Full collection of essays written during my undergraduate and graduate studies in literature.

Students learn more when they play—while the value of play often is emphasized only for those early in their education, play has a role in higher education as well. To teach book history across time and space, I developed two card games: Codex Conquest (http://codexconquest.lib.uiowa.edu/) and Mark (under development: h…[Read more]

Teaching Book History through Card Games: Codex Conquest and Mark
Amy Hildreth Chen, English and American Literature Librarian, University of Iowa
Students learn more when they play—while the value of play often is emphasized only for those early in their education, play has a role in higher education as well. To teach book history across t…[Read more]

In 1526, royal refiner and natural historian Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1478-1557) praised the singular quality of the “muchos tesoros de oro labrado / en poder delos indios q̄ se hā cōquistado” (lxv, v). By 1535, however, he had to define what, exactly, he meant by gold: “No hablo aquí en el oro que se ha habido por rescates, o en la guerra, ni…[Read more]

Archives and libraries operate within a complex web of social, political and economic forces. Digital technologies, globalization, the corporatization of the academy, and increasing commercial control of the scholarly record are just some of the myriad forces shaping their evolution. Libraries and archives in turn have shaped the production of…[Read more]

In light of (re)new(ed) interest in focusing interdisciplinary scholarly attention on the history of capitalism – a focus captured in Edward Baptist’s recent book, The Half has Never Been Told – this essay reads Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel A Mercy as a key text for considering the history of capitalism as central to conceptions of circum-…[Read more]

In light of (re)new(ed) interest in focusing interdisciplinary scholarly attention on the history of capitalism – a focus captured in Edward Baptist’s recent book, The Half has Never Been Told – this essay reads Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel A Mercy as a key text for considering the history of capitalism as central to conceptions of circum-…[Read more]

Short paper presented for MLA 2019 Session 417 – “Critical Computation: What’s Next?”

This book constitutes the result of a pedagogical experimentation, that I conducted for the Master in Linguistic and Literary Sciences of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milan, during the academic year 2017-2018. The critical essays that are here collected have been written by some students of my class, and show clearly enough that…[Read more]

This article describes a pedagogical project that took place between 2015 and 2016, and involved my students of the French Literature class, third year of Bachelor of Arts (foreign languages). The intersection and interrelation between figurative art and poetry were at the centre of the theoretical insight, whereas the necessity of adapting our…[Read more]

This course was first taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in fall 2018.
It addresses feminism, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, and critical race and ethnic studies in conjunction with translation studies.

Review of James Cook, Alexander Kolassa, and Adam Whittaker, eds.
Recomposing the Past: Representations of Early Music on Stage and
Screen. Ashgate Screen Music Series. New York and London:
Routledge, 2018. xii, 259 pp. ISBN: 9781138287471 (hardback).

In this article, I argue that Margaret Cavendish uses ‘Sociable Letters’ and the female friendship within its pages to intervene in early modern epistolary traditions and negotiate alternatives for conventional markers of intimacy between correspondents. Grounding the argument in current scholarly debates on familiar letter conventions, I…[Read more]