Our work in this course will center around two questions. First, what were the material and social conditions for Black men, women, and children living in the territory that would become the United States, from roughly 1750 until on or about 1860? While slavery is likely the first concept that comes to mind, additional concepts such as racism,…[Read more]

This article focuses on three post-9/11 meta-poems – “My Wife Says Don’t Write About September 11th” by Ryan G. Van Cleave, “How to Write A Poem After September 11th” by Nikki Moustaki and “To the Words” by W. S. Merwin – to demonstrate the point that the current scholarly understanding of post-9/11 aesthetics as something functioning like…[Read more]

Despite their commitment to Ezra Pound’s commandment to “make it new!:” modernist authors like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Katherine Mansfield, Edith Wharton, and Thornton Wilder referred to Jane Austen surprisingly often in their public and private writings. Although they excoriated her sexual inexperience and limited…[Read more]

Review of Daniel Hack, “Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature” (Princeton UP, 2017).

Talitha LeFlouria’s Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South ambitiously takes on the task of highlighting the roles that black women played in the modernization of the Georgian economy and culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; roles that were products of material and ideological circumstances as well as a…[Read more]

This article compares the historiographic methods of two 19th century, California historians.. Mariano Vallejo, former Mexican military commander of Alta California, wrote his Recuerdos at the request of San Francisco-based, Anglo-American historian Hubert H. Bancroft. In his own memoir, Literary Industries (1915), Bancroft describes his…[Read more]

This essay examines the circumstances of the production and appearance of East Germany’s first film about homosexuality (the short documentary “Die andere Liebe” or “The Other Love”), while considering the role it plays in our understanding of the development of German lesbian and gay history. More specifically, this essay provides a reading of…[Read more]

By reading each of the novels of Kate O’Brien’s oeuvre as ‘a travel story’, just as we read Balzac’s Père Goriot, it becomes necessary to read them as ‘a spatial practice’, a narrative that locates itself in and responds to a specific space. The specific geography of Kate O’Brien’s Parisian novels of development, Without My Cloak (1931), The…[Read more]

The relationship between obsolescence and innovation in the digital age is a peculiar one, conveying not past and future but instead demonstrating their eternal simultaneity.

Critically surveys the long premodern history of race and racism, colonization and imperialism, and globalism, across c. 1000-1500 CE.

The twenty-first century has seen a transformation of twentieth-century narrative and historical discourse. On the one hand, the Cold War national fantasy of mutually assured destruction has multiplied, producing a diverse array of apocalyptic visions. On the other, there has been an increasing sobriety about human finitude, especially considered…[Read more]

Charles Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition (1901) is overwhelmingly understood as an historical novel. Critics have again and again focused on its journalistic historicity; its ambivalent racial politics; its attitudes towards assimilation, separatism, vengeance, and resistance; and Chesnutt’s alleged biographical identification with various cha…[Read more]

Charles Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition (1901) is overwhelmingly understood as an historical novel. Critics have again and again focused on its journalistic historicity; its ambivalent racial politics; its attitudes towards assimilation, separatism, vengeance, and resistance; and Chesnutt’s alleged biographical identification with various cha…[Read more]