Thinking Software

Histories, Theories, and Practices of Programming and Artificial Intelligence

Course Description

What do computing and thinking have in common? Can computer programs understand, learn, and exercise creativity? How and when does software curtail, limit, replace, and deaden human thought—and alternatively, can software enable, accommodate, amplify, and democratize it?

This course investigates “thinking software” in two linked senses: its topic is artificial intelligence (software that “thinks”) and its approach emphasizes critical and interdisciplinary engagements with programming (thinking with and about software). Students will develop skills as technological practitioner-theorists and gain proficiency in analyzing, designing, and applying forms of artificial intelligence and “thinking software.” Topics include the limits of computation (computability, computational complexity); openness, secrecy, and cryptography; models and metaphors of artificial intelligence (e.g. neural networks); theories of nonhuman intelligence before and beyond computation (e.g. animal learning, “the wisdom of the crowd”); textual data in natural language processing and machine learning; and approaches to thinking about, measuring, and communicating the environmental, economic, and ethical risks and costs of AI through data visualization, description, and speculative narrative.

AI enthusiasts, skeptics, and the undecided are all welcome in this course. Regardless of orientation, students will develop the foundational knowledge and skills to reason about software and artificial intelligence beyond the imprecise generalizations and caricatures that sometimes appear in AI hype and condemnation alike. Assignments will include a final project and biweekly problem sets including both programming exercises and writing and design prompts. No prior programming experience is required.

Sample Readings

What Do Programmers Think They’re Doing? Who Do They Think They Are?

  • Ted Chiang, “The Lifecycle of Software Objects.” Exhalation: Stories (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019), 62–172.
  • Miriam Posner, “JavaScript Is for Girls,” Logic(s) Magazine, March 15, 2017.
  • Richard Sennett, “The Modern Hephaestus: Ancient Weavers and Linux Programmers,” The Craftsman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 21–27.
  • Excerpts from Ben Tarnoff and Moira Weigel, eds., Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk about What They Do--and How They Do It (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020)
  • Fred Turner, “The Shifting Politics of the Computational Metaphor,” From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 11–40.

Recent Feminist Futures

Course Description

This course examines science fiction as part of a feminist and queer tradition of forecasting, anticipating, and imagining other worlds: worlds without patriarchy and with alternative configurations of race, gender, sexuality, and power. We’ll consider feminist and queer utopias, dystopias, and heterotopias, with a special focus on the work of minoritized writers, artists, and intellectuals who have responded to histories of dehumanization not by asserting their essential humanity and claim to human rights, but by developing rich appropriations and transformations of animality, automatism, alienness, and deviance.

We will read feminist science fiction as lessons in reading science and fiction as feminists.

Gender Beyond the Human

  1. Introduction
    • Joanna Russ, “The Image of Women in SF” (1970)
    • Sheree Renee Thomas and Walidah Imarisha, Foreword and Introduction to Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements (2015)
  2. “Fembots have feelings too”: The Future of Service Work and Emotional Labor
    • Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (2021)
  3. Strange Reproduction
    • Ridley Scott, Alien (1979)
  4. Manifesting the Nonhuman
    • Donna Haraway, “The Cyborg Manifesto” (1985)
    • Geoff Ryman et al. “The Mundane Manifesto” (2004)
    • Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix” (1994)
  1. Seduction and Coercion
    • Octavia E. Butler, Dawn (1987)
  2. Queer Sexuality
    • Samuel R. Delany, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984)
  3. Sex at the End of the World
    • Octavia E. Butler, “Bloodchild” (1984)
    • Carmen Maria Machado, “Inventory” (2017)
    • Raccoona Sheldon (AKA Alice Sheldon / James Tiptree Jr.), “The Screwfly Solution” (1977)

