About

S.B. West is an Associate Professor of Instruction at Northwestern University, with a research focus on Latin American literary and cultural canon hemispherically, emphasizing textual production from the Mayan or Yucatán peninsula. Their work is organized around abolitionist, decolonial, and trans feminisms that challenge the colonial, cisheteronormative underpinnings of gender, class, and race relations. Their current book-length project, titled Autonomy and Abolition in the "Caste War," involves a rereading of Yucatán's nineteenth-century textual register, highlighting how gender and race conflicts facilitated the transfer of colonial oppression into liberal state-building. Additionally, they have active projects on contemporary Yucatec Maya or Maaya T'aan literature, US Spanish-language im/migration literature, and feminist theory.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Art
• History
• Art history
• Computer Science
• Literature
• Classics
• Psychology
• Psychoanalysis
• Aesthetics
• Media studies
• Philosophy
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• Knowledge and Performance in the Early Modern Theatrum Mundi

  Open MIND · 2025-07-18 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The widespread use of the metaphor of the theater of the world in many kinds of early modern European writing masks the wide range of meanings the metaphor could convey. The theatrum mundi could signify either a turning away from the material world in favor of heaven or the scrupulous study of the visible world; it could emphasize the essential hypocrisy of society as well as the centrality of human action in the world. This doubleness of meaning is as much a part of the theater metaphor as either of its senses and seems to depend on the regular attribution to the theater —metaphorical and actual— of a division between what it represented and the means it used to represent it. This paper argues that our usual understanding of the theater as necessarily divided between a true substance and a false seeming does not necessarily apply to early modern uses of the theater metaphor as a characterization of the process of knowing. Rather, the theater metaphor suggests that knowledge is neither a mere reflection of what is known nor a complete fabrication, but a kind of performance or enactment. The understanding of knowledge as performance allows us to distinguish a theory of knowing that is peculiar to the early modern period, and perhaps that can serve to characterize that period against what comes before it and after it.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• MENTAL HEALTH AND WELL-BEING IN EDUCATION: STRATEGIES FOR SUPPORTING STUDENTS AND EDUCATORS

  Murray State's Digital Commons (Murray State University) · 2025-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Educational systems encounter severe challenges because their mental health crisis affects student learning performance and teacher workforce retention. The research investigates multiple aspects of school mental health and well-being through an evaluation of systemic elements that cause rising student and educator anxiety, depression, and burnout. The research evaluates effective interventions through Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) and trauma-informed practices and school-based mental health services across national and international case studies. The research paper examines how mental health support differs between socioeconomic groups while investigating how stigma makes these disparities worse and why equity-based frameworks with cultural sensitivity are necessary. The paper examines how legal and policy barriers, specifically FERPA and HIPAA regulatory ambiguity, prevent effective service delivery. The proposed policy solutions include teaching mental health in school curricula, increasing mental health staffing funding, and promoting cross-sector partnerships. The research shows that educational policy and practice require a complete, sustainable model that integrates mental health as a fundamental component to establish inclusive, resilient, high-performing school environments.

  Publisher

• Recent Studies in Tudor and Stuart Drama

  Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • History
  • Literature

  An assessment of recent scholarly work treating the literature of Tudor and Stuart Drama and some general observations on the state of the profession. A full bibliography and price list of works received by SEL for consideration follow.

  PublisherDOI

• 2

  2021-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter examines several intersecting uses of the concept of occupatio or occupation to distinguish playing upon a stage in relation to similar activities in early modern England. These include occupation as the rhetorical trope of interruption, as professional affiliation, habitual use of time, sexual euphemism, military besiegement, and finally in Blumenberg's nearly homonymous figure of reoccupation for historical change within apparently consistent or recurrent patterns. These uses point towards a literal definition of playing, that is, as the drawing of mobile and imprecise but specific conceptual and practiced boundaries around it. In particular, playing celebrated itself as distinctly innovative, in contrast to a widespread cultural bias against novelty. Readings of the moral play New Custom and of the later Sir Thomas More, which looks back at earlier kinds of performance like the moral play, propose a varying stance towards way playing innovates through its dislocations and repetitions of earlier examples.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  2021-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 1

