An overview of Zhang Jiucheng’s 張九成 (1092-1159) thought on mind-cultivation and Zhu Xi’s 朱熹 critique of Zhang and other Buddho-Confucians of the early Southern Song dynasty (1126-1279).

One of a series of blog posts reflecting on #HumetricsHSS, the work of the Humane Metrics for the Humanities team at the Triangle Scholarly Communication Institute in 2016.

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]

Shakespearean tragedies have played an important part in modern and contemporary East Asian engagements with Western cultures. Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Singaporean translations, rewritings, films, and theatre productions have three important shared characteristics, namely hybridization of genres, intra-regional and trans-historical…[Read more]

The age of global Shakespeare has arrived. It is an age in which national and transnational performances become self-conscious of the contact zone they inhabit, where dramatic meanings are co-determined by linguistic cohesion and pluralism. If Jacque Derrida’s theory of translation makes all writing inherently multilingual, Shakespeare as…[Read more]

An Interview with Alexa Huang, George Washington University | The Blotted Line

“I am proud to have answered my calling to tell stories and to show others how to listen for silenced voices. Story-telling makes us human because it…[Read more]

Modern Chinese fiction dealing with cultural others can be taken as a lens through which to reread the cosmopolitan theory. At stake in the debate between communitarianism and liberalism are the viability of single cultural membership and its validity. Lao She’s Self-Sacrifice (1934) and Dr. Wen (1936-1937) question the viability of global c…[Read more]

Touring theatre is a place where theatre studies and globalization come into contact. The year of 2012 was a year of global festivities in which Shakespeare’s works played a major part. Through their exemplary power, the intersections of world cultures and Shakespeare provide a set of important issues for repositioning theatre studies in the w…[Read more]

Having reached a critical mass of participants, performances and the study of Shakespeare in different cultural contexts are changing how we think about globalization. The idea of global Shakespeares has caught on because of site-specific imaginations involving early modern and modern Globe theatres that aspired to perform the globe. Seeing global…[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….

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/