Worlds Without Gender, Worlds Without Men

  1. Beyond “The Battle of the Sexes”
    • Joanna Russ, The Female Man (1975)
  2. Utopias
    • Alexandra Brodsky and Rachel Kauder Nalebuff (eds.), selections from The Feminist Utopia Project (2015)
    • Joanna Russ, “Recent Feminist Utopias” (1981)
    • Valerie Solanas, “SCUM Manifesto” (1967)
  3. Dystopias
    • Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (1976)
    • James Tiptree Jr., “The Women Men Don’t See” (1973)
  4. Heterotopias
    • Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine DeLandro, Bitch Planet (2014-2017)
  5. Alien Anthropology
    • Ursula Le Guin, “Is Gender Necessary, Redux” (1976, 1988), The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
    • James Tiptree Jr., “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” (1976)
  6. Students’ Choice
    • Some suggestions
      1. Margaret Atwood
      2. Karen Joy Fowler
      3. Nicola Griffith
      4. Nalo Hopkinson
      5. N.K. Jemisin
      6. Vonda N. McIntyre
      7. Nnedi Okorafor
      8. Joan Slonczewski

Theory, Violence, and Consent

Course Description

This course surveys theories of sexual violence interrogating the relationship between theory and sexual violence. How does theory – literary, critical, media, feminist, critical race, queer, film – subtend, develop, or trouble the concepts and frameworks we depend on to adjudicate sexual violence? In this seminar, we will consider how the constellation of heterogeneous intellectual formations called “theory” have shaped and challenged contemporary discourses of sexual violence. We begin by considering how challenges and revisions to the ideas of the human and the subject demonstrate the affordances and limitations of consent as a demarcation of sexual harm. We then consider how mediation represents and perpetuates harm through feminist media, literary, and film theory. Finally, we explore alternatives to legalistic and carceral justice, and the challenges of imagining and representing recovery and reparation following world-destroying acts of violence in the macro-scales of war and trauma.

Course Content Note

Throughout the semester, we will read and view texts that involve disturbing content, including sexual assault and racial violence. Please familiarize yourself with the texts in advance to determine if a particular session might generate a response that requires additional accommodation. You are permitted to use your allotted absences to excuse yourself from these sessions without providing any explanation or notice. If you are a survivor of any of these forms of violence, I am sorry this has happened to you. I will post a list of resources and support services for survivors and allies, both within and outside of the university.

In order to maintain an inclusive academic environment, I ask that survivors of sexual assault avoid sharing details of their personal experience, as this may have the unintended effect of triggering other students. Given the statistical likelihood that there will be survivors among us, please refrain from any victim-blaming language. This course demands a community of free and open exchange, which requires that we respect the well-being and perspectives of all students. On top of these basic principles, in an early class meeting, we will discuss and formulate some additional community standards as a group, and revisit these midway through the semester for additions and revisions.

  1. Consent, Law, Policy, and Social Theory
    • Joseph Fischel, “Introduction: Sex and the Ends of Consent,” in Sex and Harm in the Age of Consent (2016)
    • Carole Pateman, “Contracting In,” in The Sexual Contract (1988)
  2. Keywords
    • Raymond Williams, selections from Keywords: a Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976): “Aesthetic,” “Exploitation,” “Image”, “Media,” “Mediation,” “Ordinary,” “Sex,” “Violence”
    • Linda Martin Alcoff, “Decolonizing Terms: ‘Consent,’ ‘Victim,’ ‘Honor,’” in Rape and Resistance (2018)
  3. Psychoanalysis, the Unconscious, and the “Rape Fantasy”
    • Judith Butler, “Sexual Consent: Some Thoughts on Psychoanalysis and Law” (2011)
    • John Forrester, “Rape, Seduction, and Psychoanalysis” (1991)
    • Mary Gaitskill, “Secretary” (1988)
  4. Race and Dehumanization
    • Samantha Pergadia, “Like an Animal: Genres of the Human in the Neo-Slave Novel” (2018)
    • Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)
  5. The Politics of Sociobiology
    • Anne Fausto-Sterling, “Putting Woman in Her (Evolutionary) Place,” Myths of Gender: Biological Theories About Women and Men (1985)
    • Excerpts from Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer, A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion (2001) and Cheryl Brown Travis, ed., Evolution, Gender, and Rape (2003)
    • Isabella Rossellini, selections from Green Porno (2008) and Seduce Me (2010)
  6. Coercion and the Capacity to Consent
    • Octavia E. Butler, “Bloodchild” (1995)
    • Joseph Fischel and Hilary O’Connell, “Cripping Consent: Autonomy and Access” in Screw Consent (2019)
    • Saidiya Hartman, “Seduction and the Ruses of Power,” in Scenes of Subjection (1997)
    • Optional: Gabriel Rosenberg, “How Meat Changed Sex: the Law of Interspecies Intimacy after Industrial Reproduction” (2017)

