Digital Commons Network^™

His 127 Microhistories: A Lens Into The Past — Apartheid In South Africa Syllabus, Marta Millar

Open Educational Resources

The microhistory course introduces students to the study of history by exploring a particular event, individual, or issue, and its legacy. Students will read both primary source documents and modern texts to examine how the topic under consideration was shaped by, and in turn shaped contemporary culture.

This syllabus is for a course focusing on the history of apartheid in South Africa. Students will analyze the political, social, economic, and cultural aspects of the apartheid era. This includes understanding how segregationist policies developed in South Africa, what political transformations led to the implementation of the apartheid system, how different policies …

Colonial Futures: Ngaio Marsh, War, And The End Of Empire, Heather M. Robinson

Publications and Research

Between the years of 1941 and 1945, Ngaio Marsh published three New Zealand-focused whodunnits; all three of these stories explore the impacts of the Second World War to some degree. What is curious is not that Marsh wrote about the war, but her sustained focus on New Zealand and New Zealanders, given that Marsh’s fiction usually took place in London or its surrounding counties. It marks the impact on Marsh of the global conflict that was changing the world, and shaking the foundations of colonialism and modernity as they had been known before 1939. In this essay, I explore how …

Deepfakes As Crisis Triggers: Experimental Evidence On Response Strategy Effectiveness, Responsibility Attributions, And Sharing Intentions, Alicia Mason, Mariah Laman, Tanner Glenn, Treyton Meyers

Faculty Submissions

The term deepfake refers to falsified media content created using artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to manipulate audio, video, or images. Deepfake news fabrications are designed to appear highly realistic, making it difficult for audiences to distinguish them from authentic content. Responding to deepfake-induced  reputational threats therefore presents a unique challenge for organizations. Despite the growing prevalence of deepfake technology, little experimental research has examined how different crisis communication strategies perform in mitigating the reputational and relational harm posed by deepfake-induced crises. Accordingly, this study seeks to (1) examine how exposure to deepfake news relates to public perceptions and affect toward …

A Dual Analysis Of Generic Stereotypes, Shaoneng Xu

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In my thesis, I provide a dual-analysis on generic stereotypes, including a semantic analysis that focuses on the truth conditions of generic sentences as well as a pragmatic analysis that focuses on the normative force of generic stereotypes. The thesis contains two parts: In the first chapter, I make a semantic analysis of generic stereotypes based on Lemeire’s (2020) paper. I unpack the general concept of generic sentences and their truth-conditions. I also discuss Lemeire’s rebuttal strategies to offensive generic stereotypes, and add to it by indicating that generics can also carry normative forces. In the second chapter, I make …

Arkansas’ Crippled Children’S Homes & The Politics Of Polio, Rylie Ford

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Most of the work in the field of disability history has centered on the Northeastern part of the United States and regions with large urban centers, therefore, excluding Southern and rural perspectives. This omission is particularly problematic when roughly 79% of the Black population in the United States lived in the South in 1940. The aim of this study is to contribute a Southern perspective to disability studies and Black medical history by tracing the development of services and aid for children with physical disabilities in Arkansas. Employing the frameworks from the social model of disability and Black disability politics, …

Syllabus: Engl 1010 English Composition I, Sarah C. Bonanno

Open Educational Resources

This is a syllabus for English Composition I (ENGL 1010 FYSA) taught at Brooklyn College during the Fall 2026 semester. This course teaches students concrete and transferable writing skills through the genres of literacy narrative, argumentative essays, and comparative writing.

Post, Anya Unser

Floodwall Magazine

No abstract provided.

"My Two Legs Are Broken, But Look At Me Dance", Korbyan Chavez

Floodwall Magazine

No abstract provided.

Retrospective: The Burney Centre, Mcgill University, 1945-2024, Peter Sabor

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

The origins of McGill University’s Burney Centre go back to 1945, when Joyce Hemlow was appointed to McGill’s Department of English. After publishing a major biography of Frances Burney in 1958, Hemlow initiated what she termed the Burney Project: a research centre devoted to producing scholarly editions of the journals and letters of Burney and her father, the music historian Charles Burney. The Frances Burney edition was completed, in 25 volumes, in 2019; five volumes of the Charles Burney edition have appeared to date, with a sixth and final volume to follow. Joyce Hemlow was succeeded as Director of the …

A Review Of Willow White's Feminist Comedy: Women Playwrights Of London (University Of Delaware Press, 2024), Mattie Burkert

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

A review of Willow White's Feminist Comedy: Women Playwrights of London by Mattie Burkert.

A Review Of Karen Bloom Gevirtz 'S The Apothecary's Wife (University Of California Press, 2024), Annika Mann

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

A review of Karen Bloom Gevirtz's The Apothecary's Wife by Annika Mann.

