This is the book – and this is the writer – to whom I owe everything. When did The Giant, O’Brien cross my path? Sometime around my transition from 20th c. MA to 21st c. Ph.D student, when I was devising scholarly research topics and writing and publishing short stories on the side and groping […]
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Delighted to share that on Jan. 11, 2023 (rescheduled from Nov. 24), I’ll be speaking in person at Highgate Cemetery about Pierce Egan and Tom Sayers, who are buried at Highgate Cemetery, and the complex, bloody world of nineteenth-century English boxing, which fascinated Lord Byron and John Keats. More at the Highgate Cemetery website.
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Wiping sweat, adjusting our sunhats in an historic heatwave, we stop at the site of the Cock and Hoop on Artillery Lane in the east London neighborhood of Spitalfields. It’s a shell of an eighteenth-century wall, window-arches of stone and empty air. A modern tower block (housing for the London School of Economics) is butted […]
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Behold a new marvel in the annals of Frankenstein memorabilia – a life-size wooden chair I’ve just purchased from its creator, local artist Tom Sheppard. As you can see, nonhuman beings can look past the Creature’s appearance and detect his inherent benevolence. 🙂
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Since we’re apparently being held captive as a nation to what writers were thinking in 1788, let’s go back to 1792, when Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. What might Wollstonecraft, landmark English feminist, say about the not-entirely-unexpected but still devastating decision today by the Supreme Court, 6-3, to overturn Roe […]
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This January, students and I were supposed to be in London and Haworth and Whitby, tracking Frankenstein’s Creature and Dracula and Heathcliff and Mr. Hyde. Instead we were in a classroom on campus, a beloved old building with a sloping floor, a harmless ghost named Gertrude (according to student legend), and a whanging, banging monster […]
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On Nov. 28, I’ll take part via Zoom in The Blake Society’s special event to celebrate the launch of its journal VALA’s new issue – which includes my short piece on teaching Blake’s “London” alongside current Blake Society president Kae Tempest’s spoken-word poem “People’s Faces” – over Zoom on Dec. 21, 2020. It was, and […]
Read morePleased to share the video of my paper “Wings in the Abyss: Reading Keats in the Pandemic,” presented on the panel “A Possession For All Time” at the virtual Association of Core Texts and Courses (ACTC) Conference, April 14, 2021.
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To many of us, the year 2020 felt like the first draft of apocalypse. The COVID-19 pandemic claimed nearly two million dead worldwide. Lockdown life drove minds and economies around the bend. George Floyd was murdered by a policeman on a Minneapolis sidewalk. Brexit disaster flapped down on rusty wings to roost on the once-United […]
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Left: The great writer. Right: Her tinfoil avatar. “I was hoping for a great memorial to Mary Wollstonecraft…this isn’t it.” – Historian Simon Schama I’m sure everyone involved meant well. I can’t wait to see how my next crop of “In Frankenstein’s Footsteps” study-abroad students will react to it [in a post-COVID J-term 2022 — […]
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