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]

Front matter for Literatures of Liberalization: Global Circulation and the Long Nineteenth Century

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]

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]

Version (MA level) of a course I taught in several iterations at the University of Pittsburgh between 1995 and 2006.

Version (BA level) of a course I taught at the University of Pittsburgh over several iterations between 1995 and 2006. Team taught in 2006 with Peter Machamer, professor in HPS at Pitt.

Bound by market pressures, twenty-first century academia finds itself fettered by the demands of “student success” that a capitalist knowledge economy places on its participants. Humanities scholars are, as Jonathan Dollimore noted in his 2014 SAA address, pressed with their back against the wall, “in a marketplace pretty indifferent to what…[Read more]

In his fiction, journalism and letters, Dostoevsky recurrently mentions ethnicity of his protagonists. Russians, Poles, Englishmen, Germans, Turks, Greeks etc. never act as individuals with their personal life but rather as ‘carriers’ of some national idea. Amidst the nations represented in Dostoevsky’s oeuvre, there are some Jews. The fashi…[Read more]