Teaching Evelina With Digital Humanities, Hilary Havens

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Digital humanities, an interdisciplinary field that applies digital methodologies and technologies to the humanities, is an excellent lens through which to approach the eighteenth century.  I integrate digital humanities tools and workshops alongside primary source readings in all of my eighteenth-century British literature classes to help students better understand those texts and the world in which they were created.  In my upper-level undergraduate class on late eighteenth-century literature, I teach four digital humanities tools to students, two of them (StoryMapJS and Voyant) in connection with Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778). These tools train students how to uncover historical and geographic contexts …

Reading Burney’S Mastectomy Letter: Presentist Thinking And Personal Responses In The Classroom, Heather Meek

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Frances Burney’s mastectomy letter, in its graphic and detailed depiction of the operation she underwent without anesthetic in 1811, does not always lend itself immediately to standard, scholarly classroom discussion. It tends, rather, to incite unusually intimate responses, as well as conversations about medicine and health today. In my teaching of the letter in literature courses at Université de Montréal over the course of the past 13 years, I have found that students are inclined to seize upon the subject of breast cancer as especially contemporary in its relevance and to share their own anecdotal knowledge of the disease. I …

Shifting Frameworks And Continued Influence: Grassroots Environmental Movements In Los Angeles, Matthew Chin

Voces Novae

No abstract provided.

"I Don’T Know That You Can Do That Anywhere Else": The Role Rural College Towns Play In The Formation Of Queer Identity, Amy Mcdowell, Ryan J. Parsons, Julia Kraus

Journal of Queer and Trans Studies in Education

Challenging dominant narratives suggesting that rural spaces are inhospitable to LGBTQ+ identities, this study examines how queer individuals navigate space, rurality, and queerness in Oxford, Mississippi, a historically conservative college town. Drawing on oral histories from the Queer Mississippi digital archive, we argue that rural institutions of higher learning (rural IHLs) and the college towns they are embedded in serve as critical sites of queer identity formation. The rural college town provides a unique space where LGBTQ+ individuals from both within and outside the South navigate self-discovery, social networks, and belonging. We highlight the transformative role of these spaces in …

Regarding World(S): A Review Of Elisha Cohn’S Milieu: A Creaturely Theory Of The Contemporary Novel (2025) And Daniel Wright’S The Grounds Of The Novel (2024), Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

The Proletarian Moment In World Literature, Anna Björk Einarsdóttir

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

During the interwar period (1918–1939), an international literary movement emerged in relation to internationalist and socialist politics and political struggles. Writers around the world saw themselves as contributors to a new proletarian moment within the historical unfolding of world literature. This movement was international, and writers situated on the peripheries of both the capitalist core and the emerging socialist world looked toward revolutionary Russia and other centers of the socialist world. This paper focuses on three such authors, the American Richard Wright, the Argentinian Roberto Arlt, and the Icelander Halldór Laxness. During the interwar period, all three were involved in …

Zheng Zhenduo And The Problem Of Priority In World Literature, Daniel M. Dooghan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This essay investigates how Zheng Zhenduo (郑振铎 1898–1958) developed a theory of world literature in response to threats to China both politically from without and culturally from within. Centered on an analysis of his 1922 article “A View on the Unification of Literature” (Wenxue de tongyiguan 文學的統一觀), the essay argues that although Zheng believed like many of his contemporaries in the transformative effects of reading world literature in translation, that does not constitute the entirety of his theorization of world literature. Instead, he accepted the first-move advantage of other national literatures in defining both world literary standards and literature …

Beyond The Great Wall: Zheng Zhenduo’S “Unification” Of World Literature At The Juncture Of China’S May Fourth And Post-World War I Era, Wenxin Liang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article examines Chinese literary scholar Zheng Zhenduo’s 1922 essay “A View on the Unification of Literature” (Wenxue de tongyiguan 文學的統一觀) as a counter-narrative to both imperial isolationism and post-World War I nationalist fragmentation. Writing at the intersection of China’s May Fourth Movement and the global post-war crisis, Zheng developed a theory of world literature that challenged both Goethean Eurocentrism and the compartmentalization of comparative literary studies. Through systematic analysis of Zheng’s theoretical writings, editorial projects, and pioneering work on folk literature (suwenxue 俗文學), this article demonstrates that Zheng’s project of “the unification of literature” operated on three …

An Arc Stretched Between East And West: World (Or Universal?) Literature In Maxim Gorky’S Publishing Utopias, Francesca Lazzarin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The Vsemirnaia Literatura publishing house was founded in Petrograd by Maxim Gorky less than a year after the October Revolution. Aligned with the objectives of the new regime, its mission was to translate and publish a substantial body of European and Asian poetry and prose, thereby contributing to the broad cultural education of the emerging Soviet generations. These ambitions clearly reflect a key element of Gorky’s conception of culture as well: for Gorky, culture in its broadest sense (encompassing literature, art, music, and science) had the potential to unite humanity under the ideals of peace and harmony. Within this new …

Reconsidering Karl Marx’S Concept Of World Literature, Kenneth Cheng

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

It is widely assumed that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels regarded world literature as an epiphenomenal product of the capitalist world market, and therefore as a symptom of rather than potential cure to the crisis of modern society. However, this conflicts with the fact that they designated the Communist Manifesto itself as a world-literary production—the joint work of communists of various nationalities—and opposed it to the national limitations of German socialist literature. This article challenges existing interpretations by outlining how Marx and Engels incorporated the humanistic idealism of the Goethean Weltliteratur tradition into the theoretical framework of historical materialism. It …

