Centaurs, Rioting in Thessaly

Published: 01/09/2018

This book treads new paths through the labyrinths of our human thought. It meanders through the darkness to encounter the monsters at the heart of the maze: Minotaurs, Centaurs, Automata, Makers, Humans. One part of our human thought emerges from classical Ionia and Greek civilisation more generally. We obsessively return to that thought, tread again[…]

As If: Essays in As You Like It

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Published: 12/29/2016

Shakespeare’s As You Like It is a play without a theme. Instead, it repeatedly poses one question in a variety of forms: What if the world were other than it is? As You Like It is a set of experiments in which its characters conditionally change an aspect of their world and see what comes[…]

The Retro-Futurism of Cuteness

Published: 11/04/2017

Is it possible to conceive of a Hello Kitty Middle Ages or a Tickle Me Elmo Renaissance? The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first reference to “cute” in the sense of “attractive, pretty, charming” to 1834. More recently, Sianne Ngai has offered a critical overview of the cuteness of the twentieth-century avant-garde within the context[…]

Dotawo: A Journal of Nubian Studies 3

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Published: 08/11/2016

Dotawo: A Journal of Nubian Studies offers a platform in which the old meets the new, in which archaeological, papyrological, and philological research into Meroitic, Old Nubian, Coptic, Greek, and Arabic sources confront current investigations in modern anthropology and ethnography, Nilo-Saharan linguistics, and critical and theoretical approaches present in post-colonial and African studies. Dotawo gives[…]

The Old Nubian Texts from Attiri

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Published: 11/22/2016

The Old Nubian Texts from Attiri is the first publication in the Dotawo: Monographs series. It presents heretofore unpublished material: an edition of a series of manuscripts discovered during the Aswan High Dam campaign at the site of Attiri, a rocky island in the Batn el-Hajjar region in Sudan, and does so in an innovative way,[…]

Object Oriented Environs

Published: 02/12/2016

Object Oriented Environs is the lively archive of a critical confluence between the environmental turn so vigorous within early modern studies, and thing theory (object oriented ontology, vibrant materialism, the new materialism and speculative realism). The book unfolds a conversation that attempts to move beyond anthropocentrism and examine nonhumans at every scale, their relations to each[…]

A Reference Grammar of Kunuz Nubian

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FORTHCOMING Spring 2017

A Reference Grammar of Kunuz Nubian is a dissertation by Ahmed Sokarno Abdel-Hafiz, completed in 1988 at SUNY, Buffalo, which has remained unpublished for nearly thirty years. Already an indispensable standard work in Nubian linguistics, owing to its wide and unofficial circulation, it tackles the phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax of Kunuz Nubian, a Nile Nubian language[…]

Posthuman Lear: Reading Shakespeare in the Anthropocene

Published: 02/26/2016

Part scholarship, part journalism, part ecological screed, this book may read like a mashup of critical perspectives. Like other current investigations into the ecological significance of early modern literature, the account of King Lear offered here draws on different and sometimes contrasting interpretive methods: cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, literary historicism and what is called the new materialism. Moreover, the book reflects on the broad global setting of eco-materialism’s themes of catastrophe and enmeshed co-existence, using contemporary examples from Japan, New Mexico, Finland, and India, all while jumping back to Shakespeare’s early modern England. … Those interested in ecology might not be interested in the history of Renaissance literacy. And those interested in the scholarship on Shakespeare’s King Lear might not be interested in accounts of tsunami stones or radioactive waste sites. But they should be. … Because the proverbial clock is ticking. What Hamlet said about readiness? Well, it’s happening. The sparrow has already fallen.

~Craig Dionne, Posthuman Lear