An innovative account that brings together cognitive science, ethnography, and literary history to examine patterns of “mindreading” in a wide range of literary works.

In this chapter, I connect my experience with abuse and intimate partner violence with my research projects and then radically changing my pedagogy away from coercion towards empathy.

In this chapter, I connect my experience with abuse and intimate partner violence with my research projects and then radically changing my pedagogy away from coercion towards empathy.

Taking a page from eighteenth century philosopher Gianbattista Vico, this is a brief reflection on how Italian Studies scholars might view their work differently in light of the digital turn.

This chapter details the efforts of the kindergarten educator, Elizabeth Harrison, to introduce Dante’s Divine Comedy to children in the midwestern United States during the late nineteenth century.

This syllabus for Major Authors: Anonymous serves as one of the capstone seminar options for our English Majors and Minors. In overhauling our curriculum to make the English BA represent more literature, we removed Single-Author-Named courses & replaced them with Major Authors. Each faculty who teach this course make an argument for the various…[Read more]

The Gulf Stream gained scientific prominence in the nineteenth century as a test case for theories about the dynamics of ocean currents and the equilibrium of transatlantic climate. Discourse about the current supplied descriptions, analogies, and myths that persist into the present. Triangulating oceanic, ecological, and transatlantic approaches…[Read more]

This essay focuses on Olive Schreiner’s personal correspondence and the allegories collected in Dreams (1890) to explore her complicated relationship to late-Victorian Decadence. I argue that Schreiner modified Decadent writers’ use of intersensoriality and synaesthesia to educate her readers into a new kind of common sense, one aligned with her…[Read more]

The reports listed here and then reproduced in facsimile were published in British and American journals during the nineteenth century. They describe contemporary aspects, both editorial and mechanical, of the production processes that made such publications possible. Leading topics include the relative efficiency of steam-powered printing, the…[Read more]

This article attributes one of the three “first” editions of Leviathan to the London printer John Richardson (fl. 1673–1703), revising Noel Malcolm’s attribution to a different printer in the recent Clarendon Edition of Leviathan. We lay out the mystery of Leviathan’s so-called “Ornaments” edition and use evidence from damaged type pieces to say…[Read more]

While many in academia around the U.S. may anchor themselves in cynical opposition to the proliferation of neoliberal discourse and the policies that accompany, I propose that language departments are in a uniquely privileged position within the humanities to assert the value of our programs within the neoliberal paradigm. Specifically, the…[Read more]

For the past twenty years, scholars of world and global history and literature have shown that the early modern world was a complex, entangled place. And yet, by emphasizing connection, such work at times overlooks the many separations that drove the engines of global early modernity: transoceanic slave trades, tribute labor, and the economic…[Read more]

The Popol Wuj is one of the most important, commonly studied, and widely circulated Indigenous literary works from colonial Mesoamerica. By some accounts, there are 1,200 editions of the work published in thirty world languages, all of which trace back to a single manuscript—itself a copy of an earlier Mayan work. To protect their work from b…[Read more]

How does one understand a filmmaker like José Antonio Nieves Conde, a Falangist whose films with strong neorealist tendencies were radically altered by the Francoist censors for being too critical of the economic injustices inherent to daily urban life after the Spanish Civil War? Many film critics have asked this question and this essay looks…[Read more]

Gene Wolfe, living though Severian, re-experiences via Thecla’s characterization of him as not being worth enough to value highly for being what he thought he could only amount to her when he first met her, that is, simply a boy at hand, his own once being lured into the attentions’ of his mother and then dismissed by her when she was done usi…[Read more]