"He cited ASU’s charter mission and specifically its emphasis on 'fundamental responsibility' for the communities it serves . . . 'ASU seemed to me to be doing something very right in its commitment to inclusion,' Padilla Peralta said." www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2025...

End of semester quiz: what’s the through line between a Renaissance pope and the 21st-century US Supreme Court? See the full video on The Doctrine of Discovery from Scott Manning Stevens on throughlines-asu.webflow.io/suite-conten...

Freak out! Register for the keynote event for Love: A RaceB4Race Symposium is legendary musician and songwriter Nile Rodgers. Nile is a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee, Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee and a multiple Grammy Award winning artist. Save your spot: na.eventscloud.com/asu-nile-rod...

RaceB4Race First and Second Book Institutes deadline has been extended until Friday! Apply this week to join a cohort of PCRS scholars to work on your book projects. acmrs.asu.edu/RaceB4Race/F...

Such good news for ASU!

Welcome to ASU @platanoclassics.bsky.social! “Dan-el Padilla Peralta is in the vanguard of scholars working to ensure that the complexities of the past are not flattened in service to the monochrome myths of our day,” said Jeffrey Cohen, dean of humanities at ASU. news.asu.edu/b/20251112-d...

Got a PCRS book project? Looking for community and guidance in the process? The RaceB4Race First and Second Book Institutes are here for you! Run by @folger.edu the institutes connect scholars with readers and experts. First book: forms.gle/ht75W13xphDj... Second book: forms.gle/gMSuCSjUj9dH...

Thank you to Andrea Myers Achi for your contributions to Throughlines! Learn about the pedagogy of careful curation and how exhibitions can confront power structures, reshape public understandings of history, and highlight racial and cultural complexity. www.throughlines.org/suite-conten...

Thank you to everyone who attended "Shakespeare now but not Hamlet again" last night with the brilliant Emma Smith! Thoughtful, compelling, funny, and revelatory. And thank you Emma Smith for the lecture and filming with Throughlines! More to come soon!

Hope to see you tomorrow for 'Shakespeare now — but not Hamlet again' an evening lecture with renowned scholar Emma Smith. Where she will offer an answer to the question, what is the Shakespeare play that best speaks to this historical moment? na.eventscloud.com/emma-smith

A book salon for The Sweet Taste of Empire by @profkfh.bsky.social? Tonight? Yes please! Still time to get your tickets. See you there! www.eventbrite.com/e/the-sweet-...

Applications are open for the RaceB4Race First and Second Book Institutes @acmrs.bsky.social. @mhanses.bsky.social and I took part in the 2024 Second Book Institute with our Cicero project, and we learned so much from early modernists. Cannot recommend enough! acmrs.asu.edu/RaceB4Race/F...

Monday, Oct. 20, ASU English professors Larissa FastHorse, Michael John Garcés and Ty Defoe facilitate an evening of Indigenous stories: "Native Nation Project"—a book launch, reading and discussion of the collaborative work. More: ow.ly/jBf050XcKRm #ASUHumanities @acmrs.bsky.social

Join us on Monday October 20 for an incredible book launch event with Larissa FastHorse, Michael John Garcés and Ty Defoe. And check out this interview with them about their work and an upcoming Oronooko adaptation... (!) news.asu.edu/20251016-art...

Last week BTS with Cassie L. Smith for Throughlines. Her scholarship explores the long history of Black literature from Olaudah Equiano to Phillis Wheatley to Black-ish. Be on the lookout for more!

What is the Shakespeare play that speaks to our current moment? Oxford professor Emma Smith has ideas: definitely not Hamlet. Join us for her talk on November 6 to hear her thoughts on the play that reflects some of our concerns, and use its fictions for good. na.eventscloud.com/ereg/index.p...

Love: A RaceB4Race Symposium is now open for registration! What does it mean to love in a time of turmoil, and what can the premodern world teach us about this? How do we negotiate loving a being, a nation, a profession that fails to love us back? na.eventscloud.com/raceb4race-l...

Yale professor Tarren Andrews understands the importance of language. She teaches her students that law is a linguistic technology shaped by culture. Find more of her thoughts and pedagogy including videos and reading lists on Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/scholars/tar...

Abdulhamit Arvas creates classrooms spaces where discomfort sparks growth, where students wrestle with hard questions, and where they learn to read beyond their own assumptions and beliefs. You can read his teaching materials on Throughlines now. www.throughlines.org/scholars/abd...

The latest issue of Daedalus, journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, was guest-edited by ASU English professor Ayanna Thompson & includes contributions from ASU President Michael Crow + other writers, artists & scholars. Learn more: ow.ly/63XX50WRASB #ASUHumanities @acmrs.bsky.social

"You should remember that students have led or been in solidarity with the most important struggles for a sustainable, equitable world in the 20th and 21st centuries. Students have connected their ability to study power’s intentions to these global struggles." www.thenation.com/article/soci...

This tragicomedy about life, love and transformation has been reimagined as a two-hour-long musical inspired by the gospel traditions of the American Black church, and presented by the Public Works program of the Public Theater. (Dramaturged by THE Ayanna Thompson) www.nytimes.com/2025/08/29/t...

⌛ Fiction Friday: "Behaving like human beings are the center of everything doesn’t make it true." From "Let’s Get Lost in the Cycle of Time Together" by ASU English professor @madelinesayet.bsky.social‬. Read the play in Daedalus: ow.ly/AplZ50WMhFy #ASUHumanities CC: @acmrs.bsky.social

"It’s a romp, a tonic, an escape from the clamorous world into a fantasy." Check out the review of Shakespeare in the Park's Twelfth Night, dramaturged by Ayanna Thompson 👀 www.nytimes.com/2025/08/21/t...

