*Indicates a student co-author.
Cole, Henri. Gravity and Center: Selected Sonnets, 1994-2022 (paperback). Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024.
Cole, Henri. “Resolutions.” Poem. The New Republic, February 8, 2024.
Abstract: This free-verse sonnet is a catalog of my New Year's resolutions.
Cole, Henri and Claire Malroux, translator. “The Hare and the Frogs.” Harvard Review, vol. 62, December 3, 2024.
Abstract: The moral of this fable is that unhappy people are comforted by the sight of others who are worse off. Our fears are often relative and can be exaggerated. Aesop is the source.
Cole, Henri. “At Sixy-Five.” Poem. The Best American Poetry 2024, edited by MaryJo Salter and David Lehman. Scribner, 2024.
Abstract: Each year this series presents essential American verse and the poets who create it. "At Sixty-Five" was written on my birthday.
Ketels, Ellen. Review of Women, Dance, and Parish Religion in England, 1300-1640: Negotiating the Steps of Faith, by Lynneth Miller Renberg. The Journal of Ecclesiastical History vol. 75, issue 3, July 2024, pp. 564-566.
Abstract: In this new study that spans the late medieval and early modern periods, Miller Renberg explores the rhetorical uses of dance. Although Miller Renberg's focus is sermons, a wide variety of sources such as ecclesiastical court documents, instructional literature, biblical commentaries, and vernacular religious poetry weave in and out of the study. Dance provides a fruitful way to explore changing gender and spiritual dynamics across three eventful centuries, and Miller Renberg attends to both the ruptures and continuities that shaped cultural understandings and (more importantly) discursive uses of dance.
Hofheinz, Marco, Craig Koslofsky, and Ellen Rentz. “Peace, Sharing/Passing of.” Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception Online, edited by Constance M. Furey, et al. De Gruyter, 2024, pp. 763-764.
Abstract: Encyclopedia entry (245 words). In the Beatitudes (Matt 5:3-12), peace is framed as an ongoing process of production and even as a precondition for Christian community and salvation: "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God" (Matt 5:9). The Pauline Epistles draw attention to Christians' ethical obligation to strive toward peace with each other as a means of moving closer to God (Rom 12:18, Col 3:12-15, Eph. 2:14-17); ideals of tolerance, mercy, mutual help, and forgiveness articulate the dynamic social dimensions of peace. The state of being "in Christ" makes Christians the "ambassadors" of God, each charged with "the ministry of reconciliation" (2 Cor 5:16-21). From as early as the 2nd century C.E., the making of peace was literalized in the Kiss of Peace, a preparatory ritual for the celebration of the Eucharist that was performed either during the Offertory (throughout Eastern tradition and in early Western tradition) or, from 5th century on in the West, just before Communion. In the two-part gesture, the embrace of the celebrants followed by that of the congregants reinforces mutual reconciliation as a prerequisite for receiving (and joining) the body of Christ. From c.1250 until the Reformation, first in England and then across Europe, the passing of peace took a more indirect and material form: the priest would kiss an object (the "paxbred" or osculatorium, usually a wooden, silver, or ivory tablet with a handle) that congregants would each kiss and pass to one another in the nave
Koul, Radhika. “Are Large Language Models Literary Critics?” Poetics Today, vol. 45, issue 2, pp. 233-241.
Koul, Radhika. “Learning with Madhavji.” Madhavamahima - Professor Madhav Deshpande Felicitation Volume, edited by Vats Deshraj Sharma. Devavani Parishad, 2024.
Lai, Yi Shun. A Suffragist's Guide to the Antarctic. Simon & Schuster, 2024.
