This review essay approaches Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller’s Thinking Literature across Continents (2016) from a set of questions about what it means to read in the age of hyperarchival accumulation. Written against the background of events in the United States and elsewhere during the fall of 2017, the essay tracks and assesses Ghosh and…[Read more]

This undergraduate seminar on author Margaret Atwood fulfills the Major Author course at Stevenson University. Students will read A Trio of Tall Tales and The Year of the Flood, as well as both read and watch The Handmaid’s Tale. The course assignments include live-tweeting, creating a webtext, and an intertextual analysis essay.

Because it is all too easy to (accidentally) make assumptions about what first-year students know about language, in 2019-2020 my lit and comp type courses will begin with a segment on language, before moving on to sentences, paragraphs, and essays.

Our exploration of language will start by jumping into a story, to help us identify the 8 parts…[Read more]

Because it is all too easy to (accidentally) make assumptions about what first-year students know about language, in 2019-2020 my lit and comp type courses will begin with a segment on language, before moving on to sentences, paragraphs, and essays.

Our exploration of language will start by jumping into a story, to help us identify the 8 parts…[Read more]

This multilingual undergraduate translation workshop was co-taught in the Spring of 2014 with Prof. Norman Holland in the division of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies at Hampshire College. During the course, students were introduced to translation theory and explored key concepts through intralingual translation exercises before embarking on…[Read more]

This essay argues that William Morris’s work displaces an implicit youthful bias in theories of utopia and socialism by making senescence a structuring principle of his ideal society. For Morris, capitalist age ideology stratifies the lifespan into zones of youth and old age, usefulness and excess, and he perceived the rising reformist…[Read more]

“Focus on ‘Henry V'” is a peer-reviewed, multimedia, digital Open Educational Resource co-authored and co-produced by faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates on the innovative digital publishing platform Scalar. Chapters include guides to early printed editions, sources, and performance and cinematic histories of the play, as well as…[Read more]

Explores ‘information history’, or the study of information and its practices, as a way to arrange investigations of past and present. An invited contribution for the volume, “Information and Power in History: Towards a Global Approach,” edited by Ida Nijenhuis, Marijke van Faassen, Joris Gijsenbergh, Wim de Jong, and Ronald Sluijter (London:…[Read more]

The Individual and the Cultural Environment Conceptual Unit
Overarching Enduring Understanding: The relationship between the individual and society 
Overarching Essential Question: How does society influence the individual?
Unit Objectives: 
 -My students will be able to demonstrate understanding of the motifs and symbols in the unit’s core te…[Read more]

The Individual and the Cultural Environment Conceptual Unit
Overarching Enduring Understanding: The relationship between the individual and society 
Overarching Essential Question: How does society influence the individual?
Unit Objectives: 
 -My students will be able to demonstrate understanding of the motifs and symbols in the unit’s core te…[Read more]

This class asks what sex looked and felt like before the instantiation of modern identity categories such as homosexuality or heterosexuality—before, that is, our desires became an index to our souls. To this end, we’ll examine texts by nineteenth-century American writers that represent the experiences and expressions of what we now call sex…[Read more]

The plural, wars, of this course’s title signals two competing traditions in Civil War memory and periodization:

* the Civil War as a distinct and defining event, from 1861 to 1865, that splits American history (and most English departments’ surveys of American literature) into two distinct halves; and

* the Civil War as an ongoing fea…[Read more]

The Iberian Peninsula during the Latin Middle Ages was home to large populations of Muslims and Jews. During the period we like to call the Middle Ages, much of the Iberian Peninsula was under Muslim rule. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the entire peninsula was under Christian rule, and Judaism and Islam were officially banned.…[Read more]

Much scholarship on The Picture of Dorian Gray has focused on its possible textual sources and its place in literary traditions. This article demonstrates that by contextualizing the novel in the history of art and the tradition of British portraiture, we are able to answer significant yet overlooked questions such as why Wilde chose “picture” rat…[Read more]

Much scholarship on The Picture of Dorian Gray has focused on its possible textual sources and its place in literary traditions. This article demonstrates that by contextualizing the novel in the history of art and the tradition of British portraiture, we are able to answer significant yet overlooked questions such as why Wilde chose “picture” rat…[Read more]

Much scholarship on The Picture of Dorian Gray has focused on its possible textual sources and its place in literary traditions. This article demonstrates that by contextualizing the novel in the history of art and the tradition of British portraiture, we are able to answer significant yet overlooked questions such as why Wilde chose “picture” rat…[Read more]

The recent surge of interest in Afrofuturism has resulted in some groundbreaking work looking at the ways technology and race intersect in film, fashion, music and literature, as is evidenced by the important collection of essays “Afrofuturism 2.0” (2016), edited by Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones. However there has not yet been an aca…[Read more]

The convivencia between the followers of the different religions of the Mediterranean persisted despite the fraught politics of Christianity and Islam. Despite the long arm of the Inquisition the protagonists in the plays of Cervantes and Lope struggle to maintain fraternal ties.