By Alison Taft, Course Director of Creative Writing, Leeds Beckett University
Ailish Kate Brassil, PhD Candidate, University College Cork
Angela Dunstan, Reader in English Literature and Visual Culture | International Lead for the School of the Arts, Queen Mary University of London
Christina Hennemann, PhD Student Creative Writing / Abortion Poetics, University of Limerick
Clodagh Philippa Guerin, PhD Candidate in Refugee World Literature, University of Limerick
Edel Semple, Lecturer in Shakespeare Studies, University College Cork
Faye Lynch, PhD candidate in the Department of English Literature, University of Liverpool
Sarah Olive, Senior Lecturer in Literature, Aston University
Stephanie Palmer, Senior Lecturer, School of Arts & Humanities, Nottingham Trent University
Wen-chin Ouyang, Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature, SOAS, University of London
For Mother’s Day, we asked nine of our academic experts to tell us who they think is the worst mother in literature. From serious villains to children’s book baddies, these mothers subvert every maternal instinct.
1. Mummy, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (2017)
Isolated, broken and wedded to routine, 30-year-old Eleanor avoids mirrors, not due to the physical scars she bears, but because she sees “too much of Mummy’s face there”.
Readers meet “Mummy” only…
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By Ngodi Etanislas, enseignant-chercheur, Université Marien Ngouabi
Congolese will go to the polls on 15 March 2026 to elect their president, with a fractured opposition unable to present a single candidate. The Congolese Labor Party (PCT), in power since the end of the 1997 civil war, along with its allies, exerts extensive control over the state apparatus…
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By Hosffman Ospino, Professor of Hispanic Ministry and Religious Education, Boston College
Timothy Matovina, Professor of Theology, University of Notre Dame
Young Latinos’ activism for immigrant rights ove the past few months has put a spotlight on their importance for the future of the Catholic Church.
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By Itay Ravid, Associate Professor of Law, Villanova University
Nearly one-third of U.S. children reported missing are Black, even though Black people constitute roughly 14% of the U.S. population.
To address one dimension of this problem, Pennsylvania and a few other states, including Alabama and Massachusetts, have in recent years…
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By Coalter G Lathrop, Senior Lecturing Fellow in International Law, Duke University
There’s a growing interest in mining the ocean seabed for minerals essential to technology. But whose minerals are they? A Law of the Sea scholar explains.
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By Ahmed Ibrahim Yunus, Ph.D. Candidate in Environmental Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology
Joe Frank Bozeman III, Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology
Rather than generating climate-warming emissions and wasting nutrients and energy, food waste can become a resource if processed in sewage treatment plants.
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By Darrell Evans, Professor of Environmental Science and Sustainability, Purdue University
Surveys have found that researchers studying UAPs can face pushback from mentors and colleagues, even from people who think it’s an important line of research.
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By Amaarah DeCuir, Senior Professorial Lecturer in Education, American University
The war on terror is among the Middle East conflicts that sparked a rise of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab discriminatory incidents in the US.
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By Holly Willis, Professor of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California
AI tools can now generate movie scenes, resurrect lost footage and replace entry-level jobs – forcing Hollywood to rethink creativity, labor and authorship.
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By Katherine Moses, Instructional Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religion, University of Mississippi
I had been with my boyfriend, Tyler, for almost 10 years when we finally agreed that we should get engaged and married. Up until then, our respective jobs – mine as an academic, his as a fisherman – had forced us to endure long stretches apart.
But I had been offered a permanent academic job teaching philosophy in Florida. Tyler said he was willing to start a business there. It seemed like the beginning of a new, stable chapter of our lives.
We moved before he officially proposed, however. Then he went to Canada for seasonal work.
In our new house in Florida,…
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