Abstract | The final scene of Elia Suleiman’s film, It Must be Heaven (2019), ends with the actor/director sitting in an Arab bar in the city of Haifa, while the young crowd is dancing to “Arabyon Ana” (2000) by Lebanese singer Yuri Mrakadi. The Arabic music is a testimony to a Palestinian-Arab culture that resists erasure.

The songs in Sulei…[Read more]

Alfonso X was king of “Castilla, León, Sevilla, Córdoba, Murcia, Jaén, and el Algarbe.” As evidenced by his title, he came to have possession of various kingdoms in Iberia. He was born in Toledo in 1221 and died in Seville in 1284, at 63 years of age. He is called the Learned King because he was an author, poet, musician, and historian, and becaus…[Read more]

Alfonso X was king of “Castilla, León, Sevilla, Córdoba, Murcia, Jaén, and el Algarbe.” As evidenced by his title, he came to have possession of various kingdoms in Iberia. He was born in Toledo in 1221 and died in Seville in 1284, at 63 years of age. He is called the Learned King because he was an author, poet, musician, and historian, and becaus…[Read more]

Núñez-Muley abstract

The Edict of 1567, or Anti-Morisco Edict, was promulgated by Spanish King Philip II on January 1, after being approved in Madrid on November 17, 1566. Its purpose was to eliminate specific Morisco customs, such as their language, dress, and dances. Núñez Muley’s Petition is an attempt to persuade Christian authorities to de…[Read more]

Survey of the rise of sikolohiyang Pilipino (Filipino psychology) in the context of decolonization and indigenization movements in the Philippines in the last decades of the 20th century.

Thomas à Kempis wrote that everyone desires peace but not the things that make for peace. Such a universal desire would be a hopeful sign, a foundation to build on as we contemplate (and, no doubt, debate) “the things that make for peace.” I offer as murder is to crow as a record of “perchings” in my contemplation of things that make for peace.…[Read more]

This is a revised 2023 version of a 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.

This is a revised 2023 version of a 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.

Cognitive science can help literary scholars formulate specific questions to be answered by archival research. This essay takes as its starting point embedded mental states (that is, mental states about mental states) and their role in generating literary subjectivity. It then follows the transformation of embedded mental states throughout several…[Read more]

This essay exemplifies a cognitive approach to literary and film studies, with particular emphasis on fictional reimagining of legal institutions. It draws on research of cognitive scientists who study metacognition—specifically, the difference between reflective and intuitive beliefs—to suggest that courtroom dramas, such as Billy Wilder’s Witne…[Read more]

Until now, critics have shown little interest in the bouquet of aromas and scents that permeate the linguistic fabric of À la recherche du temps perdu , to the point of forming an olfactory (and cognitive) underlay. The aesthetic impact of these odors warrants further investigation, starting with a reconstruction of the “problem of smell” in Prou…[Read more]

“The essays in this volume attend to both of these possible relations to the infrastructures of inscription. They explore not only how white supremacist histories and infrastructures have limited and foreclosed black expression but also how black expression has extended, recoded, and transformed some of these very structures, affording new possibilities.”

A book’s a book, and numbers are numbers, right? Well, maybe. For the Shakespeare Association of America seminar on “Counting (in) Early Modern Drama,” I proposed to give myself the task of understanding and then communicating the technological underpinnings of a digital facsimile. One specific question I wanted to address, with the help of…[Read more]