Infrastructure is all around us, rarely remarked upon. Indeed, the latent state of
infrastructure is part of what marks it as such; as Susan Leigh Starr has noted,
infrastructure studies involves the examination of “boring things.”

This class will explore the emerging nexus of critical infrastructure studies and
critical university stu…[Read more]

In this introduction to the digital humanities (DH), we will approach the field via a Caribbean Studies lens, exploring how an understanding of the digital based in the growing area of digital Caribbean studies might shape the larger field of DH.

The course aims to provide a landscape view of DH, paying attention to how its various approaches…[Read more]

In this introduction to the digital humanities (DH), we will approach the field via a Caribbean Studies lens, exploring how an understanding of the digital based in the growing area of digital Caribbean studies might shape the larger field of DH.

The course aims to provide a landscape view of DH, paying attention to how its various approaches…[Read more]

Review of Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel, by David Kurnick

Review of Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel, by David Kurnick

How might literary and cultural spheres intersect with the Anthropocene, the epoch — however defined — of humanity’s detectable influence at geological scale? What forms, genres, objects, and methodological lenses might prove most fertile in mediating between the concept’s abstraction and its concrete entailments for literary and cultural hi…[Read more]

This essay considers the use of “serial thinking”—an approach to representation and cognition that emphasizes repetition, enumeration, and aggregation—in the work of Thomas Hardy. Examining his first novel, Desperate Remedies (1871), it connects Hardy’s approaches to serial thinking with the discourse of Victorian logic (especially the work of J…[Read more]

This essay reads Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry for its “ecological perception”: a perceptual modality involving the dynamic interaction between human bodies and environmental givens or potentialities. Linking Hopkins’s syncretic ideas about perception to the psychologist J. J. Gibson’s account of our sensitivity to environmental “affordan…[Read more]

Bringing together theoretical writing on objects, testimony, and trauma to develop the category of the “nonhuman witness,” this essay considers the narrative, ethical, and ecological work performed by peripheral objects in J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands (1974). Coetzee’s insistent object catalogues acquire narrative agency and provide material for a c…[Read more]

Bringing together theoretical writing on objects, testimony, and trauma to develop the category of the “nonhuman witness,” this essay considers the narrative, ethical, and ecological work performed by peripheral objects in J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands (1974). Coetzee’s insistent object catalogues acquire narrative agency and provide material for a c…[Read more]

Bringing together theoretical writing on objects, testimony, and trauma to develop the category of the “nonhuman witness,” this essay considers the narrative, ethical, and ecological work performed by peripheral objects in J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands (1974). Coetzee’s insistent object catalogues acquire narrative agency and provide material for a c…[Read more]

​This chapter explores some legal and literary ramifications of “accident” in British law and society from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth century. This period saw changes in common law and legislation relating to accidents, including the emergence of negligence as a distinct tort and statutory provisions for employer liabi…[Read more]

John Ruskin’s cloud aesthetics develop a coherent, if figurative, inquiry into the nature of human liberty. His changing accounts of cloud formations across Modern Painters gradually place more emphasis on liberty within a framework of restraint and self-government. Attending to the shifting and equivocal senses of liberty in Ruskin’s aes…[Read more]

Departing in some measure from critical views that invoke similar contextual materials, this essay argues for a reevaluation of Hopkins’s debt to scientific thinking in his poetry and poetics. Hovering between competing conceptions of nature’s structure and purpose—evolutionary theory, energy physics, natural theology—Hopkins develops a poetics…[Read more]

This essay argues that L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between (1953) fits into the critical tradition of the Bildungsroman in one specific sense: its attention to matters of deception. First, this plot of formation and development involves a necessary apprenticeship in deception: a moral training that has links with everyday practices of c…[Read more]

More than ten years have passed since the 2007 MLA Ad Hoc Committee of Foreign Languages report recommended structural and curricular change initiatives to counteract the growing crisis in postsecondary world language education. Almost a decade earlier, Heidi Byrnes had already expounded on the need to replace persistent bifurcated curricular…[Read more]

Henrietta Rose-Innes’s novel Nineveh (2011) catalogs the activities of a humane pest expert as she discovers, on an estate under construction outside Cape Town, how human and insect actors undermine the spatial expectations of post-apartheid South Africa. Rose-Innes advances a vision of interspecies connection by recasting controversial themes…[Read more]

Henrietta Rose-Innes’s novel Nineveh (2011) catalogs the activities of a humane pest expert as she discovers, on an estate under construction outside Cape Town, how human and insect actors undermine the spatial expectations of post-apartheid South Africa. Rose-Innes advances a vision of interspecies connection by recasting controversial themes…[Read more]

Henrietta Rose-Innes’s novel Nineveh (2011) catalogs the activities of a humane pest expert as she discovers, on an estate under construction outside Cape Town, how human and insect actors undermine the spatial expectations of post-apartheid South Africa. Rose-Innes advances a vision of interspecies connection by recasting controversial themes…[Read more]

This essay considers the significance of rumor in the work of Thomas Hardy, anchoring its claims in a reading of Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891). I argue that rumor conditions the narrative movement of this novel through its linked operations in social space and bodily sensation. First, I examine the relationship between the movements of…[Read more]