Building on existing film and urban histories, this innovative volume examines Spanish cinema through contemporary interdisciplinary theories of urban space, the built environment, visuality and mass culture from the industrial through to the digital age. Architecture and the Urban in Spanish Film brings together the scholarship of an…[Read more]

How does one understand a filmmaker like José Antonio Nieves Conde, a Falangist whose films with strong neorealist tendencies were radically altered by the Francoist censors for being too critical of the economic injustices inherent to daily urban life after the Spanish Civil War? Many film critics have asked this question and this essay looks…[Read more]

Gene Wolfe, living though Severian, re-experiences via Thecla’s characterization of him as not being worth enough to value highly for being what he thought he could only amount to her when he first met her, that is, simply a boy at hand, his own once being lured into the attentions’ of his mother and then dismissed by her when she was done usi…[Read more]

This volume explores the history, evolution, and future of Luso-Hispanic Cultural Studies as a discipline, a pedagogical tool, and a set of working practices by bringing together a diverse group of renowned specialists to examine how the field has grown out of and radically reconsidered some of the basic premises of British Cultural Studies since…[Read more]

Review of Katherine R. Larson, The Matter of Song in Early England. Abstract: Katherine R. Larson’s The Matter of Song in Early England is an exceptional study. It offers the perspective not just of an academic—Larson is professor of English at the University of Toronto—but also that of a performer, as Larson is an ac- complished singer. In this…[Read more]

Canon, tradition, and origin anchor developmental accounts of Black literary history, describing the forward movement from a singular beginning in terms of birth, maturation, and inheritance. This model delimits a specialized field of study, but also obscures texts, practices, and archives that do not cohere with it. In the study of slave…[Read more]

Since the Intifada of 2000, living conditions in the Gaza Strip have progressively deteriorated, and when Hamas came to power in 2006–07, a complete blockade was enforced on the inhabitants by Egypt and Israel. In addition, five full-scale wars have been
waged on the Strip. Despite these conditions, Gazans remain resilient, as evidenced by s…[Read more]

Describes and provides examples of modules and assignments for a sophomore Brit Lit survey and an upper-division poetics class that responded to student demands for a more racially diverse canon. Includes a brief discussion of Lucius Henry Holsey, enslaved worker on the UGA campus, who claimed to have learned to read from Milton’s Paradise Lost…[Read more]

A literary analysis and summary of John Burnside’s poem “The Painter Fabritius Begins Work on the Lost Noli Me Tangere of 1652” (2,570 words)

Scholars who have studied the contested meaning of “creole” in Louisiana have
typically maintained that the “Creole myth,” that is the strategic redefinition of
the term “creole” to refer to the white descendants of Louisiana’s original French
and Spanish settlers, emerged during or shortly after the Civil War. Drawing on
a newspaper art…[Read more]

Published in New Orleans in 1845 by a group of free men of color, Les Cenelles: Choix de poésies indigènes is now commonly recognized as the first collection of African American poetry. As a testament to and expression of the intellectual prowess of New Orleans’s francophone free Black community, Les Cenelles deserves to be read as a formally int…[Read more]

Este ensayo propone una lectura de Conquista de las islas Malucas (1609) del poeta, historiador y eclesiástico Bartolomé Leonardo de Argensola (1562-1631) como un gabinete de curiosidades textual lleno de narraciones y objetos maravillosos. El autor emplea sus propias ideas sobre la escritura de la historia para crear una crónica de conquista co…[Read more]

In this paper, in a panel co-sponsored by the MLA Committee on Contingent Labor in the Profession and the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, I summarize some of the structural and practical problems that challenge contingent scholars when they try to publish their work in scholarly journals. I share the record of the online, multimedia,…[Read more]

Attention in the humanities has lately turned to the re-thinking of traditional modes of publishing. But is the academy prepared to assess work that deviates from the recognised forms and formats associated with ‘digging down and standing back’ (Felski 2015, p. 52)? This chapter investigates whether humanistic research, usually expressed in wor…[Read more]

The purpose of this essay is to better understand the motives of the real estate mogul and construction magnate -J.C.Nichols- responsible for the construction of the first non-centrally located shopping mall in the United States in Kansas City in the 1920s. Specifically, this study focuses on why and how Nichols resorted to a pastiche of…[Read more]

This essay compares the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic at two universities on opposite sides of the world: Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in the United States. It argues that the pandemic has revealed the extent to which campuses have reorganized their institutional…[Read more]