One of the recurring themes in the public perception of containment policies during the current COVID-19 pandemic are the supposedly uneven and everchanging measures taken up by international, national and local authorities. This is especially the case in countries with a federal structure, like Germany. Not surprisingly, historical containment…[Read more]

In this short essay I discuss two new translations of Helmuth Plessner’s work, “Political Anthropology,” translated by Nils F. Schott (Northwestern University Press, 2018), and “Levels of Organic Life and the Human: An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology,” translated by Millay Hyatt (Fordham University Press, 2019).

This chapter analyses the image production practices of the Goettingen university anatomist and natural historian Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) and the Berlin artis Daniel Chodowiecki (1726-1801) when they collaborated on Blumenbach’s Beyträge zur Naturgeschichte (1790). Blumenbach wanted Chodowiecki to produce family scences for each of…[Read more]

In Nobel laureate Kawabata Yasunari’s novel Snow Country, the protagonist Shimamura refers to an “old book” which gave him in-depth knowledge about the region known in Japan as the “Snow Country”. The name of the book is not disclosed by Kawabata, but it is now known that the “old book” is Hokuetsu Seppu (first published in 1837), written by Su…[Read more]

Introduction to a special issue on Renaissance post-humanism and its afterlives.

Introduction to a special issue on Renaissance post-humanism and its afterlives.

The Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville was one of the most widely read works of the early Middle Ages, as is evidenced by the number of surviving manuscripts. August Eduard Anspach’s handlist from the 1940s puts their number at almost 1,200, of which approximately 300 were estimated to have been copied before the year 1000. This article, based on a…[Read more]

Literary journalism offers an important way for explaining the complexity of the scientific world to a lay audience. An analysis of two of Richard Preston’s pieces published by The New Yorker, “The Mountains of Pi” and “Capturing the Unicorn” and how they give emphasize science-in-the-making.

This article is a slightly revised version of a plenary panel address presented at the ‘Passages’ Symposium at the Sorbonne, Paris on the 12th of June 2019, in honor of the centenary of the birth of the American poet Robert Duncan. The article traces some of the mutual interest and influence between the poets Robert Duncan and Hilda Doolittle…[Read more]

The genesis and growth of minerals, as well as the existence in ore veins of such organic features as ‘seeds’, ‘matrices’, and ‘nourishment’, remained central and recurrent issues for natural philosophers, technicians, alchemists and practitioners throughout early modern Europe. By providing an overview of the main themes, voices, and concurrent…[Read more]

It is well known that the literary history of Latin America and its canon has been/is written by a patriarchal Eurocentric society that controls what constitutes national literature. It is also established that (colonial/contemporary) Latin American subjects in the periphery of the urban republic of letters are not included due to their gender…[Read more]

New directions of research in colonial women’s studies on gender roles, periphery and margins, and discursive practices that expand the notion of “literary text” (Adorno 177), indicate that the textual corpus of colonial women’s writings continues to increase. This emergent group of texts reveals patterns of rhetorical strategies and recurre…[Read more]

In the history of early modern science, the German physician Andreas Libavius (Halle, Saxony, c.1550–Coburg, Bavaria, 1616) is known for having promoted the institutionalization of alchemy in the academic sphere along with the creation of laboratories and instruments. Libavius was also remarkable for his extended network of scholarly friends and f…[Read more]

In the opening of Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen (1904), the protagonist, Elizabeth, comes across Marianne North’s autobiography, Recollections of a Happy Life (1894) and her description of the bathing near Putbus, “a sandy cove where the water was always calm, and of how you floated about on its crystal surface, and be…[Read more]

It is apparent that George Eliot’s novels were heavily engaged with development in natural history; her metaphors made use of and reflected on mid-1800s discussions of evolution and taxonomy. In this essay, research in science history and Eliot studies leads to evidence of how, in Felix Holt (1866), Eliot was influenced by evolutionary s…[Read more]

It is apparent that George Eliot’s novels were heavily engaged with development in natural history; her metaphors made use of and reflected on mid-1800s discussions of evolution and taxonomy. In this essay, research in science history and Eliot studies leads to evidence of how, in Felix Holt (1866), Eliot was influenced by evolutionary s…[Read more]