Drawing on research in developmental psychology, rhetorical narratology, and cultural history, as well as on digital data mining, this essay seeks to broaden the interdisciplinary and interpretive range of cognitive literary studies.

In light of (re)new(ed) interest in focusing interdisciplinary scholarly attention on the history of capitalism – a focus captured in Edward Baptist’s recent book, The Half has Never Been Told – this essay reads Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel A Mercy as a key text for considering the history of capitalism as central to conceptions of circum-…[Read more]

Short paper presented for MLA 2019 Session 417 – “Critical Computation: What’s Next?”

In his 2004 novel GraceLand, Chris Abani unsettles notions of youth “empowerment,” or “resistance,” creating a restless oscillation between cynicism and idealism. On the one hand, pervasive violence and restricting
norms seem to debilitate the novel’s characters, leaving little room to negoti- ate the constraints of their bleak lives in the slums…[Read more]

This article examines the global African modernism of Amos Tutuola through the lens of his nonhuman folkloric creatures. Though the work of the early Nigerian novelist is often characterized as modernism’s inversion, or “traditional,” Tutuola in fact articulates a succession of surreal monsters in The Palm Wine Drinkard (1952) and My Life in the B…[Read more]

We live in a moment of “apocalyptic time,” the “time of the end of time.” Ours is a moment of global ecological crisis, of the ever-impending collapse of capital. That we live on the brink is too clear. What is not, however, is our ability to imagine the moment after this dual crisis. In recent years, African artists have begun to articul…[Read more]

This 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 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.

Review of James Cook, Alexander Kolassa, and Adam Whittaker, eds.
Recomposing the Past: Representations of Early Music on Stage and
Screen. Ashgate Screen Music Series. New York and London:
Routledge, 2018. xii, 259 pp. ISBN: 9781138287471 (hardback).

In this article, I argue that Margaret Cavendish uses ‘Sociable Letters’ and the female friendship within its pages to intervene in early modern epistolary traditions and negotiate alternatives for conventional markers of intimacy between correspondents. Grounding the argument in current scholarly debates on familiar letter conventions, I…[Read more]