Unit 2: Mediated Violence

  1. Wounding Words and Images
    • Excerpt from Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997)
    • Andrea Dworkin, “Third Rape” (1991)
    • Excerpt from Catherine MacKinnon, Only Words (1993)
    • Sharon Marcus, “Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words” (2002)
    • Joyce Carol Oates, “The Girl” (1976)
  2. Posthumanism, Disembodiment, and Information
    • Julian Dibbell, “A Rape in Cyberspace” (1993)
    • Excerpt from N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (1999)
  3. Narrative, Media, and Literary History
    • Frances Ferguson, “Rape and the Rise of the Novel” (1987)
    • Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)
    • Sarah Banet-Weiser and Kathryn Claire Higgins, Believability: Sexual Violence, Media, and the Politics of Doubt (2023)
  4. Film Theory, Spectatorship, and the Gaze
    • Michael Haneke, The Piano Teacher (2001)
    • Vivian C. Sobchack, “No Lies: Direct Cinema as Rape” (1977)
    • Moira Weigel, “The Piano Teacher: Bad Romances” (2017)

Unit 3: Trauma and Reparation

  1. Trauma and Testimony
    • Cathy Carruth, “Introduction: Trauma and Experience” and “Introduction: Recapturing the Past,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995)
    • Edouard Louis, History of Violence (2016)
  2. #MeToo, Life Writing, and Truth Telling
    • Leigh Gilmore, The #MeToo Effect: What Happens When We Believe Women (2023)
    • Chanel Miller, Know My Name (2019)
  3. Nationalism, War, Rape
    • Veena Das, “Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain,” in Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (2006)
    • Chang Rae Lee, A Gesture Life (1999)
  4. Restorative Justice
    • Alexandra Brodsky, Sexual Justice (2021)

The Humanities and the Human Sciences

Course Description

What is human nature? And to whom does this question belong: biologists or philosophers? Readers or computer scientists? This seminar will consider the organization of intellectual inquiry and its histories. We’ll approach fundamental questions about the human by examining and experimenting with boundaries, crossings, collaborations, and occasional antagonisms between and among the humanities and the sciences. Approaches will include literary theory, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, economics, feminism, biology and evolutionary theory, neuroscience, and computation. Thinkers we’ll engage with include: Anne Fausto-Sterling, Michel Foucault, Clifford Geertz, Erving Goffman, Donna Haraway, Paul Ricoeur, Edward Said, and E. O. Wilson.

Unit 1: On the Disciplines

  1. Introduction: Academic Cultures
    • David Graeber, “Anthropology and the Rise of the Professional-Managerial Class” (2014)
    • Eugenia Zurowski, “Where Do You Know From?: An Exercise in Placing Ourselves Together in the Classroom” (2020)
    • “Two Cultures” Dossier, excerpts from:
      1. Jacob Bronowski, The Common Sense of Science (1951)
      2. C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures (1959)
      3. Aldous Huxley, Literature and Science (1963)
      4. John Brockman, “The New Humanists” (2001)
  2. Disciplines and Interdisciplinarity
    • Michel Foucault, excerpt from The Order of Things (1966)
    • Jonathan Kramnick, “The Interdisciplinary Fallacy” (2017)
    • Banu Subramaniam, “Interdisciplinary Hauntings: the Ghostly World of Naturecultures,” from Ghost Stories for Darwin (2014)
  3. Knowledge Production and the Science Wars
    • Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges” (1988)
    • Barbara Herrnstein Smith, excerpt from Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth, and the Human (2006)
  4. Modeling Social Theory
    • Clifford Geertz, “Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought” (1980)
    • Mary S. Morgan and M. Norton Wise, “Narrative Science and Narrative Knowing” (2017)
    • Mary Poovey, “The Model System of Contemporary Literary Criticism” (2001)
    • Paul Ricoeur, “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text” (1973)

