My "The Hunger Games" module with SPACE (Signum Portals for Adult Continuing Education) online via Signum University is currently a candidate for September 2025. This is a proposed first module of five, one for each of the five Hunger Games novels by Suzanne Collins. Each week will include one recorded lecture and one live discussion section. Voting runs through August 1. I hope you will join us as we explore the lessons we may learn from Panem.

May the odds be ever in our favor!

More information is here.

My 12-week graduate course on the Dystopian Tradition will be offered this summer online at Signum University. I'm so glad that this class made; these works, and the conversations they make possible, are more important and relevant than ever.

“Nothing appears more surprising to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers.” - David Hume, quoted in Sunrise on the Reaping

Happy Sunrise on the Reaping Day!

To celebrate, here is my new talk for the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville: "Why You Should Read The Hunger Games.

Watch on YouTube

I'm delighted to say that it's back! My month-long module "Meet The Last Man" module with SPACE (Signum Portals for Adult Continuing Education) online via Signum University is currently up for candidacy for June 2025. Voting is open through May 1.

Mary Shelley's novel The Last Man is one of the most relevant books we can read right now, and I'm really looking forward to exploring it with students!

Here is more information.

Watch on YouTube

Octavia E. Butler's "must read" masterpiece Parable of the Sower (1993) begins its first chapter on July 20, 2024.

Here are some recent articles I found to be of great interest:

- "What Not: lost feminist novel that anticipated Brave New World finally finds its time"

- "Japan’s modern crime literature: Centuries in the making"

- "Giving life to a woman found in a 4,250-year-old grave in Caithness"

- "Native Superheroes Are The Norm At This All-Indigenous Comics Store"

Happy birthday to E.M. Forster (1 January, 1879 – 7 June, 1970)!



“He broke off, and she fancied that he looked sad. She could not be sure, for the Machine did not transmit nuances of expression. It only gave a general idea of people -- an idea that was good enough for all practical purposes, Vashti thought. The imponderable bloom, declared by a discredited philosophy to be the actual essence of intercourse, was rightly ignored by the Machine, just as the imponderable bloom of the grape was ignored by the manufacturers of artificial fruit. Something 'good enough' had long since been accepted by our race.”
― E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops (1909)