When we received the news that we would be moving to remote teaching for the rest of the semester, my Hispanic Theatre & Performance class was in the middle of reading La vida es sueño (Life’s a Dream) by Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1636). This play, a theatricalized adaptation of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” follows the struggles of two protagonists as their lives intersect: a prisoner who is actually a prince and a woman, disguised as a man, seeking revenge on the man who abandoned her. For us, it was also extremely pertinent for understanding our current reality...

In the middle of March, at the height of the novel coronavirus pandemic the internet was flooded with a convenient claim: “There is a St. Corona, and She is the Patron Saint against plagues and epidemics.”¹ Since I am an art historian with a background in early modern visual culture, this caught my attention. According to several sources, not only was St. Corona associated with pandemics, but the remains of the second-century saint were thought to rest in a small town in Northern Italy not far from the epicenter of the European outbreak...

Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines exile as “the state or a period of forced absence from one’s country or home.” This means, of course, exile depends on one’s definition of home. For those of us in higher education, residential students who live “on campus” may very well consider their time at college as an experience of exile—forced from their home by parents, peer pressure, or broader economic systems. On the other hand, many students may find being away from campus its own type of exile. Gratefully, many of...

In the spring of 2020, the novel coronavirus manifested a global pandemic (COVID-19) large enough to require a complete shift in higher education. Students and educators had to adapt to digital classes; some universities faced complete restructuring and closures. Even before the switch to online lessons, difficulties persisted in the teaching of early modern studies, specifically the interplay between those centuries and ours, a productive link that is often hard to teach and hard for undergraduates to grasp. By relating my experience teaching Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (ca....