The screening was introduced by Duke University German Studies Professor Mert Reisoglu, whose research centers on Turkish-German Studies, media theory and history and intellectual history. In his opening remarks, Reisoglu noted the film鈥檚 historical parallels with the political climate in Germany in the 2010s.

The event was co-moderated by Assistant Professor of English Dan Burns, who assigned the film as part of his Winter Term film studies class, 鈥淭he Social Thriller.鈥� Eager to explore an international variant of the course鈥檚 largely U.S.-themed focus on sociopolitical allegory in suspense and horror narratives, students noted that Reisoglu鈥檚 commentary offered an international perspective on the issues explored in American films such as Jordan Peele鈥檚 鈥楪et Out鈥� and Nikyatu Jusu鈥檚 鈥楴anny.鈥� Other students appreciated the new exposure to director Fatih Akin鈥檚 work, which revolutionized the treatment of migrants in Germany by emphasizing 鈥渢he pleasures of hybridity鈥� associated with navigating two countries in films like 鈥淗ead-On鈥� and 鈥淭he聽Edge of Heaven.”

Global Neighborhood鈥檚 Spring 2025 series continues Feb.18 in Global Commons 103 with filmmaker Frederick Murphy鈥檚 鈥淚ndelible Appalachia.鈥� Other series titles centering on the neighborhood theme of 鈥淪ustainable Futures鈥� this year will include Ryusuke Hamaguchi鈥檚 鈥淓vil Does Not Exist鈥� on March 11, Micha Peled鈥檚 鈥淏itter Seeds鈥� on March 25 and Zheng Xu鈥檚 鈥淯pstream鈥� on April 15.

Inspired by their recent team-taught Literature on Screen course, Burns, assistant professor in English, and Swanson, assistant professor in Cinema & Television Arts, gave a hybrid talk on a panel with the theme 鈥淣etworks, Multiverses, and (Trans)Media Ecologies.鈥�

Their talk, titled 鈥淒irection as Data Extraction: Surveilling Behavioral Surplus in Joseph Kosinski鈥檚 ‘Spiderhead,’鈥� explored Shoshana Zuboff鈥檚 theory of 鈥渂ehavioral surplus鈥� in a comparative analysis of George Saunders鈥� short story 鈥淓scape from Spiderhead鈥� (2010) and director Joseph Kosinski鈥檚 recent Netflix Original adaptation, “Spiderhead” (2022). Reading the work’s “clinical trials” context as an allegory of surveillance capitalism, they argued that Kosinski鈥檚 modernist and postmodern production design evokes the data-gathering practices mobilized by corporate interests outside of their users’ awareness and autonomy鈥攁 new prediction market that maximizes profits through the harvesting of personal information.

Hosted by the University of Montana this year from Sept. 21-23, the Literature/Film Association is currently the largest and most active scholarly society in the United States devoted to the study of literature and film.

A panelist on the interdisciplinary Forum Session 聽Pearson delivered her paper, 鈥淭he White Supremacist Strategy of Lost Cause Medievalism,鈥� in a roundtable format that included scholars from Drake, Rice, Caltech, George Washington and Cal State-Monterey Bay. Pearson鈥檚 paper argued that Thomas Dixon鈥檚 bestselling novels “The Leopard鈥檚 Spots”聽and “The Clansman” (on which the blockbuster 1915 movie The Birth of a Nation was based) used popular ideas about the medieval period to seize the white U.S. imagination and promulgate white racial reunification at the expense of Black lives and rights.

Chairing an Asian Literatures Special Session entitled 聽Karunanayake introduced and moderated discussions by literature faculty from Colgate University, Hunter College and UT-El Paso. His talk, 鈥淪hyam Selvadurai鈥檚 Mapping of Queer Memory as Postmemory,鈥� applied Marianne Hirsch鈥檚 formulation of 鈥減ostmemory鈥� to the queer Sri Lankan Canadian writer鈥檚 work and argued that Selvadurai鈥檚 invocation of queer memory fills the gaps of the heteropatriarchal nationalist consciousness, thus presenting a postmemory of postcolonial Sri Lanka.

For the roundtable 聽Burns鈥� 鈥淭oo Big to Fail: Hanya Yanagihara鈥檚 A Little Life and the Art of Excess in the Age of Inclusion鈥� analyzed narrative theories of maximalist fiction in a comparative case study on the varied reception histories surrounding Yanagihara鈥檚 National Book Award-nominated and Booker Prize-shortlisted epic novel. Burns鈥� paper explored how the existing critical orthodoxy surrounding big, ambitious novels written by women deliberately fails its subjects through implicit biases that conflate the perceived perceptual limitations of a given work鈥檚 visionary scope with the minoritarian positionality of its authorship. The panel included scholars from Hartwick College, UT-Austin, Cornell, Oregon, and Penn State-Harrisburg, whose work examined emergent literary forms and their relationship with or remediation by other media, including film, documentary, social media, publishing platforms, transmedia, autotheory, and other hybrid narrative and poetic forms.

