Coloniality is a complex heritage encapsulating complex cultural challenges confronting the performance artist. Nigerian musical production appears to have been operating in a world without borders since the advent of colonialism. There have been non-indigenous forms brought into the cultural landscape which have challenged the performers. The…[Read more]

Examining gay journalism as gay liberation literature, this essay forwards a cultural history of sexuality informed by comparative urban and queer studies. My main argument is that gay liberation literature under apartheid lags behind important shifts in sexual activism; and my larger aim is to extend the valences of postcolonial queer studies…[Read more]

The Trump presidency has fueled growing apprehension about a media landscape rife with lies, bogus news, and conspiracy theories. These concerns can be situated within a discourse of archival silence which questions the ways in which knowledge may be concealed, misappropriated and exploited in the service of governments, corporations and…[Read more]

City Botany: Reading Urban Ecologies in China through Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke

Lecture/class notes on Herbert Marcuse’s Essay on Authority. I’m sharing my teaching notes (rough) for works that may be helpful to others and are widely taught.

Lecture/class notes on Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents. I’m sharing my teaching notes (rough) for works that may be helpful to others and are widely taught.

This essay proposes the concept of literary immanence as a new critical model for reading world literature from the perspective of the specific situation experienced by the subject as he or she encounters the world. The literary event is instantiated within three discursive domains: literary immanence, the literary situation into which the subject…[Read more]

With thirty-seven named locations, the Digby Mary Magdalene is rightfully considered to require the most elaborate staging of the Middle English dramatic corpus. In this article, I re-examine the manuscript to find evidence of how the various locations in the play can be grouped into what I term staging complexes. Beginning with the division of…[Read more]

The extracodical stanzas of John Lydgate’s Testament and “Quis Dabit Meo Capiti Fontem Lacrimarum” in the Clopton chantry chapel of the Great Church of Holy Trinity, Long Melford, not only are two intriguing witnesses differing in presentation and language from the manuscript copies but also can be considered as part of a rhetorical program where…[Read more]

Pilot for a modular course in-person, hybrid, or online format. Texts and other materials available in digital and streaming formats.