The Irish mantle – a type of long, heavy woolen cloak – came under regular attack by writers and lawmakers in Tudor and Stuart England. This article examines how a range of early modern English texts used the Irish mantle to establish and regulate the boundaries of national identity. The Irish were problematically similar to the English; most…[Read more]

For an MLA panel, January 2016, this talk recalls the 2014 crisis at the University of Virginia about an alleged fraternity gang rape, discusses the policy on sexual assault that designates “responsible employees,” and proposes measures: change drinking laws; avoid segregating any space by identity; offer responsible parties. Humanities professors…[Read more]

For an MLA panel, January 2016, this talk recalls the 2014 crisis at the University of Virginia about an alleged fraternity gang rape, discusses the policy on sexual assault that designates “responsible employees,” and proposes measures: change drinking laws; avoid segregating any space by identity; offer responsible parties. Humanities professors…[Read more]

La Camelias de Amelia (written in Spanish) is a 2009 collection of short stories about Puerto Rico and its people. Its author, Zoé Jiménez Corretjer, forms part of the Puerto Rican writers called ‘La Generación de los 80’ (authors writing in Spanish from the island and not in English from US territory.)
This review only analyzes the work as a u…[Read more]

In today’s DH environment, where big data and linked data are increasingly the focus of scholars looking for ways to extend their research questions through more expansive and complementary datasets, what is the role of the individual research project? Is its value now truly in integration and association and aggregation with other d…[Read more]

Shakespeare’s three political tragedies―Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear―have numerously been presented or adapted on film. These three plays all involve the recurring trope of madness, which, as constructed by Shakespeare, provided a wider canvas on which to detail those materials that could not be otherwise expressed: sexual desire and exp…[Read more]

This essay describes and illustrates the activities associated with the University of California at Berkeley’s Shakespeare Program, over the last forty years, covering teaching innovations, numerous research publications, multiple productions and videos of Shakespeare’s plays, and creation of websites, Shakespeare’s Staging and Milton Revealed.

Virginia Woolf’s well known distaste for the generic and aesthetic instability of Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness (1928) finds echoes in more recent responses, even as the novel remains an anchor of a lesbian literary canon. I demonstrate that Hall’s novel does indeed exhibit generic and psychological instability, as a Victo…[Read more]

Marie Darrieussecq’s Clèves (2011) shocked readers with the vulgarity of its language and spurred controversy over its status as a literary text. In this article, I show how the novel’s “bad” language is a foil for Darrieussecq’s larger project of rewriting the adolescent female body, removing it from the sexualized and objectified optic through…[Read more]

John Milton is a hero to Millennials: C. S. Lewis based Perelandra on Paradise Lost; Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy mirrors the epic; Mark Morris’s best ballet is “L’Allegro and Il Penseroso”; digital artist Terrance Lindall created virtual images of Paradise Lost for the Oxford U. Press; Comus is the originator and lead Krewe for…[Read more]

Between 1988 and 1994 American comic books engaged the politics, problematics, and crises of the AIDS epidemic by injecting the virus and its social, cultural, and epidemiological effects on gay men into the four-color fantasies of the superhero genre. As the comic-book industry was undergoing major internal changes that allowed for more mature,…[Read more]