In late November 2006, I was knee-deep in my daughter’s toddlerhood, still getting used to the new body I’d found myself in. A little rounder in the middle, breasts still…
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American Bimbo, Contemporaries Essays
American Bimbo, Contemporaries Essays
On Twinning: The Parent Trap, The Hiltons, and the White Girls Who Raised Me
Once, at ten, I cut a tuft of my hair with a pair of craft scissors. I had just re-watched The Parent Trap and was mesmerized still by that red-headed…
American Bimbo, Contemporaries Essays
Neither sexy, cool, nor smart
§1 It was, intellectually and politically, a dark time: 2005. In Miami Beach, a nineteen-year-old with “a rhinestone Playboy bunny ring, white stilettos that laced in tight X’s up her…
American Bimbo, Contemporaries Essays
Lindsay Lohan’s Splashy, Sensationalized Journey To Sobriety
Our story begins in 2006, on the eve of Lindsay Lohan’s first DUI, with fourteen-year-old me weeping over the fact that I was neither rich nor famous. “She has no…
American Bimbo, Contemporaries Essays
Introduction
In college, I purchased a set of heart-shaped friendship necklaces on Etsy. Entrapped in each pendant was a girl caught in flashbulb glare, all feral eyes and shiny hair. In…
Contemporaries Essays, Contemporary Literature from the Classroom
Bodies’ Return to Physical Books: Teaching through and alongside BookTok and Bookstagram
A classics student named Esme, who goes by the username @bookswithsmee online, devotes her social media channels — both TikTok and Instagram — to the lives of her books.1 While…
Contemporaries Essays, Contemporary Literature from the Classroom
Melancholy Margery
Note: I wrote this essay in November 2023, roughly six months before students across the United States and in many other countries began setting up encampments to protest universities’ complicity in…
Contemporaries Essays, Contemporary Literature from the Classroom
Teaching Ten Years of “Last Year’s Novels”
Sometimes when I teach, I become acutely aware of how curtailed we can be in approaching contemporary texts by the frameworks we ourselves have put in place supposedly to help…
Contemporaries Essays, Contemporary Literature from the Classroom
Notes From the Edge: Reflections on Black Literature, Feeling, and Teaching
With heartfelt thanks to each and every student I’ve had the privilege of working with. Last year, in a contemporary literature class, I taught Brandon Taylor’s debut novel Real Life…
Contemporaries Essays, Contemporary Literature from the Classroom
Marginality and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the contemporary English Literature classroom: an ‘aggregated’ perspective
I. Introduction (JR and CLM) This essay is co-authored by John Roache, a “teaching-focused” Lecturer in English Literature at a UK university, and Cyrus Larcombe Moore, a poet and recent…