  2021-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 6

  2021-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter discusses the intersection of playing practices and the food trades that supplied them, in particular what the foods most often associated with it say about playing. Playhouse foods like apples, nuts, garlic, and bottle ale were symbolic objects as well as real ones, delineating relations of conflict and community within the playhouses among players and playgoers. Playing itself was often said to be a gallimaufry or hodgepodge, a mixed hash of words, actions, playgoers, and outlooks. Eating figured appropriate ways of consuming and digesting playing, and since you are what you eat, suggested that playgoers converted what they saw into themselves. Taste too was physically embodied. Loudly opening bottles of ale, cracking nuts, or throwing apples, playgoers played along with the play. The garlic smell that was said to hover over the crowd literalized a shared atmosphere for players and playgoers alike. Not all foods that were consumed in playhouses were representative of playing. Its characteristic foods, though, were one medium in which playing defined itself.

  PublisherDOI

• 4

  2021-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter looks at the confusions of the playhouses, both thematic and actual. Plots of plays often turn around confusions of identities, genders, or actions, but the plots seem to borrow from the disorienting uproar and distracted thinking that were frequently said to characterize the playhouse and make it an antitype of Babel. Both kinds of confusion in turn were attributed to the mingling in playhouses, into which crowds of people of all classes, genders, ages, creeds, and other identities, were poured together, holding and finding diverging opinions, beliefs, and emotions. Along with the dangers of confusion and disorder, though, the interaction of the crowd within playhouses could sometimes become productive of new attitudes and new affects. They could become sites of incipient if sometimes inarticulate community, or a commons as a shared resource, as suggested in readings of one performance of A Comedy of Errors at the Christmas revels of Gray's Inn and an episode in Acts in which a Roman theater becomes the scene of an arraignment on Paul.

  PublisherDOI

• 3

  2021-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter considers the figure that Hamlet calls the groundling, but is more often called the understander: those members of an audience who stood in the yard under the stage, whose physical position and supposed ignorance led to the jibe that they did not cognitively understand the plays they attended. They were contrasted to the privileged stances of playhouse critics, who sat above the action in the galleries and whose dispassionate judgement was imagined to allow them to approach a performed play as if they were reading it. Understanding played a central role of the writing and preaching of Reformers like Thomas Cranmer. The understanding they looked for, however, was often as embodied as it was cognitive. In contrast to the critical form of judgment privileged by those who wrote and read plays, understanders approached playgoing with a different orientation. They responded to playing in practiced, appropriate ways that they did not articulate. They did not distinguish. Plays like King Lear and The Spanish Tragedy represent and praise these kinds of embodied knowledge as "seeing feelingly"; the understander who beheld them may have experienced something similar.

  PublisherDOI

• Trying Conclusions

  2021-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The conclusion takes up the difficulty and uncertainty with which plays determined their ends and established their own conclusions. Its example is a scene from Twelfth Night that never mentions playing specifically and yet is woven of almost every figure the book discusses. In it, characters drinking all night in a buttery sing a round. Its refrain is "Hold thy peace!" so the longer the characters sing together, the more discordant the song grows and the more they vie to demand each other's silence. Their singing grows louder and wakes other characters, who in turn come down to shut the singers up. These encounters transform in what had seemed the direction of the plot, introduce a second line of action, and shape the rest of the play in an unanticipated way. Out of these discordant pieces emerges a new, differently organized form and the promise of a different conclusion (ultimately unfulfilled, protended but intimated). The scene can be understood as an unarticulated emblem of playing.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jeffrey Masten

  11 shared

• Terry Hanley

  University of Manchester

  7 shared

• Clare Lennie

  7 shared

• Greg Nolan

  University of Leeds

  4 shared

• Hannah C. Mackay

  University of Manchester

  3 shared

• James Moorey

  3 shared

• Bryan Reynolds

  3 shared

• Frank Margison

  Greater Manchester Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust

  3 shared