Research & Innovation

American Comparative Literature Association co-winner for best first book in Comparative Literature, 2013 for The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of Tradition

Perhaps there is no other region in the world that has been more radically altered in terms of human and botanic migration, transplantation, and settlement than the Caribbean. Theorists such as Edouard Glissant argue that the dialectic between Caribbean "nature" and "culture," engendered by this unique and troubled history, has not heretofore been brought into productive relation. Caribbean Literature and the Environment redresses this omission by gathering together eighteen essays that consider the relationship between human and natural history. The result is the first volume to examine the literatures of the Caribbean from an ecocritical perspective in all language areas of the region.

In its exploration of the relationship between nature and culture, this collection focuses on four overlapping themes: how Caribbean texts inscribe the environmental impact of colonial and plantation economies; how colonial myths of edenic and natural origins are revisioned; what the connections are between histories of biotic and cultural creolization; and how a Caribbean aesthetics might usefully articulate a means to preserve sustainability in the context of tourism and globalization. By creating a dialogue between the growing field of ecological literary studies, which has primarily been concerned with white settler narratives, and Caribbean cultural production, especially the region’s negotiation of complex racial and ethnic legacies, these essays explore the ways in which the history of transplantation and settlement has provided unique challenges and opportunities for establishing a sense of place and an environmental ethic in the Caribbean.

The volume includes an extensive introduction by the editors and essays by Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Derek Walcott, Wilson Harris, Cyril Dabydeen, Helen Tiffen, Hena Maes-Jelinek, and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, among others, as well as interviews with Walcott and Raphaël Confiant. It will appeal to all those interested in Caribbean, literary, and ecocritical studies.

The conquest and colonization of the Americas resulted in all kinds of exchanges, including the transmission of diseases and the sharing of medicines to treat them. In this book, Kelly Wisecup examines how European settlers, Native Americans, and New World Africans communicated medical knowledge in early America, and how the colonists represented what they learned in their literatures.

Against the prevailing view that colonial texts provide insight only into their writers perspectives, Wisecup demonstrates that Europeans, Natives, and Africans held certain medical ideas in common, including a conception of disease as both a spiritual and a physical entity, and a belief in the power of special rituals or prayers to restore health. As a consequence, medical knowledge and practices operated as a shared form of communication on which everyone drew in order to adapt to a world of devastating new maladies and unfamiliar cures.

By signaling one s relation to supernatural forces, to the natural world, and to other people, medicine became an effective means of communicating a variety of messages about power and identity as well as bodies and minds. Native Americans in Virginia and New England, for example, responded to the nearly simultaneous arrival of mysterious epidemics and peoples by incorporating colonists into explanations of disease, while British American colonists emphasized to their audiences back home the value of medical knowledge drawn from cross-cultural encounters in the New World.

What if Romeo had stayed helplessly in love with Rosaline instead of Juliet? Or if Mercutio and Tybalt hadn't died...but had gotten together instead? In this Shakespearean take on the "Choose Your Own Ending" model, the audience casts votes throughout the performance to determine which course true love will take; ultimately deciding whether everybody lives or everybody dies. With eight dramatically different possible endings, this isn't the tale of star-crossed lovers that you read in high school. An irreverent, madcap reimagining of Shakespeare's most beloved romance.

Ed. Speculative Medievalisms: Discography (Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, 2013). 159-172.

In The South Carolina Roots of African American Thought, each of the nineteen authors is introduced with a supplementary scholarly essay to illustrate the cultural and historical import of their works and to demonstrate how they draw on and distinguish themselves from one another. These connections exhibit a coherent legacy of engagement, brought on and nurtured by South Carolina traditions.

Meg Eden’s The Girl Who Came Back is a collection of narrative poems that circle  around a Mother’s love of an amusement park that has been destroyed by time and  urban sprawl.  The Mother’s recollections are shared with the daughter, until the  love of the past amusement park becomes a shared fantasy. Eden asks us to consider  the way experience shapes memory and the way memory shapes reality. It begs to  question the importance of shared narratives.  This is a collection of what happens  when Sleeping Beauty and Snow White become your childhood friends in a life that  is lived standing outside windows, dreaming of the inside.