Coloniality is a complex heritage encapsulating complex cultural challenges confronting the performance artist. Nigerian musical production appears to have been operating in a world without borders since the advent of colonialism. There have been non-indigenous forms brought into the cultural landscape which have challenged the performers. The…[Read more]

The preliminary materials in Shakespeare’s First Folio survive in a variety of sequences, and until Peter Blayney proposed bibliographical reasons for a correct order in the 1990s, scholars weren’t sure what order was intended by the publishers. These slides diagram Blayney’s order, the reasoning behind it, and some of the variant orders that can…[Read more]

Zadie Smith’s novel On Beauty confirms that the fiction of the second generation Caribbean diaspora has indeed arrived on the international scene, if indeed any confirmation was required after the phenomenal success of Smith’s first novel
White Teeth. The status of Smith’s fiction in the Euro-American academy, which is also the setting of O…[Read more]

My subject is an archive of gay and lesbian activism that helps us understand a postcolonial counterpublic. The project I undertake is of historical recovery and theoretical elaboration of the specificities of postcolonial sexuality-based movements as necessary and long overdue supplements to global sexual activism.

Examining gay journalism as gay liberation literature, this essay forwards a cultural history of sexuality informed by comparative urban and queer studies. My main argument is that gay liberation literature under apartheid lags behind important shifts in sexual activism; and my larger aim is to extend the valences of postcolonial queer studies…[Read more]

The manuscript now called the Salisbury Breviary (Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, MS lat. 17294) contains the only extant illustrated cycle of of the Life of St Edith of Wilton; the fifteen miniatures accompany the readings for the feast of St Edith. These images emphasize the connections among Edith’s holiness, royal genealogy, and…[Read more]

The performances of Christ in the text of The Dream of the Rood construct a masculinity for Christ that is majestic, martial, and specifically heterosexual and that relies on a fragile opposition with a femininity defined as dominated Other in the figure of the Cross. His particularly constructed masculinity, explored rather than merely assumed or…[Read more]

An entry in the Women Medievalists and the Academy collection, this brief biography presents Cambridge historian Mary Bateson, scholar and suffragist, who lived on the cusp of the opportunity for academic professionalization for women. Her life illustrates an inspiring blend of serious scholarship, accessible publication, and devoted political…[Read more]

Feminist and gender scholars working in Anglo-Saxon studies in the past ten years have been asking new and important questions of a variety of Old English and Anglo-Latin texts. Most crucially, this interdisciplinary new work redefines the historiographical paradigms of Anglo-Saxon cultural production and reception so that women must now be…[Read more]

Abstract: This short edition makes available for the first time three Middle English verse prayers to Christ from the Mohun Hours, a fourteenth-century Book of Hours held by the Boston Public Library (MS 124). Late medieval Books of Hours have received substantial recent critical attention as expressions of devotional literacy practiced mainly by…[Read more]

Historical source study of the last text in the composite manuscript Lon- don, BL Cotton Faustina B.iii can shed light on the transmission and use of chronicle texts and their translations in late medieval England. The author of the Middle English verse Life of St. Æthelthryth used John Trevisa’s English translation of Ranulf Higden’s Poly…[Read more]

Emphasizing the peculiar, the perverse, the clandestine and the scandalous, this volume opens up a critical discourse on sexuality and visual culture in early modern Italy. Contributors consider not just painted (conventional) representations of sexual activities and eroticized bodies, but also images from print media, drawings, sculpted objects…[Read more]

Questo volume propone un discorso critico sulla sessualità e sulla cultura visiva dell’Italia rinascimentale. I saggi raccolti tentano di fare luce su una serie di zone d’ombra, dando spazio a tutte quelle pratiche o preferenze considerate in genere come alternative o anomalie, e a un’ampia varietà di scenari “scandalosi”. Particolare attenzione…[Read more]

Shakespearean tragedies and comedies have been adapted to the silver screen in India, Malaysia, Tibet, Hong Kong, Singapore, China, and Japan. How do Shakespeare and modern directors talk to each other across cultural and historical divides? Why are particular strategies used or themes emphasized? How are pre-linguistic structures of spectacle and…[Read more]

PDF of slides for a panel presentation on Jane-Austen and Regency-themed video games.

PDF of slides for a panel presentation on Jane-Austen and Regency-themed video games.

Dany Laferrière’s first novel, Comment faire l’amour avec un Nègre was a literary sensation when it was first released in Quebec in the mid-80s. The author/narrator plays with reader’s expectations, presenting both a stereotypical image of the black man (sex-obsessed, white-hating) and one that contradicts and upsets their expectations. Influen…[Read more]