A two-page abstract of the book.

In the 2018 MLA Convention, the Luso-Brazilian Forum organized a meeting to remember Professor Antonio Candido (1918-2017), on January 6, 7:15-8:30 PM. This posting collects most papers read at the meeting. Should you be interested in contributing your own remembrance, or reflections on Candido’s career, please send them to me on the Commons. I…[Read more]

Establishing a meaningful digital identity is essential to managing one’s scholarly and professional reputation. This workshop addresses ways to cultivate an online identity and offers guidance on “going public” using tools and strategies for building a community around your work. Topics include social media, writing for different audiences, perso…[Read more]

This presentation explores ethical dilemmas for graduate school educators in programs that prepare M.A. students to teach English in community colleges. Such graduate programs attract students and produce strong, enthusiastic teachers, and university administrators value the programs because they draw tuition; however, the job prospects for…[Read more]

Slides accompanying a panel representing the Pittsburgh Bicentennial Frankenstein project to build a digital scholarly variorum edition that updates, bridges, and intersects multiple divergent editions of Frankenstein, including the manuscript notebook drafts of 1816, the 1818, 1823, and 1831 print editions, as well as the handwritten notes in the…[Read more]

The following is a response delivered at the end of the Critical Infrastructure Studies Panel, which took place at the January 2018 Modern Language Association Conference in New York City. This response argues that the call for critical infrastructure studies can ultimately help us mobilize a critically informed resistance to capital and set of…[Read more]

A survey of the foundational disciplines of literate culture in the British isles, from the failure of the Roman imperial project in the fifth century to Henry VIII’s promulgation of uniform Latin grammars in 1540-42.

Grammar and rhetoric were the disciplines charged with teaching correct and effective use of language in antiquity. In the M…[Read more]

Preview of “Introduction” to The Yearbook of English Studies 47 (2017), Walter Scott: New Interpretations.

Just over half a century ago, Marxist critic Georg Lukács proposed that Walter Scott — writing more than a century earlier — was responsible for a new kind of historical narrative: readers, by identifying with everyday kinds of fict…[Read more]

Abstract:
This article explores Robert Louis Stevenson’s use of costume as a device for exploring Scotland’s fetishization of it’s literary and cultural history. In Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae, the mythologizing of James Durie as the eponymous Master depends upon a series of dramatic costume changes. Durie confounds attempts to consign…[Read more]

The Dialogus de appetenda gloria qui inscribitur Gonsalus (1523) is Juan Gine´s de Sepu´ lveda’s first reflection on the moral aspects of war. In it, he addresses whether it is morally licit for Christians to desire worldly honor and glory, a question that Christian mystics, Irenicists, and humanists like Desiderius Erasmus and Juan Luis Vives pos…[Read more]

The Dialogus de appetenda gloria qui inscribitur Gonsalus (1523) is Juan Gine´s de Sepu´ lveda’s first reflection on the moral aspects of war. In it, he addresses whether it is morally licit for Christians to desire worldly honor and glory, a question that Christian mystics, Irenicists, and humanists like Desiderius Erasmus and Juan Luis Vives pos…[Read more]

This essay investigates Walter Scott’s writing, across several genres, as a contribution to an environmental historiography of Scotland. One of the main research questions is whether that writing provides any evidence for an early land ethic that anticipates Aldo Leopold’s twentieth-century use of that term. Scott’s response to aesthetic…[Read more]

Feminist resistance has been crucial for Argentina’s recovery from the military dictatorship of 1976-1983. Alicia Partnoy was “disappeared” into one of hundreds of torture centers sardonically called “Little Schools.” After her release and exile to the United States, she published her poetic testimony, The Little School, with Cleis Press in 1986.…[Read more]

As in other early language traditions, premodern English poetry was written out with very light punctuation. The sparsity of manuscript punctuation appears especially problematic in the period before 1200, when poetry in English lacked visual linebreaks. The difficulties of parsing this poetry are substantial. Modern editors of Old English verse…[Read more]

As in other early language traditions, premodern English poetry was written out with very light punctuation. The sparsity of manuscript punctuation appears especially problematic in the period before 1200, when poetry in English lacked visual linebreaks. The difficulties of parsing this poetry are substantial. Modern editors of Old English verse…[Read more]

From the twelfth century to the seventeenth, political prophecy was prominent among English literary genres no less than in English political life. Derived from Welsh poetic tradition via Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin History of the Kings of Britain, prophecy reached all social classes. Prophetic texts influenced the decisions of kings, shaped p…[Read more]

From the twelfth century to the seventeenth, political prophecy was prominent among English literary genres no less than in English political life. Derived from Welsh poetic tradition via Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin History of the Kings of Britain, prophecy reached all social classes. Prophetic texts influenced the decisions of kings, shaped p…[Read more]