...Dong Limin This essay examines the ways a gender studies perspective has been applied in Chinese academic reflections on China’s socialist culture and practice during the so-called Seventeen-Year Period, which spanned from the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 to the beginning...

...Pamela Katz In “But She’s a Thinker,” Pamela Katz discusses the process by which she and director Margarethe von Trotta chose the Eichmann years as the frame for their dramatic film about Hannah Arendt. After years of research and a great deal of thought, they believed this was the best way...

...Ed Cohen In his last years lecturing at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault repeatedly alighted on the figure of the psychagogue as an exemplar of “living philosophy.” The psychagogue, in contradistinction to his confrere the pedagogue, addresses the truth by addressing the soul, the psyche...

...Jennifer Doyle In 2014, Amanda Thomashow filed a complaint against Larry Nassar at Michigan State University. In its report describing the ensuing investigation, the university cleared Nassar of wrongdoing. A few years later, Nassar was sent to prison for abusing hundreds of girls and women...

...Ranjana Khanna The term gender has, for many years, been invoked as if it solved all the problems inherent in the category of sex . But has gender —as term and as concept—created another set of problems and problematic analogies? Is it the red herring of current work in our field? And does it have...

... since the 1990s, the two scholars shift their focus to the problematic articulations between the social sciences and biology that have shaped one of the most important critiques to emerge from gender studies in the last twenty-five years. © 2016 by Brown University and differences : A Journal...

... of language. In the last twenty to twenty-five years, the return to philology has been a dominant part of the Anglo-Saxon discourse of “world literature,” which has turned away from theory. The return to philology is captured in a market-based adaptation of literature in terms of globalization...

...Alexander R. Galloway The politics of math are of newfound concern today, due to the outsize influence of algorithms and code in contemporary life. While only a few years ago, tech authors were still hawking Silicon Valley as the great hope for humanity, today one is more likely to hear how Big...

... violence, which is where Klein takes that critique fifteen years later. What starts as a question for Freud about how it is that war legitimizes a murderous representation of the other becomes, in Klein, a question about the morality of mourning. In wartime, this morality becomes political, as Klein's...

...Geraldine Heng The Assassins of Alamut are presented in popular media and academic studies as the eleventh-century forerunners of today’s “suicide terrorists,” thus producing a genealogy of spectacular Middle Eastern suicide-homicides that stretches back some nine hundred years. “Sex, Lies...

...Dominic Pettman The “acousmatic voice”—as famously defined and deployed by Michel Chion and Kaja Silverman—has in recent years unanchored itself from its cinematic context and become a free-floating aspect of the information age. We thus find ourselves adrift in a sea of solicitous voices without...

... in China , a work that uses minimalist procedures to depict Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to China. The author contends that the opera’s use of rhythm and treatment of time reveals the anxieties of its historical moment, the concluding years of the Cold War...

...Poulomi Saha The years between 1930 and 1933 saw a dramatic rise in anticolonial violence in Bengal. Young women who participated in this violence, caught between competing masculinist discourses of colonial authorities and nationalist communities that deemed them either dupes or martyrs...

..., and perhaps most critically, how the field will be shaped in the years to come. This article engages with two current conversations and considers the politics and possibilities of a DH project that builds a sustainable practice of a self in academia and a lifeline to others as a way of imagining a collective...

... twenty years or so, responding to world-historical transitions like those of 1989-91 and 2001, the discipline of comparative literature has reexamined some of its key concepts (world, comparison, translation) as well as what is probably the most distinctive aspect of its method, acquired professional...

... such a development seemed welcome and even likely. Instead, ten years later, an entirely different transformation has taken place via the development of the digital humanities (DH), in which the close study of literature and the languages in which it is embedded have themselves been demoted in favor of “distant...

...Ann duCille During its formative years—its short happy life in the latter decades of the twentieth century—black feminist criticism focused almost exclusively on literature by and about black women, a body of work it claimed as its own “precious” private property. This essay uses a foreign body...

...” (Foucault), the “society effect” (Althusser), the “knowledge effect” (Althusser), and the “state effect” (Mitchell). Through a reading of Georg Lukács's essay “The Moment and Form” and J. M. Coetzee's novel Diary of a Bad Year , the article introduces two further effects to be placed alongside...

... when the younger actor was only fourteen years old by combining a Twitter apology with a coming-out statement, commentators were quick to pillory Spacey for “conflating” homosexuality and pedophilia. This essay explores what acknowledging the unacknowledgeable—an un exceptional intergenerational...