My sonic work “City Noise” proposes both an artistic and a theoretical approach to the city-sound relationship. The default assumption about this relationship is that sounds reflect a one-to-one relationship between soundscape and landscape, both drawing upon and revealing the physical and social landscapes from which they originate. However, the…[Read more]

My sonic work “City Noise” proposes both an artistic and a theoretical approach to the city-sound relationship. The default assumption about this relationship is that sounds reflect a one-to-one relationship between soundscape and landscape, both drawing upon and revealing the physical and social landscapes from which they originate. However, the…[Read more]

Illustration as part of art works has often been considered a form of low art, but as it has progressively become more developed, it has established a decent place in the art community. Through this paper, the authors have tried to apply a primarily participatory research method, including participant observation, deep interview, and literature…[Read more]

Illustration as part of art works has often been considered a form of low art, but as it has progressively become more developed, it has established a decent place in the art community. Through this paper, the authors have tried to apply a primarily participatory research method, including participant observation, deep interview, and literature…[Read more]

Appeals to a cosmic ecological democracy are common in environmentally engaged scholarship, and especially in ecological theology. This essay takes up the thought of Sylvia Wynter, Delores Williams, and Saidiya Hartman to argue for a different horizon for ecological politics.

In this class, students will engage in a critical examination of environmental transformations that arise from the complex interactions between natural systems and human activities. The pursuit of knowledge about natural resources and ecological systems is a scientific enterprise, yet addressing questions about the production, consumption,…[Read more]

Susan Fenimore Cooper’s slow-moving nature journal, Rural Hours (1850), is an education of the senses in which both author and reader learn where to look and how to look. Her creative decision represent herself as a “gleaner” and to both use and subtly subvert the seasonal cycle (so that we may see more deeply, more intimately, more truth…[Read more]

An introduction to music appreciation and history that emphasizes the political, cultural, and social influences on music from antiquity to the 20th century. Contents include sacred and secular, vocal and instrumental, and folk and art music from across the Western world, including modern popular song. No previous musical experience necessary. All…[Read more]

South African novelist and essayist Olive Schreiner interpreted South African racial and class categories for British readers in an effort to prevent what she worried would be bloody conflict between Boers and indigenous Africans.

Folk sources and narratives underlie much of Wuthering Heights.

In The Burns Antiphoner – From manuscript to interactive resource, Anna Kijas reports on a new project based around a 14th-century source, the Burns Antiphoner. In this project they focus on integrating and delivering images, metadata, and recorded audio and video to provide an in-depth look at the contents and experience of this particular s…[Read more]

Traces the history of municipal solid-waste disposal at Bakersfield California from 1872-1992

This paper proposes that we can reimagine insular literatures and medieval islescapes as commodious seas of cultural and intellectual loci that span time, culture, and text alike. By moving beyond the rhetoric of insular separation or connectivity, we can see that islands connect even when medieval minds saw separation. The essay focuses on the…[Read more]

This article is a discussion of the “discourse on the unthinkable” surrounding potential future democratic engagements with rivers as non-human persons or natural objects. In the context of the Asia–Pacific region, this article suggests that the developments in material philosophy entitled “new materialism” are essential tools in the reconcept…[Read more]

This article explores the diagram found on the recto side of Pierpont Morgan, M. 982, a single leaf from a twelfth-century manuscript held by the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, and believed to originate in the scriptorium of Saint Peter’s Abbey in Salzburg, Austria. The diagram represents knowledge as an ‘ecodiagrammatic’ pattern, depic…[Read more]

Gathering into lively conversation scholars in medieval, early modern and object studies, Inhuman Nature explores the activity of the things, forces, and relations that enable, sustain and operate indifferently to us. Enamored by fictions of environmental sovereignty, we too often imagine “human” to be a solitary category of being. This col…[Read more]

In the context of the global water crisis, we seek an understanding of the histories of water management, their fashioning, and their legacy today. We juxtapose temporally diverse narratives to explore the premodern imaginings that have shaped our inheritance of hydrological thought. Rather than conceptualize their historical influence as a linear…[Read more]

Recent years have seen an infusion of new ideas into material philosophy through the work of the so-called ‘new materialists’. Poignant examples appear within two recent books: the first, Vibrant Matter by Jane Bennett (2010), sets out to “enhance receptivity to the impersonal life that surrounds and infuses us” (2010: 4). The second, Element…[Read more]

In 1984 I published a chapter on the art song, simply entitled “Song,” in my first book, Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After (University of California Press). The chapter aimed to replace the traditional understanding of song as a harmonious fusion of words and music. The chapter has had a fortunate reception, but as time has run…[Read more]

A short article reflecting on the relationship of Schubert’s songs to the culture of modernity, with reference to the author’s 1985 article “The Schubert Lied.” Includes an account of the song “Wanderers Nachtled.”