Zunshine’s essay draws on recent research in developmental psychology and cognitive evolutionary anthropology to examine emotional responses to supernatural events by the child and adult characters of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (1816), as well as to revisit the traditional literary critical view of those responses, acc…[Read more]

“The essays in this volume attend to both of these possible relations to the infrastructures of inscription. They explore not only how white supremacist histories and infrastructures have limited and foreclosed black expression but also how black expression has extended, recoded, and transformed some of these very structures, affording new possibilities.”

A book’s a book, and numbers are numbers, right? Well, maybe. For the Shakespeare Association of America seminar on “Counting (in) Early Modern Drama,” I proposed to give myself the task of understanding and then communicating the technological underpinnings of a digital facsimile. One specific question I wanted to address, with the help of…[Read more]

According to Fredson Bowers, writing in Shakespeare Quarterly in 1951, we will never know the printer of that section “until we know everything there is to be learned about seventeenth-century types.” 2 Bowers doubted we could ever list the full set of F4’s printers because F4 was printed anonymously, and the volume left few clues about its…[Read more]

This interview with esteemed literary critic J. Hillis Miller was conducted via Skype on July 17, 2013. Miller speaks about a number of issues important to his life and work. Providing a number of emblematic parables, Miller discusses his early career, his work on the poetry of William Carlos Williams, and his famous essay “The Critic as H…[Read more]

This interview with literary critic Jonathan Arac was conducted at the University of Pittsburgh on May 19, 2015. Arac, a member of the boundary 2 editorial collective since 1979, speaks at length about his life and work. Addressing the impact of theory on his career, he discusses how he came to be associated with the New Americanists, his project…[Read more]

Series of Powerpoint slides. Background on the limited time of faculty at “the 99%” of institutions (Francisco and O’Dair) to conduct research and thus the importance of not wasting that labor by choosing inappropriate venues. Overview of types of journal, and suggestions for using reflection prompts, the MLA directory of Periodicals, and a…[Read more]

Based in the South throughout his career, the Black Baptist minister Sutton E. Griggs wrote nearly fifty books and pamphlets, including five novels, nearly all of which he issued through his own publishing companies. Griggs was a founder of American Baptist Theological Seminary, which several Civil Rights Movement leaders attended in the 1950s.…[Read more]

As I have done in connection with another tale about vengeance Edgar Allan Poe published two and a half years earlier, “The Cask of Amontillado,” in what follows I offer a generalized biographical interpretation of the 1849 story “Hop-Frog,” linking it to Poe’s February 1845 essay “Some Secrets of the Magazine Prison-House” and his September 184…[Read more]

This essay examines ethnic strife and cultural friction in New Orleans during the Mexican-American war. Specifically, it explores how the Crescent City’s anglophone and francophone populations navigated the tension between national and transnational affiliation through performance. By considering both the material and the immaterial aspects of p…[Read more]

What follows is a talk I gave (over zoom) on June 29, 2022, for the London Rare Book School and the Institute of English Studies, University of London, and mildly revised in the transcript I posted on my blog on September 7, 2022. It was an opportunity for me to talk about the work I’ve been doing on feminist bibliography over the past couple of…[Read more]

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals should work to protect multiple runs of actual Victorian periodicals, which are potentially at risk in “collective collections” organized by academic libraries.

This syllabus for Major Authors: Anonymous serves as one of the capstone seminar options for our English Majors and Minors. In overhauling our curriculum to make the English BA represent more literature, we removed Single-Author-Named courses & replaced them with Major Authors. Each faculty who teach this course make an argument for the various…[Read more]