*Indicates a student co-author.
De la Durantaye, Leland. Review of Parade, by Rachel Cusk. Los Angeles Review of Books, April 6, 2025.
Abstract: Whose Voices Are These? Leland de la Durantaye considers art, abstraction, and violence in Rachel Cusk’s Parade.
Cole, Henri. The Other Love: Poems. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025.
Abstract: The poems in 'The Other Love' meditate on aging and the passage of time. There is an openness to beauty and mystery, despite a constant awareness of violence, particularly an American violence. In the endless struggle between form and chaos, The Other Love is a way of seeing the world, an attitude more than an emotion, and a love of things and people as they are.
Cole, Henri. “What Sparks Poetry – Books We've Loved: Henri Cole on James Longenbach's “In the Village.” Poetry Daily, January 20, 2025.
Abstract: This essay is a close reading of Longenbach's lyric sequence “In the Village,” included in his beautiful posthumous collection Seafarer.
Cole, Henri. “One Vessel.” Poem. The New Yorker, March 17, 2025.
Abstract: This shape poem represents man as a vessel. The speaker is thankful for a life that has been sweetly rewarding.
Cole, Henri. “Nights and Days.” Memoir. The Paris Review, April 22, 2025.
Abstract: This haibun (a literary form blending prose and haiku) is a memoir of the AIDS years. It is also an homage to the poet James Merrill on his centennial.
Cole, Henri. “My Identity.” Poem. Liberties: A Journal of Culture and Politics, vol. 5, number 4, Summer 2025.
Abstract: In this poem, the speaker self-identifies as a reader rather than in connection with his sexuality, gender, or race.
Cole, Henri. “Wild Type.” Poem. Liberties: A Journal of Culture and Politics, vol. 5, number 4, Summer 2025.
Abstract: This poem ponders “wild type,” or what we think of as the typical form of a species. The speaker of the poem asks, “Am I really so original as a wild type?”
Cole, Henri. “Young Tom's Room.” Liberties: A Journal of Culture and Politics, vol. 5, number 4, Summer 2025.
Abstract: I wrote this poem during a residency at the T.S. Eliot House in Gloucester, MA. It includes many aesthetic declarations in connection with Eliot.
Cole, Henri. “No One Over Fifty, Please.” Liberties: A Journal of Culture and Politics, vol. 5, number 4, Summer 2025.
Abstract: This is a poem about ageism in the romantic realm.
Etskovitz, Joani. “‘Not for Mere Children’: Charlotte Smith’s Feminist Novels for ‘Young Persons.’” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, vol. 54, no. 1, 2025.
Abstract: In 1794, Charlotte Smith set out to invent a new kind of book for 'young persons.' In a reply to her editor's suggestion that she, a near-destitute mother of twelve, write for children in order to turn a quick profit, Smith pitched 'a sort of School book, calculated not for mere children, but for young persons from twelve to sixteen.' The preface to her first book of this sort, Rural Walks (1795), identifies her daughter's intellectual needs as her inspiration: 'in the very little time that the incessant necessity of writing for the support of my family allows me to bestow on the education of a girl between twelve and thirteen, I have found… that something of this kind was still wanting.' Wanting it was. Smith sold two additional books modeled on Rural Walks, Rambles Farther (1796) and Minor Morals (1798), proving her fictional Mrs. Woodfield's assertion that 'no person is too young to be taught to think' (RW, 10). What kind of thinking does Rural Walks teach, and how, formally, does it engage adolescent readers? Smith's books for young persons depict a process of creative learning—of wandering, questioning, and storytelling—that landed her in the middle of a culture war over the roles of wonder and curiosity in girls' education.
Ketels, Ellen. “The Genesis of Masculinity.” Sexuality in the Medieval West, edited by Michelle M. Sauer and Jenny Bledsoe. Leeds: ARC Humanities Press, 2025, pp. 141-153.
Abstract: In this essay, I explore the textual production of masculinity in the interrelated fields of theology, philosophy, and medicine. This is masculinity 'by the book,' as it were: I trace the origin and circulation of central concepts of masculinity that shaped (and continue to shape) western culture. My approach is an inherently problematic one because, as we shall see, it presents a fixed ideal - masculinity in its most static and oppressive form, a theoretical rather than practical masculinity. In taking this approach, I do not mean to prioritize the representational at the expense of the real, lived experiences of medieval men. We cannot fully understand medieval masculinity if we do not embrace its fullness and variance. Nor can we understand masculinity, however, if we do not grapple with its origins, with the burdensome archive that both undergirded and overwrote it. Notions of medieval masculinity were rooted in a mass of oft-repeated knowledge (theological, philosophical, medical), and in tracing the circulation of these texts, we begin to understand the history of a system of classification that has exerted enormous influence over western culture, and which continues to obscure our understanding of the lived experience of medieval men. The archive of masculinity presents male supremacy as a given, rendering it practically invisible as an object of analysis. In tracing the origins of masculinity, I demonstrate how concepts of masculinity both shaped and erased men.
Koul, Radhika. “Taking Critical Guidance: Classical Drama as Transnational Drama.” Transnational Encounters in Early Modern Drama, edited by Dinah Wouters and Jan Bloemendal. Brill, 2025, pp. 1450-1750.
Abstract: How does early modern European drama manifest a kind of transnationalism that is distinct from what we call transnational in the contemporary world? Given the rise of nationalism in the late eighteenth century, there is, of course, something deeply anachronistic about the use of the word ‘national’ or ‘transnational’ for literature that did not have much contact with this very specific and often all-encompassing social, cultural and political framework. And yet, as the introduction to this volume on transnationalism in early modern European drama deftly and thoroughly explores, our understanding of early modern European drama would be significantly poorer if we allowed current national literary boundaries to limit how we appreciate this complex and multi-faceted phenomenon. In this paper, I examine a particular strain of transnationalism in early modern France, one noteworthy for a manifestly transhistorical and transcultural approach to literary critique and production. Such an approach was often co-extensive with the study and adoption of Greco-Roman classics and would yield the very emblems of national greatness for modern France. But understanding this process as one demonstrating a distinctly transnational impulse would be to reconstruct and reframe this engagement with the classics. In this essay, I excerpt some moments that exemplify this transhistorical and transcultural approach to literary critique and production from the oeuvre of Jean Racine and Nicolas Boileau and consider some of the methodological challenges involved in writing drama with such an approach.
Smith, Derik. “The Framework for Action and the Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement.” The Journal of Baha’i Studies, vol. 35, no. 1-2, March 2025, pp. 103-121.
Abstract: Individuals, communities, and institutions throughout the world are learning about how the evolving framework for action described in the Plans of the Universal House of Justice can be used to create meaningful, lasting transformation in society. This paper suggests that insights into the efficacy of the framework can be gleaned through consideration of its relation to social transformation movements of the past. In particular, contemplation of the history of the Southern civil rights movement engenders appreciation for the prescriptions of the House of Justice. Framework concepts such as the importance of sincere love for humanity, unified action, continuity of action, process-oriented planning, and the connection between service and transformation were vital African American organizers of the civil rights movement. Ultimately, the presentation submits that we honor the richest legacy of the civil rights movement by pursuing—as best we can—noble endeavors in alignment with the framework for action laid out in the Plans of the Universal House of Justice.