Abstract: November 1914. Clara Ketterling-Dunbar is one of twenty-eight crew members of The Resolute—a ship meant for an Antarctic expedition now marooned on an ice floe one hundred miles from the shore of the continent. An eighteen-year-old American, Clara has told the crew she’s twenty-one years old and Canadian. Since the war broke out, sentiment toward Americans has not been the most favorable, and Clara will be underestimated enough simply for being a woman without also giving away just how young she is. Two members of the crew know her nationality, but no one knows the truth of her activities in England before The Resolute set sail. She and her suffragist sisters in the Women’s Social & Political Union were waging war of a different kind in London. They taught Clara to fight. And now, even marooned on the ice, she won’t stop fighting for women’s rights…or for survival. In the wilderness of Antarctica, Clara is determined to demonstrate what a woman is truly capable of—if the crew will let her.
Laser, Jessica. The Goner School. University of Iowa Press, 2024.
Abstract: Jessica Laser has given her generation a voice and a name in this masterful, funny, and heartbreaking collection, The Goner School. Members of this school, despairing and hopeful, count themselves among the self-aware, trauma-informed inheritors of a warming, warring planet. Childhood, the gym, plant medicine ceremonies, PhD programs, Jews, evangelicals, everyone you’ve slept with, Lake Michigan, the Bay Area, William James, and Taylor Swift may seem incongruous, but they all take place in one world from which, try as we might, there is no escape.
Laser, Jessica. “Consecutive Preterite.” Poem. The Paris Review, issue 247, Spring 2024.
Lerer, Seth. Introducing the History of the English Language. Routledge, Taylor and Francis, 2024.
Abstract: This is an undergraduate textbook for courses in the History of the English Language. It runs from Indo-European to the present, with special attention to world English and internet communication.
Lerer, Seth. “Bicentennial Beginnings: Learning to write and learning to live, with Richard Wilbur as a guide.” The American Scholar, January 4, 2024.
Abstract: "Bicentennial Beginnings" is an autobiographical reflection on teaching and poetics.
Lerer, Seth. “Chaucerian Theatricality: Then and Now.” Literature Compass, vol 21, issue 10-12, 2024.
Abstract: John Ganim's 1990 book, Chaucerian Theatricality, raised important questions about the methods of studying Chaucer's public poetry and, in turn, about the relationships among authorial, narratorial, and critical voices, both in his time and ours. This paper reconsiders Ganim's book in the context of Chaucerian criticism of the 1990s, and it develops the implications of its notion of theatricality to embrace new readings of the Tales and new approaches to twenty-first-century debates in Chaucer scholarship. The paper concludes by arguing that the real, current site of Chaucerian theatricality lies in the areas of teaching and research, especially in the recent publication and dissemination of work reassessing the status of Chaucer's raptus of Cecily of Chaumpaigne.
Lobis, Seth. “Georgic.” The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 5. Seventeenth-Century British Poetry, edited by Laura L. Knoppers. Oxford Academic, 2024, pp. 222-234.
Abstract: With roots in Hesiod’s Works and Days, Virgil’s Georgics, and the Bible, seventeenth-century English georgic was a diverse, flexible genre. Recognition of the diversity and flexibility of early modern English georgic has served to correct a long-standing literary-historical tendency to regard the genre as if it were buried in barren ground until its eighteenth-century efflorescence. A less rigidly imitative view of seventeenth-century georgic, one neither narrowly fixed on the Virgilian model nor disconnected from it, reveals a richly varied landscape of works markedly different in scope and style: vast and copious, like Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion; classically restrained, like Jonson’s estate poems; loco-reflective, like Denham’s Cooper’s Hill; exploratory and extravagant, like Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’; stately and historical, like Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis; and universal and intimate, like Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Morrison, James. “Through a Lens Darkly: Dreyer's Witches.” Something Wicked: Witchcraft in Movies, Television, and Popular Culture, edited by Douglas Brode and Leah Deyneka. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024.
Abstract: An anthology of essays that deal with Witchcraft and the figure of the Witch, as they have been presented in motion pictures, television, and popular culture, in order to understand how, why, and when the common anti-Witchcraft/ anti-Witch attitude evolved.