Transatlantic literary exchange depended, during the 19th and earlier 20th centuries, on the ocean liner. Books and periodicals were exported via sea routes, lent among passengers or through ships’ libraries, and even bought and sold on board. The High Seas Bookshops, established on some Anchor Line vessels in the 1920s, strikingly demonstrate the…[Read more]

The Association of Language Companies (ALC) has been working to increase connections, relationships, and shared learning between the professional and academic sides of the language services supply chain. From these efforts, the ALC
Bridge was born. The American Translators Association is a member of this initiative.

Based in the South throughout his career, the Black Baptist minister Sutton E. Griggs wrote nearly fifty books and pamphlets, including five novels, nearly all of which he issued through his own publishing companies. Griggs was a founder of American Baptist Theological Seminary, which several Civil Rights Movement leaders attended in the 1950s.…[Read more]

As I have done in connection with another tale about vengeance Edgar Allan Poe published two and a half years earlier, “The Cask of Amontillado,” in what follows I offer a generalized biographical interpretation of the 1849 story “Hop-Frog,” linking it to Poe’s February 1845 essay “Some Secrets of the Magazine Prison-House” and his September 184…[Read more]

This talk introduces the concept of “prosthetic narration,” a narrative technique that mediates the engagement of disabled cognition such that the reader is invited to reimagine how one thinks and perceives. In his essay, “The Novel,” Émile Zola establishes the “intimate union” between the author and “the reality of the scene” as a premise of fic…[Read more]

Virginia Woolf is already recognized today as a major player in the Bloomsbury Group, an intellectual powerhouse that influenced modern philosophy, politics, economics, aesthetics, biography, and literary criticism. Yet Woolf’s reputation as a fiction writer first and foremost has distracted critical attention from her thorough interrogation of w…[Read more]

James Agee’s complicated life and complex work have elicited varied critical responses, but none thus far by way of the writer’s intriguing relationship with his sometime analyst Frances Wickes. I believe Agee’s autobiographical writings prove both intertextual with and influenced by Wickes’s work, especially in regard to her novel and to The Mor…[Read more]

War diaries are often written under duress, and are attempts at documenting events as they unfold, or narrating stories of how people survive under trying circumstances. She argues that conditions of war under which authors produce their work dictate the form itself. When an author’s life is under threat, when safety is compromised, m…[Read more]

In Portuguese Nobel Laureate José Saramago’s As Intermitências da Morte (2005) and in Mahmoud Darwish’s epic poem Mural (2000), the authors contemplate the nothingness that accompanies death, a concern that increasingly permeates their later writings. Although ‘death’ is depicted differently, the authors fear that with death “the universe wo…[Read more]

This memorial tribute for the late Ciaran Carson (1948-2019), Irish creative writer extraordinaire, was commissioned three years ago for inclusion in a special number of “Reading Ireland” which has not yet materialised. It is now archived in and by Humanities Common on the third anniversary of his funeral rites and burial in Belfast, Northern…[Read more]

Abstract of my full article published on disability and masculinity in the Global South.

Abstract of my full article published on disability and masculinity in the Global South.

This article explores the tradition of Bacha Posh in Afghan culture as depicted in Afghan-American Nadia Hashimiʼs debut novel The Pearl that Broke its Shell (2014). In this novel, Hashimi shows how Afghan girls are obliged to cross-dress and live dual lives as boys for several years to lay claim for their rights to education and freedom of…[Read more]

In The Night Watchman (2020), Louise Erdrich continues to blur the lines between history and fiction as she has done in several of her novels. Erdrich introduces the reader to several magical elements that appear to be entirely real: two ghosts, a dog that talks, and an unearthly powwow with Jesus as one of the dancers. The main objective of this…[Read more]

In The Night Watchman (2020), Louise Erdrich continues to blur the lines between history and fiction as she has done in several of her novels. Erdrich introduces the reader to several magical elements that appear to be entirely real: two ghosts, a dog that talks, and an unearthly powwow with Jesus as one of the dancers. The main objective of this…[Read more]

Examines the intersection between Chan Buddhism and Neo-Confucianism during the Southern Song dynasty period (1126-1279) in China.