Changing Scholarship

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 ...

One of the great paradoxes of my life at the moment is that I am writing a textbook (on religion and disability) while slowly moving away from using textbooks in my own courses, from lower-level intro classes to upper-level electives. Textbooks have been hard to wean myself from. They are ...

The best thing anyone ever told me in graduate school rings as clear and true today as it did then. It was during the first year of my doctoral work after one of my classes that my instructor pulled me aside and said matter-of-factly, “Mark, you’ve got a chip ...

This blogpost is a conversation between Kimberly Diaz, University of California Riverside, Michael DeAnda, DePaul University, and Neomi DeAnda, University of Dayton. KIM: Neomi, how did the Loteria session at the AAR come to be? NEOMI: This year marked the twentieth anniversary of the first time I attended the American ...