Simmers, Erich. "The Global War on Culture: The Occupation of Arab-American Cultural Citizenship in Randa Jarrar's Short Fiction." Anamesa 4.2 (Fall 2006, Borders Issue): 5-20

This article explores how cultural citizenship becomes a occupied territory in Randa Jarrar's short stories, "A Frame for the Sky" and "Lost in Freakin' Yonkers." In these two texts, global hegemonic forces compete for cultural dominance over Arab-American cultural citizenship, and Arab-Americans' negotiation of cultural practice and belief mirrors the experience of living in an occupied territory with its own unique form of cultural partition violence (Article, Journal).

Simmers, Erich. "The Burning Towers: A Twenty-First-Century Re-Imagining of Leda's Terror." Anamesa 4.1 (Spring 2006, Violence Issue): 78-92

"A shudder in the loins engender there / The broken wall, the burning roof and tower / And Agamemnon dead." Is it possible to see the attack on the World Trade Center in the burning tower? Can the reader imagine wires dangling from "the vague terrorized fingers" of a hooded Abu Ghraib prisoner? These are provocative claims beyond what Yeats could have intended, but the labeling of acts as terror can be seen in the anti- and postcolonial atmosphere of 1910s and 1920s Ireland. By exposing the connections between the poem's original context and modern conceptions of terror, this article interrogates postcolonial readings of "Leda" and connects literature with terrorist imaginaries (Article, Journal).