essays
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Fleeing Backwards: The Problematic Present in Medieval Studies
When and how do we talk about the attitudes of an entire field? These conversations often occur in office hours, not in articles, emerging over drinks at conferences or in fights in closed Facebook groups. In my field of expertise, medieval studies, I’ve noticed an...
Notes From a Saint
Life lessons have the tendency to sneak up on us. Often, we’re going about our business, doing what we do, and a message from the universe smacks us upside the head without warning. If we are paying attention, the impact can be life-altering. Our perceptions of...
Nesting
For years, we had cats. Gigantic rescue cats, retrieved from a Philadelphia parking lot when they were only a pair of gray and black kittens, as benign and rambunctious as the cubs in Tiger King. But they grew into the sort of cats who fantasized all day long about...
Challenging Patriarchy in María de Zayas’s “Novelas”
The virtual archival exhibit Wise and Valiant: Women and Writing in the Spanish Golden Age, curated by Ana M. Rodríguez-Rodríguez in collaboration with the Cervantes Institute and the National Library of Spain, acknowledges that women writers of the Spanish Golden Age...
Lessons Learned from a Self-Plagiarist
This past year, writer’s block hit me more acutely than ever. Time I had blocked off to write became day-long reading sprees and, when that felt too mentally taxing, hours of binge watching. Clearly, I needed help. That’s why I picked up Imagine: How Creativity...
Pilgrims at the Plantation
“The moment you’ve been waiting for!” Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Aaron Burr announces in Act I of Hamilton. “The pride of Mount Vernon: George Washington,” who stomps, stern and capable, onto the stage. (Thanks, Disney+.)There’s little new left to observe about the...
REVELATIONS in Isolation
In late March, faced with the new shelter-in-place order and only a faint understanding of the damage COVID-19 was to bring, I turned to my mother’s bookcase for a chance to escape. Luckily, I live with a parent who is a writer, poet, and voracious reader. Her...
Sacrificial Motherhood and Bodily Autonomy
Deolinda Correa trudged across the arid Cuyo Valley in search of her husband, her infant son in tow. While her initial goal was the pursuit of her husband, who had been forcibly conscripted by a regional caudillo — a strongman who rules by force and a cult of...
Science Fiction as an Abolitionist Tool
While accepting the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2014, Ursula K. Le Guin called for science-fiction writers to use their power of imagination to envision a world no longer constricted by the inherent...
The Limits of Urbanism
Some books are published at the wrong time. Richard Sennett’s and Pablo Sendra’s Designing Disorder: Experiments and Disruption in the City is one such book. Published by Verso during the early peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in April, the work is a type of manifesto...
Lineage and Language
Throughout my adulthood, curanderas have said that my grandmother watches over me. I knew this was true when my mother came back from a visit to Mexico five years ago. She opened her suitcase and handed me a white plastic rosary and a black shawl. These items belonged...
Euphoria’s Minor Mother
Euphoria debuted on HBO in 2019, meeting with almost universal critical acclaim. The show is a teen drama that explicitly confronts controversial subjects like drug addiction, abusive relationships, and mental illness. At the show’s center is its narrator and...