The first lessons we learn in school can stay with us all our lives, but this was nowhere more true than in the last decades of the fourteenth century when grammar-school students were not only learning to read and write, but understanding, for the first time, that their mother tongue, English, was grammatical. The efflorescence […]
How did an ancient mythological figure who stole fire from the gods become a face of the modern, lending his name to trailblazing spaceships and radical publishing outfits alike? How did Prometheus come to represent a notion of civilizational progress through revolution–scientific, political, and spiritual–and thereby to center nothing less than a myth of modernity […]
Professor Jared Hickman’s new book, Black Prometheus, argues that certain features of the Prometheus myth–its geographical associations, iconography of bodily suffering, and function as a limit case in a long tradition of absolutist political theology–made it ripe for revival and reinvention in a historical moment in which freedom itself was racialized, in what was the […]
The English department is delighted to welcome Professor Lawrence Jackson to Johns Hopkins. Lawrence Jackson is the author of My Father’s Name: A Black Virginia Family after the Civil War (Chicago 2012), The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics (Princeton 2010) and Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius, 1913-1952 (Wiley 2002). […]
Professor Mark Christian Thompson’s new book, Kafka’s Blues, proves the startling thesis that many of Kafka’s major works engage in a coherent, sustained meditation on racial transformation from white European into what Kafka refers to as the “Negro” (a term he used in English). Indeed, this book demonstrates that cultural assimilation and bodily transformation in […]
The Department of English is pleased to welcome our new Fall 2016 graduate students: Nathanael Doherty, Gloria Jirsaraie, Alexandra Lossada, Atesede Makonnen, and Alexander Streim.
How do great moments in literary traditions arise from times of intense social and political upheaval? South African Literature’s Russian Soul charts the interplay of narrative innovation and political isolation in two of the world’s most renowned non-European literatures. In this book, Jeanne-Marie Jackson demonstrates how Russian writing’s “Golden Age” in the troubled nineteenth-century has served as […]
Professor Jeanne-Marie Jackson’s new book, South African Literature’s Russian Soul: Narrative Forms of Global Isolation, has just been released from Bloomsbury Press. South African Literature’s Russian Soul charts the interplay of narrative innovation and political isolation in two of the world’s most renowned non-European literatures. In this book, Jeanne-Marie Jackson demonstrates how Russian writing’s “Golden […]
The English department is delighted to welcome Professor Andrew H. Miller to Johns Hopkins. Professor Miller, an expert in Victorian studies, attempts, in his research, to show the ways that literary forms make valuable trouble for our thought about various issues, especially those pertaining to human psychology, moral philosophy and history. Professor Miller comes to Hopkins from Indiana University, where for […]
