The essays collected in this volume demonstrate that, when certain medieval and contemporary cultural texts are placed alongside each other — such as a fourteenth-century penitential handbook and the reality television show “Survivor,” or early fifteenth-century Lancastrian statecraft (Henry IV) and the stagecraft of George W. Bush’s presidential…[Read more]

Christina McPhee’s ‘commonplace book’ draws from a palimpsest of handwritten notes, lists, quotations, bibliographic fragments, and sketches, from an artist whose voracious reading practice is a direct feed into her life and art — all set to a visual and textual design-as-score, as prominent writers on painting, media arts, performance, video i…[Read more]

Although widely beloved for its playfulness and comic sensibility, Chaucer’s poetry is also subtly shot through with dark moments that open into obscure and irresolvably haunting vistas, passages into which one might fall head-first and never reach the abyssal bottom, scenes and events where everything could possibly go horribly wrong or where e…[Read more]

Proceedings from the two Speculative Medievalisms symposia, held at King’s College London (Jan. 2011) and The Graduate Center, City University of New York (Sep. 2011), and organized by The Petropunk Collective (Eileen Joy, Anna Klosowska, Nicola Masciandaro, and Michael O’Rourke). These interdisciplinary events were dedicated to dialogue and cro…[Read more]

This short essay, co-authored with L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, in the edited 2-volume collection BURN AFTER READING, eds. Eileen A. Joy, Myra Seaman, and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Oliphaunt Books, 2014), ruminates the importance of the humanities as an important space for the artfulness of living, for enriched environments, and real-time experimental…[Read more]

The essays, manifestos, rants, screeds, pleas, soliloquies, telegrams, broadsides, eulogies, songs, harangues, confessions, laments, and acts of poetic terrorism in these two volumes — which collectively form an academic “rave” — were culled, with some later additions, from roundtable sessions at the International Congress on Medieval Studies…[Read more]

Module Summary: Using the aftermath of 9/11 and the US invasion of Iraq as a case study, this module asks why states engage in torture, giving particular consideration to why liberal states euphemise, conceal, and downplay this practice. We will examine the ramifications of 9/11 across multiple legal domains, domestically within the US and…[Read more]

The 2018 International Research Conference at UC Davis focuses on:

Changing political environment and its impact on international research
Increasing importance of networks and consortia in advancing international research
Role of interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary research in solving global challenges
Educating the next…[Read more]

Mad Max: Fury Road has been critiqued for its feminist, masculine, biblical, and environmental themes, but these critiques fail to engage with the connection between humans, machines, and the Earth in Fury Road. Nuclear technology may have produced the apocalyptic wasteland in which the film is set, but machines and industrial technology remain…[Read more]

Fashion is defined most prominently by its association with perpetual metamorphoses and rapid changes constantly driven by the demand for novelty. Traditionally, fashion mechanisms were known to function cyclically in relation to social ideals and epochs of thought. Following the democratization and decentralization of the fashion system in the…[Read more]

This paper describes a catalogued but rare manuscript (call number 170/307) held by the Charles Young Research Library at UCLA, in which one can find the by-laws of a barely known medieval confraternity, located in the city of Teruel and devoted to St. Julian.
Most of these by-laws were written around 1402, although it does also…[Read more]

Evaluation can be seen as an opportunity for transvaluation, or what Nietzsche called the revaluation of values. However, evaluation is often treated instead as the enforcement of standards – standardization rather than transformation. When evaluation as transvaluation and evaluation as standardization are both used to evaluate the same s…[Read more]

With its focus on the achievement of painterly effects in photography , the international Pictorialist movement sought to employ various techniques and aesthetic approaches in order to capture images of landscapes and delicate feminine beauty within perfectly composed atmospheric settings. Facing the turn of the twentieth century, a time when the…[Read more]

This paper considers the ways in which the television ghost story serves to support understanding and interpretations of history, and particularly an understanding of causality. As Helen Wheatley has identified, the typical detailed period settings of the television Gothic operate as a form of ‘dark heritage’ drama, where, instead of the att…[Read more]

This work addresses the question of how the patron saint festivities in San Germán, Puerto Rico assisted in the reconstruction of the Puerto Rican nation during the 1950s. Particularly, I focus on how community leaders reproduced ideas of nationhood based on hispano-centric, white, Catholic, and patriarchal parameters. I investigate how an…[Read more]

This paper analyzes the 1774 Portugal Inquisition’s Regiment and its link with the cultural interventionism that marked the Pombalist reformism, whichstarted at the second halfof 18th century. These are allthe policiesthat influenced the public, social, cultural and religious institutions of Portugal and its colonies, based in…[Read more]

The aim of this course is to explore the cultural constructions of gender and sexuality in the literature of Medieval and Renaissance Southern Europe. We will approach questions such as the status of women and the context of misogyny, the societal role of same-sex relations, the presentation and visualization of sexuality, desire and the body. We…[Read more]

371 is an introduction to canonical works of Early Modern Spanish. This semester, we take a novel approach to the reading and interpretation of masterpieces of Spanish literature to revisit the notion of canon, and to challenge standard disciplinary approaches that constrain Spanish and Portuguese within the boundaries of national literary and…[Read more]

Explores the Marianas Web meme as a cultural myth. Special appearance by Rudy Giuliani.

Discusses the use of emotions in marketing and advertising, especially contemporary digital marketing, and how emotional manipulation will lead to a world full of love.