I like to give me students something to beat up on, so I started class today with this sentence from Cliffs Notes: In Cincinnati, far…
You probably know Behn’s Oroonoko better than I do. I’m reading/teaching (or that teaching/reading?) it for the first time. Yesterday, we focused on this: All that Love…
I was sure I’d wet myself during the flight. I apologized to Steve: “What’s that awful smell. Is it me?” Like an old man in…
The problem with teaching a medieval class on race and representation has been the unrelenting negativity of nearly all of the texts we’re doing: the…
I recently agreed — breaking my great period of NO — to write a book chapter on animals and disability simply because it’s been a…
A record of an inexpert surprise. The 1275 English Statute of the Jewry vainly offered England’s Jews a new opportunity. I quote from the 1810 translation…
I’ve just commented, with some befuddlement, on two classes of short papers on the Prioress’s Tale. I had introduced the Tale with, yes, a Trigger…
With much internal grumbling, I’m going to the climate march tomorrow, marching with memories of other failed marches. Too many people I respect are going…
What Geraldine Barnes called the “nineteenth-century ‘theatre’ of Vinland” began in the 1830s with the publication of Carl Christian Rafn’s Antiquitates Americanae and reached its apogee in the 1890s as a kind of counter-programming to the celebration of Columbus’s landing. The mania offered its adherents two things, a white heritage and a specifically medieval, embattled white heritage, while also, as I’ll conclude, obligating them to protect their whiteness, making them prisoners of their own concocted identity.
