Julianne Werlin

Oct 21, 2024 | chronicle.com | Jamie Bolker |Kevin Carey |Sophie Nguyen |Julianne Werlin |Len Gutkin

In the last few months, two rich essays have appeared looking back at a series of flare-ups, since 2019 or so, in the perennial debate over the politics of historical study. In July, Past & Present published the Northwestern University historian Sarah Maza’s “Presentism and the Politics of History: Revisiting the 2022 James Sweet Affair.” And earlier this month, Liberties published the Rutgers University at Camden historian Katherine C.

Oct 18, 2024 | chronicle.com | Julianne Werlin

“Criticism” is a curiously protean word. In academic discourse, as in ordinary speech, it can refer simply to the act of appraisal, sometimes with a censorious edge. It’s used to describe reviews, whether positive or negative, of new books and movies, but it can also refer to the routine work of academics in English departments or cultural-studies programs.

Jul 23, 2024 | lifeandletters.substack.com | Julianne Werlin

“How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?” So L.C. Knights asked in a famous lecture on Shakespeare, delivered in 1933. The purpose of his talk wasn’t to answer the question. It was to argue that it shouldn’t be asked. Shakespeare’s plays, according to Knights, were first and foremost “dramatic poems,” works of literary art unified through metaphor and language, rather than a record of interactions between characters.