In a book review of Story of O, part of which appeared on the cover of early paperback editions, Eliot Fremont-Smith wrote that its publication in 1965 marked “the end of any coherent restrictive application of the concept of pornography to books.” This essay explores the implications of that significant shift in censorship policy for lib…[Read more]

This chapter argues that the sexy librarian stereotype emerged at the end of the twentieth century from the confluence between sexual liberation, free speech movements and print pornography. It focuses on a series of librarian themed pornographic paperbacks published in the 1970s and 1980s by Greenleaf Classics. These stories, although flimsy…[Read more]

The book examines little known and forgotten writings by Magnus Hirschfeld, the influential sexologist who is best known today for his homosexual activism, transgender work and founding of the world’s first Institute of Sexual Science in 1919. Arguing that negative experiences, as much as affirmative subculture formation, shaped a collective sense…[Read more]

A contribution to the Editors’ Forum on Queer Form, edited by Kadji Amin, Roy Pérez, and Amber Musser, for ASAP/Journal.

The following text was presented as part of the Presidential Panel at the American Comparative Literature Association, Utrecht (The Netherlands), July 8th 2017. The panel was composed of Joseph Slaughter (ACLA President, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University in the City of New York), Maria Aristodemou, Law, Birkbeck College,…[Read more]

Review of López-Morillas, Consuelo, ed. El Corán de Toledo. Oviedo: Trea, 2011. Originally published in Calíope 18.3 (2013): 129-131. https://ssl.uh.edu/class/spanish/caliope/

Review of Decter, Jonathan. Iberian Jewish Literature: Between al-Andalus and Christian Europe. Indiana UP, 2007. Originally published in Calíope 14.1 (2008): 139-42. https://ssl.uh.edu/class/spanish/caliope/

In his prologue to the late fourteenth-century romance, the Destruction of Troy, John
Clerk of Whalley negotiates between his roles as translator, historian and alliterative
poet to introduce his account of the fall of Troy for medieval English readers.
Professing to tell the true story of Britain’s ancient ancestors, he invokes the f…[Read more]

In his prologue to the late fourteenth-century romance, the Destruction of Troy, John
Clerk of Whalley negotiates between his roles as translator, historian and alliterative
poet to introduce his account of the fall of Troy for medieval English readers.
Professing to tell the true story of Britain’s ancient ancestors, he invokes the f…[Read more]

In the next seven minutes, I would like to convince you that real formalism and real historicism really are, or really should be, one and the same critical practice. Our idea of what counts as knowledge about early English literature will be enriched by integrating formalist and historicist methods. Those of us who work on prosody and poetics are…[Read more]

Quantity matters in the meter of Beowulf and other early English poems. It matters in the form of a metrical principle known as resolution. Metrical resolution served alliterative poets as a way of counting; it can serve modern scholars as evidence for the cultural meanings of verse craft. This paper therefore has two sections: How it Works and…[Read more]

Quantity matters in the meter of Beowulf and other early English poems. It matters in the form of a metrical principle known as resolution. Metrical resolution served alliterative poets as a way of counting; it can serve modern scholars as evidence for the cultural meanings of verse craft. This paper therefore has two sections: How it Works and…[Read more]

Review of Maravillas, peregrinaciones y utopías: literatura de viajes en el mundo románico. Ed. Rafael Beltrán. Valencia: Universitat de Valencia, 2002. Originally published in Bulletin of Spanish Studies 80.6 (2003): 743-44.

Review of Mocedades de Rodrigo. Ed. Leonardo Funes, with Felipe Tenenbaum. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Tamesis. 2004. Originally published in Bulletin of Spanish Studies 83.8 (2006): 982-83.

Review of Barletta, Vincent. Covert Gestures: Crypto-Islamic Literature as Cultural Practice in Early Modern Spain. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Originally published in Hispania 89.1 (2006): 50-52.

Review of Young, Douglas C. Rogues and Genres: Generic Transformation in the Spanish Picaresque and Arabic Maqāma. Newark: Delaware: Juan de la Cuesta, 2004. Originally published in Aljamía 19 (529-531).

Review of Díaz-Mas, Paloma. Sephardim: The Jews from Spain. Ed. and trans. George K. Zucker. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Originally published in Bulletin of the Society for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies 33.1 (33-34).

Review of Szpiech, Ryan. Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic (Middle Ages Series). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Orignially published in Speculum 88.3 (853-855).

Review of Hook, David, ed. The Arthur of the Iberians: The Arthurian Legends in the Spanish and Portuguese Worlds. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2015. Orignally published in Arthuriana 26.4 (2016): 78-81.

Through the comparative study of non-Anglophone translations of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, we can achieve the progressive goals of Emily Apter’s “translational transnationalism” and Edward Said’s “cosmopolitan humanism.” Both translation and humanism were intrinsic to Chaucer’s initial composition of the Tales, and in turn, both shap…[Read more]