How can the practice of mourning the self (in multiple senses), and learning to work with grief rather than through it, help teach us to fight for a better existence?

At the January 2026 Modern Language Association (MLA) Awards Ceremony, MLA President Tina Lu presented Ramón Saldívar with the MLA Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement. A professor of English and comparative literature and the Hoagland Family Professor of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford...

Q: You are widely recognized as one of the foremost Twain scholars in the field, and the trajectory of your career is indelibly entangled with Mark Twain and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in particular. While this expertise is clear in the simultaneous precision and capaciousness of the references...

Through an analysis of two Asian North American pieces (text and video documentary) meditating on Chinese labor employed in the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, Iyko Day reflects on gendered and sexual temporalities of race, labor, and capitalism in the construction of the transcontinental railroads in Canada and the United States. Day pushes back on a temporal logic of equivalence imposed on alien labor put to work in an industrial, capitalist temporality.

In the hands of filmmakers, executions were more than acts of retribution and incapacitation. They were opportunities for personal, and sometimes cultural, redemption.

In this interview, on the occasion of the publication of her new book, Rey Chow reflects on the public (as well as environmental and digital) humanities and the current status of Michel Foucault's thought, among other topics.

Iseeyou (2013) is a short film essay by Simon Gush, depicting Johannesburg’s representations of mining. The film deftly questions what is at stake in the visibility and invisibility of labor.

Kara Walker's public installations in New York and New Orleans ask, what can contemporary art do to reckon with its links to racial capitalism?

It is not a coincidence that distant reading does not deal well with gender, sexuality, or race. But if we re-commit ourselves to the project of exposing and interrogating power, we arrive potentially at a form of distant reading that is much more inclusive.

How the autism spectrum in the popular imagination overlaps with and feeds a particular feature of European-American whiteness: the bias toward independence and self-sufficiency.