Is today's "fourth wave" feminist movement really a "fifth wave"? We can't understand the inclusiveness, confidence, and playful spirit of today's protest movement without appreciating the wave of community-building that took place in girls' internet fan culture starting around 2000.
All good things must come to an end, right? As we imagine the possible end of Trump's presidency, consider these scenarios that are about as unlikely as President Trump seemed this time last year.
Assessing the benefits and pitfalls of historicizing, romanticizing or ignoring the past when imagining the future.
Cultural studies has turned out to be, in retrospect, a weirdly thorough success that is influencing the creation and reception of culture everywhere in the world, especially outside the academy.
The glamour of servitude in today's gilded age of privilege and celebrity worship.
Is it time to revive Epicureanism, perhaps as academic practice?
Fallible, stupid, and yet joyful, comedy is a very human magic lately much on our minds.
Did the violent history of European exploration culminate in greater freedom or bland decadence?
American Dreams in China (2013) is a Chinese film about upward mobility that will feel familiar to most Americans.
How important is Katniss Everdeen, really, to the uprising in Panem? Would she count as a “world-historical figure,” according to Georg Lukács?
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Eleanor Courtemanche teaches Victorian literature and economic thought at the University of Illinois, with occasional digressions into pop culture and media theory. Her book about Adam Smith's "invisible hand" and the construction of moral outcomes in complex Victorian novels was published in 2011. Here's her faculty webpage: http://www.english.illinois.edu/people/ecourtem.