A reading of Beowulf that theorizes Heorot as a cultural reliquary, in so doing troubling the more standard readings of this poem as a series of episodes and digressions, in favor of focusing more on the as-yet inadequately examined queer temporalities of human experiences in the world that are embedded within the feast hall and the poem that contains it.

A reading of Beowulf that theorizes Heorot as a cultural reliquary, in so doing troubling the more standard readings of this poem as a series of episodes and digressions, in favor of focusing more on the as-yet inadequately examined queer temporalities of human experiences in the world that are embedded within the feast hall and the poem that contains it.

The block that I am teaching on Birkbeck, University of London’s MA in Critical and Cultural Studies in 2018-2019.

This wide-ranging block focuses on a series of important topics examining the convergence of technology, subjectivity and cultural theory. By examining technological, political, and cultural change, we will consider how 20th and…[Read more]

The Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities is about researching media through new media: for example, playing games to better understand their politics and mechanics, exhibiting new media art to witness how people engage it, building stories to become more familiar with their structures and narratives, making wearable technologies to…[Read more]

This essay identifies four major factors responsible for the use of vernacular in Anglophone Caribbean poetry. Analyses of selected texts by Lorna Goodison, Louise Bennett, Kendel Hippolyte, and DerekWalcott illustrate that these four factors include the representation of working class characters, subversive protests against the imposition of…[Read more]

The relationship between obsolescence and innovation in the digital age is a peculiar one, conveying not past and future but instead demonstrating their eternal simultaneity.

In a 1972 poem about Vancouver Island, Mexican writer José Emilio Pacheco wonders, “Acaso fue el Aztlán de las mexicas / De allí partieron siete tribus.” Though Pacheco spent several years living in Vancouver during the late 1960s and early 1970s—and was published in a 1971 anthology of poetry “From Canada’s Unofficial Languages”—h…[Read more]

This is the typescript of the Introductory chapter of the book, THE INVENTION OF RACE IN THE EUROPEAN MIDDLE AGES, published on March 8, 2018 by Cambridge UP (503 pp., 8 chapters, 10″ x 7″ format). The book discusses Jews, Muslims, Africans and blackness, Native Americans, Mongols, and the Romani (“Gypsies”) in 7 chapters, including a critical…[Read more]

This special issue of the Italianist collects ten essays that consider the multiple manifestations of realism and idealism in Italy from the Trecento to the present day. Notions of the ‘real Italy’ (and of ‘Italian realism’) remain fundamental for scholars working in various disciplines, while the exploration of the ideal Italies constru…[Read more]

Recent scholarship has focused on the flowering of poetry that engaged with geographic and spatial logics in the United States in the years following the Second World War, notably in Lytle Shaw’s 2013 study Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics. Alongside such works as William Carlos Williams’s Paterson and Charles Olson’s Maxim…[Read more]

An introduction to a newly published edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

A two-page abstract of the book.

A two-page abstract of the book.

Christina Rossetti, sexuality, narrative poems

This paper analyzes Walt Whitman’s American Civil War poems in his collection Drum-Taps
in comparison with the poetry written by British soldier-poets of WWI. These poems present
Whitman as a problematic model for future generations of war poets since he hardly ever
questions the meaninglessness of bloodshed in the battlefield, a trait which i…[Read more]