Aliya A Ali explores how kinship and marriage alliances shaped political power and governance in the early Islamic city of Kūfa.
By Sara Austin and Ann Wainscott We met at New Faculty Orientation in 2018. Sara was seated across a large round table from me, and during introductions she mentioned that she was a scholar of children’s literature. I immediately mentioned…
By Marek Sroka Seventy-five years ago, Winston Churchill, in what was to become one of the most famous orations of the Cold War, declared that “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has…
By James Bailey ‘I am a hoarder of two things: documents and trusted friends’, wrote Spark in her 1992 autobiography, Curriculum Vitae. ‘The former outweigh the latter in terms of quantity’, she added. Spark wasn’t exaggerating; while the author was…
By Virginie Trachsler The young Persephone is gathering flowers in a meadow when her uncle Hades, god of the underworld, rises through a crack in the earth and abducts her on his golden chariot. Her mother Ceres wanders the earth…
By Jacob Bates-Firth Sarah Kofman and the Relief of Philosophy (ed. Bates-Firth and McKeane) is out now as a special issue of Paragraph, 44:1 (March 2021) and concurrently in book form with Edinburgh University Press. Backdrop When John and I began to…
‘How do you do it? I am dazzled’, enthused Evelyn Waugh in a letter to Muriel Spark in 1960. Spark’s latest novel, The Bachelors, was hot off the press, and this, Waugh told her, was ‘the cleverest and most elegant…
By Niall Nance-Carroll Young people are a coveted demographic in politics, and they are increasingly shaping both the message and the movement of progressives. Far from being the “youth wing” of a larger adult-led activist movement (indeed, one of the…
Tell us a bit about Transatlantic Transformations of Romanticism Well, my book takes a fresh look at the literature of British Romanticism and its influence on twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literary culture and thought. It reads works of prose and…
By Vesna Antoniova Why do the intricacies of nominal compounds remain hidden even after being considered in a number of different frameworks? We have seen that even after half a century of research, no satisfactory conclusions to the understanding of…