spaces. They commodified and sold a voyeuristic look at the masque and the masquing hall, access to which was normally restricted to the elite. This essay examines a selection of 17th-century plays that dramatize…[Read more]

The Irish mantle – a type of long, heavy woolen cloak – came under regular attack by writers and lawmakers in Tudor and Stuart England. This article examines how a range of early modern English texts used the Irish mantle to establish and regulate the boundaries of national identity. The Irish were problematically similar to the English; most…[Read more]