This study focuses on the cultural history of illegitimacy and its representation in literature, with an emphasis on the gender of fictional bastards and foundlings.

Exploration of how “Silas Marner” is George Eliot’s means to distinguish herself from those who are truly guilty of abandoning parental mores… ancestors, parents, themselves. An argument is made that the reason for the text is as provision for the author to temporarily relieve herself of guilt.

Exploration of how Elizabeth Gaskell uses her textual creation, “Cranford,” to insert a male “bomb” into specifically delineated memories of her pre-adult life, thereby effecting displaced matricide.

Analysis of how Jo creates her own femininity, apart from her mother’s, through effectively earning the trust and interest of increasingly impressive paternal imagos.

Exploration of how Aphra Behn uses her textual creation “Oronnoko” to engage in a guiltless sexual affair that bypasses all societal and inner-psychic censors.

Full collection of essays written during my undergraduate and graduate studies in literature.

This essay looks to the near history of copyright, commercially licensed resources, and fair use that shapes digital scholarship on nineteenth-century periodicals today. Using the digitization of British Library newspapers as a case study, I demonstrate how arguments about access to public domain materials do not fully account for the complex…[Read more]

Students learn more when they play—while the value of play often is emphasized only for those early in their education, play has a role in higher education as well. To teach book history across time and space, I developed two card games: Codex Conquest (http://codexconquest.lib.uiowa.edu/) and Mark (under development: h…[Read more]

Teaching Book History through Card Games: Codex Conquest and Mark
Amy Hildreth Chen, English and American Literature Librarian, University of Iowa
Students learn more when they play—while the value of play often is emphasized only for those early in their education, play has a role in higher education as well. To teach book history across t…[Read more]

In 1526, royal refiner and natural historian Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1478-1557) praised the singular quality of the “muchos tesoros de oro labrado / en poder delos indios q̄ se hā cōquistado” (lxv, v). By 1535, however, he had to define what, exactly, he meant by gold: “No hablo aquí en el oro que se ha habido por rescates, o en la guerra, ni…[Read more]

In light of (re)new(ed) interest in focusing interdisciplinary scholarly attention on the history of capitalism – a focus captured in Edward Baptist’s recent book, The Half has Never Been Told – this essay reads Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel A Mercy as a key text for considering the history of capitalism as central to conceptions of circum-…[Read more]

Short paper presented for MLA 2019 Session 417 – “Critical Computation: What’s Next?”

Front matter for Literatures of Liberalization: Global Circulation and the Long Nineteenth Century

This book constitutes the result of a pedagogical experimentation, that I conducted for the Master in Linguistic and Literary Sciences of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milan, during the academic year 2017-2018. The critical essays that are here collected have been written by some students of my class, and show clearly enough that…[Read more]

This article describes a pedagogical project that took place between 2015 and 2016, and involved my students of the French Literature class, third year of Bachelor of Arts (foreign languages). The intersection and interrelation between figurative art and poetry were at the centre of the theoretical insight, whereas the necessity of adapting our…[Read more]

This course was first taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in fall 2018.
It addresses feminism, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, and critical race and ethnic studies in conjunction with translation studies.