Research & Innovation

These life stories provide central insights into blues music and stand as a fascinating form of narrative in their own right. Barry Lee Pearson has conducted dozens of field interviews and collected over a hundred published autobiographies to present this collective portrait of bluesmen's careers as they themselves tell them: their musical learning, communities, work, pleasures, travels, triumphs, and crises.

We are committed to providing a platform for folks who are marginalized in the literary community, including but not limited to people of color, trans and nonbinary people, members of the LGBTQIA community, and people with disabilities.

The phrase “Victorian dirt” invites consideration in part because it strikes us as an oxymoron: even with all we know about the range and variety of human experience in the nineteenth century, it is hard not to cling to the caricature of the Victorians as stuffy prudes who found the very idea of dirt alarming, not to say unthinkable. The phrase promises disenchantment, titillation, and defamiliarisation. With the presumed superiority of our own acuity and worldliness, and the privileges of hindsight, we harbour the fantasy that we may know the Victorians better than they knew themselves. What we learn from such investigations, however, is just how attached we are to values of cleanliness and sanitation, which makes the discovery of nineteenth-century dirt a perpetual experience of joyful disgust and self-affirming discomfort. Even more, perhaps, we learn how attracted we are to the experience of revelation itself: the unveiling of the hidden, the secret, the unknown—even when the constituents of that knowledge can hardly continue to surprise us.

It also emphasizes the significance of the comparative study of bonded labor to our understanding of “the Atlantic.” It explores forms of historical storytelling across a broad range of cultural materials, from Chinese American activist Wong Chin Foo's 1874 “fugitive coolie” narrative and bilingual Spanish-Chinese labor contracts to the novels of contemporary writers such as Cristina García, Amitav Ghosh, Toni Morrison, and Patricia Powell. What does it mean to place the archives of New World slavery and Asian indenture in conversation or in juxtaposition, especially when this counterpoint does not result in a structure of complementarity?

Following World War I, political commentator Walter Lippmann worried that citizens increasingly held inaccurate and misinformed beliefs because of the way information was produced, circulated, and received in a mass-mediated society. Lippmann dubbed this manipulative opinion-making process "the manufacture of consent." A more familiar term for such large-scale persuasion would be propaganda. In Weapons of Democracy, Jonathan Auerbach explores how Lippmann’s stark critique gave voice to a set of misgivings that had troubled American social reformers since the late nineteenth century.

Progressives, social scientists, and muckrakers initially drew on mass persuasion as part of the effort to mobilize sentiment for their own cherished reforms, including regulating monopolies, protecting consumers, and promoting disinterested, efficient government. "Propaganda" was associated with public education and consciousness raising for the good of the whole. By the second decade of the twentieth century, the need to muster support for American involvement in the Great War produced the Committee on Public Information, which zealously spread the gospel of American democracy abroad and worked to stifle dissent at home. After the war, public relations firms—which treated publicity as an end in itself—proliferated.

Weapons of Democracy traces the fate of American public opinion in theory and practice from 1884 to 1934 and explains how propaganda continues to shape today’s public sphere. The book closely analyzes the work of prominent political leaders, journalists, intellectuals, novelists, and corporate publicists, including Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, George Creel, John Dewey, Julia Lathrop, Ivy Lee, and Edward Bernays. Truly interdisciplinary in both scope and method, this book will appeal to students and scholars in American studies, history, political theory, media and communications, and rhetoric and literary studies.

Legal personification serves as the backdrop of my discussion of Bottom’s metamorphosis, which I see as evocative of developments within common law around the creation of artificial persons. In early modern jurisprudence, disembodiment offered an occasion for incorporation, such that the non-consensual human could be transformed into an artificial entity with agentic capacity. Through the staging of metamorphosis, A Midsummer Night’s Dream elaborates the surreal transformation of the human into the non-human as a theatrical effect with political implications, insofar as personification is an enabling condition of the collective rather than a crisis of the individual. The play’s sensitivity to artificial assemblage puts it in conversation with a strand of contemporary political thought interested in the complexity of the will beyond the human body.

Items of clothing, jewels, food, weapons, and domestic goods like bed linens and tableware produced parallel narratives that complicated the linguistic construction of a given character, the moral argument of a play, and the audience’s investment in theatrical spectacle. Indeed, in the early modern period, the public stage provided the premier venue for exploring the complex meanings of material culture.1 By investigating the unexpected roles played by objects on stage, scholars have learned much about the social lives of early modern things off the stage.2 As they changed hands, moved in and out of commodity status, accrued and lost value and cemented and severed human bonds, objects remained central to the performance of identity, generally, and more particularly, fundamental to the fashioning of gendered selves.

This volume brings together two vibrant areas of Renaissance studies today: memory and sexuality. The contributors show that not only Shakespeare but also a broad range of his contemporaries were deeply interested in how memory and sexuality interact. Are erotic experiences heightened or deflated by the presence of memory? Can a sexual act be commemorative?

Forever Young: Rereading Emily Dickinson,” Cambridge Companion to American Poets, ed. Mark Richardson (Cambridge University Press 2015), 119-135.

These awards publicly recognize distinguished performance in 1) Teaching, 2) Scholarship, Research, or Creative Activity, 3) Public Service, 4) Mentoring, and 5) Innovation on the part of faculty members.