In his 2004 novel GraceLand, Chris Abani unsettles notions of youth “empowerment,” or “resistance,” creating a restless oscillation between cynicism and idealism. On the one hand, pervasive violence and restricting
norms seem to debilitate the novel’s characters, leaving little room to negoti- ate the constraints of their bleak lives in the slums…[Read more]

“Notre-Dame in Jean Fouquet’s Hours of Etienne Chevalier, ca. 1452-52” is a book excerpt of May Spangler’s “Paris in Architecture, Literature and Art,” recently published at Peter Lang. Designed for an interdisciplinary course in Cultural Studies, the book capitalizes on the little exposure liberal arts students have to architecture, and the wid…[Read more]

This article examines the global African modernism of Amos Tutuola through the lens of his nonhuman folkloric creatures. Though the work of the early Nigerian novelist is often characterized as modernism’s inversion, or “traditional,” Tutuola in fact articulates a succession of surreal monsters in The Palm Wine Drinkard (1952) and My Life in the B…[Read more]

We live in a moment of “apocalyptic time,” the “time of the end of time.” Ours is a moment of global ecological crisis, of the ever-impending collapse of capital. That we live on the brink is too clear. What is not, however, is our ability to imagine the moment after this dual crisis. In recent years, African artists have begun to articul…[Read more]

This book constitutes the result of a pedagogical experimentation, that I conducted for the Master in Linguistic and Literary Sciences of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milan, during the academic year 2017-2018. The critical essays that are here collected have been written by some students of my class, and show clearly enough that…[Read more]

This article describes a pedagogical project that took place between 2015 and 2016, and involved my students of the French Literature class, third year of Bachelor of Arts (foreign languages). The intersection and interrelation between figurative art and poetry were at the centre of the theoretical insight, whereas the necessity of adapting our…[Read more]

This course was first taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in fall 2018.
It addresses feminism, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, and critical race and ethnic studies in conjunction with translation studies.

This course was first taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in fall 2018.
It addresses feminism, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, and critical race and ethnic studies in conjunction with translation studies.

Examining the production, transmission, and consumption of the syllabus opens up ways of seeing the traces of dominant practices, meanings, and values in contemporary academic culture. This hegemony is in place as a function of the deliberate efforts of intellectuals hailing from the dominant cultural group. What has become pedagogical…[Read more]

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]