The world needs good question askers as much as it needs good problem solvers. Before solving problems, we need to first identify the problems. Great stories are often strangers at home. The best of them defamiliarize banal experiences and everyday utterances while offering something recognizable through a new language and form.…[Read more]

This Spanish-language unit contains an excerpt of an Arabic treatise composed by ʿAlī ibn Ḥazm (d. 1063) to lament the capital of the province of Córdoba, a city in the southern Spanish region of Andalusia. This treatise was composed during the civil war (fitna) that started in 1009 and ended in 1031 with the collapse of the Umayyad Caliphate of C…[Read more]

This unit contains an excerpt of an Arabic treatise composed by ʿAlī ibn Ḥazm (d. 1063) to lament the capital of the province of Córdoba, a city in the southern Spanish region of Andalusia. This treatise was composed during the civil war (fitna) that started in 1009 and ended in 1031 with the collapse of the Umayyad Caliphate of Córdoba.

T…[Read more]

Since the nineteenth century, stage and film directors have mounted hundreds of adaptations of Shakespeare drawn on East Asian motifs, and by the late twentieth century, Shakespeare had become one of the most frequently performed playwrights in East Asia. There are five striking themes surrounding cultural, racial, and gender dynamics. Gender…[Read more]

FREE ACCESS: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0377919X.2020.1855933
For the last decade of his life, the Palestinian intellectual, author, and editor Ghassan Kanafani (d. 1972) was deeply immersed in theorizing, lecturing, and publishing on Palestinian resistance literature from Beirut. A refugee of the 1948 war, Kanafani presented…[Read more]

The idea that Shakespeare is a global author has taken many forms since the building of the Globe playhouse in London in 1599. Performances of Shakespeare not only create channels between geographic spaces but also connect different time periods. Divided into two major sections, Shakespeare and World Cultures and Shakespeare and Genres, the…[Read more]

In this article, I examine how Sissieretta Jones (frequently described as America’s first Black superstar, among other superlatives) strategically leveraged her European performance reviews in order to increase her listenership and wages in the United States. Jones toured Europe for the first (and only) time from February until November in 1895. A…[Read more]

This work includes a series of aspects of the study of numerals, from different perspectives and with different applications. It is particularly relevant the application of diachronic analysis to the establishment of a date for the Libro de Alexandre. some of those aspects were already treated by the author in different publications; however, they…[Read more]

First presented as a paper at the 2018 SAMLA Convention in Atlanta, this article will become a chapter of my book in progress on the photobooks of the 1930s and 1940s illustrated with the photographs of the Farm Security Administration.

This course is a study of the literature of the U.S.-Mexico border from the 1980s to the present. We begin with Gloria Anzaldúa’s foundational texts, Borderlands / La Frontera, and her landmark feminist anthology, co-edited with Cherríe Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Radical Writings by Women of Color. We then consider the legacies and aft…[Read more]

This course is a study of Latinx literatures and cultures produced in the last two decades. We will concentrate our attention on how contemporary art works represent and participate in the upheavals of the twenty-first century—9/11, global economic and ecological crisis, mass migration and mass deportation, political and social mobilization, s…[Read more]

The syllabus for science fiction course offered Spring 2021 in the English Department at Davidson College.

Syllabus for spring 2021 graduate seminar, “Approaches to the Material Text.” Readings survey in history of the book and related fields. Includes prose introductions synthesizing each week’s readings.

Birds are everywhere in nineteenth-century American literature, including the work of Emily Dickinson. Women poets often referred to their poems in terms of making songs. This essay rethinks the birds in Dickinson’s letters and poems. It suggests that Dickinson’s birds, and their songs, show her awareness of business. They exist within com…[Read more]

Syllabus for the English ENG921 course, “Narrative in a Digital Age” for the Winter 2021 semester, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada.

Syllabus for the English ENG921 course, “Narrative in a Digital Age” for the Winter 2021 semester, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada.

In an early version of his article “Harlem Literati in the Twenties,” first published in the Saturday Evening Review in 1940, Langston Hughes offers the curious suggestion that Wallace Thurman was the ghostwriter of Men, Marriage and Me (erroneously written as Men, Women and Checks in Hughes’ article), the tell-all memoir ostensibly by the origi…[Read more]

Collegiate language programs faced challenges for survival long before COVID-19 hit the US. Now with the impending financial fallout from having to move online, colleges and universities will be scrutinizing even more so the value and viability of supporting language departments. This presentation will present a snapshot of where language programs…[Read more]