From cocaine-fueled parties at the Chateau Marmont to multi-million dollar film sets, from warm ocean waves crashing onto the sandy shores of Santa Monica to the infamous Manson Family’s Spahn Ranch–Los Angeles in the 1960s and 70s was a place of multiplicity. Didion and Babitz turn the inherent ambiguity of the LA of their time into a coherent historical narrative. How do Joan Didion and Eve Babitz use the personal essay to construct a history of their shared present in Los Angeles during the 1960s and 70s, centered on the themes of fame, death, and morality?

Botanical gardens are far more than the idyllic spaces that find themselves flooded with tourists throughout each year. Rather, these human-made spaces in nature have been identified as catalysts for significant sociological changes. By investigating the history of British colonial botanical gardens, one can tie together environmental history, colonial history and the history of knowledge, and understand how humans shape and are shaped by the environment.

How does Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild-Built explore a utopian view of society that de-centers the human, and how do robots function within this society as mediators between humans and the environment?

Works of postcolonial literature provide a means to observe and negotiate with such conceptions of culture, as many novels explore characters who develop a notion of identity rooted in the coalescence of multiple cultural identities. How is the mother figure constructed as a source of an entangled transcultural identity in Jean Wide Sargasso Sea and Annie John?

A story that touched the hearts of 19th-century readers when it was first published, Little Women has continued to find relevance and popularity well into the 21st century through the practice of adaptation. How do adapters turn Alcott’s Little Women into their own story and keep audiences coming back for more?