Would you like to get better at mindreading (i.e., at inferring people’s beliefs, desires, and intentions, based on their behavior)? As it turns out, all you would have to do is lower your relative social status. Studies have shown that people in weaker social positions engage in more active and perceptive mindreading than do people in stronger s…[Read more]

This is the 2020 update of a comprehensive open-access annotated bibliography listing carillon scores by African American composers and/or based on African American music. While most of the items are published, a few are unpublished but in informal circulation, or are pending publication. Carillonists are invited to use this resource to identify…[Read more]

This open-access international bibliography lists published and unpublished original carillon works by over a hundred women, transgender, and nonbinary composers. The composers’ birth years range from 1858 to the twenty-first century, the musical styles range from lyrical to avant-garde, and the formats range from solo to ensemble to e…[Read more]

This article strives to examine the historical narrative of music recording in its acoustic era (from 1877 to the late 1920s), at a time when competing technologies for capturing and registering sound and music were being incorporated into everyday life. Moreover, it examines the overlap of continuous and discontinuous media and processes of…[Read more]

This essay examines the cultural practices and prejudices that shaped the Italian reception of German Neue Sachlichkeit in the 1920s and explores their role in the development of Italian Neorealism in the 1940s. I argue that, precisely because Italian critics approached the German critical category – and indeed all critical categorisation – wit…[Read more]

The search for a methodology for reading world literature largely entails the development of new critical paradigms, but it has also occasioned a re-examination and rehabilitation of world literature’s historical formulations. This essay reclaims a forgotten milestone, the 1946 essay “La ‘letteratura mondiale'” by the eminent Italian philologist…[Read more]

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Italian intellectuals participated in Italy’s reconstruction
with an ideological commitment inspired by the African-American struggle for equal rights in the
United States. Drawing on the work of many of the leading figures in postwar Italian culture,
including Italo Calvino, Giorgio Caproni, Cesare P…[Read more]

In this essay, I argue that the post-war critical re-interpretation of Boccaccio’s oeuvre was central to the theory and practice of Italian Neorealism. What is more, I maintain that Neorealism significantly influenced Boccaccio studies, shaping critical approaches to Boccaccio for decades after 1945. Reading scholarly and critical studies of…[Read more]

This essay will examine the multiple performance texts that exist in Ivo Van Hove’s transcultural and transmedial performance event, The Roman Tragedies (which toured worldwide from 2007 to 2013) to suggest that, in today’s “spreadable” culture (to borrow from Henry Jenkins), appropriative use becomes the bridge that can unify ‘work’ and ‘event.…[Read more]

This book is the first full-length monograph to bring a range of computational methods to bear in a sustained fashion, on a single novel, at the micro-level. While most contemporary digital studies are interested in distant-reading paradigms for large-scale literary history – using their digital methods as a telescope – following calls by Alan Liu…[Read more]

Syllabus for an upper-level English seminar at SUNY Cortland | Is Google racist? Is Wikipedia sexist? In this course, we will critically reflect on the digital tools and platforms that mediate so much of our daily lives. More specifically, we will explore how digital technologies can reproduce and challenge conditions of racial, class, and gender…[Read more]

A missa para Santa Cecília, do Padre Joaquim José da Rocha Espanca, composta em 1869, é exemplo da devoção e vivência espiritual no mosteiro de São Bento de Cástris durante o século XIX.
Apesar do decreto de extinção das ordens religiosas datar de 1834, S. Bento de Cástris só foi extinto em 18 de Abril de 1890. Assim, esta missa foi composta pou…[Read more]

The book publishing industry is an important social, cultural, and economic institution whose records deserve to be preserved for the public good. Books.Files was an exploratory project funded in part by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation aimed at assessing the archival value of digital assets in the contemporary publishing industry for stakeholders…[Read more]

The period following the end of Getúlio Vargas’s second government (1951-1954) saw a massive expansion of the media industries with popular music in particular becoming an important cultural touchstone. Some salient trends in the post-War period include the politicization of music and other media (radio, television, social media), the in…[Read more]

Numbers appear to have limited value for literary study, since our discipline is usually more concerned to explore differences of interpretation than to describe the objective features of literary works. But it may be time to re-examine the assumption that numbers are only useful for objective description. Machine learning algorithms are actually…[Read more]

This essay surveys literary criticism at the intersection of narrative theory and the Victorian novel, which often takes one of two major approaches. In the first approach, critics examine how the act of narration itself shapes and constrains Victorian narratives, whereas in the second approach, critics focus on the relationship between Victorian…[Read more]

A book project with the goal of documenting commercially produced recordings of Negro spirituals composed for solo concert vocalists. Portions of this information is currently available on the online site, The Spirituals Database (http://spirituals-database.com).

Over 5,600 entries cover more than a century of recordings on compact discs,…[Read more]

This co-authored piece introduces our co-edited volume ‘Dreams of Germany’. It explores how, where and by whom notions of ‘musical Germanness’ have been constituted in the modern era, and to what effect. Picking up on ideas first explored systematically by Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter in their 2002 collection ‘Music and German National…[Read more]