Unit 2: Case Studies in Science and Social Theory

  1. Reductionism and Scientific Unity
    • John Dupre, “The Disunity of Science” (1983)
    • Stephen J. Gould, excerpt from The Mismeasure of Man (1981)
    • E. O. Wilson, excerpt from Consilience (1998)
  2. Sociobiology: Sex, Violence, and Evolutionary Psychology
    • documents from the Science for the People papers, including materials from the Sociobiology Study Group, special collections, MIT
    • Anne Fausto-Sterling, excerpt from Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and Men (1985)
    • Isabella Rossellini, Green Porno (2008) and Seduce Me (2010)
    • Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer, excerpt from A Natural History of Rape (2000)
    • E. O. Wilson, excerpts from Sociobiology (1975) and On Human Nature (1978)
  3. Games, Play, and Game Theory
    • Erving Goffman, excerpt from “Expression Games: An Analysis of Doubts at Play” (1969)
    • Susanna Paasonen, Many Splendored Things: Thinking Sex and Play (2018)
    • Ariel Rubinstein, “On the Rhetoric of Game Theory” (2009)
    • Thomas Schelling, excerpt from The Strategy of Conflict (1981)
    • Recommended
      1. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens (1938)
      2. Patrick Jagoda, Experimental Games (2020)
  4. The Economics of Everything
    • Gary S. Becker, “The Economic Approach to Human Behavior” (1976)
    • Lydia Davis, selected stories
    • Michelle Murphy, The Economization of Life (2017)

Unit 3: New Directions in the Scientific Humanities

  1. Neurocriticism
    • Joshua Gang, Behaviorism, Consciousness, and the Literary Mind (2021)
    • Blakey Vermeule, Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? (2009)
  2. Bios: Life Media and Life Science
    • Stephen Jay Gould, “The Median Isn’t the Message” (1991)
    • Paul Kalanithi, “How Long Have I Got Left?” (2014)
    • Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals (1980)
    • Edward Said, On Late Style (2007)
    • Steven Shapin, excerpt from The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation (2008)
  3. Quantification
    • Arjun Appadurai, “Number in the Colonial Imagination” (1993)
    • Sally Engle Merry, The Seductions of Quantification: Measuring Human Rights, Gender Violence, and Sex Trafficking (2016)
    • E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” (1967)
    • Jacqueline Wernimont, Numbered Lives (2019)
  4. Digital Humanities, Empiricism and Reproducibility
    • Laura B. McGrath, “Comping White” (2019)
    • Andrew Piper, Enumerations: Data and Literary Study (2018)

Introduction to Graduate Studies: Genres of Academic Work and Life

PhD Proseminar, could be adapted for MA

Course Description

This introduction to graduate studies in the humanities aims to fill common gaps in graduate education, ensuring that no one falls through the cracks. The course will prepare students for both graduate school and academic life beyond this institution. While some proseminars survey schools, methods, theories, or major directions in a field, this seminar dispenses with content and focuses instead on equipping students with essential skills, habits, and practices for navigating academic life and work.

This seminar will introduce professional genres, shibboleths, and conventions that are crucial for academic survival and success, but that graduate students are often expected to acquire by osmosis, from one-on-one mentoring, or through other informal and semi-independent means. As a matter of equity, this course aims to provide all graduate students with access to this knowledge.

[notes/draft-in-progress below]

  • Graduate School Genres
    • seminar paper
    • thesis/dissertation prospectus/proposal
    • thesis/dissertation
  • Academic Genres Beyond Graduate School
    • journal article
    • academic monograph
    • book chapter
    • conference paper
    • reader’s report
    • feedback on work by colleagues, friends, and students (informal, verbal, written)
    • job talk
    • question during Q&A
    • syllabus
    • emails
    • cover letter (various purposes)
    • grand/funding proposal
    • “non-academic writing”
    • lecture
    • lesson plan
    • acknowledgments

Skills and Habits:

  • Developing a realistic, sustainable, and productive writing process
  • Knowing how and when to ask for and offer help, support, and care
  • Finding mentors and colleagues
  • Protecting Work/life balance, avoiding burnout
  • Developing resilience, avoiding defensiveness, and being generous without sacrificing values, integrity, or boundaries
  • Organizing notes and citations (potentially with software like Zotero, Endnote, Mendeley, Notion, OneNote, Obsidian, Scrivener)

Assignments

  • Weekly reading, writing exercises, and presentations
  • No seminar paper
  • Informal but serious final essay that’s both reflective and proleptic: a statement of intellectual, personal, and professional values, goals, and plans you can return to and revise in moments of uncertainty or indecision for at least the next few years.