Historicising Nyerere’S Presidency In The Nyakyusa Mythical Narratives, Ignas Fedeo

Zamani: A Journal of African Historical Studies

Julius K Nyerere, the founding President of Tanzania, held office from 1962 to 1985. Much has been written about Nyerere's presidency, with the literature generally falling into two categories: strong advocacy for his decisions, actions, and ideas, and pointed criticism against him. Using narrative and new historicism theories, this article examines the recreation of the history of Nyerere’s presidency in local narratives, specifically Nyakyusa myths. The myths were collected using the oral history interviews from Kyela and Busokelo districts in Tanzania. The Nyakyusa believe that Nyerere was endowed with immense mystical powers, some of which embedded in his stick and …

English Faculty Members’ Perception And Attitude Toward The Use Of Chatgpt By English Language Teaching In Higher Education In Saudi Arabia, Wjoud Hussain Almadani

University of Tabuk Journal for Humanities and Social Sciences

Objectives: Artificial intelligence (AI) driven ChatGPT is an innovative transformation tool in the rapidly evolving educational landscape. This study aimed to understand faculty members' perspectives and attitudes toward using ChatGPT for English language teaching in Saudi Arabia, particularly in Najdi rural areas. Method: The study employed a survey-based quantitative research design involving English-language faculty members in Saudi Arabia, particularly at Shaqrah University. Result: Despite having a mixed opinion on the willingness to use ChatGPT in English language teaching, participants have identified several applications of ChatGPT, such as translation and vocabulary, creating presentations, preparing exam and quiz questions, and creating activity …

Russian Language In An Interdisciplinary Setting: A Case Study, Foreign Area Studies At The United States Naval Academy, Joan Chevalier

Russian Language Journal

Russian language enrollments have been dropping in recent years at colleges and universities in the United States. In contrast to this national trend, the number of students studying Russian language at the United States Naval Academy (USNA) has remained robust over the past decade and is poised to increase in the near future as a relatively new interdisciplinary major, Foreign Area Studies (FAS), is expanded and revised. This paper traces recent developments at USNA that have led to the development and expansion of Foreign Area Studies, integrating language study into an interdisciplinary curriculum featuring courses related to nations and cultures …

Russian As A Lingua Franca In A Security Cooperation Context: Designing Career-Oriented Language Training Programs, Daniel Medford

Russian Language Journal

As Slavic language programs seek to align their curricula with workforce needs, the role of Russian and other Slavic languages in military and government service presents unique challenges and opportunities. This paper examines how linguistic training, particularly in Russian, can be better structured for students at American universities and colleges who wish to pursue government and security-related careers. Drawing on 30 interviews with native and non-native Russian speakers serving in the U.S. Army, this study explores the implications of using Russian as a lingua franca for U.S. military cooperation with former Soviet states. Given the political sensitivities surrounding the Russian …

Oral History Project (For "Global Game Industries"), James Fleury

Generative AI Teaching Activities

Students will research a video game industry professional, develop questions about their career, interview them, edit the interview into a transcript, and discuss this process during an in-class presentation.

The Impact Of Using Artificial Intelligence Tools On Enhancing Female Students’ Interaction And Participation In Online Learning, Haya Meshal Rajah Albaqami

University of Tabuk Journal for Humanities and Social Sciences

This study explores how artificial intelligence (AI) tools support student interaction and participation in online learning, through the lens of Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). Sixteen female undergraduates (aged 19–23) from Turabah University College, Taif University, all experienced in using AI tools (ChatGPT, Grammarly, Canva), took part in individual interviews. Using reflexive thematic analysis, seven themes were identified describing students’ experiences: (1) Widespread AI Tool Use, (2) Enhanced Understanding of Content, (3) Facilitated Peer/Teacher Interaction, (4) Increased Academic Engagement, (5) Stimulated Independent Exploration, (6) Concerns and Challenges, and (7) AI as Support, Not Substitute. The AI tools were perceived …

Notas Críticas (Reseñas), Yandrey Lay, Marzia Dessi

Intersecciones Hispánicas: Revista de Cultura, Literatura y Lingüística

No abstract provided.

A Multimodal Analysis Of Conflicting Discourses On New Mexican Identity, Nicholas L. Chavez, Fátima Holguín

Intersecciones Hispánicas: Revista de Cultura, Literatura y Lingüística

We analyze two contrasting discourses on New Mexican identity, as represented in political cartoons from Trever (2021) and García (2018). We show how visual and linguistic elements of the cartoons work together to construct identity through metaphor and metonymy. It was found that Trever (2021) relied on cultural symbols such as the Zia Sun symbol as metonyms for various aspects of New Mexico’s identity, while García (2018) subverted established metaphors for American culture such as the melting pot and Uncle Sam to critique governmental influence on Nuevomexicano (‘New Mexican’) identity formation. Using the critical discourse analysis framework of Fairclough (1995), …

History Happenings, Georgia Southern University

History: News & Publications

No abstract provided.