This workbook provides a brief introduction to digital text analysis through a series of three-part units. Each unit introduces students to a concept, a tool for or method of digital text analysis, and a series of exercises for practicing the new skills. In some cases, studies of particular projects are presented instead of tools in the third…[Read more]

Inspired by my work on the Women in Book History Bibliography, this presentation takes a different angle on discussions of women’s texts in digital archives. The WBHB collects secondary sources on women’s writing and labor over a broad range of languages, subjects, geographic locations, and time periods. Because we collect secondary sources, we…[Read more]

This essay explores the cultural legacy of Hindustani, which names the intimate overlap between two South Asian languages, Hindi and Urdu. Hindi and Urdu have distinct religious identities, national associations and scripts, yet they are nearly identical in syntax, diverging to some extent in their vocabulary. Hindi and Urdu speakers,…[Read more]

The discussion of postmodernism involving modernity and its ramifications requires contemporary and cross-cultural perspectives.

The discussion of postmodernism involving modernity and its ramifications requires contemporary and cross-cultural perspectives.

The discussion of postmodernism involving modernity and its ramifications requires contemporary and cross-cultural perspectives.

This essay brings together cognitive literary theory and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogic imagination to illuminate the construction of social class in the eighteenth-century novel. It offers a close reading of selected passages from Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778), made possible by combining Bakhtinian and cognitive poetics. It also dis…[Read more]

Anne Donlon delves into the history of the British Left after World War I to assert the significance of the Black and feminist interventions of Claude McKay and Sylvia Pankhurst. Donlon centers the publication of “A Black Man Replies,” McKay’s letter to the editor published in Pankhurst’s newspaper The Worker’s Dreadnought, against white supremaci…[Read more]

Anne Donlon delves into the history of the British Left after World War I to assert the significance of the Black and feminist interventions of Claude McKay and Sylvia Pankhurst. Donlon centers the publication of “A Black Man Replies,” McKay’s letter to the editor published in Pankhurst’s newspaper The Worker’s Dreadnought, against white supremaci…[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]

Abstract
The Sudanese-born author Leila Aboulela describes the position of the non-western Anglophone writer as a translator by default, moving ‘back and forth’ between languages and cultures. This essay argues that Aboulela’s novel The Translator (1999) calls into question conceptualizations of translation that grow out of western relig…[Read more]

This article describes how the novelist David Mitchell employs the “topos of the cult,” a set of conventions that describe a mental state of unfreedom, in the novels Ghostwritten (1999) and Cloud Atlas (2004). This figuration of an unfree form of society—characterized by a group’s specialized language, closed social spaces, and charismatic leade…[Read more]

This paper will begin by looking at the historical theoretical relationship between science fiction and dystopia. It will then proceed to demonstrate how recent theorists have failed to adequately incorporate the practical changes authors have introduced to the genre, which includes the incorporation of aspects of magical realism. Brown Girl in…[Read more]

Although we have long discussed the rise of consumer culture and the increase of print in Restoration England (see Birth of a Consumer Society, 1982), comparatively little information exists on specific methods publishers used to advertise to audiences and what role they played in creating new markets. My project fills this gap by examining…[Read more]

Lecture/class notes on Samuel Beckett’s Murphy. I’m sharing my teaching notes (rough) for works that may be helpful to others and are widely taught.

Lecture/class notes on Modernism. I’m sharing my teaching notes (rough) for works that may be helpful to others and are widely taught.

Lecture/class notes on Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. I’m sharing my teaching notes (rough) for works that may be helpful to others and are widely taught.