The Modern Language Association has been the flagship conference in literary studies since 1883 with sessions that present a range of critical approaches on a variety of languages, literatures, and cultural traditions. This year鈥檚 convention鈥檚 theme, 鈥淲orking Conditions,鈥� invited participants to consider the subject of knowledge work through 鈥渢he reconstruction of the profession, its institutions, and its wider environment.鈥�

Morehead, assistant professor of English, presented his research on how some films produce the same kind of political emotions that public monuments and memorials do. His talk 鈥淢onument Films and the Politics of Tragic Emotions鈥� identified the aspects of a new film genre that aligns itself with the commemorative and political aspirations of monuments. Reading Oliver Stone鈥檚 film “World Trade Center” as an example of how these kinds of films create a national 鈥渢ragic spectatorship,鈥� he made the claim that monument films do their political work through orienting their audiences toward feeling certain national events as tragedies.

Inspired by their work in a recent Literature on Screen course, Burns, assistant professor in English, and Stafford, a first-year English major, gave a collaborative talk entitled, 鈥淰oice v. Vision: The Reception Histories of ‘If Beale Street Could Talk.’鈥�

Their presentation examined Barry Jenkins鈥� 2019 adaptation of James Baldwin鈥檚 novel in dialogue with recent film scholarship as well as excerpts from the author鈥檚 own unfinished screenplay of his narrative. Written on-spec by Baldwin after Universal Studios acquired the rights to “If Beale Street Could Talk” in the mid-70s, the fragmentary document remains unpublished and is available only in the at the 鈥攚here Burns conducted archival research in Fall 2021 with a grant from the Provost鈥檚 Office.

The virtual symposium, entitled 鈥淥nly Connect,鈥� highlighted the importance of textual, intertextual, social and biological adaptation during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Literature/Film Association is currently the largest and most active scholarly society in the United States devoted to the study of literature and film. The U.K.-based Association of Adaptation Studies is committed to challenging assumptions concerning the boundaries of literature on screen and enlarging the place of adaptation studies across the humanities curriculum.

As one literature major explained, “Peele’s backstory for this movie’s premise is far deeper than the one created for his previous film. It’s ‘The Sunken Place’ expanded and reimagined as a community space—with its own secret history and legacy.”

“That’s why I probably won’t be sleeping tonight,” another student quickly added.

Following the Friday evening show, Assistant professors Craig Morehead and Dan Burns led an hour-long discussion over coffee with a dozen diehard cinephiles in the Snow Family Grand Atrium in the School of Communications. The conversation focused on a range of topics: from interpreting the Tethered’s subterranean society to Freudian interpretations of “doubling” and “the uncanny” to spotting Peele’s complex layering of intertextual references to other films and literature.

Underscored by the director’s trademark sardonic humor, the film’s creative use of soundtrack, for instance, had recent literature graduate and attendee David Patterson ’18 marveling at one scene’s juxtaposition of The Beach Boys and N.W.A. while also looking up Minnie Riperton song lyrics to better grasp Peele’s final message.

“With all the allusions, pop culture references, and Easter Eggs thrown at the audience,” Patterson said, “we've got our work cut out for us.”

If nothing else, the film’s searing commentary on the polarizing state of U.S. national identity—students and faculty alike agreed—does for “family vacations” what its predecessor did for “meeting the parents.”

Grant funding for this special event was generously provided by the Office of the Associate Provost for Academic and Inclusive Excellence.

Entitled “Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon: Recovery and Reception,” the panel featured the research of scholars from Brown, Harvard, Wright State University, and the Universidad San Francisco de Quito (Ecuador). Each presenter engaged with a variety of questions surrounding Hurston’s text, including topics ranging from the publication history of her anthropological writings and innovations in ethnographic fieldwork, to representations of gender in relation to Barracoon’s social, economic, and historical contexts. Conversation following the talks turned to the ethics of recovery work in the Hurston archive as well as the text’s contribution to research on global human trafficking in the 19th century.

Burns also served as a panelist on a session entitled “Temporality, Race, and the Fantastic in African American Literature” for which he presented his paper “‘Mock-Scholarship’ and the Research Space of Possible Queer Worlds in Samuel R. Delany’s The Mad Man.” The paper examined Delany’s intertextual use of “mock-scholarship”—a self-reflexive strategy commonly associated with postmodern satire—to recover previously neglected areas within LGBTQ history. In dialogue with recent literary criticism on the affective relations of queer experimental aesthetics and hermeneutics in postwar U.S. fiction, Burns’s paper joined scholars sharing their work on other contemporary writers of speculative fiction such as Kiese Laymon, Octavia Butler, Diana Gabaldon, Nnedi Okorafor, and N.K. Jemisin.

A national conference and journal founded in 1973, the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States seeks to expand the definition of new, more broadly conceived U.S. literature through the study and teaching of Latino, Native American, African American, Asian and Pacific American, and ethnically specific Euro-American literary works, their authors, and their cultural contexts.

Burns’ paper, “Secret History as Subterraneity: Excavating Chris Abani’s Las Vegas” takes a geocritical approach to poet-novelist Abani’s 2014 neo-noir novel “The Secret History of Las Vegas,” in which apartheid’s traumatic legacy is subtly remapped onto Sin City and its surrounding desert environs.

