This chapter analyzes administrative efforts to control epizootic disease in eighteenth-century Schleswig-Holstein as disaster management. It points to the importance of quarantine, slaughter, and the control of trade as the principal methods adopted by governments and draws links with the methods used to control plague in humans. The chapter…[Read more]

Ritual-magical divination in manuscript Hs. 3227a of the Germanische Nationalmuseum Nuremberg

The tomb of Sunan Kudus is one of the walisongo monuments. The development of tourism caused a shift in the function and value of the tomb. The purpose of the study was conducted to explain the commodification of religious tourism in the Sunan Kudus Grave with research problems including: (1) the causes of commodification of the Sunan Kudus tomb,…[Read more]

This article engages with cosmopolitan conceptions of culture that flourished in the nineteenth century Caucasus with a view to clarifying the relevance of these legacies today. I focus in particular on the polymath writer ʿAbbās Qulī Āghā Bākīkhānūf (1794–1847). As I explore Bākīkhānūf’s historical writing, I consider how the Persianate liter…[Read more]

In Kant’s Critique of Judgment, his exploration of how something like life (organized matter) can appear to the faculties of a finite consciousness makes life as possible as it is impossible. A passing reference Kant makes to the idea that every organ of an organism can be seen as a parasite is taken as a lever to deconstruct his notion of…[Read more]

Liste der Neuerscheinungen zur deutschsprachigen historischen Wissens- und Gebrauchsliteratur 2019.

Public health in twenty-first century Ghana is mired with several issues ranging from the inadequacy of
public health facilities, improper settlement planning, insanitary conditions, and the inadequacy of laws
and their implementation. This situation compared to the colonial era is a direct contradiction.
Development in the pre-colonial era to…[Read more]

On scholarly traditions, quantitative assessments, and academic malpractices in Italy – and how someone disagreed (Isis, Vol. 110, n. S1, pp. 15-17 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/707594)

Massa por Argamassa apresenta uma exploração profunda de um dos maiores ilusionistas da literatura, Jorge Luis Borges. Seu conto “A Biblioteca de Babel” é um exemplar ilustre de sua capacidade lúdica, embora não somente devido ao mundo invertido que nele é imaginado, no qual uma biblioteca, que supostamente contém todas as combinações possíveis de…[Read more]

They say the global proliferation of colonial and neoliberal (ir)rationalities and the techno-managerial enclosure of the ‘commons’ (Hardt & Negri 2000; Harvey 2004) has resulted in a ‘foreclosure of politics’, prompting calls for a renewed technocultural hegemony for a post-capitalist future (Srnicek & Williams 2015) or a return to the revolut…[Read more]

This essay situates the file-sharing website AAARG (primarily used to share academic texts in the humanities) in the context of the economics of the contemporary academy. Contingent employment prevents access to research libraries, while reduced library budgets and the exploitative practices of publishing conglomerates such as Elsevier limit…[Read more]

Published 5/4/2016: A deconstruction of distant reading and a close reading of Jorge Luis Borges’ “On Rigor in Science.” The undecidability of the political and conceptual borders of the story challenges the possibility of any absolutist and orientalist cartographic project (such as Moretti’s literary mapmaking). Implications for the digital…[Read more]

This essay deconstructs Jane Bennett’s and Erwin Schrödinger’s theories of life to demonstrate the untenability of defining life on the basis of either identity (relation to self) or difference (relation to other). Because the living thing is undecidably self and other, its traditional bond to the self-relation of teleology is untenable. Yet reli…[Read more]

This essay deconstructs Jane Bennett’s and Erwin Schrödinger’s theories of life to demonstrate the untenability of defining life on the basis of either identity (relation to self) or difference (relation to other). Because the living thing is undecidably self and other, its traditional bond to the self-relation of teleology is untenable. Yet reli…[Read more]

This article treats late ancient rabbinic texts (ca. 1st-early 3rd cents. CE), reading them as biology, and following their ideas about the limits and possibilities of reproductive and species variation. I read sources from the tractates of Niddah, Kil’ayim, and Bekhorot, in the Mishnah and Toseta, as expressions of a science of generation, or a b…[Read more]

Introduction to the book Anton Pannekoek: Ways of Viewing Science and Society

One of Anton Pannekoek’s main scientific projects was to provide a representation of the appearance of the Milky Way – an object he believed to be an optical illusion. This paper elucidates how Pannekoek thought the Milky Way appearance was formed by a combination of human psychology and physiology, and why he attributed such significance to it.…[Read more]

Anton Pannekoek (1873-1960), prominent astronomer and world-renowned socialist theorist, stood at the nexus of the revolutions in politics, science and the arts of the early twentieth century. His astronomy was uniquely visual and highly innovative, while his politics were radical. Anton Pannekoek: Ways of Viewing Science and Society collects…[Read more]