Transatlantic literary exchange depended, during the 19th and earlier 20th centuries, on the ocean liner. Books and periodicals were exported via sea routes, lent among passengers or through ships’ libraries, and even bought and sold on board. The High Seas Bookshops, established on some Anchor Line vessels in the 1920s, strikingly demonstrate the…[Read more]

Exhibition Catalog for “learning to see nothing: new and recent work on paper and canvas,” by Steven Schroeder. Eleanor Hayes Art Gallery, Kinzer Performing Arts Center, Northern Oklahoma College, Tonkawa, Oklahoma, 4 September – 18 October 2018.

The forty poems in this collection have percolated through more than forty years of meditation on “city” that began when I was an undergraduate studying with Richard Luecke at Valparaiso University. The title, In the Path of Totality, references a phrase made familiar by media coverage leading up to the total solar eclipse that was visible acr…[Read more]

China is the occasion, not the subject or the object, of the forty-seven poems collected in Steven Schroeder’s Fallen Prose – lyrical glimpses of the “new” city in Southern light. Most of the poems in the collection are set in Shenzhen, a few in Zhuhai, Macao, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong – and one or two a bit further west, in Kunming. All attend…[Read more]

There is an all at once quality to lyric poetry that makes it akin to mysticism. It knows there is more to vision than meets the eye. It takes the whole world in while knowing the whole of it is always known imperfectly, always here, always now. The here and now of the seventy-one poems in Steven Schroeder’s new collection is most often Chicago,…[Read more]

In the spirit of the old Shaker hymn, the poems in Steven Schroeder’s new collection turn and turn – from a question Laozi raises to Woody Guthrie’s holy ground, from Chicago to Texas to Shenzhen to Macao, in conversation with poets and philosophers from Euclid and Thoreau to Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Gertrude Stein, Buddy Holly, Lyle Lovet…[Read more]

Shakespeare’s Henry V (1600) concludes with a treaty between England and France, enabled through the marriage of King Henry and Princess Katherine, the compromises of France and Burgundy, Queen Isabella’s advocacy and even Henry’s own willingness to let his delegates speak on his behalf. Although the final scene dramatizes the historical treat…[Read more]

The Association of Language Companies (ALC) has been working to increase connections, relationships, and shared learning between the professional and academic sides of the language services supply chain. From these efforts, the ALC
Bridge was born. The American Translators Association is a member of this initiative.

Text of a talk delivered remotely to Seshadripuram Evening Degree College to commemorate their Golden Jubilee in July 2022. Not peer-reviewed. Discusses, in memoiristic fashion, Tripthi Pillai’s coinage “Shakespeare Damage” — the initial encounter of many minoritized or colonized subjects (including LGBTQ+ persons) with Shakespeare– and…[Read more]

The metatheatricality of A Midsummer Night’s Dream has invited recent directors to tell particular kinds of socially progressive stories. This article uses the notion of “social reparation” to theorize remedial uses of Shakespeare in adaptations that give artists and audiences more moral agency. By imagining more inclusive local habitations and s…[Read more]

This talk introduces the concept of “prosthetic narration,” a narrative technique that mediates the engagement of disabled cognition such that the reader is invited to reimagine how one thinks and perceives. In his essay, “The Novel,” Émile Zola establishes the “intimate union” between the author and “the reality of the scene” as a premise of fic…[Read more]

James Agee’s complicated life and complex work have elicited varied critical responses, but none thus far by way of the writer’s intriguing relationship with his sometime analyst Frances Wickes. I believe Agee’s autobiographical writings prove both intertextual with and influenced by Wickes’s work, especially in regard to her novel and to The Mor…[Read more]

The rise of global Shakespeare as an industry and cultural practice—the incorporation of Shakespearean performance in cultural diplomacy and in the cultural marketplace—is aided by digital tools of dissemination and digital forms of artistic expression. Shakespeare has evolved from a cultural nomad in the past centuries—a body of works with no pe…[Read more]

War diaries are often written under duress, and are attempts at documenting events as they unfold, or narrating stories of how people survive under trying circumstances. She argues that conditions of war under which authors produce their work dictate the form itself. When an author’s life is under threat, when safety is compromised, m…[Read more]

In Portuguese Nobel Laureate José Saramago’s As Intermitências da Morte (2005) and in Mahmoud Darwish’s epic poem Mural (2000), the authors contemplate the nothingness that accompanies death, a concern that increasingly permeates their later writings. Although ‘death’ is depicted differently, the authors fear that with death “the universe wo…[Read more]

This memorial tribute for the late Ciaran Carson (1948-2019), Irish creative writer extraordinaire, was commissioned three years ago for inclusion in a special number of “Reading Ireland” which has not yet materialised. It is now archived in and by Humanities Common on the third anniversary of his funeral rites and burial in Belfast, Northern…[Read more]

This memorial tribute for the late Ciaran Carson (1948-2019), Irish creative writer extraordinaire, was commissioned three years ago for inclusion in a special number of “Reading Ireland” which has not yet materialised. It is now archived in and by Humanities Common on the third anniversary of his funeral rites and burial in Belfast, Northern…[Read more]

The depiction of women of East Asian descent in science fiction films reveals how racial hierarchies are mapped onto, and used as justification for, mistreatment of women—and misogynistic prejudices inform racism. Contributing to the patterns that dehumanize Asian women are multiple sci-fi films that feature cyborgs and androids in Asian female b…[Read more]