CFP / Essay Contest
Empire and Contemporary Children’s Literature
Empire Studies, an open-access online magazine, invites essays for a special issue on specific topics within a broad consideration of “Empire and Contemporary Children’s Literature.”
We are looking for student-friendly, jargon-free essays,
1600-2000 word count. The winning…[Read more]

WAR AND THE NATURAL WORLD: Discussion questions for “Scarred Lands and Wounded Lives: The Environmental Footprint of War” by Alice and Lincoln Day and related sources.

WAR AND THE NATURAL WORLD: Interview with filmmakers and producers Alice and Lincoln Day about their documentary “Scarred Lands and Wounded Lives: The Environmental Footprint of War”

My cadets always listen carefully to the “Law of Unintended Consequences.” It is a law that applies in the most surprising of contexts, none more so than warfare.
The unintended consequences of war—both good and bad—are fascinating to my students. My cadets always engage with lesson plans on the technology that came out of World War II, for exa…[Read more]

Nature and Empire: Discussion questions for “Kingdom Under Glass: A Tale of Obsession, Adventure, and One Man’s Quest to Preserve the World’s Great Animals” by Jay Kirk

Interview with Kirk on his work on Akeley.

Jay Kirk’s Kingdom Under Glass examines the life and career of taxidermist/adventurer Carl Akeley. Kirk, a professor of creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania, follows Akeley on his life-long quest to perfect methods of the preservation and presentation of natural specimens, and to establish himself as an artistic talent within the b…[Read more]

The relationship between man’s empire and nature is critical, as we are finding out today. Overwhelmingly the relationship is one of sheer exploitation, but the style and content of our attitude towards nature in all its forms has taken vastly different form in different societies.
Nature and empire is an impossibly sprawling and complex field, e…[Read more]

Discussion Questions for Women in Melville by Cynthia Nixon

Interview with Claudia A. Dixon, author of Bringing Her Home: The Woman in Herman Melville.

Claudia Dixon is a bold thinker and a natural writer. I wish writers like Claudia Dixon were producing all of our textbooks. In chapter three, she looks at Melville’s friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, and how much it meant to Melville that a fellow author understood what he was trying to do. In the following interview and excerpt from her d…[Read more]

Interview with Nicholas Christopher, author of Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City

“Somewhere in the Night” is an insightful look into one of the most influential genres of the
20th century. Poet and scholar Nicholas Christopher delivers to his readers a compelling
personal journey into the mysteries of movies as diverse as D.O.A., Sunset Boulevard, and even
Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. It is a sprawling subject…[Read more]

In this interview and the subsequent book review, we try to introduce the general reader to the topic. Nicholas Christopher is a poet and scholar whose book Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City opens the door to noir riches.
Film noir’s lasting value to students, teachers and the general reader is in the depth and breadth of t…[Read more]

How do cultural influences travel from place to place? It is sometimes easy to trace these lines of influence in the modern era, but how did this process work in the past? Looking at the past, how can we decipher which elements of architecture or music or literature came from which sub-culture? In her dissertation, the author looks closely at…[Read more]

James Joyce is a fascinating writer, but he can be a most difficult author to teach. In her dissertation, Lynn Bongiovanni brings a recent viewpoint – empire theory – to bear on this most singular author and finds an interesting paradox. While Joyce inveighed against imperial rule – in this case, Ireland’s “colonization” by the British – he was ca…[Read more]

Smart people like Edward Said, Harold Bloom and, here, Nalini Iyer, see elements of imperial narratives in novels like Robinson Crusoe and Lord of the Flies. The same elements can be identified in contemporary stories movies like Avatar. As empires change, so do the stories we tell to make sense of the machineries and processes that support…[Read more]

We all tend to see what we want to see — in ourselves, in our friends, in our culture, and in other cultures. In his dissertation, Jens-Uwe Guettel takes a penetrating look at how Germany viewed America over the course of the 19th century, the period of America’s great expansion westward.
In the following interview and excerpt, you will find hig…[Read more]

My students always get a kick out of writing like this – provocative, smart, funny, and taking with a big idea. In this case, the idea is really big: that radar was a precursor to GPS in giving us a way to conceive of our universe, and to map ourselves within that universe (and that is only part of the thesis). Here are two typical s…[Read more]