One pleasurable challenge of my job is getting to teach interdisciplinary courses. To expedite students through their general education requirements in History, English, and Philosophy, our college offers hybrid courses combining two or three disciplines. But, lacking hybrid professors to go with them, these courses are taught by folks like me -- stretching, consulting, and …
Author: Dr. Christiana Salah
If Louisa Met Saoirse: On Bigotry and Casting Little Women
The new trailer for Greta Gerwig's film adaptation of Little Women has gone live, and book lovers have gone into a delighted tizzy (except diehard fans of the Winona Ryder-Christian Bale film, of course). One unusual thing about Gerwig's new version, which surprisingly has gotten little press, is that these March sisters are distinctly less American. …
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Reasons to Own a Lot of Books that Don’t Spark Any Joy
Just like we infer the existence of a black hole by the behavior of matter around it, so I learned of the existence of Marie Kondo’s Netflix series based on a sudden flurry of posts on social media about how many books a person should own. Apparently, Kondo’s Tidying Up includes scenes of tidying up …
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Below the Bennets’ Stairs: Jo Baker’s Longbourn (book review)
Longbourn, Jo Baker’s 2013 semi-retelling of Pride and Prejudice, may well be the best-written Austen-adjacent text that I’ve read, in terms of prose style. And I have read… a lot. I use the term “semi-retelling” because the book is about the Longbourn servants, focalized through Sarah the housemaid, and doesn’t really concern the events of …
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Race, Christianity, and High Drama in The Woman of Colour (1808 book review)
Drawing again on that list of diverse Austen-adjacent texts that tipped me off about Sofia Khan Is Not Obliged, I also decided to check out The Woman of Colour: A Tale, an anonymous epistolary novel published in 1808. It's about the daughter of a female slave and a white Jamaican plantation owner, who is raised …
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