A contribution to Transition’s “I Can’t Breathe” forum, an online space for responses to the murders of unarmed black Americans by police. My piece, which was chosen for publication in the print edition of the magazine, reflected upon the similarities between the death of Eric Garner in New York City and the death of an enslaved sugar refiner nam…[Read more]

Postcolonial theory has a people problem. By this, I am unabashedly suggesting that postcolonial theoreticians’ overemphasis on people as the site of analysis lies at the heart of the limitations of the field’s key terms, epistemological boundaries, and approach to understanding phenomena as a whole. Indeed, if postcolonial theory and its rel…[Read more]

Very short essay on the way Deleuze uses images in his book on Bacon. In the original French edition, the images are in a separate volume; he does that in order to mime, or enact, the theory of sensation in his text. It seems to me this is an unusual and promising strategy for art history (disposing images so their sequence and arrangement…[Read more]

This essay explores the cultural legacy of Hindustani, which names the intimate overlap between two South Asian languages, Hindi and Urdu. Hindi and Urdu have distinct religious identities, national associations and scripts, yet they are nearly identical in syntax, diverging to some extent in their vocabulary. Hindi and Urdu speakers,…[Read more]

An introductory survey of climate fiction (a.k.a. “cli-fi”) in English. Written with an international readership in mind.

From the original paper presentation: In this paper I discuss the figurative language used in Louise Erdrich’s novel Tracks with a particular focus on the figures and symbols associated with food and food practices. This paper performs a textual analysis of figurative language and symbols and the themes of food and food practices to reveal the…[Read more]

This essay is part of a collection of open access articles on Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The articles are written for first-time readers of Chaucer and are designed to supplement the teaching of the Canterbury Tales, particularly in university classrooms.

My contribution is focused on the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, providing an…[Read more]

Teaching material online course

This is an analysis of Terayama Shūji’s 1981 film “Shanhai ijin shōkan,” a French co-production which was marketed in the Anglosphere as “China Doll” and in France as “Les Fruits de la passion,” invoking both Ōshima Nagisa’s 1978 “L’Empire de la passion” (the sequel to his notorious “Empire of the Senses” / “L’Empire des sens,” 1976) as well as Ro…[Read more]

This presentation will introduce the HuMetricsHSS (Humane Metrics in the Humanities and Social Sciences) initiative, which aims to develop and support a values-based framework of indicators for excellence for the humanities and social science in academia and, by extension, academic libraries. This value-based evaluation paradigm uses metrics only…[Read more]

Readings of literary texts are always shaped by a reader’s particular location and knowledge, but those locations are themselves defined by their histories. Romeo and Juliet has inspired new sets of allegorical vocabularies of history in locations without confrontations with the English heritage in colonial contexts. Why is the reading of a c…[Read more]

The Teaching Literature Book Award is an international, juried prize, awarded biennially by the faculty in the graduate programs in English at Idaho State University. This commendation discusses both the winning volume and an honorable mention.

Objective: Using the MLA International Bibliography, students will develop a presentation that demonstrates their understanding of how scholarship on a single work of literature changes over time.

Abstract: This paper investigates the shifting definitions of the term gāthā (Ch. ji) over an 800-year period, from the earliest sūtratranslations into Chinese until the mid-tenth century. Although the term originally referred to the verse sections of scriptures, gāthās soon began to circulate separately, used in ritual, contemplative, and peda…[Read more]