In The Night Watchman (2020), Louise Erdrich continues to blur the lines between history and fiction as she has done in several of her novels. Erdrich introduces the reader to several magical elements that appear to be entirely real: two ghosts, a dog that talks, and an unearthly powwow with Jesus as one of the dancers. The main objective of this…[Read more]

In 2000 a Stanford professor raped me. My rape is now older than I was. (I’m still not as old as he was.) The more time passes the more I’m struck by Stanford’s apathy and fecklessness about sexual violence. I wrote a letter asking Stanford to stop compounding the abuse and to reckon with its rape culture. This letter—including the “Incomp…[Read more]

Johannesburg is a landlocked city, famously the largest human concentration in the southern hemisphere not located on a river. What opportunities does it afford for hydrocolonial analysis, given Isabel Hofmeyr’s anchoring of that term in oceanic studies? How might a hydrocolonial orientation defamiliarize the relations between surface and depths…[Read more]

Dream Life of Waste: Archaeologies of the Soul in the Key of Capitalism

(Entries organized in chronological order by date of obsolescence)

Essay on the poetry of Emily Dickinson and her impact upon literature. This essay celebrates her global reach from within societal spheres of gender. “Emily Dickinson transformed the genre of poetry from the academic salon styled idealism to the personal poignant voice of reality from the poet’s point of view.”

In this chapter, I connect my experience with abuse and intimate partner violence with my research projects and then radically changing my pedagogy away from coercion towards empathy.

This chapter details the efforts of the kindergarten educator, Elizabeth Harrison, to introduce Dante’s Divine Comedy to children in the midwestern United States during the late nineteenth century.

This chapter details the efforts of the kindergarten educator, Elizabeth Harrison, to introduce Dante’s Divine Comedy to children in the midwestern United States during the late nineteenth century.

This syllabus for Major Authors: Anonymous serves as one of the capstone seminar options for our English Majors and Minors. In overhauling our curriculum to make the English BA represent more literature, we removed Single-Author-Named courses & replaced them with Major Authors. Each faculty who teach this course make an argument for the various…[Read more]

The aestheticism of Walter Pater and Vernon Lee participated in a late-nineteenth-century discourse devoted to exploring the aesthetic’s role in producing and sustaining, as well as undermining, notions of racial difference. Pater’s “A Study of Dionysus: The Spiritual Form of Fire and Dew” (1876) and Lee’s “Dionea” (1890) partake of Immanue…[Read more]

This essay focuses on Olive Schreiner’s personal correspondence and the allegories collected in Dreams (1890) to explore her complicated relationship to late-Victorian Decadence. I argue that Schreiner modified Decadent writers’ use of intersensoriality and synaesthesia to educate her readers into a new kind of common sense, one aligned with her…[Read more]

In the fall of 2019 I taught my eighteenth-century novel course as an exercise in slow reading, taking a tactic I had used before: putting a canonical work of fiction into the context of the other voices in the literary marketplace, and the circumstances of its making. For such a course, Tristram Shandy is an ideal central text. It was published…[Read more]

The reports listed here and then reproduced in facsimile were published in British and American journals during the nineteenth century. They describe contemporary aspects, both editorial and mechanical, of the production processes that made such publications possible. Leading topics include the relative efficiency of steam-powered printing, the…[Read more]