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English Research Latest Stories and Happenings

Welcome to the Purdue English Research page. Here, you'll learn about recent publications, awards, and research initiatives led by faculty in the Department of English.

Brian Leung Publishes "All I Should Not Tell"

All I Should Not Tell, Brian Leung, C&R Press, 2023.

About the Book (from the publisher)

In All I Should Not Tell, Conner Grayson, fourteen, wants nothing more than to see his intensely abusive step-father, Cudge, destroyed. He considers it a blessing for himself and his younger, too-innocent, brother, Sammy, when the man disappears, though he’s convinced that his mother has done something unspeakable to her husband. With Cudge gone, there’s no threat of exposing Conner’s deepest secret, his love for Mark, another boy in Orgull, a fictional river town outside of Louisville. But almost immediately, Mark disappears as well. Flash forward two decades. Conner remains tortured about his past, including the apparent suicides of his biological father and his brother. But, he has found a certain level of happiness with the family he’s built with his wife, Lamb, as well as his boyfriend, James. It’s complicated. When Cudge’s octogenarian father shows up from California to investigate Cudge’s long ago disappearance, Conner spirals into a series of unwise decisions culminating in discoveries about his past that may destroy his current family. It might be there’s only one person who can pull him from the wreckage.

Alfred J. Lopez Publishes "A Posthumous History of José Martí"

A Posthumous History of José Martí The Apostle and his Afterlife, Alfred J. Lopez, Routledge, 2023.  

About the Book (from the publisher)

A Posthumous History of José Martí: The Apostle and His Afterlife focuses on Martí’s posthumous legacy and his lasting influence on succeeding generations of Cubans on the island and abroad. Over 120 years after his death on a Cuban battlefield in 1895, Martí studies have long been the contested property of opposing sides in an ongoing ideological battle. Both the Cuban nation-state, which claims Martí as a crucial inspiration for its Marxist revolutionary government, and diasporic communities in the US who honor Martí as a figure of hope for the Cuban nation-in-exile, insist on the centrality of his words and image for their respective visions of Cuban nationhood. The book also explores more recent scholarship that has reassessed Martí’s literary, cultural, and ideological value, allowing us to read him beyond the Havana-Miami axis toward engagement with a broader historical and geographical tableau. Martí has thus begun to outgrow his mutually-reinforcing cults in Cuba and the diaspora, to assume his true significance as a hemispheric and global writer and thinker.

Jennifer Freeman Marshall Publishes "Ain't I Anthropologist"

Ain’t I an Anthropologist: Zora Neale Hurston Beyond the Literary Icon, Jennifer Freeman Marshall, University of Illinois Press, 2023.  

About the Book (from the publisher)

Iconic as a novelist and popular cultural figure, Zora Neale Hurston remains underappreciated as an anthropologist. Is it inevitable that Hurston’s literary authority should eclipse her anthropological authority? In a highly interdisciplinary study, Freeman Marshall explores Hurston’s popular appeal as iconography, her elevation into the literary canon, her concurrent marginalization in anthropology despite her significant contributions, and her place within constructions of Black feminist literary traditions. Ain’t I an Anthropologist reassesses Zora Neale Hurston’s place in American cultural and intellectual life and establishes Hurston’s conceptual contributions to the field of American Anthropology beyond her experimental mode of writing culture.