Shakespeare’s three political tragedies―Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear―have numerously been presented or adapted on film. These three plays all involve the recurring trope of madness, which, as constructed by Shakespeare, provided a wider canvas on which to detail those materials that could not be otherwise expressed: sexual desire and exp…[Read more]

Between 1988 and 1994 American comic books engaged the politics, problematics, and crises of the AIDS epidemic by injecting the virus and its social, cultural, and epidemiological effects on gay men into the four-color fantasies of the superhero genre. As the comic-book industry was undergoing major internal changes that allowed for more mature,…[Read more]

The humanities must work together with STEM if we are to succeed in articulating relevant, historically informed, and culturally nuanced responses to grand challenges.

On many occasions cinema has chosen to shoot movies in locales other than the ones in which the events of the films are supposed to take place in. This could be due to various reasons, namely cheaper production costs, or inability to gain access to the original place. The choice of location, however, tries to provide a mirror image of the…[Read more]

Media representations of Arabs and terrorists.

n her treatise on abjection, Julia Kristeva argues that the abject is located outside the self, remaining in a state of repulsion that threatens to destroy the self. Abject representations are prevalent in the way terrorists have been portrayed in the Western news media post-September 11, 2001. These images of abjection are problematic, as they…[Read more]

Code switching is a practice exercised by multilingual speakers. Linguists define the term as the simultaneous use of more than one language. Code switching is prevalent in postcolonial countries in which the colonial language has continued to exist alongside the native language. In the past, code switching in the Arab world has been confined to…[Read more]

The changes that have been witnessed by media in the Arab world have redefined media’s initial role as a source of information. With the advent of satellite television new realities, namely the dismantling of communication boundaries, have emerged. At first, such advancements posed a challenge to government bodies, specifically in the Arab region;…[Read more]

This paper offers a brief consideration of the literary ballad as a register of what by the mid-’60s economists had diagnosed as “urban crisis” and in 1970 John Ashbery called “urban chaos.” I’m particularly interested in how poets used the ballad to see and see into the failures of the “spatio-temporal fix” of urban renewal. My general idea is…[Read more]

This essay demonstrates that Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake goes beyond conventional wisdom about immigrant experiences in so far as it explores how the South Asian diaspora participates in transnational connections, shaping and transforming the notion of American identity in the contemporary global era. Lahiri’s novel offers us a striking acc…[Read more]

How do we offer feedback to essays? Over time, the response as narrative has become problematic. Class sizes have increased, more classes are being taught, fewer professors are teaching composition. Time has become even more scarce as duties outside the classroom multiply for full-time faculty. In addition, technology has changed the way by…[Read more]

contribution to the 2016 MLA Convention Panel sponsored by “Connected Academics”