Have you got your copy yet? Can't wait for this launch event for The Sweet Taste of Empire by the incomparable @profkfh.bsky.social

This is fantastic news! One of the early postmedieval utopian texts that helped develop a French strand of utopian literature & that paved the way for the ambiguous & satirical approaches of Cyrano de Bergerac, Denis Veiras & Gabriel de Foigny. I'm really looking forward to reading it.

This was one of my favorite projects to be a part of in recent memory. Get your syllabus ready for the fall. Check out Throughlines today.

I really needed this today. Ayanna Thompson sent me a link to this jaw-dropping thing they built with a Mellon grant at @acmrs.bsky.social You can get lost in it. A spectacular reminder that digital resources don't have to be about surveillance, coercion, & disciplining the labor force.

“'Classicism and Other Phobias,' contends with loss in its own way, by asking if classics might be used to combat forces, like racism, that give rise to profound losses... ” @newyorker.com @platanoclassics.bsky.social www.newyorker.com/books/book-c...

🐴 Fiction Friday: "That’s the key: the patterns. Without them, it’s just people in horse costumes." From "Horseplay" by ASU English alum @leahenewsom.bsky.social‬. Read the story in Daedalus, journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences: ow.ly/2LMN50WFv9k #ASUHumanities CC: @acmrs.bsky.social

Arden Shakespeare fourth series is coming! Read Titus 🥩 🥧 co-edited by Ayanna Thompson in May '26.

Shout out to Throughlines scholar, collaborator, and friend of ACMRS ‪@platanoclassics on his new book, Classicism and Other Phobias! Running to check out his book recommendations now 👀. www.newyorker.com/books/book-c...

Who's the grumpy uncle in your head 👴🏻? Patrica Akhimie joins Throughlines to talk about the importance of editing in Shakespeare. www.throughlines.org/suite-conten...

"The central question for this Dædalus issue asks artists and scholars to speculate about what aspects of our present historical moment will enrapture, haunt, and/or plague thinkers in the future." Dædalus Summer 2025 edited by Ayanna Thompson www.amacad.org/daedalus/how...

How did a seventeenth-century South American trading post become the blueprint for the prison system in the present-day United States? Read "The Color of Commerce: Racial Identity and Corporate Logic in Behn’s Oroonoko" by Brandon Taylor on The Sundial medium.com/the-sundial-...

Happy pub day to The Island of Hermaphrodites, translated by Kathleen P. long. Long offers new audiences a satirical romp through a world of absurdist power—one that feels politically salient today. Access the full text for free online asu.pressbooks.pub/the-island-o...

Tomorrow is August 🤯 is your syllabus ready?? Throughlines carries several exemplar syllabi to help inspire you for the semester ahead. We are also proud to announce new pedagogical resources from Patrica Akhimie and Geraldine Heng are now available. Start here: www.throughlines.org

"I work hard at not creating a narrative of totalizing war and despair." Geraldine Heng on teaching global premodern literature. Be on the look out for more pedagogical resources from Heng coming soon from Throughlines.

Did you hear? Ayanna Thompson was elected as a fellow to the British Academy! Please join us in congratulating her on this accomplishment. www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/news/agm-wel...

👀 Is that our executive director Ayanna Thompson hanging out with the absolutely STACKED cast of The Public Theater's 12th Night??

Birthright citizenship isn’t only a legal construct, but it’s also a reproductive issue. Any attempt to narrow who qualifies as a citizen necessarily burdens the women whose bodies become the contested sites of national identity. More from Dan-el Padilla Peralta on citizenship and biopolitics:

As I finished Shakespeare in Tongues in 2024, I could sense that my chapter on The Tempest and the 2012 outlawing of the Mexican American Studies curriculum in Tucson, AZ, would become increasingly relevant in this new era of epistemic violence, so I wrote a short piece about it for The Sundial.

Happy pub day Design and Discomfort: Teaching Shakespeare and Race! Edited by Laura B. Turchi, this collection brings together educators and teaching artists who share innovative strategies for rethinking Shakespeare’s role in education. Published by ACMRS Press acmrspress.com/978086698624...

"In giving voice to resistance in the face of dispossession and enslavement, Caliban disrupts the hierarchical, colonial world order that is invested in keeping him at the bottom and Prospero on top." Read more from ‪@kathrynvsantos.bsky.social‬ new piece in The Sundial

June 6 is National Higher Education Day! With that in mind enjoy our dean Jeffrey J. Cohen on the importance of the humanities on a panel hosted by ACMRS and Higher Ed Dive titled, "Now More Than Ever: The Humanities of the Future" www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXHt...

"It makes me nuts that, so often Black and brown folks have to put their name next to Shakespeare's or another great white man to be considered, you know, legitimate, and you've made it. And I just didn't want that to happen." www.kjzz.org/the-show/202...

“I have the best job in the world,” said Thompson, a Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University, the executive director for the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and a theater consultant. news.asu.edu/20250530-art...

Want to participate in the RaceB4Race Mentorship Network? Get your application in now! Deadline extended to 5/25. forms.gle/EKwB26DGq7Md...

Don't forget to apply for the RaceB4Race Mentorship Network! Mentees visit with expert scholars in PCRS over two semesters to discuss career development, work-life balance, writing, publishing, and cutting-edge research happening within PCRS. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

"This project really doesn’t have any right to... make quite as much sense as it does. But it is an absorbing, heart-racing, and thrilling production that gracefully utilizes this music to co-exist within powerful dramatic depictions of grief, fear, madness, and death." pitchfork.com/thepitch/rad...