Next year, two dozen Stanford students and alumni will fan out across the globe – traveling to more than a dozen countries – to pursue special projects funded by the Fulbright U.S. Student Program.
One of the recipients is Jillian Keenan (M.A. in Journalism, ‘09; B.A. in English, ‘08) who will be working in Singapore. Through research at the Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive and an internship at a Singaporean theatre company (TheatreWorks), Jillian will study multicultural interpretations of Shakespeare.
"Hazel Markus and Paula Moya have assembled an all-star roster of scholars to put to rest, once and for all, the fallacy that 'race doesn't matter.' This volume is absolutely necessary and will fast become a landmark of scholarship on race and ethnicity." -- Henry Louis Gates Jr.
A collection of essays, which focuses on race and ethnicity in everyday life, drawing on the latest in science and scholarship from across the disciplines including sociology, history, biology, psychology, anthropology, literature, education, drama, and communication.
The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, editor. Published by the Library of America to mark the centennial of Twain’s death, this collection brings together the words of over 60 writers, from his earliest reviewers to today, probing the many facets of Mark Twain: his incomparable humor, his revolutionary use of vernacular language, his irreverence and skepticism, his profound grappling with issues of race, his fearless opposition to the injustices and outrages of an imperialistic age.
Roland Greene, professor of English and of comparative literature, launched the website Arcade in November. It's now attracting more than 5,000 visitors per day and providing humanities scholars with an intellectual network, a digital salon and a sounding board for ideas. This new website has the potential to bring humanists together all over the world – and revolutionize the way scholars do business.
"The Culture of Diagram offers a bracingly innovative and insightful critical genealogy of 'diagrammatic knowledge' of the past 250 years. It represents interdisciplinary thinking at its path-breaking best: bringing together art history and visual studies, cultural and intellectual history, and science studies, Bender and Marrinan establish critically fresh and compelling insights that will spark considerable and ongoing discussion in each of those fields." (Daniel Brewer)
Prof. Vermeule wonders how readers become involved in the lives of fictional characters, people they know do not exist. Vermeule examines the ways in which readers’ experiences of literature are affected by the emotional attachments they form to fictional characters and how those experiences then influence their social relationships in real life. . . . From the perspective of cognitive science, Vermeule finds that caring about literary characters is not all that different form caring about other people, especially strangers. The tools used by literary authors to sharpen and focus reader interest tap into evolved neural mechanisms that trigger a caring response.
Susan Sontag once called Terry Castle “the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today.” But her new book, The Professor and Other Writings, proves she's one of our most expressive and enlightening memoirists as well. - (Salon.com)
"These essays are written by a brilliant mind at play. There is a sparkling intensity and wit in the tone, tempered by wisdom, but loosened by honesty and humor. Terry Castle is a great noticer, a superb and fearless observer of both herself and the world. The essays in The Professor are likely to become classics of their kind." - Colm Toibin, author of The Master and Brooklyn
When the poet and cultural critic W. S. Di Piero turns his attention to things that have mattered in his life--cities, poetry, movies, photography, art--readers are in for an exhilarating ride. City Dog, both a series of essays and the autobiography of a consciousness, ranges from Di Piero's early years as the son of Italian immigrants in South Philadelphia to his working life as a writer. The collection includes a few choice pieces from out-of-print collections and new work that shows Di Piero puzzling over other preoccupations: memory, music, eros, the social order, Dante, Sid Ceasar, Van Gogh, and even hats. . . . This intimate compilation reveals the common themes that have connected his wanderings all along.
As Gavin Jones points out in his new introduction, Margaret perhaps stands alone in its creation of a female character who grows in social rather than domestic power. The novel also remains unique in its exploration of transcendental philosophy in novelistic form. Part eco-criticism, part seduction novel, part temperance tract, and part social history, Margaret is a virtual handbook for understanding the literary culture of mid-nineteenth-century America, the missing piece in puzzling out connections between writers such as Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and Thoreau. First published in 1845, Sylvester Judd’s novel centers on the fictional New England village of Livingston . . .
Bede was the author of more than 40 works. "In his time, there was no one like him," said Brown. The Northumbrian monk known as "Venerable Bede" (c.672-735) has been called "the teacher of the whole Middle Ages" and "the father of English history." For Brown, author of the newly published Companion to Bede, he is something more: The early scholar has been Brown's lifetime's work. Bede was the ultimate polymath--a master of every subject of his time: poetic principles and practice, mathematics, astronomy, history, theology, grammar.