This is the syllabus for an introductory course on Marx and critical theory that I taught at Binghamton University in the spring semester, 2020. It revises and expands an earlier iteration of the course that I had taught in spring, 2018, also at Binghamton University.

[COMPLETE OPEN-ACCESS CURRICULUM INCLUDED] In April 2017, the world population topped 7.5 billion people. As our population continues to grow, natural resources are dwindling due to human consumption, and the resources that remain are unequally distributed. More than ever, our world needs thoughtful, engaged, global citizens to address the…[Read more]

Due to the great interest for the first two sessions of the Digital Humanities Doctoral Seminar, we are very happy to announce two new online sessions on August 3rd & 4th and on September 3rd & 4th. This doctoral seminar is an introduction to Digital Humanities defined as the application of methods and tools from Information and Communication…[Read more]

Focussing the Nasa’s Opportunity Rover, the essay claims the field of creativity as definitively human, supported by Vilém Flusser’s understanding the the “apparatus”.

En este trabajo analizamos Los empeños de una casa de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, una versión de la comedia de capa y espada en la que los valores patriarcales se critican y subvierten, mientras que los personajes femeninos adquieren complejidad y un inusitado protagonismo, pues en ellos se refleja cómo las mujeres de la época encaran los obst…[Read more]

Excerpt of Foreword by Kofi Annan: “Ten years have passed since a group of young editors published the original Rescue Mission: Planet Earth—a children’s version of Agenda 21. Agenda 21 is the blueprint for sustainable development adopted at the ‘Earth Summit’ in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Rescue Mission was a wake-up call to ‘stop senseless war…[Read more]

Interview with Martha Hennessy, the granddaughter of Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker, on her life, her anti-nuclear and peace activism, and ongoing trial as part of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7.

In the summer of 2018, I visited Nancy Fraser at her home to conduct an interview on the various social, economic, and political struggles of our day. From the fight against neoliberalism to the movements challenging the far-right, Fraser analyzes our contemporary situation, remaining firmly rooted in the Marxist tradition. Central to Fraser’s…[Read more]

This article analyzes the famous tenth-century Greek alchemical codex Marcianus graecus 299, and in particular its first quire, considering the structure and significance of the manuscript as a whole.

This is a review of the book “Kali’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna, Jeffrey J. Kripal, University of Chicago Press, 1995” . “Kali’s child” fell well short of a proof that Sri Ramakrishna’s mystical experiences were actually “profoundly, provocatively, scandalously erotic”. To reconstruct the autobiogr…[Read more]

In the year 1397 in the parish of Tuttington (Norfolk), a woman whose name is lost to history, frantic to rid herself of the evil spirit that possessed her, turned to suicide. She attempted first to hang herself, but her husband discovered her while life remained in her body, cut down the rope, and comforted her. A few weeks later she tried once…[Read more]

An examination of three cases of judicial separation from the late medieval court of York.

Since the publication of Philippe Aries’ Centuries of Childhood in the early 1960’s, historians of the family have been intrigued by the prospect of a history of change in familial sentiment. 1 Aries’ study of attitudes about children from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, based primarily on art and material evidence, demonstrates…[Read more]

This paper asks us to rethink the boundaries between consent and coercion in medieval England. From gentle persuasion to threats and abuse, coercion was a part of the courtship process. Although late medieval society expected parents to play an active, even heavy-handed, role in matchmaking, the English church recognized the possibility that…[Read more]

When Isabelle, widow of Richard Vergeons, commissioned the writing of a bill of complaint to Chancery at the end of the fifteenth century, she was clearly at the end of her tether. Six months before the writing of the petition, the wife of Thomas Hyll, a wire monger of London, approached the petitioner’s husband, begging for ‘‘secour and saufg…[Read more]

According to medieval common law, assault against a pregnant woman causing miscarriage after the fi rst trimester was homicide. Some scholars have argued, however, that in practice English jurors refused to acknowledge assaults of this nature as homicide. The underlying argument is that because abortion by assault is a crime against women, male…[Read more]

Scholars of the medieval family would generally agree that the lot of the medieval wife was not an easy one. Medieval husbands held the upper hand in the power relationship, both legally and socially. Although Lawrence Stone’s view of niarried life in the Middle Ages as “brutal and often hostile, with little communication, [and] much wife-beating”…[Read more]

Art historian Barbara Kellum’s 1973 article on child murder in medieval England paints a picture of a world replete with ruthless and murderous single mothers who escaped the legal consequences of their actions due to an indifferent court system that chose to turn a blind eye to the deaths of young children. Despite the overstated tone of her w…[Read more]

With regard to English common law, medieval women were able to participate in the curial process in only a limited way. This is not true of women as defendants: women could be sued for almost any civil or criminal plaint, but their privileges as plaintiffs were broadly curtailed by marital status and cultural expectation. The legal fiction of…[Read more]

In the year 1304, Matilda Bonamy of Guernsey, a young woman from one of the Anglo-Norman island’smost established and affluent families, found herself in a predicament familiar to many of today’s youth. A liaison with Jordan Clouet, also from a family of long provenance in Guernsey if not as comfortable, had left her pregnant. To Matilda the sol…[Read more]