This syllabus describes a group of meetings among faculty, proposing a sustained course of study in which we would ask:
1) Can humanities methods be made available to the public?
2) Do digital methodologies capture and operationalize humanities principles, advance humanistic methodologies, or impede humanities work?

This course focuses on developing skills of close reading and literary analysis, both in class discussion and in assignments, through the study of major black writers. This section will be a study of global black literature—novels, drama, and poetry—written in English from the twentieth century to the present. We will consider how major aut…[Read more]

In the last six years, scholars have engaged with the effects of globalization on the study of collective memory, emphasizing the de-territorialization, de-nationalization of memory cultures. While being attentive to the global circulation and transformation of collective memories, authors in this issue seek to revisit and critique some…[Read more]

In the last six years, scholars have engaged with the effects of globalization on the study of collective memory, emphasizing the de-territorialization, de-nationalization of memory cultures. While being attentive to the global circulation and transformation of collective memories, authors in this issue seek to revisit and critique some…[Read more]

Amine’s essay explores memory-making and highlights a paradox in
Leı¨la Sebbar’s The Seine was Red, a novel that describes the conflicting memories of the police massacre of Algerians in Paris on 17 October 1961. Structured as a family album with captioned identities, place, and time, Sebbar’s novel employs a mode of remembrance that convent…[Read more]

Previous scholarship on source materials for Lawrence Durrell’s Gnostic themes in Monsieur are insufficient in light of his marginalia in Serge Hutin’s Les Gnostiques and his notebooks for the novel. We contend that archival evidence from the Bibliothèque Lawrence Durrell in Nanterre, France, necessitates a reevaluation of previous work in orde…[Read more]

Claude Dupin published two versions of his critique of the Esprit des lois: Réflexions sur quelques parties d’un livre intitulé ‘De l’esprit des loix,’ in 2 volumes, which appeared in 1749 and was suppressed by the author; and Observations sur un livre intitulé de l’Esprit des loix, in three volumes, published before 1755 and also suppressed.…[Read more]

This essay describes and illustrates the activities associated with the University of California at Berkeley’s Shakespeare Program, over the last forty years, covering teaching innovations, numerous research publications, multiple productions and videos of Shakespeare’s plays, and creation of websites, Shakespeare’s Staging and Milton Revealed.

Draft work (notes and bibliography not included) from one of my books in progress tentatively titled Against the Cultural Singularity: Digital Humanities & Critical Infrastructure Studies. Excerpted are a few portions from the beginning of the manuscript that bear on the critical potential of the digital humanities and critique.

Marie Darrieussecq’s Clèves (2011) shocked readers with the vulgarity of its language and spurred controversy over its status as a literary text. In this article, I show how the novel’s “bad” language is a foil for Darrieussecq’s larger project of rewriting the adolescent female body, removing it from the sexualized and objectified optic through…[Read more]

Literary scholars’ conversations about distant reading have spent too much time pitting it against close reading, and not enough time understanding connections to other disciplines. Distant reading is better understood as part of a methodological shift that has permitted humanists and social scientists to build stronger interdisciplinary connections.

A description of a successful team-taught introductory literature/DH course on “Identity, Ethnicity, and the Digital Humanities” at Washington & Jefferson College.