public humanities
I’m sometimes told by people who work outside of universities that being a teacher-writer-editor in an English Department sounds great, and occasionally it is.
As a scholar of modernism and the Spanish Civil War, I have long been engaged with others’ ideas about engagement—both modernists and scholars of modernism—questioning the intersection of politics and art. As a scholar at the margins of the academy, I have sought to make sense of where my own work might fit, both into the world of scholarship and the wider world in which scholarship takes shape.
Ghostbusters (2016) has floated across the summer blockbuster landscape like so many colorful balloons of popular entertainment before it: an airy bauble destined to disappear. However, its ascendance into the box office heavens has been weighed down with some surprising (and unsurprising) baggage.