Contributing

Contributing

Scholars aspire to make “a contribution”: we seek to add to the already existing store of knowledge about a subject. In literary scholarship, new insights are often built on the insights of those who have gone before, and when it comes to classic texts...

Reframing American Literature I

Last year, on the eve of my lecture about Anne Hutchinson and Mary Rowlandson, I wrote a post over at PWHNY speculating about how I might change my American Literature I syllabus when I taught it in the spring of 2010: It might be time to reframe the course. Rather...

Manic Monday

And not “just another” manic Monday. In fact, I can’t remember another day on which I’ve had to give three big public performances — and on different subjects to boot (though in my mind there are significant areas of overlap among them)....

NYUAD Institute Talk

By all accounts, the lecture that I gave for the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute on Wednesday night went well. The title of the talk was “Cosmopolitanism, Multiculturalism, and the Promise of Literature.” Like Joanna’s lecture on the Silk Road, it took place...

Sharjah

Sharjah, which is right next to Dubai, is more conservative than its neighbor. No alcohol is served in the emirate, which was named the cultural capital of the Arab world by UNESCO because of its excellent museums. The American University of Sharjah there was founded...