relevate

In the world of literary scholarship, we’re always focused on the other guy. We place our opinions, our thoughts, our most cutting critiques onto the works of other writers, and work under an established discourse of criticism and praise. But, we very seldom dare to dabble in creation. Many of us feel that it isn’t our job, that creation is for the artists, the poets, the writers, and we exist onl...

In the mid nineteenth century, Louisa May Alcott was a struggling, aspiring writer. She had written a great deal for periodicals, published a few books, and dabbled in sensationalism. Most of these she wrote under her own name, but some she penned under pseudonyms. Nevertheless, despite her attempts on all of these fronts, nothing ever really caught—nothing worked to bring her star fully into the...

The world of print media has been ever evolving since its inception in the fifteenth century. Woodblock printing gave way to the Gutenberg press, which gave way to the Rotary press, which gave way to the internet. In just the last few decades, online media has catalyzed the largest change in the discourse of public literacy since the very invention of mass printing. Globalization has given us the...

When a book comes out—if it’s successful—a couple of things can happen. That book can make it on lists, like the New York Times Best-Sellers, or Goodreads Listopia . It can win awards like the Booker, the Hugo, or the Pulitzer. Or it can be translated into other languages—reprinted for audiences all over the world. There are some famous examples of this. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, was original...

Food. Food is so many things. It is nourishment, sustenance, it fuels our bodies as we work, live, and play. It’s something that motivates us, a symbol of survival. But it is also so much more. Food is capable of satisfying not just our biological needs, but our spiritual ones too. Food brings people together, through both process and product. It’s the thing that gathers families around the table...

We live in a content saturated media landscape. Since the birth of Netflix's streaming service in 2007, there has been a steady exponential explosion of online media and media platforms. It seems that every month we have a new streaming app, and every app offers dozens to hundreds of brand new original series and movies. Society has gone from being at the receiving end of a monocultural conve...

In 1925, right here in Wilmington North Carolina, Gertrude Perry West founded her little magazine, Poetic Thrills . It was the first of its kind in the state, and West had big plans. The magazine prided itself in its “national scope and international hope.” There were hundreds of poetry periodicals popping up around the country at this time, but Poetic Thrills was different. Commonly, little magaz...

In the Fall of 1933, John Andrew Rice and and a half dozen ex-Rollins professors set out into the unknown. Spurned by their previous employers, sick and tired of the American higher education system, they took to the wilderness—setting up camp in the North Carolina Blue Ridge Mountains. There, they did what any rag-tag ensemble of renegade college professors would do: they built a school. They att...

Acclaimed American novelist Kurt Vonnegut once said, that “The most daring thing (a person can do,) is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”  I started going to college in the heart of the COVID pandemic. It wasn’t until my third semester that I actually started going to classes in person; and, those classrooms were not at all what I expected. They...

Circa 1867, Louisa May Alcott was yearning for success. Despite being featured in a number of periodicals, writing consistently for serials, and even putting out a few books, she hadn’t yet broken through to the realm of real popularity. She tried seemingly everything, even writing salacious tales of seduction and murder — under pseudonyms, of course, but nothing ever really stuck. She just couldn...

We like to categorize things—put them in neat little boxes with defined walls, with simple labels, and expect that nothing will ever challenge or break free of those molds. We do this with people, with media, and clothing, we even do it with tools. We assign something, anything, a function, and we rarely think about the ways in which it might work outside of those parameters.  Take the computer fo...

Alice Corbin Henderson did not want to leave Chicago. The mid-west born and raised poet and editor had everything that she needed right there in the city. She was in with the hot and happening poets of the day, she was the co-editor of the most popular and influential of the city’s poetry magazines, and she was receiving considerable acclaim as a rising poet herself. When her husband told her that...

In the 2014 film, “Gone Girl”, which was adapted from the novel of the same name by Gillian Flynn, scorned wife Amy Dunne delivers a legendary monologue. If you haven’t seen the movie, or read the book; It’s a thriller about a couple who seem perfectly happy on the outside, but are rotten to the core within. When Amy fakes her own murder—fed up with her miserable marriage to a man she despises—she...

Food-hacks. Supplements. Fad diets. Nootropics. In the expansive landscape of online marketing campaigns, social media, and algorithms, it feels like half of all that you read or hear online boasts some form of posthuman biological optimization. These products promise a gambit of health benefits and biological improvements to the human body. Some claim to help your brain function at a faster speed...

Laird Hamilton once said, “If you don't understand the wave, you can't respect it. And if you don't have respect, it's only a matter of time before the ocean teaches you to get some.” I find that often, the same can be said of our work in the Humanities. To properly respect a novel, a poem, or even an essay, it helps to have a basic understanding of the forms and structures—the...

“What is it that you do in the English Department?” “What can you actually do with an English Degree?” “Don’t you all just end up as high school teachers?” These questions are ones that all English majors endure every time they dare talk about their studies. For decades, the Humanities have been the punch line of any joke regarding liberal arts education. It’s something that has always been taken...