This essay offers a critical reading of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland as a “neo-cosmopolitan fiction,” one which is invested in imagining a transnational and global community, in order to initiate a new analytical framework for South Asian diasporic literature. I argue that this critical framework not only challenges the notion of literary canon…[Read more]

This essay offers a critical reading of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland as a “neo-cosmopolitan fiction,” one which is invested in imagining a transnational and global community, in order to initiate a new analytical framework for South Asian diasporic literature. I argue that this critical framework not only challenges the notion of literary canon…[Read more]

Today, Lady Lovelace is recognized as the first computer programmer – for an algorithm she co-authored with inventor Charles Babbage in 1843. She has also become, per biographer Betty Toole, a “modern myth,” whose very ambiguity and otherness encourage readers’ self-invention around gender and tech, human-machine interactions, and female sexuali…[Read more]

Art Spiegelman is one of the most-discussed creators in Comic Book Studies. His Pulitzer-winning work Maus (1980 and 1991) was, alongside The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and Watchmen (1987), the catalyst to a sea change in the commercial and critical fortunes of the alternative comic book during the mid-1980s. It has been a landmark text in…[Read more]

Art Spiegelman is one of the most-discussed creators in Comic Book Studies. His Pulitzer-winning work Maus (1980 and 1991) was, alongside The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and Watchmen (1987), the catalyst to a sea change in the commercial and critical fortunes of the alternative comic book during the mid-1980s. It has been a landmark text in…[Read more]

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an author, letter writer and poet who lived between 1890 and 1937. His works blend science fiction with Gothic themes. Lovecraft was, by the majority of accounts (including his own), a bad writer. He was also an outspoken racist for the majority of his life to a degree which makes much of his work, to a modern reader,…[Read more]

This paper examines Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces (2007) in the context of Holocaust literature and historiography. It begins with an introduction to the genre of Holocaust literature and the problematic nature of ‘survivor’ testimony. Michaels’ work is then contextualized within this body of literature. The essay goes on to examine the means t…[Read more]

This paper offers a synthesis and critique of the existing academic literature on Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese and an overview of Asian American alternative comics. It examines the range of literary and linguistic sources which Yang draws upon in his collage of Chinoiserie and Japonism. It presents the argument that existing criticism h…[Read more]

This paper explores the manifestation of trauma in superhero comics following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11. These texts are considered from the perspectives of clinical psychology and Silverman’s concept of historical trauma. The paper first examines the genre as a whole, followed by an exploration of elements c…[Read more]

Introduction to Modernism: Evolution of an Idea, which traces the emergence and coherence of the term “modernism”, and the field of modernist studies, from the late 1800s to the present.

The ad hoc Committee on Diversity and Tolerance was formed in response to a motion passed by the Delegate Assembly in 1999 calling for the reconstitution of what had been the Task Force against Campus Bigotry. The new committee was to be charged with “working to establish a climate in which all students, faculty, and other college employees, no m…[Read more]

This presentation explored the implications of constraints on due process and academic freedom in light of contingent faculty hiring.