Thanks to an increasingly interconnected global economy, the role of study abroad in twenty-first-century education has expanded. Student participation continues to grow as disciplinary offerings broaden; meanwhile, programs face persistent challenges to maximize access, strengthen language learning and multicultural awareness, reduce research ......
A prolific poet and a protofeminist, Christine de Pizan worked within a sophisticated late medieval court culture and formed an identity as an authority on her society's preoccupations with religion, politics, and morality. Her works address various aspects of misogyny, the appropriate actions of rulers, and the ethical framework for social ......
A series of dream visions, Piers Plowman is a moral reckoning of the whole of medieval England, in which every part of society--from church and king to every sort of ""folk""--is considered in the light of the narrator's interpretation of Christian revelation. The Middle English poem, rich and beautiful, is a particular challenge to teach: it ......
Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic has quickly joined the ranks of celebrated literary graphic novels. Set in part at a family-run funeral home, the book explores Alison's complicated relationship with her father, a closeted gay man. Amid the tensions of her home life, Alison discovers her own lesbian sexuality and her talent for ......
The Italian romance epic of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with its multitude of characters, complex plots, and roots in medieval Carolingian and Arthurian chivalric romances, was a form popular with courtly and urban audiences. In the hands of writers such as Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso, works of remarkable sophistication that combined ......
Behind our contemporary experience of globalization, precarity, and consumerism lies a history of colonization, increasing literacy, transnational trade in goods and labor, and industrialization. Teaching British laboring-class literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries means exploring ideas of class, status, and labor in relation to ......
Gertrude Stein studied psychology at Radcliffe with William James and went on to train as a medical doctor before coming out as a lesbian and moving to Paris, where she collected contemporary art and wrote poetry, novels, essays, and libretti. A trail-blazing modernist, she was attacked by more than one generation of critics and has influenced ......
The greatest work of one of France's greatest writers, Victor Hugo's Les Miserables seemed stylistically and even politically out of date when it was published in 1862. But its indictment of injustice, concern for those suffering in misery, unapologetic embrace of the ideals of the French Revolution, and memorable characters have proved ......
Gertrude Stein studied psychology at Radcliffe with William James and went on to train as a medical doctor before coming out as a lesbian and moving to Paris, where she collected contemporary art and wrote poetry, novels, essays, and libretti. A trail-blazing modernist, she was attacked by more than one generation of critics and has influenced ......