Research & Innovation

When he walks, he is called a vagrant, a mad man. He is chased out of towns and villages, ridiculed and imprisoned. When the reverie of his walking ends, he’s left wondering where he is, with no memory of how he got there. His past exists only in fleeting images.

Pursuing the American Dream, he ended up fighting for his life. Sasha Denisov dreams of buying his own taxi medallion and remarrying the beautiful Ani. He got his green card from her and fell in love. His pursuit of happiness clashes with criminals. They want the same medallion. An assassin and the police are after the cabbie. The pursuit of justice drives two Boston detectives assigned to his case. They get an unexpected break in a ten-year old murder and push both investigations forward.

Longlisted for the 2015 Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, this second collection is full of poems that have their finger on the pulse of contemporary Jamaica in all its exuberance and brokenness. Tanya Shirley tells these stories with a winning mixture of acute observation, outrage, outrageousness, tenderness and understanding​.

But this scholarship theorizes tragedy through a single narrow model, generally applies it to a limited conception of the domain of constitutional law, and ultimately conceives tragedy only as a liability rather than as a positive potentiality of constitutional practice. This essay critiques one theoretical understanding of tragedy and introduces three more, to argue for an open-ended praxis of pluralist tragic engagement with the United States Constitution that is necessary for the sober, mature, demystified, and deliberative functionality of the constitutional system. Each of these four models of tragedy is paired with a domain of constitutional law: Aristotle’s model with interpretation, Hegel’s with structure and institutions, the radical Brazilian theater director Augusto Boal’s with performance and public effects, and Nietzsche’s with cultural and educational accessibility.

Oliphaunt Books, 2014, pp 39-59.

They wake up even earlier than we do. Natalia and I both start work at 8 a.m., but she works right here in town, her hometown in Poland, and I need to take the train to the language school all the way in Szczecin.

The article reviews a course-embedded writing mentors program that responds to the   particular manifestations of language discrimination at a small, private HBCU. For  those  instructors who choose to participate in it, the program is intended to facilitate an instructor's implementation of code-meshing pedagogy.

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Juked is an independent journal that appears online as well as in annual print issues.

The award is given for a paper presented at the previous two sessions of the NeMLA Convention using women and/or gender-centered approaches. This essay may not be submitted to another contest for the duration of the award’s deliberation.

Eds. Holly A. Crocker and D. Vance Smith (Routledge, 2014), 367-375.