The main objective of this article is to examine the representation of ʻhomelandʼ in three short stories by Caribbean-American writer Edwidge Danticat: “The Book of the Dead,” “Night Talkers,” and “The Gift.” All three stories represent Haitian migrants in the multi-cultural setting of the United States. A central theme that connects these stories…[Read more]

Abstract of my book chapter, published in Memory, Voice, and Identity
Muslim Women’s Writing from across the Middle East
Edited By Feroza Jussawalla, Doaa Omran

Solidarity between South Africa and Palestine has a long history, and often times, a comparison is drawn between the apartheid system in South Africa and the Israeli occupation and settler-colonial project in Palestine. In 1997, the late South African President, Nelson Mandela, said, “We know all too well that our freedom is incomplete without t…[Read more]

Although the systematic eviction of Palestinians from their homeland has been recorded at length since the establishment of the state of Israel in 948, the documentation has namely concerned itself with urban centers or villages. Expulsion and removal of marginalized communities, namely the Bedouins’, from their ancestral encampments or homes h…[Read more]

Salaria Kea was the only African American woman to serve with the American Medical Unit during the Spanish Civil War. Her experience has been silenced and edited within the archive by traditionally more authoritative voices. Reconsidering the impact of intersectionality on personal experience can lead to a better understanding of Black U.S.…[Read more]

Series of Powerpoint slides. Background on the limited time of faculty at “the 99%” of institutions (Francisco and O’Dair) to conduct research and thus the importance of not wasting that labor by choosing inappropriate venues. Overview of types of journal, and suggestions for using reflection prompts, the MLA directory of Periodicals, and a…[Read more]

War diaries are often written under duress, and are attempts at documenting events as they unfold, or narrating stories of how people survive under trying circumstances. She argues that conditions of war under which authors produce their work dictate the form itself. When an author’s life is under threat, when safety is compromised, m…[Read more]

In Portuguese Nobel Laureate José Saramago’s As Intermitências da Morte (2005) and in Mahmoud Darwish’s epic poem Mural (2000), the authors contemplate the nothingness that accompanies death, a concern that increasingly permeates their later writings. Although ‘death’ is depicted differently, the authors fear that with death “the universe wo…[Read more]

This memorial tribute for the late Ciaran Carson (1948-2019), Irish creative writer extraordinaire, was commissioned three years ago for inclusion in a special number of “Reading Ireland” which has not yet materialised. It is now archived in and by Humanities Common on the third anniversary of his funeral rites and burial in Belfast, Northern…[Read more]

What follows is a talk I gave (over zoom) on June 29, 2022, for the London Rare Book School and the Institute of English Studies, University of London, and mildly revised in the transcript I posted on my blog on September 7, 2022. It was an opportunity for me to talk about the work I’ve been doing on feminist bibliography over the past couple of…[Read more]

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals should work to protect multiple runs of actual Victorian periodicals, which are potentially at risk in “collective collections” organized by academic libraries.

Essay on the poetry of Emily Dickinson and her impact upon literature. This essay celebrates her global reach from within societal spheres of gender. “Emily Dickinson transformed the genre of poetry from the academic salon styled idealism to the personal poignant voice of reality from the poet’s point of view.”

An innovative account that brings together cognitive science, ethnography, and literary history to examine patterns of “mindreading” in a wide range of literary works.

This essay/ article examines the provenance and the implications of a literary archive acquired by the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of Queen’s University Belfast and now fully catalogued by Brian Caraher and Emma Hegarty under the auspices of the British Academy. The state-of-the-art. fully annotated, online catalogue establishes the…[Read more]