Targeting the familiar activist trope of “going underground” and the secret history subgenre’s rich legacy in exploring it, Burns’ discussion departs from conventional readings of Abani’s work within the theme of masculinist critique associated with the fiction of other “Third Generation” Nigerian English-language writers (Cole, Obioma, Onuzo, and Adichie) to argue for the theoretical co-development of “excavation” as both cultural metaphor and epistemic lens.

Following this logic, the paper locates Abani’s work in the telluric tradition of contemporary novelas de la tierra—an ethnographic strategy the novelist shares with other recent popular writers of color such as Hanya Yanagihara (“The People in the Trees”), Marlon James (“A Brief History of Seven Killings”), and Colson Whitehead (“The Underground Railroad”).

Addressing the larger conference theme of “TransCulture,” the paper was part of a panel dedicated to genre, gender and identity that examined the transnational and transhistorical dimensions of the multi-ethnic West, as well as issues of transience and permanence in migrant, immigrant, refugee, and diasporic experience with respect to debates about citizenship and borders.

A national conference and journal founded in 1973, MELUS seeks to expand the definition of new, more broadly conceived US literature through the study and teaching of Latino, Native American, African American, Asian and Pacific American, and ethnically specific Euro-American literary works, their authors, and their cultural contexts.

Inspired by popular student reaction to the new adaptation’s release in September, Assistant Professor of English Dan Burns invited two Asheville film critics to 黑料不打烊 on Saturday, Jan. 13 for an evening double feature and discussion of two King classics: "Carrie" (1976) and "Stand by Me" (1986).

“Asheville Movie Guys” Bruce Steele and Edwin Arnaudin regularly lead hosted screenings for capacity audiences: a popular fixture of the city’s downtown arts scene for the last three years. Invited to speak to Burns’ topics in literature course on Stephen King, Steele and Arnaudin engaged with students about everything from the author’s imaginative impact on contemporary popular culture and media to the social, historical, and political backgrounds for King’s coming of age-themed novels and their adaptations.

As one student noted after the event, “Thinking about Stephen King's books and movies apart from a strictly horror context gives those stories an unexpected resonance—even 30 to 40 years after publication or release. Bruce and Edwin’s accessible approach brought this home with a fresh, timely perspective that kept everyone absorbed the whole night.”

Critic-partners in the screening initiative, Steele and Arnaudin shared a wealth of experience from the fields of media studies, journalism, and cultural criticism with 黑料不打烊’s campus community.

Former Editor-in-Chief for The Advocate (1999-2006) and Managing Editor of Out (1992-1998), Steele is the current planning editor for the Asheville Citizen-Times and lead film critic for the Asheville Scene (the Citizen-Times’ entertainment division). He holds an master's degree in film history, theory, and criticism from Columbia University. Arnaudin, with a master's in library and information science from UNC-Chapel Hill, is a staff writer for Mountain Xpress and also reviews films for . Both are members of the Southeastern Film Critics Association (SEFCA) and North Carolina Film Critics Association (NCFCA).

Grant funding for this special event was generously provided by the Office of the Associate Provost for Academic and Inclusive Excellence and the Office of Substance Education.

addresses the resurgence of long-form fiction in mainstream American publishing. Burns’s critical introduction explores the extent to which older genre theories such as “encyclopedic narrative,” the “Mega-Novel,” “modern epic,” and the “systems novel” remain relevant with the rise of digital literacies and comparative textual media. Examining the current revival of interest in large-scale works through a survey of newly released titles from major American authors including Joshua Cohen, Mark Z. Danielewski, Garth Risk Hallberg and Hanya Yanagihara, the issue also considers how “maximalist” approaches to fiction require a certain dedication from reading audiences at a time many critics complain that people no longer have time for long, dense and often difficult books.

Burns teaches writing, literary interpretation, and special topics in literature courses at 黑料不打烊, and recently completed his Ph.D. in American literature from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Burns’s paper, “Toward a Mestiza Modernism: Multi-Ethnic Canon Formation and the Borderland Discourses of Gayl Jones’s Mosquito,” examines the novelist Gayl Jones’s use of transnational and interethnic border imagery to advance a critique of the Western canon’s historical neglect of writers and communities of color. Exploring the larger conference theme of “Performing Racial, Gender, Sexual, and Class Identities in Multi-ethnic American Literatures and Culture,” the paper was part of panel dedicated to authors of diverse ethnicities—including Samson Occam, Winnifred Eaton, and Gina Apostol—who often revise society’s expectations for their characters and for themselves as artists through the reinvention of literary devices and genre definitions.

A national conference and journal founded in 1973, MELUS seeks to expand the definition of new, more broadly conceived US literature through the study and teaching of Latino, Native American, African American, Asian and Pacific American, and ethnically specific Euro-American literary works, their authors, and their cultural contexts.

This year’s conference was held in Charleston, South Carolina, to celebrate the rich legacy of the coastal city’s multicultural peoples.