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Fifteen Eighty Four

Academic perspectives from Cambridge University Press

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Tiny Things and Why We Love Them (and what they do to us…)

Why do people adore tiny things? From souvenir keychains to dollhouses, Christmas ornaments to refrigerator magnets, the act of shrinking a life-size thing to a smaller scale has an influential effect....

Stephanie M. Langin-Hooper | 3 Feb 2020

THE AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH: A HISTORY

As an awe-struck adolescent in attendance at the 1962 Pittsburgh Annual Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, I saw Bishop Richard R. Wright, Jr., a scholarly protégé of W. E. B. Du Bois....

Dennis C Dickerson | 31 Jan 2020

Moneyball for the Huddled Masses

In a thought-provoking piece in Politico Magazine , Professor Justin Gest proposes a “Moneyball Fix” for America’s immigration system.  Taking a page out of sports analytics, he suggests that...

Matthew Wright, Morris Levy | 30 Jan 2020

Sing to Me Muse…

Where do the Iliad and Odyssey come from? The story of these ancient epic poems is a “complicated” one (to borrow Emily Wilson’s inspired translation of the Homeric epithet polytropos, a word that...

Corinne Ondine Pache, Casey Due, Susan Lupack, Robert Lamberton | 30 Jan 2020

Trump and Iran Go Back Years

We do not yet know whether President Trump’s killing of Qassim Suleimani, Iran’s second most powerful leader, will prove to be a masterstroke or a disaster. The president’s antipathy toward the Islamic...

Timothy J Lynch | 27 Jan 2020

An Introduction to How Party Activism Survives

Party activism, understood as individuals voluntarily and regularly participating in party-related activities (i.e. not simply for electoral campaigns), seems to be a thing of the past. In the best-case...

Verónica Pérez Bentancur, Rafael Piñeiro Rodríguez, Fernando Rosenblatt | 24 Jan 2020

Associating with Dickinson: What the Manuscripts Can Tell Us About the Poet’s Conversation with her Culture

I hate movies about Emily Dickinson, and novels. I hate even the idea of the play. I hate impudent rapey poems addressed to Dickinson by entitled male poets. I hate the mugs, pot holders, T-shirts, and...

Melanie Hubbard | 24 Jan 2020

Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature

When I was writing Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature, a book primarily about two writers, the Earl of Rochester and Aphra Behn, back in the 1990s, the opening sentence of the jacket blurb read:...

Warren Chernaik | 24 Jan 2020

The Arabs and the Age of Capital

Herman Melville’s last novel, The Confidence-Man, was published on April Fool’s Day, 1857. Aboard a steamboat on the Mississippi, a series of plausible projectors invite their fellow passengers to...

Peter Hill | 21 Jan 2020

New York: A Literary History

New York: A Literary History is the result of a lifetime of reading books about the city and reading authors who made the city their home. From Stephen Crane, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, and Zora Neale...

Ross Wilson. | 21 Jan 2020

Irish Literature for Victorians?

Any history of twentieth century literature in English is unimaginable without Yeats and Joyce, both born in Dublin in the last years of the nineteenth century. They are international figures who came...

Matthew Campbell | 17 Jan 2020

Modernism’s Ecological Point of View

“Get there if you can and see the land you once were proud to own…” W. H. Auden’s Poems (1930) presents a catalogue of exhausted landscapes and fragile psyches. This line in particular repeats...

Andrew Kalaidjian | 17 Jan 2020