Changing Scholarship

With almost no leaves in the canopy above us, sunlight flooded the gently sloping hillside, penetrating and illuminating every open space in the leaf litter. My students and I had just spent some time—I don’t know exactly how long—inspecting a Dark Fishing Spider (Dolomedes tenebrosus) who was ...

Playin’ Mas’ – Intertextual Oz  As a person of Caribbean heritage and a scholar of Caribbean and African Diasporic studies, I see elements of Trinidad and Tobago’s carnival in accounts of Geoffrey Holder’s approach to envisioning The Wiz. It was Holder’s costuming, first iterated in sketches, which led ...

I am not a scholar of Religion or Theology. However, my work as a creative writer and professor of Creative Nonfiction often involves identifying everyday divinities; finding the sacred in small things, the flawed, and the profane. Many of the readers/contributors to this blog might recognize my name as ...

The Wiz It is the malleability of the Oz story to reflect different social, historical, and cultural contexts while utilizing recognizable symbols – special magical shoes, the Yellow Brick Road – which makes it such a powerful myth of America. Early in the twentieth century, within a few years of the publication ...

The Mythos of Oz This year, 2024, marks two milestones of Oz, an American mythos based on L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. In the first instance, it is the eighty-fifth anniversary of the MGM movie musical The Wizard of Oz (1939), and in the second, the fiftieth ...