The idea that Shakespeare is a global author has taken many forms since the building of the Globe playhouse in London in 1599. Performances of Shakespeare not only create channels between geographic spaces but also connect different time periods. Divided into two major sections, Shakespeare and World Cultures and Shakespeare and Genres, the…[Read more]

In this article, I examine how Sissieretta Jones (frequently described as America’s first Black superstar, among other superlatives) strategically leveraged her European performance reviews in order to increase her listenership and wages in the United States. Jones toured Europe for the first (and only) time from February until November in 1895. A…[Read more]

First presented as a paper at the 2018 SAMLA Convention in Atlanta, this article will become a chapter of my book in progress on the photobooks of the 1930s and 1940s illustrated with the photographs of the Farm Security Administration.

This course is a study of the literature of the U.S.-Mexico border from the 1980s to the present. We begin with Gloria Anzaldúa’s foundational texts, Borderlands / La Frontera, and her landmark feminist anthology, co-edited with Cherríe Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Radical Writings by Women of Color. We then consider the legacies and aft…[Read more]

This course is a study of Latinx literatures and cultures produced in the last two decades. We will concentrate our attention on how contemporary art works represent and participate in the upheavals of the twenty-first century—9/11, global economic and ecological crisis, mass migration and mass deportation, political and social mobilization, s…[Read more]

The syllabus for science fiction course offered Spring 2021 in the English Department at Davidson College.

Birds are everywhere in nineteenth-century American literature, including the work of Emily Dickinson. Women poets often referred to their poems in terms of making songs. This essay rethinks the birds in Dickinson’s letters and poems. It suggests that Dickinson’s birds, and their songs, show her awareness of business. They exist within com…[Read more]

In an early version of his article “Harlem Literati in the Twenties,” first published in the Saturday Evening Review in 1940, Langston Hughes offers the curious suggestion that Wallace Thurman was the ghostwriter of Men, Marriage and Me (erroneously written as Men, Women and Checks in Hughes’ article), the tell-all memoir ostensibly by the origi…[Read more]

Collegiate language programs faced challenges for survival long before COVID-19 hit the US. Now with the impending financial fallout from having to move online, colleges and universities will be scrutinizing even more so the value and viability of supporting language departments. This presentation will present a snapshot of where language programs…[Read more]

This discusses the multi-year process of implementing co-requisite composition courses and establishing a multiple measures placement mechanism to determine which students need what kinds of developmental course work, if any. The end result was an increase in course pass rates and an increase in retention.

This is the syllabus for the Spring 2021 section of Texts & Technology in History, which will be taught synchronously via Zoom at UCF as part of the PhD in T&T. This iteration of the course particularly considers whose texts are archived, who shapes our technologies, and which histories are preserved and retold.