Digital humanists have a labor problem, but it’s not what you might think. In this chapter, I describe the problem of student labor in digital humanities as I see it, and examine some of the structural issues that drive the use of student labor. I place the labor economy of digital humanities projects within the broader context of the innovation e…[Read more]

This article analyzes Stop-and-Frisk policing within the long history of lynching through the analytical framework of performance studies. Contemporary audio recordings of stop-and-frisk procedures are thought in relation to the historical examples of the Zoot Suit Riots and late 19th-century and early 20th-century lynchings of African Americans.

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]

At the intersection of comics and medicine is the rise of the Graphic Medicine scholarship field. This course examines the ways in which the sequentialized hybrid of word and image is bringing new insights to patient, healthcare, and clinical experiences.

In any manner of ways, the comics medium (whether known as comic books, graphic novels,…[Read more]

Front matter for Literatures of Liberalization: Global Circulation and the Long Nineteenth Century

Two-Act Play

Nobody goes to Gary is a Swiftian satire. Gil Tolliver, an investigative reporter I New York City, makes a fateful journey into the real heart of Gary, Indiana, after hearing the musical tune “Gary, Indiana, Gary, Indiana” during _The Music Man_. Don’t measure the distance of Gary from New York in miles, but in emotional light…[Read more]

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).

Since his first works came to critical attention, Ernest Hemingway has occupied a space in the critical and cultural imagination as a definitively ‘masculine’ writer. His novels and stories focus on male narrators in difficult or extreme situations involving war, violence, and the natural world, and his critical heritage has focused on these ele…[Read more]

Bound by market pressures, twenty-first century academia finds itself fettered by the demands of “student success” that a capitalist knowledge economy places on its participants. Humanities scholars are, as Jonathan Dollimore noted in his 2014 SAA address, pressed with their back against the wall, “in a marketplace pretty indifferent to what…[Read more]

This special issue of Social Text takes as its starting point the generative tension between recovery as an imperative that is fundamental to historical writing and research, and the impossibility of recovery when engaged with archives whose very assembly and organization occlude certain historical subjects. Responding to recent debates among…[Read more]

Syllabus, project assignments, and milestones for HON 313, “Reading Machines” (Fall 2017), a first-year interdisciplinary experience course at NC State University. Reading Machines invites students into a historically ranging, critically intensive, and hands-on learning environment about the technologies by which humans transmit ideas. The course…[Read more]

Late medieval culture tends to value pain highly and positively. Accordingly, much medievalist scholarship links pain with fear and emphasizes their usefulness in the period’s philosophy, literature, visual art, and drama. Yet, key moments in The York Play of the Crucifixion, The Second Shepherds’ Play, and The Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge tro…[Read more]