Religion is deeply embedded in American history, and one cannot understand American history's broad dynamics without accounting for it. Without detailing the history of religions, teachers cannot properly explain key themes in US survey courses, such as politics, social dynamics, immigration and colonization, gender, race, or class. From early ......
Danish film director Carl Th. Dreyer, one of the twentieth century's most famous filmmakers, is best known for his masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc, and his midcentury classics, Day of Wrath and Ordet. Both viewers and scholars largely leave his early work, for Nordisk Film, on the shelf, dismissing it as immature melodramatic fare produced ......
In November 2020, B.J. Hollars answered a call from his father-in-law while teaching. "When will you be home?" Steve asked. "I have news." So began the Hollars family's year of plenty--a cancer diagnosis on top of the ongoing COVID pandemic, then feelings of falling short as parents, partners, and people. While Hollars traces his family's daily ......
A proud Armenian who claimed a distant link to nobility, born in what was then part of czarist Russia, Rouben Mamoulian (1897-1987) became one of the most astonishing and confounding directors of American film and theater, directing the original stage productions of Porgy and Bess, Carousel, and Oklahoma!, as well as films including Love Me ......
In raw, lyrical poems, Host explores parasitic relationships-between men and women, sons and mothers, and humans and the Earth-and considers their consequences. Throughout this collection, flukes abound, both chance occurrences and flatworms changing their hosts' behavior. How much control do we have over our lives? To what extent are we being ......
Growing up queer, closeted, and afraid, Richard Scott Larson found expression for his interior life in horror films, especially John Carpenter's 1978 classic, Halloween. He developed an intense childhood identification with Michael Myers, Carpenter's inscrutable masked villain, as well as Michael's potential victims. In The Long Hallway, Larson ......
When Tave wakes up alone in the hospital, she barely remembers the car wreck. Far from home, dazed, and despondent, she struggles to face the challenges of her new paralysis-all while worrying about her partner Les, also severely injured in the accident, but now home with her homophobic parents who refuse to allow contact. In rehab, Tave ......
Hart Island has served as a potter's field for more than a century, holding over a million indigent, unclaimed, or unknown New Yorkers' bodies-and yet it is little-known even among locals. In this absorbing and elegiac story, on this island shaped like a miniature boot of Italy, Gary Zebrun explores overlapping connections of sexuality, family, ......
This innovative collection examines how book history and digital humanities (DH) practices are integrated through approach, access, and assessment. Eight essays by rising and senior scholars practicing in multiple fields-including librarians, literature scholars, digital humanists, and historians-consider and reimagine the interconnected futures ......