Research & Innovation

Started in 1989, they publish short fiction, poetry, personal essay/memoir, visuals, and scholarly essays for a general audience.

From an award-winning poet comes this riveting, gorgeous memoir about a young runaway, the trauma that haunted her as an adult, and the friendship with a horse that finally set her free.

When she was eleven years old, Rita began to run away. Her father’s violence and her mother’s hostility drove her out of the house and into the streets in search of a better life. This soon led her into a dangerous world of drugs, predatory older men, and the occasional kindness of strangers, but despite the dangers, Rita kept running. One day she came upon a field of horses galloping along a roadside fence, and the sight of them gave her hope. The memory of their hoofbeats stayed with her.

Rita survives her harrowing childhood to become a prize-winning writer and the wife of a promising surgeon. But when she is suddenly besieged by terrifying panic attacks, her past trauma threatens her hard-won happiness and the stable, comfortable life she’s built with her husband. Within weeks, she is incapacitated with fear—literally afraid of her own shadow. Realizing that she is facing a life of psychological imprisonment, Rita undertakes a journey to find help through a variety of treatments. It is ultimately through chasing her childhood passion for horses that she meets a spirited, endearing horse named Claret—with his own troubled history—and together they surmount daunting odds as they move toward fear and learn to trust, and ultimately save, each other.

"Vision, clarity, and perspective: such are the benefits of altitude. And altitude is what you got, from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century, when you erected an earthen mount, or mound, in your ornamental garden."

 

Since that traumatic loss, Sam’s life has grown complicated. In a moment of desperate confusion, he sells his life story to a Norwegian filmmaker named Istvakson, known for the stylized violence of his films. Soon he comes to regret his decision, leading to an increasingly intense game of cat and mouse between the two men. Furthermore, Sam has begun “seeing” Elizabeth—not only seeing but holding conversations with her, almost every evening, and what at first seems simply hallucination born of terrible grief reveals itself, evening by evening, as something else entirely.

Sin and Confession in Colonial Peru by Regina Harrison looks closely at the implementation of the European sacrament of confession in the early modern contest of the Andes. This book examines the practice of cultural translation through analysis of Spanish ecclesiastic literature written in Quechua, the language of the Incas. Explicit in the writing of the early Spanish-Quechua tests is a desire to communicate Christian concepts to the Andean ‘heathen’; also present in these texts is abundant documentation of both cultural conversion and cultural survival. The catechisms, sermons, manuals for the confessor and grammars written by secular and regular clergy serve as a rich repository of semantic changes as Quechua is pressed into service by the Spanish translators. However, these semantic ‘refashionings’ often retained traces of ancient Andean modes of thought despite the didactic lessons preached from the pulpits and in the plazas. With examples drawn directly from the pages of the confession manuals, we see how sin is newly defined in Quechua lexemes, the role of women is circumscribed to fit Old World patterns, and new monetized perspectives on labor and trade are taught to the subjugated indigenous peoples of the Andes by means of the Ten Commandments. Although outwardly confession appears to be an instrument of oppression, in the hands of indigenous champion Bartolomé de Las Casas and other Dominicans in Peru, confessional practice ultimately became a political weapon to compel Spanish restitution of Incan lands and wealth. (University of Texas Press, June, 2014)

A window onto the lives of the Romantic poets through the re-creation of one legendary night in 1817.

 

The author of the highly acclaimed Posthumous Keats, praised as “full of . . . those fleeting moments we call genius” (Washington Post), now provides a window into the lives of Keats and his contemporaries in this brilliant new work.

 

On December 28, 1817, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon hosted what he referred to in his diaries and autobiography as the “immortal dinner.” He wanted to introduce his young friend John Keats to the great William Wordsworth and to celebrate with his friends his most important historical painting thus far, “Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem,” in which Keats, Wordsworth, and Charles Lamb (also a guest at the party) appeared. After thoughtful and entertaining discussions of poetry and art and their relation to Enlightenment science, the party evolved into a lively, raucous evening. This legendary event would prove to be a highlight in the lives of these immortals.

 

A beautiful and profound work of extraordinary brilliance, The Immortal Evening regards the dinner as a lens through which to understand the lives and work of these legendary artists and to contemplate the immortality of genius.

 

Winner of the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism

ACLS is a nonprofit federation of 75 scholarly organizations. As the preeminent representative of American scholarship in the humanities and related social sciences, ACLS holds a core belief that knowledge is a public good.

On our walk to preschool lately we’ve been passing the carcass of a headless bird, just lying there on the red-brick sidewalk, rotting.

Focused on six major African American writers and artists of the 1950s, this study shows how their Left affiliations enabled them to shape an aesthetic that maintained traditions of race radicalism and literary experimentation.

Arnold’s scope for and definition of “natural” in no way limits that word to being only “of the earth.” Instead, it expands out so that all observations, all happenings, from natural disasters to the use of DDT and from the effects of ice storms to that of a fourteen-wheeler’s on the highway fit within the natural world.