Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938) has found unusual currency of late. In 2011, the play lent its name to a major funding program launched by the National Endowment for the Arts; in 2017, it appeared in the center of a popular podcast and was revived by a British theater company in the wake of a terrorist attack. These productions recognize what t…[Read more]

Building Digital Archives as We Fight, a panel sponsored by the Digital Humanities Caucus of the American Studies Association, will consider the affordances and challenges of building digital archives, as well as the ethical dimensions of using emerging technologies that affect the process and pace of digital archiving. Drawing on firsthand…[Read more]

Abstract
This paper argues that Ah!lam Mustaghanami’s novel Dhakirat al-jasad (Memories of the Flesh)
enacts a break with Algeria’s Francophone literary past, multiply staging its affiliation with the
Arabic language. !e novel positions itself as part of an Algerian linguistic drama that, once
translated into French as Mémoires de la chai…[Read more]

In 1950, the United States Central Intelligence Agency created the Congress for Cultural Free- dom, with its main offices in Paris, lhe CCF was designed as a cultural front in the Cold War in response to the Soviet Cominform, and founded and funded a worldwide network of literary journals (as well as conferences, concerts, art exhibits and other…[Read more]

Chapter 21 of The Routledge Companion to Media Technology and Obsolescence, ed. Mark J.P. Wolf (New York and London: Routledge, 2019): 296-310.

My latest book publication, due from U of Tennessee P in 2020.

Cultural memory is actively constructed through embodied and political performances. Tang Xianzu and William Shakespeare, two “national poets” of unequal global stature, have recently become vehicles for British and Chinese cultural diplomacy and exchange during their quatercentenary in 2016. The culture of commemoration is a key factor in Tang’s…[Read more]

As the digital humanities have rapidly gained prominence and attention over the last decade, learning has shifted from individual experiences at training environments such as THATCamps and Institutes to more formal institutional instruction. This means that the number of people teaching digital humanities (DH) has had to increase. Who are these…[Read more]

Introduction to four poems written by Langston Hughes during the Spanish Civil War, published in the Little-Known Documents section of PMLA.

The introduction alongside the text of the four poems can be found on the PMLA’s site: https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2019.134.3.562.

Late 19th-century Beirut and Cairo were capitals of Arabic literary production and press
activity. A period, oft deemed a nahḍah, that witnessed the advent of the novel form or
riwāyah in Arabic, this was also the moment of intensified French and British imperial
involvement in the region, and the concomitant industrialization of Beirut’s silk…[Read more]

This special issue of the Journal of Creative Writing Studies centers on how creative writing changes when writers actively engage computers as nonhuman collaborators in “creative making.” Using examples from McGurl’s The Program Era, Emily Dickinson, and the crowdsourced “translation” of Melville’s classic into Emoji Dick, Berens suggests th…[Read more]

This special issue of the Journal of Creative Writing Studies centers on how creative writing changes when writers actively engage computers as nonhuman collaborators in “creative making.” Using examples from McGurl’s The Program Era, Emily Dickinson, and the crowdsourced “translation” of Melville’s classic into Emoji Dick, Berens suggests th…[Read more]

As a work that survives and appears in more than one form, King Lear has a vexing problem of interpretation and a rich opportunity for the study of textual and cultural variants. The play begins with an aging monarch staging a fantastical, paradoxical final act as a king. It lures us toward a final act of interpretation to nail down the nature of…[Read more]

This article seeks to explore into the impact of 9/11 tragedy on the private lives of ordinary people and individuals and into the associated theme of identity crisis, as reflected in four important post-9/11 poems – “Someone Says They Looked Like Cartwheeling Birds” by Lyn Lifshin, “Making Love After September 11, 2001” by Aliki Barnstone…[Read more]

Abstract.
In this paper, I read Leı ¨la Sebbar’s staging in her novel She´razzed: 17 ans,brune, frise´ e, les yeux verts of the resistance by children of North African and other immigrants in the early 1980s to the French state’s cartographic modes and documentsof control. The paper will consider the many uses to which the map was put by theFren…[Read more]

Abstract
This paper argues that Ahlām Mustaghānamī’s novel Dhākirat al-jasad (Memories of the Flesh) enacts a break with Algeria’s Francophone literary past, multiply staging its affiliation with the Arabic language. e novel positions itself as part of an Algerian linguistic drama that, once translated into French as Mémoires de la chair , is p…[Read more]