This essay argues that greater attention to the significance of the material culture of print, especially in early African American print culture, shows how technologies of racialization emerge in conjunction with technologies of printed words and images. The stereotype is perhaps the most familiar case. In one sense it offers quick reproduction…[Read more]

This essay argues that greater attention to the significance of the material culture of print, especially in early African American print culture, shows how technologies of racialization emerge in conjunction with technologies of printed words and images. The stereotype is perhaps the most familiar case. In one sense it offers quick reproduction…[Read more]

When it is spoken of at all, Emerson’s “Monadnoc” is described as a solicitation of natural sublimity. But a close rhetorical analysis of the poem reveals greater ambivalence about this sublimity than is apparent—linking it to later American philosophic poems by Frost, Stevens, Ammons, and Kinnell that at once solicit and question natural plenitu…[Read more]

“The Lore and Lure of the Academic Job Market” is an MLA 2016 special session in which panelists consider how discipline-specific “lore” continually lures graduate students and contingent and full-time faculty members into an already overcrowded job market. Instead of providing advice about getting a job, participants evaluate that advice and gen…[Read more]

Studying William Blake means studying the event of history, the way history merges with and emerges within theology, politics and philosophy. William Blake’s poetry has had a precarious relationship with history; his work resonates from very specific historical concerns and yet also seems to struggle against being confined to any formal h…[Read more]

The “modern university” is the social institution that has grown beyond the confines of brick and mortar to become a certifying body granting approval to those subjects who pass through its machinery, typically operating under the regulation and supervision of a government-sanctioned system of formalized accreditation. The modern university is ine…[Read more]

Muslim women’s perspective on liberatory Islamic orality (or empowerment via the oral traditions within Islam) is vastly accentuated in Fatema Mernissi’s and Leila Ahmed’s examinations of the harem structure. These harem narratives celebrate Sufism, a mystical Islamic theosophy that foregrounds orality and invites a constant search toward divine…[Read more]

This white paper outlines a model for open access (OA) publishing for the humanities and social sciences (HSS) that offers a scalable, fair, responsive, and discipline-independent solution that can be applied to the entire scholarly communication ecosystem in an incremental fashion, rolled out at both small and large scale. The solution proposed…[Read more]