With the support of recent theorizing in evolutionary biology and anthropology, this essay refurbishes the term archetype for reuse, recognizing that it signals a painful cognitive failure. Examples are taken from The Terminator movies and pictures of the annunciation to Mary.

Iconotropism is a gargantuan overgeneralization hypothesizing that people are hungry for pictures and feed on them, metabolize them, turn them into nourishment. The study examples are Raphael’s Transfiguration and Titian’s Diana and Actaeon. It is a contribution to embodiment theory and cognitive cultural history.

This is an afterword to Movement in Literature: Exploring Kinesis Intelligence, ed. by Kathryn Banks and Timothy Chesters. (Palgrave 2018). It is intended to advance further work on kinesic intelligence by connection some of what has already been written about how the forms of fiction appeal to what human bodies know about action with what can be…[Read more]

Global studies enable us to examine deceivingly harmonious images of Shakespeare. This chapter focuses on the modern period and introduces readers to a number of key concepts in Shakespeare and global studies, namely censorship and redaction, genre, gender, race, and politics of reception. Performing Shakespeare not only creates channels between…[Read more]

Shakespeare scholarship has long been interested in the temporal dynamics of The Winter’s Tale, and has often turned to melancholic or traumatic time frames to explain the thematic persistence of lost time in Shakespeare’s romance. In this chapter, I argue that dance provides a key interpretive framework for understanding the play’s interest in bo…[Read more]

The introduction to a special issue of Studies in Documentary Film I co-edited with Sarah Hamblin on “Radical Documentary in the Globalized Age of New Media”

Social media is a key contemporary site of activity for politics, entertainment, and relationships, but how can we study it? This course combines theory and practice; students will both read canonical and contemporary social media research from leading scholars and learn to engage with social media platforms to collect and analyze their own data.…[Read more]

Susan B. Anthony declared in 1896 that the bicycle “has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.” The comparative study of ‘Whale Rider’ (2002) and ‘Wadjda’ (2012) demonstrates that this liberating effect of the basic tool of transportation is being reinforced in the new millennium. The analysis further situates two con…[Read more]

Susan B. Anthony declared in 1896 that the bicycle “has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.” The comparative study of ‘Whale Rider’ (2002) and ‘Wadjda’ (2012) demonstrates that this liberating effect of the basic tool of transportation is being reinforced in the new millennium. The analysis further situates two con…[Read more]

This is the syllabus for an introductory course on Marx and critical theory that I taught at Binghamton University in the spring semester, 2020. It revises and expands an earlier iteration of the course that I had taught in spring, 2018, also at Binghamton University.

The epilogue tackles the ramifications of these new modes of inscribing temporally and visually ambiguous articulations of Shakespeare and China into a global vernacular in theater (Lin Zhaohua’s Richard III) and cinema (Feng Xiaogang’s The Banquet). A paradox of infatuation with Asian visuality and rejection of ethnic authenticity emerged in the…[Read more]

Named the Writer of the Millennium, Shakespeare has come full circle and become a cliché, embraced by marketers and contested by intellectuals. Similar narratives about China’s rise in global stature have been told with equal gusto, championed and denounced in turn by optimists and critics. If Shakespeare now has worldwide currency, how is the se…[Read more]

Thanks to Karl Marx’s references in his political treatises, Shakespeare held a significant place in a number of communist and other left-authoritarian countries, including China and the USSR. And although there were themes in Shakespeare that turned out to be inconvenient for communist ideology, other Shakespearean plays were put into service. I…[Read more]

While scholars have long considered John Keats’s Ode to Psyche a document of secularization, the poem’s precise relationship to the secular needs further attention. This essay engages with recent critiques of secularism, by Gil Anidjar and others, which challenge readings of Keats that make secularism or “toleration” a hallmark of his radical…[Read more]

When James Macpherson turned to the popular poetry of ancient Scotland, he found in it what philosophers now call folk psychology: a commonsense theory about how minds work. Yet because his poems were largely forgeries, Macpherson winds up importing more recent physiology into his portrayal of ancient, pagan materialism. As a result, the poems’ v…[Read more]

a bibliography-in-progress for cognitive literary, film, theater, and media studies

From Michel de Montaigne’s essay “Of Friendship” to Jacques Derrida’s rearticulation of the former in The Politics of Friendship, scholars both early modern and modern have sought ways to address the fluid co-mixture of bodies from which the discourse of friendship can and does emerge. More recently still, new materialist thinkers of ontolog…[Read more]