Homepage

Teraanga Republic

In Teraanga Republic, Emily Jenan Riley unveils the importance of women’s patronage politics in a Muslim-majority Senegal expressed through teraanga—a pivotal concept in the Wolof language referencing hospitality, generosity, and honor. Riley challenges perceptions of governance, gender and politics, authority, and religion on a global scale, revealing the interconnectedness of republican, Indigenous, and Islamic ways of enacting politics. Teraanga Republic delves into how the women who fought for equal political representation have transformed their private expressions of teraanga and piety into public governance strategies.

Beautiful Clay

In Beautiful Clay, noted scholar of traditional ceramics John A. Burrison writes about how a potter applies aesthetics to utilitarian objects to transform raw clay into something beautiful. Though what is considered beautiful in art changes from culture to culture and person to person, there are universal techniques such as manipulating form, color, texture, and more that tap into clay’s potential for beauty. Burrison uses an approach from a perspective of international artistry rather than an approach bound by history or geography. After beginning with more than 40,000 images that the author curated as a study resource, Beautiful Clay narrows it down to around 230 images that capture the artistry within traditional ceramics worldwide.

When Comedy Goes Wrong

When Comedy Goes Wrong examines how, beginning in the late-twentieth and carrying into the early twenty-first century, a certain comic dispirit found various platforms for disheartening cultural politics. From the calculated follies on talk radio programs like the Rush Limbaugh Show through the charades of “cancel culture” and ultimately to so-called Alt-Right comedy, the transgressions, improprieties, and ego trips endemic to a newfangled comic freedom produced entirely unfunny ways of being. To understand these unfunny ways, Christopher J. Gilbert challenges the prevailing belief in humor’s goodness, analyzing radio personalities, meme culture, films, civil unrest, and even the language of ordinary individuals and everyday speech, all to demonstrate what happens when humor becomes humorless.

On the Blog

This Old Goose Still Honks: Dysfluency in William Carlos Williams’s Late Poetry

By Jeffrey Careyva, author of “‘The Mind and the Poem Are All Apiece’: William Carlos Williams and the Dysfluent Poetics of Aphasia,” Journal of Modern Literature,…

Read More

Victorian Studies 66.4: What can Scholars’ Quotations Tell us about our Fields and Disciplines?

By Sierra Eckert (Wesleyan University) and Milan Terlunen (Johns Hopkins University)

**Read Eckert and Terlunen’s article “What We Quote: Disciplinary History and the Textual Atmospheres of Middlemarch” for free on Project MUSE….

Read More

In Memoriam: John Sallis

The Adelmann Professor of Philosophy at BC has died at age 86

University Communications | February 2025

John Sallis, the Frederick J. Adelmann, S.J. Professor of Philosophy at Boston College and a highly regarded sage of continental philosophy,…

Read More

Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace

Fifteen years since the publication of its second edition, this foundational text in the history of Arab-Israeli peacemaking endeavors has been updated to include developments from the past twenty-five...