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]

2020 New England Graphic Medicine Conference
Call for Papers
MARCH 26-28, 2020
[Deadline: January 10, 2020]

Graphic Medicine is a genre, a field, a tool, a community, and a cause. It is large enough to accommodate all health and medical experiences, from that of the doctor to that of the patient – from that of a microbe to that of a p…[Read more]

The Egyptian Surrealist Art et Liberté group was recuperated in two exhibitions beginning in 2016 and continuing through 2018. The larger exhibition by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath emphasizes the group’s internationalism and the complexity of its engagement with various forms of Surrealism, including André Breton and Leon Trotsky’s 1938 manif…[Read more]

Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia, this essay argues that modernism was a heterotopic movement, in which the creation of alternative social environments (such as Gertrude Stein’s atelier or the writers’ colony), and the imagination of alternative forms of social life in literature, were mutually informing, and inext…[Read more]

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]

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.

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

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

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.

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]

This review essay approaches Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller’s Thinking Literature across Continents (2016) from a set of questions about what it means to read in the age of hyperarchival accumulation. Written against the background of events in the United States and elsewhere during the fall of 2017, the essay tracks and assesses Ghosh and…[Read more]

Since the first Pokémon game launched in Japan in 1996, the series has been a balancing act between casual and hardcore gaming. While the first iteration and “core” series has emphasized a modified, accessible version of traditional JRPG mechanics, other titles have frequently emphasized so-called casual play; most recently, Pokémon Go lured in a…[Read more]

This undergraduate seminar on author Margaret Atwood fulfills the Major Author course at Stevenson University. Students will read A Trio of Tall Tales and The Year of the Flood, as well as both read and watch The Handmaid’s Tale. The course assignments include live-tweeting, creating a webtext, and an intertextual analysis essay.

Syllabus for ENGL 479P: BookLab, an upper-division undergraduate course at the University of Maryland. Taught with the resources and facilities of the Department of English’s BookLab, the course is a historical, imaginative, and experiential introduction to the multitudinous forms of what is not the oldest but is surely among the most enduring of…[Read more]

I can’t seem to forget the anecdotic episode that one of my Literature Professors used to tell the class: a deconstructionist acquaintance of theirs was so absorbed in their literal undertaking that their meals consisted only of letter-noodles soup, so that even the most mundane of tasks could intertwine itself with textuality. Farfetched as this…[Read more]

“Where do we find ourselves?” are Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Experience” first words. The query is the author’s starting point for a number of philosophical considerations; it’s also the point of departure for our making sense of pain, through the reading of both Emerson’s essay and James Joyce’s Ulysses.
The essay hipothesises that Joyce’s “We walk…[Read more]

This article covers an entire generation of American popular novels published between the Civil War and World War I: campus fictions, focusing all but exclusively on homosocial scenes of undergraduate merriment. Centering on the camaraderie of fraternal sociality, campus novels model friendship as a democratic ideal for dispensing with conflict,…[Read more]