Topics and Sources

  • Histories of Academic Cultures and Institutions
    • Two Cultures
    • Michael Warner, “Styles of Intellectual Publics”
    • Mary McCarthy, Groves of Academe or Gerald Graff, Professing Literature
    • The Chair (Netflix)
    • excerpt from Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Autonomedia / Minor Compositions, 2013).
    • Edward W. Said, “On the University,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 25 (2005), 26-36.
  • Politics, Activism, and Academic Freedom
    • Excerpt from Steven Salaita, An Honest Living: A Memoir of Peculiar Itineraries (Fordham University Press, 2024).
    • Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society 1, no. 1 (2012), 1-40.
    • Katrina L. Rogers, Putting the Humanities PhD to Work: Thriving in and beyond the Classroom (Duke University Press, 2020)
  • Genres
  • Misconduct and Bad Behavior, Whisper Networks and Gossip (Soft Plagiarism, Idea Theft)
  • “Non-Academic” Writing
    • Browse Bookforum, LitHub, Los Angeles Review of Books, N+1, Parapraxis, Public Books
    • Lili Loofbourow and Phillip Maciak, “The Semipublic Intellectual: Academia, Criticism, and the Internet Age,” special section, “The Changing Profession.” PMLA 130, no. 2 (2015)

A meme based on the box for Cap'N Crunch's "Oops! All Berries" Cereal, reading "Oops! All H idden Curriculum"

Queer Natures, Queer Lives

Course Description

In fall 2023, Kew Gardens in London faced some unusual backlash against their annual autumn festival. Celebrating the “diversity of art, plants and fungi,” the Gardens chose the theme of “Queer Nature,” linking ecological biodiversity to the diversity of human gender and sexuality.

What can plants, animals, fungi, and other organisms contribute to queer theory and queer liberation? Is queer, trans, and nonbinary life natural? Does queerness have an evolutionary basis and function? Are nature and biology productive foundations or distractions for queer activism and critique? This course confronts these questions by considering the relationship between queer art, literature, and theory and scientific and other forms of knowledge production about the natural world. We’ll examine both rejections and celebrations of the idea of queerness as natural, along with feminist and queer of color revisions and deconstructions of distinctions between nature, culture, and technology and between the human and the nonhuman.

Artists and authors might include Karen Barad, Joshua Bennett, Octavia E. Butler, Charles Darwin, Samuel R. Delany, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Greta Gaard, Donna Haraway, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Greta LaFleur, Daniel Lee, Melissa K. Nelson, Richard Prum, Isabella Rossellini, Catriona Sandilands, Sam See, Nicole Seymour, Banu Subramaniam, Kim Tallbear, and James Tiptree Jr.

Asian American Literature On Campus

Course Description

The category of “Asian American” has been closely associated with the college campus since coalitions of student activists demanded the formation of Asian American and other ethnic studies programs in the 1960s. At the same time, recent attacks on affirmative action have exposed how vexed the presence of Asian America on campus and in university curricula remains: are Asian Americans under- or over-represented in higher education? Is “Asian American” still a useful category, or does it obscure significant demographic and cultural diversity? Must the association between Asian Americans and higher education feed the model minority stereotype? This course considers the relationship between literature and the political and cultural category “Asian American” through canonical works of Asian American literature, fiction about Asian Americans on campus, and literature by college students and teachers. Authors may include Anne Anlin Cheng, Susan Choi, Mohsin Hamid, Cathy Park Hong, R.O. Kwon, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Jia Tolentino, Weike Wang, Karen Tei Yamashita, Jenny Zhang.

