Attention in the humanities has lately turned to the re-thinking of traditional modes of publishing. But is the academy prepared to assess work that deviates from the recognised forms and formats associated with ‘digging down and standing back’ (Felski 2015, p. 52)? This chapter investigates whether humanistic research, usually expressed in wor…[Read more]

Graduate seminar syllabus: In this seminar, we will explore the contemporary comic, considering literary and cultural works across a range of platforms and markets. Comics are still frequently (and historically) associated with popular culture, and linked to children’s literature and mass media, even as they loom large through big and small screen…[Read more]

This article proposes a new literary history of British Asia that examines its earliest communities and cultural institutions in translocal and regional registers. Combining translocalism and regionalism redefines Anglo‐Indian writing as constituted by multisited forces, only one of which is the reciprocal exchange between Britain and its c…[Read more]

This book delves into the inadequately explored, liberative side of Humanism during the late Renaissance. While some long-sixteenth-century thinking anticipates twentieth-century Liberation Theology, a broader description is simply “liberation thinking,” which embraces its diverse, timeless, and sometimes nontheological aspects.

Two moments fra…[Read more]

Born poor, the material and ideological networks that propelled Peter Abrahams to literacy in 1930s South Africa lay bare how white liberalism, Pan-Africanism, and Marxism all overlapped as well as contradicted one another in the global 1930s. The confluences and contradictions of these currents of thought, artistic production, and political…[Read more]

This essay decodes how Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings uses the history of Jamaican music, culminating in the conflict between roots reggae and dancehall, to chart the Cold War’s conflicts over time, temporality, and futurity. A Brief History of Seven Killings points readers to a jaded, subaltern temporality encoded in a dan…[Read more]

Syllabus for spring 2021 graduate seminar, “Approaches to the Material Text.” Readings survey in history of the book and related fields. Includes prose introductions synthesizing each week’s readings.

Syllabus for spring 2021 graduate seminar, “Approaches to the Material Text.” Readings survey in history of the book and related fields. Includes prose introductions synthesizing each week’s readings.

Syllabus for the English ENG921 course, “Narrative in a Digital Age” for the Winter 2021 semester, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada.

The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the history of books by focusing on books and early modern culture. By learning about how books were made and how books were used, students will gain a clearer appreciation of how early modern culture was shaped by and was a shaping force in the development of print culture. The archival…[Read more]

In an early version of his article “Harlem Literati in the Twenties,” first published in the Saturday Evening Review in 1940, Langston Hughes offers the curious suggestion that Wallace Thurman was the ghostwriter of Men, Marriage and Me (erroneously written as Men, Women and Checks in Hughes’ article), the tell-all memoir ostensibly by the origi…[Read more]

The attached is the schedule that I devised for an entry-level, cross-disciplinary grad course in digital humanities, offered across several schools and departments. It is licensed by Creative Commons as Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International, meaning that you are free to adapt and repurpose it for non-commercial uses as long as…[Read more]

This is the PowerPoint presentation to accompany my comments for the Theoretical Foundations of Victorian Studies roundtable on January 7, 2021.

This essay draws on formalist cultural studies and material feminism to argue for a new approach in modernist studies, which I call formalist materialism, an approach that reads ecological forms alongside aesthetic forms. Such an approach may have distinct advantages. Formalist materialism illuminates a new direction for formalists by connecting…[Read more]