George Peele’s The Old Wives Tale (published 1595) was performed by the Queen’s Men in the 1580s. Initially, the play has been dismissed by several critics as a vulgar and cheap entertainment without much value. Yet, the metadramatic techniques employed in the play sheds light to how humour could be effectively triggered in the respective per…[Read more]

From Michel de Montaigne’s essay “Of Friendship” to Jacques Derrida’s rearticulation of the former in The Politics of Friendship, scholars both early modern and modern have sought ways to address the fluid co-mixture of bodies from which the discourse of friendship can and does emerge. More recently still, new materialist thinkers of ontolog…[Read more]

A reading of Shakespeare and Deleuze on the subject of Anthropocene air. Keywords: endurance, climate change, fossil capitalism, carbon ghosts, Hamlet.

Can we imagine a Blue Humanities that takes the non-relation as a starting point for ecological thought? I believe we can. Following Shakespeare and Deleuze, this essay engages in a thought experiment that, if it is not too absurd, might, like the ship of fools of medieval times, unmoor the Blue Humanities from its current safe harbor by putting…[Read more]

This essay examines how the rhetoric of animalization in Shakespeare’s Othello compels us to think early modern categories of race in connection with early modern discourses of “human” versus “animal.” Beginning with Shakespeare’s representation of Iago, I suggest that it is the potential for sameness conditioned by Iago’s counterfactua…[Read more]

Final progress report about the California Open Educational Resources Council’s work with 3 representatives from each of the California State University, University of California, and California Community Colleges, to investigate the efficacy of implementing adoption of OER textbooks and to create a repository of OER textbooks for use in all 3 systems.

Based on its survey responses, the California Open Educational Resources Council identified several impediments to adopting OER textbooks and concluded that rigorous peer review was ultimately the first step towards advocating for adoption of OER textbooks. The Council quickly identified 50 highly-enrolled courses with expensive textbooks across…[Read more]

This is a pedagogical edition of the medieval Castilian texts with modern Spanish introduction, notes, and bibliography by Ana Gómez Bravo, of a series of excerpts of late fifteenth-century texts related to the cultural practices (perceived and actual) of judeo-conversos, or Jews who have converted to Christianity. It includes an introduction…[Read more]

This is a pedagogical edition of the medieval Castilian texts with English introduction, translation, notes, and bibliography by Ana Gómez Bravo, of a series of excerpts of late fifteenth-century texts related to the cultural practices (perceived and actual) of judeo-conversos, or Jews who have converted to Christianity. It includes an…[Read more]

In this essay Queen Margaret’s curses in Richard III become part of a feminist ethics on the early modern stage. As a parrhesiast, in Foucault’s terms, Margaret speaks truth to power and claims a right of citizenship. That Margaret elicits universal revulsion from the other characters while also holding a unique, though not untroubled, pos…[Read more]

This is a pedagogical edition of a selection of Las excelencias de los hebreos (Amsterdam 1679), in .doc format with Spanish introduction and notes, with the original text in Spanish. Las excelencias de los hebreos (Amsterdam 1679) is a treatise describing the positive characteristics (excelencias) of the Jewish people and a containing a…[Read more]

Traditionally read as a poem about laboring subjects who gain power through abstract and abstracting forms of bodily discipline, John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, 1674) more compellingly foregrounds the erotics of the Garden as a space where humans and nonhumans intra-act materially and sexually. Following Christopher Hill, who long ago pointed t…[Read more]

Turning to Walter Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana (1596) and The History of the World (1614), I reframe such biopolitical factors as Ralegh’s “dissability” around a concept that has less to do with human world-making and more to do with the “states of exception” (Giorgio Agamben) under which inhuman agencies come to matter for world history (of…[Read more]

The book publishing industry is an important social, cultural, and economic institution whose records deserve to be preserved for the public good. Books.Files was an exploratory project funded in part by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation aimed at assessing the archival value of digital assets in the contemporary publishing industry for stakeholders…[Read more]

Though the verbal icon has a long and robust multisensory history extending beyond Milton, my goal here is to challenge ableist readings of Milton’s poetry by linking his poetic ekphrasis to the politics and aesthetics of disability.

Juan Latino was a professor of Latin at the University of Granada and is considered Europe’s first Black poet. This poem appeared in a 1572 book by Juan Latino celebrating Spain’s victory in the Battle of Lepanto (1571). This is a pedagogical unit that includes the original Latin text accompanied by a Spanish translation, with an English…[Read more]