After presenting an overview of scholarship on post-9/11 American poetry, my article focuses on a group of largely neglected post-9/11 poems, which deal with spectral consciousness and hallucinatory experiences. In exploring this issue, I have tried to establish a relationship between trauma-related intrusive memories and hallucination on the…[Read more]

Historians, literary scholars, and international lawyers interested in the early modern period have all grappled with the problem of anachronism, yet mostly independently of one another. This essay uses the question of war crime in Shakespeare’s Henry V to argue that early modernists interested in international law need not reject synchronic h…[Read more]

The book examines little known and forgotten writings by Magnus Hirschfeld, the influential sexologist who is best known today for his homosexual activism, transgender work and founding of the world’s first Institute of Sexual Science in 1919. Arguing that negative experiences, as much as affirmative subculture formation, shaped a collective sense…[Read more]

A contribution to the Editors’ Forum on Queer Form, edited by Kadji Amin, Roy Pérez, and Amber Musser, for ASAP/Journal.

Because nineteenth-century paper was made from rags, the materiality of paper money became a likely ground from which to debate the nature of value in modern capitalism. On one hand, if paper money was backed by nothing but itself, then it was worth little more than itself: a gathering of lowly rags. On the other hand, the process of turning…[Read more]

«On the Death of Isabel of Borbón» is perhaps the best written testimony of Queen Isabel’s love for the arts and letters. This poem, in all likelihood penned by Philip IV to honor Isabel’s life, is composed of eight decimas and the last verse of each is also the title of a Spanish Golden Age comedia. Although the special delight that Isabel found…[Read more]

Using REED London as a case study of how we, as pre-modern performance and theatre historians, are using digital methods to aggregate its materials, access and analyze a remarkably broad array of archival documents, and amplify their importance to a broader spectrum of humanities scholars and potential collaborators than we cannot have been able…[Read more]

A how-to lesson on working with Early English Books Online and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, focusing both on the basics of searching and navigating interfaces and on thinking about remediation on how EEBO and ECCO represent material texts. Presented originally at Edinburgh’s “Beyond the Black Box” series in May 2017.

A how-to lesson on working with Early English Books Online and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, focusing both on the basics of searching and navigating interfaces and on thinking about remediation on how EEBO and ECCO represent material texts. Presented originally at Edinburgh’s “Beyond the Black Box” series in May 2017.

The preliminary materials in Shakespeare’s First Folio survive in a variety of sequences, and until Peter Blayney proposed bibliographical reasons for a correct order in the 1990s, scholars weren’t sure what order was intended by the publishers. These slides diagram Blayney’s order, the reasoning behind it, and some of the variant orders that can…[Read more]

This course, under the broad heading of literature and science, takes on the subject of climate change fiction (cli-fi). It was first taught at Antioch College in winter of 2017. The course included field trips to the OSU climate research center, a local nature preserve, and the College’s farm.

Zadie Smith’s novel On Beauty confirms that the fiction of the second generation Caribbean diaspora has indeed arrived on the international scene, if indeed any confirmation was required after the phenomenal success of Smith’s first novel
White Teeth. The status of Smith’s fiction in the Euro-American academy, which is also the setting of O…[Read more]

My subject is an archive of gay and lesbian activism that helps us understand a postcolonial counterpublic. The project I undertake is of historical recovery and theoretical elaboration of the specificities of postcolonial sexuality-based movements as necessary and long overdue supplements to global sexual activism.

Examining gay journalism as gay liberation literature, this essay forwards a cultural history of sexuality informed by comparative urban and queer studies. My main argument is that gay liberation literature under apartheid lags behind important shifts in sexual activism; and my larger aim is to extend the valences of postcolonial queer studies…[Read more]

The manuscript now called the Salisbury Breviary (Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, MS lat. 17294) contains the only extant illustrated cycle of of the Life of St Edith of Wilton; the fifteen miniatures accompany the readings for the feast of St Edith. These images emphasize the connections among Edith’s holiness, royal genealogy, and…[Read more]

The performances of Christ in the text of The Dream of the Rood construct a masculinity for Christ that is majestic, martial, and specifically heterosexual and that relies on a fragile opposition with a femininity defined as dominated Other in the figure of the Cross. His particularly constructed masculinity, explored rather than merely assumed or…[Read more]

An entry in the Women Medievalists and the Academy collection, this brief biography presents Cambridge historian Mary Bateson, scholar and suffragist, who lived on the cusp of the opportunity for academic professionalization for women. Her life illustrates an inspiring blend of serious scholarship, accessible publication, and devoted political…[Read more]

Feminist and gender scholars working in Anglo-Saxon studies in the past ten years have been asking new and important questions of a variety of Old English and Anglo-Latin texts. Most crucially, this interdisciplinary new work redefines the historiographical paradigms of Anglo-Saxon cultural production and reception so that women must now be…[Read more]