Research & Innovation

Glissant and the Middle Passage establishes Édouard Glissant’s proper place as a key theorist of ruin, catastrophe, abyss, and memory. Identifying his insistence on memories and histories tied to place as the crucial geography at the heart of his work, this book imparts an innovative new response to the specific historical experiences of the Middle Passage.

Learn more about Glissant and the Middle Passage.

As a college student at Gdańsk University in the 1980s, I learned that Polish Nazis had existed, and that they bore swastikas, the symbol of their pride, tattooed in their armpits. I imagined them shaving their armpits just before the war, before Hitler invaded Poland on the first day of September 1939, and then waiting, after Germany’s defeat, for the hair to grow back to cover their worst secret. Walking the streets of Gdańsk, and passing the men of my grandfather’s generation, I wondered sometimes which ones had swastikas in their armpits. Did I know anyone who had a hidden swastika? I felt uneasy about sharing with them my language, my heritage, my culture, my music, my architecture, even the food we considered Polish. Something I don’t really believe in—a collective, tribal guilt—got its grip on me.

Read "Nazis and the layers of shame" here.

By imagining and constructing the dialogue to function as a metadiscourse on the conversational theories that provide the speaking points of her characters, Scudéry enacts her rhetorical theory of sermo in addition to describing it. After an overview of varying forms of the dialogue genre in Renaissance Europe, a comparison between Scudéry's Conversations and Sir Thomas Elyot's The Defence of Good Women illuminates Scudéry's feminist construction of the genre and exemplifies her choice to use the dialogue to both perform and advance her theories on conversational practice.

Clark Atlanta University, Spring 2019.

Co-authored with Laurel Bassett. “Got Gout?: Eighteenth-Century Global ‘Remedies’ in Mary Kettilby’s Receipt Book.” Blog post on the Folger Shakespeare Library’s The Collation: Research and Exploration at the Folger.

ervice work now dominates the labor market. The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that 81 percent of all U.S. employment by 2026 will be in services. While the service work sector includes jobs with a wide range of educational attainment, training, perceived prestige, and remuneration, most of the new jobs are non-unionized, have little potential for productivity- or wage-growth, and are resistant to automation.1The typical worker in these positions works part-time in one or more jobs for low wages, often under degraded conditions, and without benefits. Disproportionately staffed by women and people of color, these jobs are in retail, home healthcare, hospitality, food service, and other jobs not seen as "real" work. Service workers pushed into this ever-expanding category comprise a massive, but fragmented proletariat

In A Poetics of Plot for the Twenty-First Century: Theorizing Unruly Narratives, Brian Richardson proposes a new, expansive model for understanding story and plot, including beginnings, endings, temporality, and unusual narrative progressions. While he focuses on late modernist, postmodern, and contemporary narratives, the study also includes many earlier works, spanning from Aristophanes and Shakespeare through James Joyce and Virginia Woolf to Salman Rushdie and Angela Carter.

Richardson argues that the act of being read is a major concern in the novel, including measuring intellectual achievement, literary disputes, and concerns about the endurance of authors over time. Most characters are inadequate readers, disparate from Woolf's own passionate experience as a reader.

The Gabbro Head Press has produced an anthology of essays written in tribute to the inspiration and influence of the renowned Tolkien scholar, writer, and professor, Verlyn Flieger. Entitled A Wilderness of Dragons: Essays in Honor of Verlyn Flieger, this volume was edited by the eminent Tolkien scholar John D. Rateliff, author of The History of the Hobbit. Awarded in 2019.

Ancient accounts describe emotion as a dynamic movement of the soul. Relying on Aristotle’s definition of movement, this chapter explores the relationship between movements of soul and verbal discourse in rhetorical treatises.