In this article I ask what happens if we consider Jewett, who spent most of her adult life at the epicenter of New England intellectual culture, as a pivotal figure in the Western history of theorizing sexuality, and her 1884 novel, A Country Doctor, as a significant document in the history of theorizing sexual and gender deviation, perfectly…[Read more]

The recent popularity of the film version of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings has renewed interest in this widely read work set in the realm of Middle-earth. A careful study of Tolkien’s work can be used to raise several philosophical questions, particularly in the area of ethics. This course will examine such questions, also considering topics fro…[Read more]

This class asks what sex looked and felt like before the instantiation of modern identity categories such as homosexuality or heterosexuality—before, that is, our desires became an index to our souls. To this end, we’ll examine texts by nineteenth-century American writers that represent the experiences and expressions of what we now call sex…[Read more]

The recent surge of interest in Afrofuturism has resulted in some groundbreaking work looking at the ways technology and race intersect in film, fashion, music and literature, as is evidenced by the important collection of essays “Afrofuturism 2.0” (2016), edited by Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones. However there has not yet been an aca…[Read more]

A series of derivative verses from the late-third century has pride of place in one of the foundational collections of Chinese poetry. These verses, “Filling out the Missing Odes” by Shu Xi, can be found at the beginning of the lyric-poetry (shi 詩) section of the Wenxuan. This essay seeks to understand why such blatantly imitative pieces may have…[Read more]

This essay explores how Pierre Nora’s sites of memory work a specific cultural function through what Melvin Dixon refers to as “a memory that ultimately rewrites history.” I look at two of the most well-known poems of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and Countee Cullen’s “Heritage,” one of which reveals a…[Read more]

IMC paper for panel 374 Medieval Futura 1: Now, sponsored by the Medieval Studies Institute, Indiana Univ.–Bloomington and organised by Dr Andrea Whitacre.

IMC paper for panel 374 Medieval Futura 1: Now, sponsored by the Medieval Studies Institute, Indiana Univ.–Bloomington and organised by Dr Andrea Whitacre.

Within the context of an increasingly dystopian sense of global crisis, how can the idea of Utopia help us galvanise political literary readings? This special session will present a roundtable discussion in which panelists consider how we can use utopian methods to understand different kinds of literary texts, reflecting upon the importance of the…[Read more]

The problem of the “yes,” of affirming an historical identity that is potentially harmful to oneself, troubles some of the imaginative leaps necessary to how readers desire to identify with texts. With that in mind, this article reads Octavia Butler’s 1979 novel Kindred as a story about memory, history, and embodiment as written both on and thr…[Read more]