This paper applies the concept of sustainability to humanities research and assessment, extending Donald Stokes’s model of “Pasteur’s Quadrant” to suggest a place for humanities- and arts-based scholarship and to identify humanistic practices and methods through which we might “assess” them. It concludes with a reading that deploys the scholarly…[Read more]

The Afterword to this EMLS Special Issue “European Women in Early Modern English Drama” contextualizes this collection in light of our continued scholarly and social investigation into the invention of “whiteness” and of a pan-European identity. It argues that texturing the flat surface of “whiteness” and “Europeanness” can enable us to “…[Read more]

This essay argues that Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) deploys feminist intermediality to appropriate Othello in the service of a highly nuanced womanist aesthetics. The essay defines and offers examples of some important theoretical approaches, including: appropriation studies; intersectional feminism; intermediality; w…[Read more]

In 2016 Paapa Essiedu, a British actor of Ghanaian ancestry, starred as Hamlet in Simon
Godwin’s lauded Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production, set in a post-colonial
African state whose non-specificity nonetheless irritated some reviewers. We contend,
however, that the production mixed multiple referents of blackness (Eastern A…[Read more]

Non-copy-edited MS Word doc of the intro to my edited collection _Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body (Routledge, 2015), uploaded in accordance with publisher’s Green OA policies.

This is the non-copy-edited Microsoft Word manuscript of my chapter in the edited collection _Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body_ (Routledge, 2015), uploaded in accordance with the publisher’s “Green OA” rules.

Chapter in exhibition “Voices of Tolerance in an Age of Persecution” curated by Vincent Carey at the Folger in 2002.

Wacks, David A. “Romance of Evast and Blaquerna by Ramón Llull (Review).” La corónica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, vol. 47, no. 1, 2018, pp. 122–24. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/cor.2018.0022.

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]

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]

Book review of Emily Colbert Carins, Esther in Early Modern Iberia and the Sephardic Diaspora: Queen of the Conversas. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 189 pp

Hugh M. Richmond, “Renaissance Landscapes,” Mouton, 1973; De Gruyter 2019.

This study explores some of the significant points in the evolution of a literary pattern, a recognizable topic or motif which captures attention through the poet’s mastery of language, which records the nuances of human awareness of each period. The author coins this…[Read more]

The convivencia between the followers of the different religions of the Mediterranean persisted despite the fraught politics of Christianity and Islam. Despite the long arm of the Inquisition the protagonists in the plays of Cervantes and Lope struggle to maintain fraternal ties.

Despite being an army officer Don Fernando is drawn towards the Muslim Princess Arlaxa. He defies army convention to meet her much to the chagrin of fellow Spanish soldiers in the presidio where they are stationed.

Despite prevailing stereotypes, the Muslim women in Cervantes’ captivity plays are forthright, ambitious and endowed with considerable agency. Though there is no evidence that Cervantes had read Erasmus, yet his portrayal of women shows them as standing their ground during adversity.

El reflejo del islam en dos obras de Lope de Vega.

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]

Portrayal of Muslims in Cervantes drama

Portrayal of Otherness in Lope’s dramas