By way of the autobiographical writings of Bruno Schulz and the “resurrection” paintings of Stanley Spencer, this talk sketches out some of the ways in which literature and the fine arts situate themselves within the division, or series of breaks, that Michel de Certeau argued Western historiography inscribes between past and present, between the…[Read more]

“Buddho-Taoism” is a neologism that appeared in Western academic discourse during the late nineteen-forties, was put to various uses without being consensually defined, enjoyed a brief vogue around the turn of the twenty-first century, and began to fall from grace in recent years. This neologism implicitly created new epistemic repertoires der…[Read more]

María Montes, musicologist expert in Medieval Music, interviewed me on April 6th, 2019 on my experience designing and teaching a course on Medieval Iberian Literature and History using the HBO Show “Game of Thrones” as a thematic axis.

Ernst Haeckel and Emil du Bois-Reymond were the most prominent champions of Darwin in Germany. This essay compares their contributions to popularizing the theory of evolution, drawing special attention to the neglected figure of du Bois-Reymond as a spokesman for a world devoid of natural purpose. It suggests that the historiography of the German…[Read more]

In this Visual Arts Journal Invited Lecture, I conduct a reading of art education historiography through two concepts, dis-appearance and re-turn, as an attempt to think philosophical research in art education historically and historical research in art education philosophically.

This essay considers the category of “Jewish law” in Jewish studies while inviting scholarly and historiographic assessment of the ways that Judaism’s link to law has come to appear as obvious. Considering that our present concepts of law are invariably linked to a geographically and temporally parochial “mythology of modern law,” the essay sounds…[Read more]

This article shows how I have been lately combining my research in the cultural
history of the Spanish Middle Ages and Early Renaissance with the TV show Game
of Thrones for teaching purposes. I have been able to design a capstone seminar to
attract students interested in the popular medievalising TV fiction, proving them
than most of the…[Read more]

On scholarly traditions, quantitative assessments and academic malpractices in Italy, and how these factors affect Italian scholarship in the history of science.

Preface to Guy Beiner, Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster (Oxford University Press, 2018)

Book review of the book by Marco Leonardi (“Renaissance Quarterly,” Volume 71, n. 4, 2018, pp. 1489-1491).

In this article, we attempt to resolve only one of the many controversies centered round Muhammad Ali Jinnah – one involving his last name. (page nos.520-526, Reddy Smriti: exploring the Indian past (commemoration volume in honor of Dr.Y. Gopal Reddy). P. Chenna Reddy, ed., B R Publishing Corporation, New Delhi)

This is the original paper, which was edited slightly and renamed as: India: One Nation or Many Nationalities – Ancient Sources and Modern Analysis, History Today, Journal of the Ind. History and Culture Society). New Delhi, No. 7, 2006-07 (pp. 1-11).

This essay examines Giambattista Vico’s philology as a contribution to democratic legitimacy. I outline three steps in Vico’s account of the historical and political development of philological knowledge: first, his merger of philosophy and philology, and the effects of that merger on the relative claims of reason and authority; second, his use…[Read more]

This article focuses on the diplomatic mission of the Ragusean captain Casilari, to free the crew of a Ragusean ship captured by the Moroccan pirates. Through the relations between Ragusa and the empire of Morocco, the paper deals with an episode of the endemic piracy in the Mediterranean, but it also sheds light on the importance of the Ragusean…[Read more]

My poetic Preface to Kathleen Biddick’s book, “Make and Let Die: Untimely Sovereignties” (punctum books, 2016), which is indebted to and adapted from Adrienne Rich’s poem “Diving into the Wreck,” which sketches out the exploratory soundings of a sea-wreck of forgotten histories that bears uncanny resonances with Kathleen Biddick’s own acediou…[Read more]

“Liquid Beowulf” serves as the Introduction to “The Postmodern Beowulf: A Critical Casebook” (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2006), and makes an argument for the Old English poem as a richly inter- and cross-temporal cultural response to historical traumas that still haunt our present moment and which also poses always important (and…[Read more]

Extending an argument presented in two articles published Studies in Art Education and Visual Arts Research, I discuss what would a poetic historiography mean for art education research.

This paper describes a catalogued but rare manuscript (call number 170/307) held by the Charles Young Research Library at UCLA, in which one can find the by-laws of a barely known medieval confraternity, located in the city of Teruel and devoted to St. Julian.
Most of these by-laws were written around 1402, although it does also…[Read more]

This essay offers an introduction to select disciplinary developments in the study of history and in historical study of the Hebrew Bible. It focuses first and foremost on “cultural history,” a broad category defined by nineteenth- and twentieth-century developments in anthropology and sociology, literary theory and linguistics, and other fie…[Read more]

Notes on the book Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer—a book by Richard E. Palmer (Evanston: Nortwestern UP, 1969). Part I: On the Definition, Scope, and Significance of Hermeneutics; Part II: Four Major Theorists (Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger and Gadamer); Part III: A Hermeneutical M…[Read more]