Masks

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FORTHCOMING Fall 2023

The mask is the classic disguise. But as humanity’s alter ego, it reveals as much as it conceals. Why are masks so often creepy, even outside of horror movies? Can a mask change expression while you’re wearing it? How much of someone’s self can inhabit a mask? Why would anyone make a plaster cast of[…]

Dancing with Philoctetes: Reflections on Pain and Remembrance

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FORTHCOMING Fall 2023

Abandoned by his community, doomed to a solitary existence with his voice as sole companion: can Sophocles’ Philoctetes still speak to us? What do his screams have to say? This book juxtaposes a new adaptation of Sophocles’ play with an essay describing the process of bringing it to life in a world on the brink[…]

Resistant Form: Aristophanes and the Comedy of Crisis

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FORTHCOMING Winter 2023

Can attending to poetic form help us imagine a radical politics and bridge the gap between pressing contemporary political concerns and an ancient literature that often seems steeped in dynamics of oppression? The corpus of the fifth-century Athenian playwright Aristophanes includes some of the funniest yet most disturbing comedies of Western literature. His work’s anarchic[…]

Social and Intellectual Networking in the Early Middle Ages

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FORTHCOMING Spring 2022

Social and Intellectual Networking in the Early Middle Ages seeks to expand our understanding of early medieval connectivity by interrogating social and intellectual collaborations, competitions and communications among persons, places, things and ideas in the European and Mediterranean West during the second half of the first millennium AD. In so doing, its contributors explore the[…]

Chaucer’s Comic Providence

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FORTHCOMING Winter 2023

Chaucer’s Comic Providence presents readings of five of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales that dramatize sexual division and the lack of rapport between the sexes. These readings are founded on the psychoanalytic thinking of Jacques Lacan in his rereading of Freud and are motivated by Thormann’s conviction that Chaucer understood what psychoanalysis would come to study as[…]