In this article I ask what happens if we consider Jewett, who spent most of her adult life at the epicenter of New England intellectual culture, as a pivotal figure in the Western history of theorizing sexuality, and her 1884 novel, A Country Doctor, as a significant document in the history of theorizing sexual and gender deviation, perfectly…[Read more]

This class asks what sex looked and felt like before the instantiation of modern identity categories such as homosexuality or heterosexuality—before, that is, our desires became an index to our souls. To this end, we’ll examine texts by nineteenth-century American writers that represent the experiences and expressions of what we now call sex…[Read more]

The Iberian Peninsula during the Latin Middle Ages was home to large populations of Muslims and Jews. During the period we like to call the Middle Ages, much of the Iberian Peninsula was under Muslim rule. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the entire peninsula was under Christian rule, and Judaism and Islam were officially banned.…[Read more]

A series of derivative verses from the late-third century has pride of place in one of the foundational collections of Chinese poetry. These verses, “Filling out the Missing Odes” by Shu Xi, can be found at the beginning of the lyric-poetry (shi 詩) section of the Wenxuan. This essay seeks to understand why such blatantly imitative pieces may have…[Read more]

This essay explores how Pierre Nora’s sites of memory work a specific cultural function through what Melvin Dixon refers to as “a memory that ultimately rewrites history.” I look at two of the most well-known poems of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and Countee Cullen’s “Heritage,” one of which reveals a…[Read more]

IMC paper for panel 374 Medieval Futura 1: Now, sponsored by the Medieval Studies Institute, Indiana Univ.–Bloomington and organised by Dr Andrea Whitacre.

The problem of the “yes,” of affirming an historical identity that is potentially harmful to oneself, troubles some of the imaginative leaps necessary to how readers desire to identify with texts. With that in mind, this article reads Octavia Butler’s 1979 novel Kindred as a story about memory, history, and embodiment as written both on and thr…[Read more]

From the mid-1960s onward, compilations of the speeches and trial addresses of South African opponents of apartheid focused attention on the apartheid regime despite intensified repression in the wake of the Rivonia Trial. Mary Benson’s novel, At the Still Point, transposes the political trial into fiction. Its “stenographic” codes of repre…[Read more]

Sepharadim participated in the Hispanic vernacular culture of the Iberian Peninsula. Even in the time of al-Andalus many spoke Hispano-Romance, and even their Hebrew literature belies a deep familiarity with and love of their native Hispano-Romance languages. However, since the early sixteenth century the vast majority of Sepharadim have never…[Read more]

We are inviting proposals for the forthcoming “Re-membering Hospitality in the Mediterranean” International Conference that will be held on March 26-27, 2020 in Toulouse, France (Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès).
Abstracts (300 words) are due by September 15, 2019 to yasser elhariry (yasser.elhariry@dartmouth.edu), Isabelle Keller-Privat (isa.…[Read more]

This volume contributes to the study of early English poetics. In these essays, several related approaches and fields of study radiate outward from poetics, including stylistics, literary history, word studies, gender studies, metrics, and textual criticism. By combining and redirecting these traditional scholarly methods, as well as exploring…[Read more]

In this article, through a reading of Mark Blacklock’s 2015 novel, I’m Jack, alongside the history of erasure poetry, I suggest that an apt literary-critical metaphor for reading redaction in contemporary literature comes from the term “metadata.” This article schematizes the ways in which redaction can work in literary contexts and points to the…[Read more]

A talk given at the ANT workshop at the University of Southern Denmark in 2017. I develop some of these ideas in chapter 4 of my current book