This study focuses on the cultural history of illegitimacy and its representation in literature, with an emphasis on the gender of fictional bastards and foundlings.

“Race” offers a compelling study of ideas related to race throughout history. Its breadth of coverage, both geographically and temporally, provides readers with an expansive, global understanding of the term from the classical period onwards: Intersections of Race and Gender // Race and Social Theory Identity // Ethnicity, and Immigration //…[Read more]

What is the relevance of Bruno Latour’s work for literary studies?

How might ANT help us rethink questions of comparison and translation?

How and why do we read? And what is the relationship between academic reading and the reading we do for pleasure? This course is divided into two parts. The first part, on critical reading, surveys some of the most influential critical approaches in recent decades, including structuralism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, feminism,…[Read more]

While there are differences between cultures in different places and times, colonial representations of indigenous peoples generally suggest they are not capable of literature nor are they worthy of being represented as nations. Colonial representations of indigenous people continue on into the independence era and can still be detected in our…[Read more]

This thematic session of the journal is devoted to expressions of creative writing inspired by monuments. Our aim is to understand how and why diverse re/constructions of their specific genesis, descriptions of architectural features, explanations of symbolism, histories of mentors, sponsors and artists generate over/interpretations in the form of…[Read more]

This is the Introduction to Rural Modernity in Britain: A Critical Intervention (Edinburgh UP, October 2018), which argues that the rural areas of Britain were impacted by modernisation just as much – if not more – than urban and suburban areas. It is the first study of modernity and modernism to focus on rural people and places that experienced…[Read more]

Drawing on research in developmental psychology, rhetorical narratology, and cultural history, as well as on digital data mining, this essay seeks to broaden the interdisciplinary and interpretive range of cognitive literary studies.

Drawing on research in developmental psychology, rhetorical narratology, and cultural history, as well as on digital data mining, this essay seeks to broaden the interdisciplinary and interpretive range of cognitive literary studies.

This is a paper that I presented at the 2019 MLA in Chicago. In this paper I situate discussions of the field of Iberian Studies within the context of the crisis of the Humanities and the future of Cultural Studies.

This article analyzes Stop-and-Frisk policing within the long history of lynching through the analytical framework of performance studies. Contemporary audio recordings of stop-and-frisk procedures are thought in relation to the historical examples of the Zoot Suit Riots and late 19th-century and early 20th-century lynchings of African Americans.

At the intersection of comics and medicine is the rise of the Graphic Medicine scholarship field. This course examines the ways in which the sequentialized hybrid of word and image is bringing new insights to patient, healthcare, and clinical experiences.

In any manner of ways, the comics medium (whether known as comic books, graphic novels,…[Read more]

Review of James Cook, Alexander Kolassa, and Adam Whittaker, eds.
Recomposing the Past: Representations of Early Music on Stage and
Screen. Ashgate Screen Music Series. New York and London:
Routledge, 2018. xii, 259 pp. ISBN: 9781138287471 (hardback).

In the 16th century most of Russia is still a terra incognita with a highly dubious and mostly mythologized geography, anthropology, and sociology. In this article we look at some texts of the Early Modern period – Sir Thomas Smithes Voiage and Entertainment in Rushia (1605), Peter Mundy’s Travel Writings of 1640–1641, and The Voiages and Trave…[Read more]