Research & Innovation

The book is authored by the Keywords Project, an independent group of scholars who, with the support of the University of Pittsburgh, Jesus College, Cambridge, and the academic journal Critical Quarterly, have spent more than a decade preparing Keywords for Today.

Ed. Joseph Tabbi. London & New York: Bloomsbury Academic Publishing, 2018. (Winner of 2018 Katherine N. Hayles Prize for Critical Writing).

Turning to Roland Barthes's 1977–78 lecture course at the Collège de France, an understudied precursor to post-critical agitation, I argue that he offers us concepts, “the neutral” and “the panorama,” that invite reflection on the affective conditions of reading. Yet here the “panorama” is no more than an intriguing sketch; Milton enriches our understanding of this concept by developing a detailed description of wayward visual attention. Exploring this dimension of Paradise Regained, I depart from the near-consensus view among scholars that the poem should be understood as a celebration of self-mastery. Ultimately, I show how Milton's account of the wandering eye both anticipates and challenges recent “post-critical” perspectives by modeling a knowingly unpredictable version of irenic reading.

With its poetic language and enduring themes, it is little wonder that the novel’s structural elements have been reimagined in various literary projects. Intriguingly, Fitzgerald’s work has lent itself especially well to the genre of 9/11 literature, particularly Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin and Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. Despite their disparate temporal settings, the underlying economic framework that contributes to the historical context in which these 9/11 novels are situated makes the insertion of Gatsby not only more germane, but also more conducive to an expanded discourse on the relationship between financial success and the racial “other” as a literary trope and mode of characterization. With consideration to the conceptualization of the American Dream, the way in which Gatsby is re-envisioned and invoked in McCann’s and O’Neill’s works, it functions to critique the sustainability of the overarching narrative of American exceptionalism as well as the problematic positioning of immigrants and minorities within this narrative.

Renowned poet Stanley Plumly, who has been praised for his “obsessive, intricate, intimate and brilliant” (Washington Post) nonfiction, explores immortality in art through the work of two impressive landscape artists: John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. How is it that this disparate pair will come to be regarded as Britain’s supreme landscape painters, precursors to Impressionism and Modernism? How did each painter’s life influence his work?

2020 Women’s & Gender Studies Caucus Essay Award “Witches & Tricksters: Feminine Forms of Resistance in Afro-Mexican Folklore”

In all her writings, both the feminist and the human engage fiercely with the material and metaphysical world. Ostriker is a poet concerned with questions of social justice, equality, religion, and how to live in a world marked by both beauty and tragedy.

The award is granted to ten “emerging faculty leaders who represent both research excellence and an extraordinary commitment to mentoring students and serving their campuses and professions,” said Stephanie J. Hull, executive vice president and chief operating officer of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. Julius has also received a second “Emerging Scholar” award from Comparative and International Education Society.

Professor Kinnaird was admired as both a fine teacher and scholar here; his great biography of the English essayist William Hazlitt was published only a year before his death in 1980. Two awards are given each year, one for the best seminar paper by a master’s student in English, the other for the best seminar paper by a doctoral student in English, written in the preceding calendar year. Details on the administration of this award will be announced in the spring.

It constitutes both a poetics and a model for understanding how persons who have been left outside the restrictive and exclusive categories of citizen resist the regulatory powers of and demand redress from the liberal state. More specifically, "Black Markets" turns to John Brougham's burlesque Columbus, El Filibustero! and Eligio Ancona's El Filibustero: Novela Historica, texts that center on pirates and piracy, to signal the importance of the piratic in the creation of exceptional American property regimes. The language of piracy, in other words, permeates the play as colonization is reduced to low-investment/high-yield marketing, at best, and get-rich-quick schemes, at worst. The piratic serves as a model for understanding why certain forms of unlawful property ownership can become the vehicle for personhood and representation.