First, a confession: In 2011, I penned a pseudonymous article under the name Sally Racket (an anagram of Crystal Lake) for The Chronicle of Higher Education’s advice column. I’ve never publicly owned my authorship of “Survivor’s Guilt,” which describes how, well, guilty I felt when I learned that I’d finally landed a tenure-track job in English […]
Drinking Tea Alone with Friends
I spend a lot of time alone these days. This summer I moved from the city where I lived for the last ten years to a small town in the middle of Ohio. The move was practical—I was no longer commuting an hour to work—and in moving away from the city where I became an […]
Psycho (But Cute)
I used to think my emotional baseline was crazy, and even crazier that one week (if I’m lucky) out of the month when I’m in thrall to the indifferent mercy of the premenstrual cycle. During that week, in a condition of “existential disorientation,” to borrow Stephen Ahern’s words, I would gain, albeit temporarily, extraordinary powers […]
A Love Letter for Anne of Green Gables
What was it exactly? The moxie of Anne, her habit of wearing her heart on her sleeve, her unabashed love for her best friend and her crush? Her canny insights, her rhapsodizing about nature, her orphan-ness, her anger, her smarts, her shame, her triumphs? That baking soda company essay she wrote (presaging the artist-selling-out trope), the […]
William Hay; Or, An Obsession
Put more poetically, disabilities are the etchings left on flesh as it encounters the world. — Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “The Case for Conserving Disability” And I am a good Subject of Speculation; for all in me is Nature…— William Hay, Deformity: An Essay This essay is about an obsession, one that is now almost a decade old. I remember […]
Taming
‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all – Tennyson, “In Memoriam” Tennyson. I’ve never wanted to believe him here. Out of context, his statement feels like the kind of cold-comfort-yoga-self-help advice you’d share with a friend, in a dark moment, when what that friend really wants is a hug […]
Antidote: A Tale of Two Valentines
You — you strange, you almost unearthly thing! — I love as my own flesh. You — poor and obscure, and small and plain as you are — I entreat to accept me as a husband. In February 2012, inside my tall dorm room, the ceiling so high we called it “the cavern,” I watched […]
An Annotated Playlist for David Hume
The vertiginous symptoms of skepticism can be hard to distinguish from the pangs of love. At first it was just a teenage infatuation. I was 16. He was … older. I wrote his name on my lined recycled A4 notepad, where it nestled among doodles of spiraling tendrils and ballerinas. He made me uneasy in […]
The Problem of Civility: A Genealogy
To speak of civility at the present moment is to intervene in a vexed and often vicious debate. When, in November 2016, the cast of Hamilton took to the stage to urge the incoming administration to “uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us,” it sparked a firestorm of public debate, some generative—about the […]
Lee Garrett, The Bachelorette’s Incompetent Iago
IAGO: And what’s he then that says I play the villain, When this advice is free I give and honest … (William Shakespeare, Othello, 2.3.324-25) *** I didn’t do anything. I was just being honest (Lee Garrett, The Bachelorette, season 13, episode 5) In 2017, ABC’s The Bachelorette “made history,” as both the show’s own promotional […]
Suicide and State Power at the Columbus Statehouse and in Othello
Before Othello commits suicide, Lodovico tells him: Your power and your command is taken off …You shall close prisoner rest, Till that the nature of your fault be known To the Venetian state. In response to this edict of Venetian jurisdiction—to erase identity, to imprison indefinitely, to declare fault—Othello, the “Moor of Venice,” declares that he has […]
Between Shakespeare, the World, and Me
Research projects always bear some intimate relation to one’s personal life and persistent preoccupations. The collaborative project I am beginning with Henry Turner about new understandings of the concept of “world” in the plays of William Shakespeare is no exception. This project had multiple origins and inspirations, but a primary motivation for me—often kept private—was […]
Pragmatism, Race, and the Collective Subject in Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors
Sometimes it happens that you unexpectedly discover something in the world that resonates strongly with you, in an immediate and therefore also somehow in an intimate way; something that speaks to you but also feels totally new to you, and that’s part of the difficulty. How can something be both new and familiar at the […]
Meghan Markle, Good English Housewife
At a global moment rife with militarized borders, unease over refugees, and anti-immigration rhetoric, Meghan Markle’s royal marriage to Prince Harry provided a timely opportunity to showcase the inclusivity of the historically exclusionary white monarchy. Several aspects of the ceremony foregrounded blackness: for example, the significant position that Markle’s black mother, Doria Ragland, occupied; the […]
To Encounter the Muse
Elisa Oh is an Associate Professor of English at Howard University, where she teaches British literature, Shakespeare, and literary theory. Her research interests include women and silence, letters, and early modern drama. Her current book project, Choreographies of Race and Gender: Dance, Travel, and Ritual in Early Modern English Literature 1558-1642, examines the cultural processes […]
Allies and Friends: The Women’s March and Alice Curwen’s Quaker Testimonial
On January 19, 2019, the third iteration of the Women’s March took place on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. The now-annual protest defines itself as a woman-led movement dedicated to uniting diverse women in social struggle and dismantling systems of oppression. The first March (held on January 21, 2017–one day after President Trump’s […]
“Letter Boxes:” On Muslim Women and Inconstancy in the Early Modern Period
Various Western politicians and feminists continue to scrutinize Muslim women and make them and their hijab a site of racialization. Recently, Boris Johnson said this about Muslim women’s hijab: “it is absolutely ridiculous that people should choose to go around looking like letter boxes.” He continued by asserting that if “a female student turned up at […]
A Pre-Colonial Take on the 2018 Filipino Pro-Woman Bill
In a historic vote made in March 2018, the Philippines House of Representatives passed Bill 7303, “An Act Instituting Absolute Divorce and Dissolution of Marriage in the Philippines.” In “Guiding Principles” Section 3.4 of the bill, legislators underscore that “the option to file for absolute divorce is a pro-woman legislation because in most cases, it […]
Teaching and Taming: On Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew and #MeToo
Scholars and theatre professionals have long questioned the viability of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew for the modern stage. Again and again, directors, actors, and academics have called out the comedic presentation of abuses Katherine endures at the hands of Petruchio and other men in the play as reprehensible. Stagings today often choose to play up […]