This primer in “cognitive cultural studies” explores the cultural fantasy of perfect access to mind through body. It shows that different genres and media—movies, novels, classic Chinese operas, medieval ribald tales, musicals, paintings, documentaries, stand-up comedy, and photography—have different strategies for making us think that we have ju…[Read more]

Art Spiegelman is one of the most-discussed creators in Comic Book Studies. His Pulitzer-winning work Maus (1980 and 1991) was, alongside The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and Watchmen (1987), the catalyst to a sea change in the commercial and critical fortunes of the alternative comic book during the mid-1980s. It has been a landmark text in…[Read more]

Art Spiegelman is one of the most-discussed creators in Comic Book Studies. His Pulitzer-winning work Maus (1980 and 1991) was, alongside The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and Watchmen (1987), the catalyst to a sea change in the commercial and critical fortunes of the alternative comic book during the mid-1980s. It has been a landmark text in…[Read more]

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an author, letter writer and poet who lived between 1890 and 1937. His works blend science fiction with Gothic themes. Lovecraft was, by the majority of accounts (including his own), a bad writer. He was also an outspoken racist for the majority of his life to a degree which makes much of his work, to a modern reader,…[Read more]

This paper examines Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces (2007) in the context of Holocaust literature and historiography. It begins with an introduction to the genre of Holocaust literature and the problematic nature of ‘survivor’ testimony. Michaels’ work is then contextualized within this body of literature. The essay goes on to examine the means t…[Read more]

This paper offers a synthesis and critique of the existing academic literature on Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese and an overview of Asian American alternative comics. It examines the range of literary and linguistic sources which Yang draws upon in his collage of Chinoiserie and Japonism. It presents the argument that existing criticism h…[Read more]

This paper explores the manifestation of trauma in superhero comics following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11. These texts are considered from the perspectives of clinical psychology and Silverman’s concept of historical trauma. The paper first examines the genre as a whole, followed by an exploration of elements c…[Read more]

Introduction to Modernism: Evolution of an Idea, which traces the emergence and coherence of the term “modernism”, and the field of modernist studies, from the late 1800s to the present.

Introduction to Modernism: Evolution of an Idea, which traces the emergence and coherence of the term “modernism”, and the field of modernist studies, from the late 1800s to the present.

Read 8 January 2016 in Austin, TX, at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, session number 218, “Quantity in English Verse: Linguistic and Neuroscience-Based Challenges to the Accentual Paradigm.” This short historiographical paper was the half-time show in our roundtable—an interlude between the session’s more substantive linguis…[Read more]

This presentation explored the implications of constraints on due process and academic freedom in light of contingent faculty hiring.

Argues that the documentary Paper Clips exemplifies the ways in which Holocaust education can unwittingly foster competing victimization narratives between blacks and Jews, sanitize both European and U.S. history, and serve subtle
but pernicious forms of supersessionism.

Argues that the documentary Paper Clips exemplifies the ways in which Holocaust education can unwittingly foster competing victimization narratives between blacks and Jews, sanitize both European and U.S. history, and serve subtle
but pernicious forms of supersessionism.

Blog on writing about writing sessions from MLA 2016

Blog on writing about writing sessions from MLA 2016

Film review of Woman in Gold (2015) as a cinematic rendering of the material turn in Holocaust memory.