Research & Innovation

Pitching potential articles to Harper's Magazine editor Lewis Lapham over "a $30 lunch at some understated French country-style place," Ehrenreich recalls the conversation shifting to how "women about to be booted into the labor market by welfare reform [were] going to make it on $6 or $7 an hour" (1). (1) Ehrenreich suggests that '"[s]omeone ought to do the old-fashioned kind of journalism--you know, go out there and try it for themselves.' I meant someone much younger than myself, some hungry neophyte journalist with time on her hands" (1-2). When Lapham insists that she investigate low-wage work herself, Ehrenreich admits misgivings about doing work she is positioned to avoid. Citing her successful career despite having grown up not far removed from "the low-wage way of life," Ehrenreich values her "gloriously autonomous, if not always well-paid, writing life" (2). Although she eventually agrees to take the assignment, Ehrenreich's ambivalence marks the difference between work as a writer and work as a service worker manipulating affect for a wage.

By putting early modern accounts of the humoral constitution of the night air in conversation with modern theories of apostrophe, I argue that the Macbeths’ experiences of night theorize political action as inseparable from the nonhuman forces in the play. Shakespeare reworks his source material to explore the borders of the human, imagining a more complex relationship between treasonous violence and the darkness that enshrouds Scotland.

This essay argues that Edmund Spenser juxtaposes Florimell and the false Florimell in The Faerie Queene to think about how the latter’s autonomy illuminates the limitations of the human political subject. Although we might expect the automaton to exhibit less agency than her human archetype, the false Florimell has more control over her sexual life. Spenser uses the automaton to interrogate the metaphor of sexual consent as political consent, showing the ill-fit between the vehicle and the tenor in this key trope of political philosophy.

Article demonstrates that King Lear theorizes a communitarian politics, rather than one founded in sovereign authority.

Through disruption, through the violence of storms, Fitzgerald searches for a necessary design, resilience and a new path to the meadow, where falcons dazzle the morning air. As rich in sound as in sense, this book is about finding magic in the ordinary, the afterglow of time, family inspirations, and resurgences across seasons.

Finalist • PEN / Jean Stein Book Award
Longlisted • Aspen Words Literary Prize
Best Books of the Year: Washington Post, NPR, Buzzfeed and Entropy
Best Short Story Collections of the Year: Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, the New York Public Library, and Electric Literature

Welcome to Cross River, Maryland, where Rion Amilcar Scott creates a mythical universe peopled by some of the most memorable characters in contemporary American fiction. Set in the mythical Cross River, Maryland, The World Doesn’t Require You heralds “a major unique literary talent” (Entertainment Weekly). Established by the leaders of America’s only successful slave revolt in the mid-nineteenth century, the town still evokes the rhythms of its founding. With lyrical prose and singular dialect, Rion Amilcar Scott pens a saga that echoes the fables carried down for generations—like the screecher birds who swoop down for their periodic sacrifice, and the water women who lure men to wet death.

Learn more about World Doesn't Require You.

This book explores the role that the verbal, conceptual, and visual language of alchemy played in the literature of the conquest of America and in the rise of an early modern paradigm of discovery in both science and international law. While the roots of the modern 'conquistadorial' attitude toward nature lie in late medieval alchemy, which fused Aristotelian reason with Christian apocalypticism in the militant context of crusade and spiritual conquest, this book argues that the modern idea of what it means to discover something has a colonial history in which conquest legitimated the modern (Baconian) idea of discovery by underwriting it with religious messianism and early modern state power. Thus, the book traces the intellectual and spiritual legacies of such late medieval alchemists as Roger Bacon, Arnald of Villanova, and Ramon Llull in the early modern literature of the conquest of America in texts written by authors such as Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, Jose de Acosta, Nicolas Monardes, Walter Raleigh, Thomas Harriot, Francis Bacon, and Alexander von Humboldt.

Translating Nature recasts the era of early modern science as an age not of discovery but of translation. As Iberian and Protestant empires expanded across the Americas, colonial travelers encountered, translated, and reinterpreted Amerindian traditions of knowledge—knowledge that was later translated by the British, reading from Spanish and Portuguese texts. Translations of natural and ethnographic knowledge therefore took place across multiple boundaries—linguistic, cultural, and geographical—and produced, through their transmissions, the discoveries that characterize the early modern era. In the process, however, the identities of many of the original bearers of knowledge were lost or hidden in translation.

The essays in Translating Nature explore the crucial role that the translation of philosophical and epistemological ideas played in European scientific exchanges with American Indians; the ethnographic practices and methods that facilitated appropriation of Amerindian knowledge; the ideas and practices used to record, organize, translate, and conceptualize Amerindian naturalist knowledge; and the persistent presence and influence of Amerindian and Iberian naturalist and medical knowledge in the development of early modern natural history. Contributors highlight the global nature of the history of science, the mobility of knowledge in the early modern era, and the foundational roles that Native Americans, Africans, and European Catholics played in this age of translation.

Contributors: Ralph Bauer, Daniela Bleichmar, William Eamon, Ruth Hill, Jaime Marroquín Arredondo, Sara Miglietti, Luis Millones Figueroa, Marcy Norton, Christopher Parsons, Juan Pimentel, Sarah Rivett, John Slater.

 

Washington, DC, March 21–24, 2019.