This article covers an entire generation of American popular novels published between the Civil War and World War I: campus fictions, focusing all but exclusively on homosocial scenes of undergraduate merriment. Centering on the camaraderie of fraternal sociality, campus novels model friendship as a democratic ideal for dispensing with conflict,…[Read more]

In this article I ask what happens if we consider Jewett, who spent most of her adult life at the epicenter of New England intellectual culture, as a pivotal figure in the Western history of theorizing sexuality, and her 1884 novel, A Country Doctor, as a significant document in the history of theorizing sexual and gender deviation, perfectly…[Read more]

In this article I ask what happens if we consider Jewett, who spent most of her adult life at the epicenter of New England intellectual culture, as a pivotal figure in the Western history of theorizing sexuality, and her 1884 novel, A Country Doctor, as a significant document in the history of theorizing sexual and gender deviation, perfectly…[Read more]

This essay explores the role of love, as defined by bell hooks, in pedagogy as well as how it plays into anxiety in our current moment.

This class asks what sex looked and felt like before the instantiation of modern identity categories such as homosexuality or heterosexuality—before, that is, our desires became an index to our souls. To this end, we’ll examine texts by nineteenth-century American writers that represent the experiences and expressions of what we now call sex…[Read more]

This class asks what sex looked and felt like before the instantiation of modern identity categories such as homosexuality or heterosexuality—before, that is, our desires became an index to our souls. To this end, we’ll examine texts by nineteenth-century American writers that represent the experiences and expressions of what we now call sex…[Read more]

The plural, wars, of this course’s title signals two competing traditions in Civil War memory and periodization:

* the Civil War as a distinct and defining event, from 1861 to 1865, that splits American history (and most English departments’ surveys of American literature) into two distinct halves; and

* the Civil War as an ongoing fea…[Read more]

The recent surge of interest in Afrofuturism has resulted in some groundbreaking work looking at the ways technology and race intersect in film, fashion, music and literature, as is evidenced by the important collection of essays “Afrofuturism 2.0” (2016), edited by Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones. However there has not yet been an aca…[Read more]

This essay recovers, describes, and analyzes the theatrical tradition emerging from New Orleans’s free people of color during the antebellum period. I will start out by tracing the presence of free people of color in the francophone theatres of New Orleans, teasing out their impact on the early formations of a francophone theatrical culture in the…[Read more]

On January 1, 1824, the English-speaking population of New Orleans celebrated the grand opening of the American Theatre, lauding
the advent of “Bards our own” and the rise of “our Drama” in the Crescent City (qtd. in Smither 41). For the city’s francophone residents, this event marked a new stage in the ongoing battle for cultural survival.…[Read more]

Moving from France to the Caribbean to the American continent, Creole Drama follows the people that created, shaped, and sustained French theatre culture in New Orleans from its inception in 1792 until the beginning of the Civil War. In doing so, it draws upon the neglected archive of francophone drama native to Louisiana, as well as a range of…[Read more]

From the mid-1960s onward, compilations of the speeches and trial addresses of South African opponents of apartheid focused attention on the apartheid regime despite intensified repression in the wake of the Rivonia Trial. Mary Benson’s novel, At the Still Point, transposes the political trial into fiction. Its “stenographic” codes of repre…[Read more]

This essay takes a long view of Wright’s work, arguing that his racial consciousness always extended beyond national boundaries and was forged from a globalist perspective. This outlook is not, as some critics have maintained, a late-stage development in Wright’s career, but rather the predominant theme that unites his oeuvre with a single con…[Read more]

This panel examines the paradoxical centrality of marginal elements in nineteenth-century aesthetics, to trace how they revitalize the conceptual and cultural impact of form. Abstracts forthcoming shortly.

Abstracts for the panel “Graphic Atwood” proposed by the Margaret Atwood Society for the 2020 MLA Convention.