Within Gothic Literature the identity of the mother causes women to lose their own identity. For the mothers in Beloved, “Everything That Rises Must Converge”, and “Greenleaf” their identity of themselves is lost as they identity as being the mother of their children rather than their own individual person. Some gothic mothers are absent mothers…[Read more]

Sentimental fiction and domestic novels elevated the female voice, giving authority to the womanly experience as wives, mothers, and women. Novels such as Maria Susanna Cummins’s The Lamplighter and Sara Payson Willis’s Ruth Hall adopted the ideology of feminine behavior and womanliness while, implying tones of dissatisfaction with the role and…[Read more]

This article argues that theoretical notions of resistance and agency prove inadequate for considering the complexities of the treatment of Sam Selvon’s Trinidadian characters. Indeed, to proceed from a binary logic of resistance and oppression carries the danger of universalizing those seen as oppressed, and smoothing over important c…[Read more]

Steering committee’s opening roundtable for conference on the present and future of digital humanities at UVA: the career path of a feminist who embraced “A Cyborg Manifesto,” learned to love bibliography, libraries, and technology, and urges cross-pollination: “thrilling tedium of growing things together,” getting our hands dirty in humanist…[Read more]

This essay examines the influence and effects of water in post-colonial African American women of the Gullah and Gee-Chee cultures from the sea islands of Georgia and south Carolina, reviewing the ecological theory of phenotypes establishing the eco-boundaries of the resulting pure-selves through the examination of one film and a novel: Julie…[Read more]

This essay examines the influence and effects of water in post-colonial African American women of the Gullah and Gee-Chee cultures from the sea islands of Georgia and south Carolina, reviewing the ecological theory of phenotypes establishing the eco-boundaries of the resulting pure-selves through the examination of one film and a novel: Julie…[Read more]

This chapter explores the strange intimacies of dis/avowal that obtain between Holocaust studies and postcolonial theory, with particular reference to writing by Aimé Césaire and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. For all that the Jewish body remains, by and large, unmourned in the canonical texts of postcolonial theory, the Holocaust has, I seek to a…[Read more]

In this short piece I look at media creations of the contemporary political landscape by way of popular history as accessed through films. I suggest that one of the ways figures like Donald Trump or Narendra Modi access a certain violent masculinity is through a shared understanding of this repertoire of images.

This, the first critical collection on Delarivier Manley, revisits the most heated discussions and adds new perspectives that will change the conversation on the foremost woman writer in the age of Queen Anne. This compilation demonstrates the wide range of thinking about Manley’s literary production and significance. While contributors r…[Read more]

My paper concerns two radically distinct portrayals of genital injury. The first examples, drawn from legal and doctrinal narrative, describe the cultural norm of meaningful castration. The other, which provides my paper with its title, is from Peter of Cornwall’s Book of Revelations. This set of one is an analogous injury that may mean nothing: n…[Read more]

Syllabus for a final-year undergraduate course on Modern Periodicals, exploring late 19th and early 20th-century magazines and newspapers from the UK, US and Canada.

Anxieties abound regarding the ostensible obsolescence of the book. Exploring whether the book is in fact becoming obsolete — and what it might mean if it were — requires thinking distinctly about the specific material form of the book (the codex) and about the content that it has long carried. If the form were to change — becoming digital, for i…[Read more]

Syllabus for a general education introduction to autobiography course taught entirely online.

This course examines the literary, cultural, and material life of written correspondence from the poetic epistle to the snarky tweet. And while we will read and analyze epistolary literature (both fiction and nonfiction) such as Ovid’s Heroides, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and
Alice Walker’s A Color Purple, we focus our efforts on “real” letters o…[Read more]

In THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR, a cozening knight and a jealous husband assume without question the availability of female bodies to adulterous liaisons, revealing their confidence in the cultural narrative of female inconstancy. Falstaff attempts to write a story in which he is the recipient of the wives’ sexual and economic favors. Ford, like T…[Read more]

Giving voice to women who suffer the brunt of masculine anxieties, THE TRAGEDY OF MARIAM privileges what I call “feminine anxieties” in its depiction of all the female characters, especially in the trinity of Mariam, Doris, and Salome. By depicting women who defy convention, the play stages women’s multiple perspectives on, reactions again…[Read more]

Shakespeare’s MACBETH interrogates the tyranny of absolute monarchical practices and divorces them from naturalized gender constructions by placing Lady Macbeth at the center of the play’s violence. I argue that she provides a parodic inversion of the ideal wife and and puts pressure on masculinist and violent structures of relations that depend…[Read more]