This syllabus was my third version of a course aimed at introducing the digital humanities at an undergraduate level. The course was organized around four projects, each of which was oriented by a theoretical reading: mapping a novel; text analysis with archival sources; reading a novel collaboratively with courses at other colleges and…[Read more]

This syllabus was my second version of a course aimed at introducing the digital humanities at an undergraduate level. The course was organized around three projects: mapping a novel; text analysis with archival sources; reading a novel collaboratively with courses at other colleges and universities while building a multimedia response; and text…[Read more]

This course focuses on developing skills of close reading and literary analysis, both in class discussion and in assignments, through the study of major black writers. This section will be a study of global black literature—novels, drama, and poetry—written in English from the twentieth century to the present. We will consider how major aut…[Read more]

Students will become familiar with Modernist literature and the various artistic movements designated under the term “Modernism.” Students will learn to critically examine modernist materials by drawing on the critical perspectives most common in modernist studies: the New Criticism, Cultural Studies, and various forms of analysis. After com…[Read more]

This article focuses on the limits of liberal discourses such as multiculturalism in an increasing global world. I focus on multicultural London and juxtapose Black British writer, Zadie Smith’s novel, White Teeth to Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things, to underline the multiple intersections between the status of colored immigrants, their des…[Read more]

Previous scholarship on source materials for Lawrence Durrell’s Gnostic themes in Monsieur are insufficient in light of his marginalia in Serge Hutin’s Les Gnostiques and his notebooks for the novel. We contend that archival evidence from the Bibliothèque Lawrence Durrell in Nanterre, France, necessitates a reevaluation of previous work in orde…[Read more]

Virginia Woolf’s well known distaste for the generic and aesthetic instability of Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness (1928) finds echoes in more recent responses, even as the novel remains an anchor of a lesbian literary canon. I demonstrate that Hall’s novel does indeed exhibit generic and psychological instability, as a Victo…[Read more]

Syllabus for an advanced graduate course on realism and the Victorian novel taught at Temple University in Fall 2015.

Syllabus for an advanced graduate course on realism and the Victorian novel taught at Temple University in Fall 2015.

This essay explores the meanings and effects of postcolonial authors’ recent refashioning of classical historical fiction. That refashioning has two aims: a materialist cartography that counters the nationalist vocation of classical historical fiction by revealing the supra-national, global aspirations of colonial capitalism as a system; and an e…[Read more]

Unlike his earlier novels, J.M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg, has not received the attention that it deserves from the critics. The novel, which is set in Russia not only draws on real aspects of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s life but also on certain events in the Russian author’s novels, specifically The Devils. Coetzee’s Dostoevsky is an aging a…[Read more]