This essay explores insistently practical medieval texts—works whose explicit goal is to assist their readers to make something in the world beyond the page (a book, a culinary dish, an ointment, an object) and asks if they can be said to have a poetics. Drawing on Michel de Certeau and Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of practice as well as Gérard Gene…[Read more]

This essay explores insistently practical medieval texts—works whose explicit goal is to assist their readers to make something in the world beyond the page (a book, a culinary dish, an ointment, an object) and asks if they can be said to have a poetics. Drawing on Michel de Certeau and Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of practice as well as Gérard Gene…[Read more]

This essay explores insistently practical medieval texts—works whose explicit goal is to assist their readers to make something in the world beyond the page (a book, a culinary dish, an ointment, an object) and asks if they can be said to have a poetics. Drawing on Michel de Certeau and Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of practice as well as Gérard Gene…[Read more]

This paper will be presented at the upcoming South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA) conference Nov.3-6 in Jacksonville, FL. The research is a part of my thesis project that will be completed in spring 2017.

My paper concerns two radically distinct portrayals of genital injury. The first examples, drawn from legal and doctrinal narrative, describe the cultural norm of meaningful castration. The other, which provides my paper with its title, is from Peter of Cornwall’s Book of Revelations. This set of one is an analogous injury that may mean nothing: n…[Read more]

This course examines the literary, cultural, and material life of written correspondence from the poetic epistle to the snarky tweet. And while we will read and analyze epistolary literature (both fiction and nonfiction) such as Ovid’s Heroides, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and
Alice Walker’s A Color Purple, we focus our efforts on “real” letters o…[Read more]

In this brief paper, I first introduce Gwendolyn Brook’s “The Anniad,” a 43-stanza ballad at the center of her 1949 Pulitzer-prize winning collection, Annie Allen. Next, I make a case that “The Anniad” is informed by a medievalism combining Brooks’ girlhood reading and the physical environment of Bronzeville, her Chicago neighborhood. Finally, I…[Read more]

Būqālah refers both to a ceramic pitcher as well as to poems ritually embedded in the traditional, favorite, divinatory pastime associated with women city dwellers of specific Algerian towns such as Blida,Cherchell, Tlemcen, Constantine, and Algiers. This essay considers the shift from orality to a written archive of French and Algerian c…[Read more]

A consideration of classical and medieval oyster lore, a study of oysters as the “minimal animal.” Hand-corrected proof for Steve Mentz, ed. OCEANIC NEW YORK (Punctum 2015) – https://punctumbooks.com/titles/oceanic-new-york/

Although “fabulous” animals tend to be thought of as, say, unicorns, for early modern and medieval natural history, as well as the developed attention to gender and reproduction in twenty-first century science, the “fabulous” animal might be the one next door, like, say, squirrels.

I’m taking the word “synagogue” seriously, and read Erkenwald’s judge as symbolically “Jewish,” a figure of the sclerotic quality of the law, a foil for Christianity’s uncertain relationship to its own law. I’ll probably publish this before my career’s over, but clearly I’m in no hurry….

I’m taking the word “synagogue” seriously, and read Erkenwald’s judge as symbolically “Jewish,” a figure of the sclerotic quality of the law, a foil for Christianity’s uncertain relationship to its own law. I’ll probably publish this before my career’s over, but clearly I’m in no hurry….

Here’s a key paragraph:
“This chapter will be an exploration of the heritage function of Vikings in America. It will look at their presumptive whiteness, from the early nineteenth century, through the real mania for all things Viking in the mid to late nineteenth century, and on to present day fascinations with the Norse in popular music,…[Read more]

My response to “New Materialisms and the End of Critique,” MLA 2015, Session 454. http://newmaterialisms.mla.hcommons-staging.org/2015/01/07/hello-world/

attempt to bring the horrors of the indo-china war to the most intimate part of women, 1967, xuan loc, rvn

This paper offers a brief consideration of the literary ballad as a register of what by the mid-’60s economists had diagnosed as “urban crisis” and in 1970 John Ashbery called “urban chaos.” I’m particularly interested in how poets used the ballad to see and see into the failures of the “spatio-temporal fix” of urban renewal. My general idea is…[Read more]