Carolyn Dever

Dec 14, 2023 | publicbooks.org | Carolyn Dever |Ben Platt |John Plotz

LONDON. Michaelmas term nearly over. Implacable November weather predictably implacable. Forty-foot Megalosaurus presumably out there somewhere. Readers may recognize a version here of the first lines of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. Dickens wrote Bleak House in 1852 and 1853, publishing it in 20 serial parts. As one did back in the day, he wrote Bleak House scratchily, noisily, using a goose quill pen, dipped at intervals into iron-gall ink, on cotton-rag paper.

Dec 13, 2023 | publicbooks.org | Eleanor M. Johnson |Carolyn Dever |Charlotte Rosen

This essay is part of a Public Books capsule by Eleanor Johnson on feminism and horror. 1973 was a banner year for American feminism. Roe v. Wade was decided in the Supreme Court in January. The Equal Rights Amendment had passed through Congress. News media decried wage disparities between men and women. Grassroots feminist activists were working to raise awareness about domestic violence—then called “wife-battery”—and to change public attitudes and policies about it.

Jul 28, 2023 | bostonglobe.com | Carolyn Dever |Olivia Gentile

Ten years ago, Jim Kenyon, a columnist for the Valley News in West Lebanon, N.H., welcomed Dartmouth College’s incoming 19th president with a profile headlined “Hangin’ With Phil: At Michigan, Dartmouth’s Next President Cuts a High-Impact, Low-Profile Figure on Campus.” Kenyon, who’d traveled to the University of Michigan to interview Phil Hanlon, was fulsome in his praise for the mathematician’s amiability, intellect, accomplishments, and work ethic.

May 24, 2023 | lrb.co.uk | Carolyn Dever |Freya Johnston

There​ is no entry for Michael Field in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. The search function directs you first to ‘Bradley, Katharine Harris’ and then to ‘Cooper, Edith Emma’. Click on the second name, however, and you aren’t taken to a biography of Cooper but back to her aunt, Bradley. These convoluted preliminaries seem appropriate for two women whose identities were entangled in various forms of aspiration, impersonation, interdependence and disguise.