This essay explores Dante Alighieri’s notion of projectile motion in relation to spiritual fulfillment in the first canto of Paradiso. The notion of impetus, or projectile motion, stood at the confluence of Greek philosophical rationality (mediated by a substantial Arabic corpus) and Christian thought, and it provides a unique window through…[Read more]

This chapter examines the plight of Fra’ Alberigo in light of philosophical questions of personal identity and embodiment. I argue that Fra’ Alberigo’s individuality and his punishment in Tolomea provides insight into Dante’s unique interpretation of the complex relationship between body and spirit and the issue of material continuity in the…[Read more]

This chapter details the efforts of the kindergarten educator, Elizabeth Harrison, to introduce Dante’s Divine Comedy to children in the midwestern United States during the late nineteenth century.

The Gulf Stream gained scientific prominence in the nineteenth century as a test case for theories about the dynamics of ocean currents and the equilibrium of transatlantic climate. Discourse about the current supplied descriptions, analogies, and myths that persist into the present. Triangulating oceanic, ecological, and transatlantic approaches…[Read more]

The aestheticism of Walter Pater and Vernon Lee participated in a late-nineteenth-century discourse devoted to exploring the aesthetic’s role in producing and sustaining, as well as undermining, notions of racial difference. Pater’s “A Study of Dionysus: The Spiritual Form of Fire and Dew” (1876) and Lee’s “Dionea” (1890) partake of Immanue…[Read more]

The aestheticism of Walter Pater and Vernon Lee participated in a late-nineteenth-century discourse devoted to exploring the aesthetic’s role in producing and sustaining, as well as undermining, notions of racial difference. Pater’s “A Study of Dionysus: The Spiritual Form of Fire and Dew” (1876) and Lee’s “Dionea” (1890) partake of Immanue…[Read more]

This essay focuses on Olive Schreiner’s personal correspondence and the allegories collected in Dreams (1890) to explore her complicated relationship to late-Victorian Decadence. I argue that Schreiner modified Decadent writers’ use of intersensoriality and synaesthesia to educate her readers into a new kind of common sense, one aligned with her…[Read more]

This essay focuses on Olive Schreiner’s personal correspondence and the allegories collected in Dreams (1890) to explore her complicated relationship to late-Victorian Decadence. I argue that Schreiner modified Decadent writers’ use of intersensoriality and synaesthesia to educate her readers into a new kind of common sense, one aligned with her…[Read more]

In the fall of 2019 I taught my eighteenth-century novel course as an exercise in slow reading, taking a tactic I had used before: putting a canonical work of fiction into the context of the other voices in the literary marketplace, and the circumstances of its making. For such a course, Tristram Shandy is an ideal central text. It was published…[Read more]

This article reflects on the pedagogical legacy of bell hooks.

For the past twenty years, scholars of world and global history and literature have shown that the early modern world was a complex, entangled place. And yet, by emphasizing connection, such work at times overlooks the many separations that drove the engines of global early modernity: transoceanic slave trades, tribute labor, and the economic…[Read more]

For the past twenty years, scholars of world and global history and literature have shown that the early modern world was a complex, entangled place. And yet, by emphasizing connection, such work at times overlooks the many separations that drove the engines of global early modernity: transoceanic slave trades, tribute labor, and the economic…[Read more]

The Popol Wuj is one of the most important, commonly studied, and widely circulated Indigenous literary works from colonial Mesoamerica. By some accounts, there are 1,200 editions of the work published in thirty world languages, all of which trace back to a single manuscript—itself a copy of an earlier Mayan work. To protect their work from b…[Read more]

Invited contribution to the book-catalog “Libros y autores del virreinato del Perú (1542-1824)” [Books and authors of the Viceroyalty of Peru] that accompanies the one-year exhibit (same title as the book) at the Instituto Cervantes in Madrid (Spain). The exhibit can be visited from September 2021-September 2022. This chapter addresses the…[Read more]