The Scandalous Play in Mansfield Park
Jane Austen uses Elizabeth Inchbald’s Lovers’ Vows to explore the social boundaries, both public and private, of Regency England.
Speculative Fiction: Beyond a Novel’s Entertainment Value
The classroom is a place to equip students to better understand the world as it was and is. Speculative fiction can help.
Speculative Fiction: A Reading List
Speculative fiction, from Afrofuturism to Star Wars, offers students tools and methods for analyzing social movements, power structures, and utopian thinking.
Transatlantic Studies: A Reading List
Using the Atlantic Ocean as a guiding metaphor, transatlanticism emphasizes the fluid nature of contrived national boundaries and identities.
Fear and Fertility in Elif Shafak’s Black Milk
Shafak exposes her terror over motherhood’s potential to devour creativity—a panic she imagines sharing with a parade of literary forebears.
Self-Publishing and the Black American Narrative
Bryan Sinche’s Published by the Author explores the resourcefulness of Black writers of the nineteenth century.
Urchins of New York and Elsewhere
Remembering the Sky Parlor for lost children and the public’s fascination with those who went astray.
Body Double
Long before the imposture of Anna Delvey, the Tichborne Claimaint swept a nation’s imagination.
Sorry, but Jane Eyre Isn’t the Romance You Want It to Be
Charlotte Brontë, a woman whose life was steeped in stifled near-romance, refused to write love as ruly, predictable, or safe.