New scholarly books in religious studies defy easy labels and reflect the eagerness of publishers to widen academic discourse and to upset conventional wisdom in the name of new knowledge—in science, across genders, between faiths, and around the world.

Gregory Crewdson’s cinematic, tableaux photographs often depict an anonymous, banal, and tension-filled life in suburban and rural communities. Working as a self-described American realist and strongly influenced by a tradition of American vernacular artists, including work by Arbus, Eggleson, Friedlander, and Hopper, Crewdson actively seeks to c…[Read more]

From the original paper presentation: In this paper I discuss the figurative language used in Louise Erdrich’s novel Tracks with a particular focus on the figures and symbols associated with food and food practices. This paper performs a textual analysis of figurative language and symbols and the themes of food and food practices to reveal the…[Read more]

What does it mean when we say that computers can ‘write’ and how are recent developments in neural networks and machine learning changing this capacity? This article examines the long-standing literary fear of authorship being replaced by machines while also interrogating the labour and credit implications that sit behind widely used str…[Read more]

In _King Lear_ the power Goneril and Regan desire and the violence in which they participate defy orthodox notions of appropriate feminine conduct. Because power as a feminine attribute is rejected as a violation of nature, they become “evil.” Rather than assuming that real women, or good women, will not defend their own power or the sov…[Read more]

Early Modern English historiography had a multi-layered bipolar constitution. Providentialism, which had dominated Medieval English thought, maintained that historical events processed according to God’s divine plan. However, with the revival and reinterpretation of Classical texts, a new and quite opposite way of thinking emerged, which was d…[Read more]

Building on Elizabethan dramatic conventions and religious debates about ghosts, Hamlet employs linguistic and dramatic means to chill its audience. Audio-visual means, along with the manner of entrances and exits, are used in order to horrify the audience. These create a fluctuation between belief and disbelief towards the macabre elements in the…[Read more]

In this essay I discuss the racial formations of Alessandro de’ Medici, first duke of Florence. These formations derive from different sources: verbal descriptions, portraiture, and the material evidence of Alessandro’s remains. I examine whether a painted “description” tallies with a verbal one, considering the variety of terms used to describ…[Read more]

a b s t r ac t
Alessandro de’ Medici’s life and its representation reveal important beliefs about family, politics,
and genealogy during the Italian Renaissance. Duke Alessandro’s government marked the end of
the Florentine Republic and the beginning of hereditary rule. Many scholars interpret Alessandro’s
assassination as a fitting end to…[Read more]

Abstract: This paper investigates the shifting definitions of the term gāthā (Ch. ji) over an 800-year period, from the earliest sūtratranslations into Chinese until the mid-tenth century. Although the term originally referred to the verse sections of scriptures, gāthās soon began to circulate separately, used in ritual, contemplative, and peda…[Read more]

Syllabus for ENGL 758D, The Speculative Situation, graduate seminar in the University of Maryland English department, Fall 2017.