Will students raised on social media still read English literature?
• What is the role of English/American literature in the PRC, India,
Australasia, the USA?
• What is the role of English language in relation to other global
and local languages?
• What is the role of decolonising efforts?
• How do our respective state apparatuses affect…[Read more]

This short story, written by Dr. Ramzi Salti, was published as part of his book titled “The Native Informant and Other Stories: Six Tales of Defiance from the Arab World”. It has been turned into a short film titled “The 40th Day’–available on YouTube at https://youtu.be/fspvJSiSQkc. Complete E-Book now available on Google Play and Kindle.

This chapter explores a tension in postcolonial Indian literature between the monolingual form of the nation and the multilingual tendencies of the linguistic regions through a comparison between the Sahitya Akademi’s (India’s national academy of letters) activities and Tamil putukkavitai (new poetry) writing. By promoting translation and con…[Read more]

Centering on the poetry of Şeyh Galib (1757–1799), this article considers Ottoman imperial sovereignty in tandem with the discourse of mysticism that underpinned it. A key rhetorical device that enables the abstraction of the politics of empire in this discourse is the metaphor of the beloved sovereign. In the mystical writing of Galib, this me…[Read more]

Registered in Romantic depictions of imperial ruins is the endurance of empire in its immateriality: the imageries of empire’s ruination announce a future where imperial sovereignty maintains its presence spectrally. Using Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntology, and recruiting further insight from political theory, this essay argues that emp…[Read more]

Calling for a historiographical shift in literary criticism, this essay stresses the expansionist vision of the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, approaches its literature as a corpus of representation for imperial subjectivities, and thereby supplements the critique of the narrative of literary modernity identified with the orientalist E. J. W.…[Read more]

Anthropomorphism, which combines two Greek words, anthropos and morphe, meaning “human” and “form’ respectively, is a term that reflects our attribution of human characteristics to non-human animals and objects, bestowing upon them agency (Taylor 2011: 266). In this respect, we elevate the status of the non-human animal, moving it from being a…[Read more]

This is a revised 2023 version of a course was first taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in fall 2018. It addresses feminism, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, and critical race and ethnic studies in conjunction with translation studies.

This is a revised 2023 version of a course was first taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in fall 2018. It addresses feminism, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, and critical race and ethnic studies in conjunction with translation studies.

Cognitive science can help literary scholars formulate specific questions to be answered by archival research. This essay takes as its starting point embedded mental states (that is, mental states about mental states) and their role in generating literary subjectivity. It then follows the transformation of embedded mental states throughout several…[Read more]

This essay exemplifies a cognitive approach to literary and film studies, with particular emphasis on fictional reimagining of legal institutions. It draws on research of cognitive scientists who study metacognition—specifically, the difference between reflective and intuitive beliefs—to suggest that courtroom dramas, such as Billy Wilder’s Witne…[Read more]

A book’s a book, and numbers are numbers, right? Well, maybe. For the Shakespeare Association of America seminar on “Counting (in) Early Modern Drama,” I proposed to give myself the task of understanding and then communicating the technological underpinnings of a digital facsimile. One specific question I wanted to address, with the help of…[Read more]