The silhouetted cutouts in Kara Walker’s Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b’tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart are fine with being seen but care little for the actual presence of the viewer. They’re kissing and sucking, fucking and birthing, playing and pillorying all without shame or service to the…[Read more]

Shakespeare is a local force to be reckoned with in the global marketplace and in digital and analog archives of collective memory. With the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth in 2014 and quatercentenary in 2016, there are several high-profile instances of global Shakespeare being tapped for its market value. The exchange value of…[Read more]

This paper discusses the relationships made between ghost figures and their living relatives within Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. In this paper I argue that a specific female identity and agency is represented in these texts through figurative language and symbolization of…[Read more]

What does it mean when we say that computers can ‘write’ and how are recent developments in neural networks and machine learning changing this capacity? This article examines the long-standing literary fear of authorship being replaced by machines while also interrogating the labour and credit implications that sit behind widely used str…[Read more]

“Predatory publishing” refers to conditions under which gold open-access academic publishers claim to conduct peer review and charge for their publishing services but do not, in fact, actually perform such reviews. Most prominently exposed in recent years by Jeffrey Beall, the phenomenon garners much media attention. In this article, we ack…[Read more]

The discussion of postmodernism involving modernity and its ramifications requires contemporary and cross-cultural perspectives.

A B ST R A C T
Rob Epstein’s The Times of Harvey Milk (USA, 1984) and Gus Van Sant’s Milk (USA,
2008), the two major films that narrate the life and tragically dramatic death of gay
politician and activist Harvey Milk (1930–1978), are widely recognized as part of
the queer cinematic canon but are less often categorized as Jewish films. While…[Read more]

This essay brings together cognitive literary theory and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogic imagination to illuminate the construction of social class in the eighteenth-century novel. It offers a close reading of selected passages from Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778), made possible by combining Bakhtinian and cognitive poetics. It also dis…[Read more]

At a time when Shakespeare is becoming increasingly globalized and diversified it is urgent more than ever to ask how this appropriated ‘Shakespeare’ constructs ethical value across cultural and other fault lines. Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation is the first book to address the intersection of ethics, aesthetics, authority, and authenticity.

Syllabus for ENGL 758D, The Speculative Situation, graduate seminar in the University of Maryland English department, Fall 2017.

Is the divide between human and machine becoming harder to maintain? From the Golem of folk tales to Frankenstein and even Siri, the concept of the semi-artificial person, or cyborg, is long-lived, appearing across popular, religious, and scientific imaginations. As technology becomes more personal, the cyborg becomes less alien, and the prospect…[Read more]

As the entire world now knows, Dr. David Dao is the passenger who was dragged off a United Airlines Flight on April 9th, 2017 by Chicago security police who broke his nose, gave him a concussion and smashed two of his teeth. Some media have treated this as a horror perpetrated by a single airline that bullies passengers, or by a business model…[Read more]