This article explores three facets of green space within a medieval monastic context: its origin, its effects and properties and the way it was shaped into an expression of power. We learn a great deal about the history of green space through the nuances of monastic thought and vice versa. The term ‘green space’ in a medieval context may ini…[Read more]

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]

This essay ruminates the ethics of a co-implicated, bounded dependence between objects (human and otherwise) that are always in some sense withdrawing from each other but also always together in a some-place labeled “here”: the world (where no Absolute or Outside vantage point is possible or habitable). This essay also considers the possibility,…[Read more]

An expanded version of a talk presented at the Sub-conference of the Modern Language Association, “The Public and Its Privates,” Cheer-up Charlie’s, Austin, Texas, 7 January 2015, that ruminates both the difficulties of collective work as well as how various scholarly collectives create spaces of radical hospitality within which individual perso…[Read more]

Through a comparative analysis of Chaucer’s “The Clerk’s Tale” and Lars von Trier’s film “Breaking the Waves,” this essay wonders what happens when two texts and one reader happen to each other and open up a singular adventure that is also a moment of ‘futurition’ that opens up new horizons of meaning, both human and inhuman. How can we reckon the…[Read more]

This essay argues, through various personal anecdotes, for a university in which our work and lives would turn away from impersonal professionalism and more towards a praxis where we would recognize better, as Brantley Bryant has written, that our “very strength, our very expertise, comes from darkness, indeterminacy, unmarketably disastrous…[Read more]

A plea for more generous modes of reading each other’s scholarship in order to arrive at a University that values productive dissensus within a framework of shared endeavor and solidarity. The essay also argues for new relational modes in which personal, professional and other identities would be rejected in favor of cruising each other’s thought and work.

This is a chronological comparative study of five visual artefacts spanning about a millennium in Chinese history and retrieved from various sources included in the mid-fifteenth century collection called in English the Taoist Canon. All five specimens are basically titled “Taiping fu” 太平符 in Chinese, literally “Great Peace Symbol”. By briefly in…[Read more]

In this chapter I investigate the coercive relationship between authorship and copyright from the perspective of intersectional feminist and de-colonial knowledge practices. Examining three artistic strategies (Richard Prince, Cady Noland and the Piracy Project) which all try to challenge the close ties between copyright and authorship – a…[Read more]

A typical cow on Earth at the turn of the 21st century is figured as an information-generating machine. She generates data from the time she is born, at every developmental milestone, with the birth, growth, and death of each of her calves, including birth, weaning, and yearling weight, calving ease, and feeding data that help farmers compute…[Read more]

The Centre for Post Digital Cultures invites you to its second annual conference, which will explore the phenomenon of ‘Pirate Care’. The term Pirate Care (Graziano, 2018) condenses two processes that are particularly visible at present. On the one hand, basic care provisions that were previously considered cornerstones of social life are now…[Read more]

The Centre for Post Digital Cultures invites you to its second annual conference, which will explore the phenomenon of ‘Pirate Care’. The term Pirate Care (Graziano, 2018) condenses two processes that are particularly visible at present. On the one hand, basic care provisions that were previously considered cornerstones of social life are now…[Read more]

Few of Arendt’s writings have drawn more criticism from her own supporters than “Reflections on LIttle Rock,” in which she opposes the federally mandated desegregation of schools. I take Arendt’s comments as a way of opening up problems in her conception of the relationship among political storytelling, plurality and judgment. I do this through a…[Read more]

This is a worksheet I ask students to use to engage in self-assessment of their own essays. I use a version of the same worksheet for peer feedback on essays.

From Charles Taylor to Marcel Gauchet, theorists of the social imaginary have given us new ways
to talk about the shared structures of meanings and practices of the West. Theorists of this group
have argued against the narrow horizons of meaning that are deployed by deliberative political
theories in developing their basic normative concepts…[Read more]

When speaking of the philosophical importance of James’s late style, critics and philosophers have taken two broad approaches. One route, exemplified by Martha Nussbaum, attributes this style to the sensitivity of the characters. The other, exemplified by Robert Pippin, attributes the writing’s complexity to the ambiguities of the moral codes dur…[Read more]

Introduction to Althusser’s concept of ideological reproduction, written for those with little to no theory experience.

Introduction to special issue of IJHS: The Gift in India in Theory and Practice

During nonemergency appointments at traditional sites of āyurvedic healthcare in Kerala, South India, classically trained Brāhmaṇa physicians and their patients seldom exchange anything of substance (whether medicinal or monetary). The physician-patient interface instead routinely involves an exchange of knowledge. Interactions between phy…[Read more]

As the Indian population’s interest in biomedicine increased at the end of the nineteenth century, public confidence in India’s indigenous medicines flagged. Physicians of Ayurveda and officials of Indian medical organizations responded with discussions about and plans for reconfiguring the āyurveda (“life science”) of the Sanskrit medical…[Read more]