Recent Publications

Book Cover for Logomotives: Words That Change the World, 1400-1700 by Marjorie Rubright and Stephen Spiess depicting a marble surrounded by rings

Logomotives are words that change worlds – past, present, and future. Bearing a wide range of linguistic, regional and disciplinary expertise, the volume’s twenty-five contributors traverse multiple geographies (Asia, Africa, Iberian Peninsula, Europe, and the Americas), work across fifteen languages and span from antiquity to our current moment to reveal how words are catalysts of cultural, political and epistemological change. Harnessing new developments in philologies of race, in queer-, feminist-, trans-, transnational- and postcolonial philologies, as well as translation studies, Logomotives illuminates the world-making capacity of words. Each chapter opens with a methodological statement, pursues a central reading and concludes with a lesson plan for undergraduate or graduate classrooms. The volume orients critical attention to the relations between what a word means, the ways in which it moves, and the changes that such motion engenders, both within and across the historical cultures under analysis and in present-day scholarship.


In Irish Anthropocene, Malcolm Sen traces the ways in which contemporary Irish literature is deeply engaged with climate change issues. Drawing upon concepts of sovereignty, precarity, and disaster, Sen examines Irish literary works and their concern with realms of the political, the economic, and the ecological. The association of greenness with Ireland and its role in the corporatization of Ireland Inc. reveals an underbelly of Ireland’s unsustainable energy and food regimes and its distressing environmental record with international climate change mitigation efforts. Writing in the shadow of such emissions, contemporary authors are alert not only to the insincerity of pastoralist rhetoric and the instrumentalized greenery of Irish fiction, but they are also responding to the planetary-level threats dominating the discourse of the Anthropocene.