Lawrence Buell, Powell M. Cabot Research Professor of American Literature, Emeritus, released a new book earlier this month on Henry David Thoreau. It is "the first concise account of Thoreau's life, thought, work, and impact in more than half a century and builds upon the explosion of new scholarship on Thoreau during the decade of the bicentennial of his birth." 

The publisher's notice of the book can be accessed ...

Read more about Henry David Thoreau: Thinking Disobediently by Professor Emeritus Lawrence Buell

In the autumn of 2020, while stargazing on his balcony in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Teju Cole was inspired to start taking photos of his kitchen counter. He decided that the daily migrations of his pots, pans, spoons, and graters paralleled the revolutions of celestial bodies, and began to track them in a “counter history.” A year later, he published the results as “Golden Apple of the Sun” (2021), a book-length photo essay that magnifies his solitary domestic experiment until it seems to encompass the world. Cole writes about the hunger he suffered as a boarding-school student in...

Read more about Teju Cole's New Novel is Haunted by the Trespasses of Art

Coming Soon (early 2024): Form and Power in Medieval and Early Modern Literature: A Book for James Simpson, edited by Daniel Donoghue, Sebastian Sobecki, and Nicholas Watson. Form and Power is a volume of essays, mainly by James’s students from Harvard and Cambridge, based on the Morton W. Bloomfield Conference held in honor of James in the Thompson Room in the fall of 2022.  James’s own Bloomfield Lecture opens the volume, which features a painting by our own Peter Sacks as its frontispiece.  
 
The book’s publisher, D. S.... Read more about Tabula Gratulatoria for James Simpson festschrift

My romance with history began in the fifth grade, in the 1960–1961 school year, in a class taught by the only male teacher in my West Virginia elementary school, Mr. McHenry. Our ancient history textbook had at most a few line drawings and no photographs at all that I recall, but it sucked me in with the indiscriminate force of my mother’s brand-new Electrolux vacuum cleaner. How ancient history made it into the curriculum of a fifth-grade class in a public school in the hills of West Virginia has long puzzled me. What I wouldn’t give to own a copy of that textbook! Its power to transport put... Read more about "Finding my Roots" by Henry Louis Gates Jr.