The influential Tamil writer Pudumaippittan turned to the short story to theorize the relationship between literature and society in the late-colonial era. He used the genre’s brevity to compress his portrayals of well-known female types—such as widows, prostitutes, and goodwives—into singular emotional events. This enabled Pudumaippittan to evoke…[Read more]

In conjunction with the Popular Culture Association (PCA) holding their 2021 conference in Boston, contributors and attendees of the New England Graphic Medicine (NEGM) Virtual Summit are proposing a slate of programming that now is welcoming additional participants.

Previous studies suggest that narrative fiction promotes social justice by increasing empathy, but critics have argued that the partiality of empathy severely limits its effectiveness as an engine of social justice, and that what needs to be developed is universal compassion rather than empathy. We created Compassion-Cultivating Pedagogy (CCP) to…[Read more]

A challenge for Graphic Medicine is its being juxtaposed alongside biomedical and scientific fields of work that operate largely in the realm of statistics and quantifiable analytics. Often, the scholarship in Graphic Medicine comes without numbers. It is anecdotal, experiential, aesthetic/literary, or theoretical, customarily, and only…[Read more]

Figures of the World: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form overturns Eurocentric genealogies and globalizing generalizations about “world literature” by examining the complex, contradictory history of naturalist fiction. Christopher Laing Hill traces the history of naturalist fiction from its emergence in France in the 1860s through its spr…[Read more]

An introduction to music appreciation and history that emphasizes the political, cultural, and social influences on music from antiquity to the 20th century. Contents include sacred and secular, vocal and instrumental, and folk and art music from across the Western world, including modern popular song. No previous musical experience necessary. All…[Read more]

In this essay Queen Margaret’s curses in Richard III become part of a feminist ethics on the early modern stage. As a parrhesiast, in Foucault’s terms, Margaret speaks truth to power and claims a right of citizenship. That Margaret elicits universal revulsion from the other characters while also holding a unique, though not untroubled, pos…[Read more]

How does a woman become a whore? What are the discursive dynamics making a woman a whore? And, more importantly, what are the discursive mechanics of unmaking? In Women and Shakespeare’s Cuckoldry Plays: Shifting Narratives of Marital Betrayal, Cristina León Alfar pursues these questions to tease out familiar cultural stories about female se…[Read more]

A job talk given as part of an interview for a faculty librarian position