Science, Technology, and Folklore

Screenshot of a social media post by the American Folklore Society in 2020, reading "With the release of Taylor Swift’s new album, Folklore, many people are asking, what is folklore? Come learn about folklore and folklore studies at: http://whatisfolklore.org/"

Course Description

Bringing together a dying(?) academic discipline and science, technology, and contemporary technoculture’s speculative orientation toward the future, this course proposes folklore as an unlikely but powerful approach to the study of science, technology, and digital media.

Topics may include internet communities, cultures, subcultures, and countercultures; rhetorics of science and technology; technology hype; digital heritage and preservation; and models of technological change, and genres may include folk science, lay theories, academic gossip, rumor, hype, meme, myth, legend, and joke.

Folklore and Science

  • American Folklore Society, Folklore and Science Section
  • Donald Braid, “‘Doing Good Physics’: Narrative and Innovation in Research,” Journal of Folklore Research 43, no. 2 (2006): 149–73
  • Carolyn F. Gilkey, “The Physicist, the Mathematician and the Engineer: Scientists and the Professional Slur,” Western Folklore 49, no. 2 (1990): 215-220
  • Loren Graham, “The Power of Names: In Culture and in Mathematics,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 157, no. 2 (2013): 229–34
  • Bruce Jackson, “‘The Greatest Mathematician in the World’: Norbert Wiener Stories,” Western Folklore 31, no. 1 (1972): 1-22
  • Robert K. Merton, “The Matthew Effect in Science,” Science 159, no. 3810 (1968): 56–63
  • Paul Renteln and Alan Dundes, “Foolproof: A Sampling of Mathematical Folk Humor,” Notices of the AMS 52, no. 1 (2005): 24-34
  • Gregory Schrempp, “Folklore and Science: Inflections of ‘Folk’ in Cognitive Research,” Journal of Folklore Research 33, no. 3 (1996): 191–206
  • Gregory Schrempp, The Science of Myths and Vice Versa (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2016)
  • Stephen M. Stigler, “Stigler’s Law of Eponymy,” Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences 39, no. 1 Series II (1980): 147–57
  • Michael Taft, “The Absentminded Professor: A Case Study of an Academic Legend Cycle,” Voices 33, no. 1/2 (Spring 2007): 10–13
  • Thomas C. Sutton and Marilyn Sutton, “Science Fiction as Mythology,” Western Folklore 28, no. 4 (1969): 230–37
  • Undo Uus, “Science and Folk Sentiments,” Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore 15 (2000): 7–23
  • Keith Weber, “Mathematical Humor: Jokes That Reveal How We Think About Mathematics and Why We Enjoy It,” The Mathematical Intelligencer 38, no. 4 (2016): 56–61
  • D.K. Wilgus, “More Norbert Wiener Stories,” Western Folklore 31, no. 1 (1972): 23-25

Folklore, Media, and Modernity

Folklore Studies Foundations

  • Roland Barthes, Mythologies
  • William R. Bascom, “Four Functions of Folklore,” The Journal of American Folklore 67, no. 266 (1954): 333–49
  • Peter Bogatyrëv and Roman Jakobson, “Folklore as a Special Form of Creativity,” The Prague School: Selected Writings, 1929-1946, ed. Peter Steiner (University of Texas Press, 1982), 32-46
  • Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men
  • Robin D. G. Kelley, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘The Folk,’” The American Historical Review 97, no. 5 (1992): 1400–1408
  • Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” The Journal of American Folklore 68, no. 270 (1955): 428–44
  • Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (University of Texas Press, 1968)
  • Vladimir Propp, Theory and History of Folklore, ed. Anatoly Liberman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984)
  • Bert O. States, “The Persistence of the Archetype,” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 2 (December 1980): 333–44
  • Archer Taylor, “The Place of Folklore,” PMLA 67, no. 1 (1952): 59-66.
  • Stith Thompson, “The Challenge of Folklore,” PMLA 79, no. 4 (1964): 357-365.

Coming Soon

Afrofuturism and Astroculture in American Media

Alien, Animal, Robot: Imagining Techno-Orientalism

On Bios: Life Writing, Life Sciences, and Biotechnology

Histories of Automation

Playing and Being Played: Arts and Sciences of Games, Gaming, and Gamification