This essay outlines five goals of publicly engaged humanities work. It was originally published in 2018 on the Humanities for All website, an initiative of the National Humanities Alliance Foundation. With the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Humanities for All documents and promotes publicly engaged humanities work in U.S. higher…[Read more]

This essay outlines five types of publicly engaged humanities work. It was originally published in 2018 on the Humanities for All website, an initiative of the National Humanities Alliance Foundation. With the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Humanities for All documents and promotes publicly engaged humanities work in U.S. higher…[Read more]

The objects of science education are transformed, degraded and disappeared for many reasons, and sometimes take other things with them when they go. This close reading of an undergraduate physiology laboratory report demonstrates how the kymograph was never a stand-alone instrument, but intertwined with conceptual frameworks and technical skills,…[Read more]

If art, education, and research always – up to some extent – put us in contact with things yet to be known, yet to be thought, what to say about this anticipation of something taking place, especially if this something ought to take place through our work? In this talk, I approach this question through a series of vignettes – ethics, polit…[Read more]

In the last decade, there has been an international resurgence of interest in the philosophy of Louis Althusser. New essays, journalism, collections, secondary literature, and even manuscripts by Althusser himself are emerging, speaking in fresh ways to audiences of theorists and activists. Althusser is especially important in educational thought,…[Read more]

Creative non-fiction/semi-academic reflective piece on seeing Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night for the first time in person at the Museum of Modern Arts.

This module will deal with the study of a few texts written in Medieval and Early Modern Europe related to Witchcraft, Heresy and Inquisition. The main purpose of this course is to consider how some patterns and stereotypes in the European cultural history of the past use to appear also in our current times. The outline below gives the general…[Read more]

This is the submission (unedited) version of the article published in Times Higher Education on April 11, 2019, which argues that the market-based competition that fuels so much of academic life is doing us all far more harm than good.

Gino Bonichi, better known as Scipione after the Roman general Scipio Africanus, was born in Macerata in 1904. He moved to Rome in 1909, where
he studied for a short period at the Academy of Fine Arts. Together with Mario Mafai and Antonietta Raphaël he was one of the founders of the so-called ‘Roman School’ or ‘Via Cavour School’, a group of…[Read more]

This short article offers a perspective on the social organization of repair and re-use of public infrastructures in the UK today by focusing on an former public library now transferred to a social enterprise which also hosts a repair centre for the processing of used household goods.

María Montes, musicologist expert in Medieval Music, interviewed me on April 6th, 2019 on my experience designing and teaching a course on Medieval Iberian Literature and History using the HBO Show “Game of Thrones” as a thematic axis.

Print-friendly remediation and backup copy of my course site for “Digital Storytelling,” part of the Spring 2019 offerings in the Public Humanities MA program at Brown University. Course web site can be found here: http://digitalstorytelling2019.jimmcgrath.us. This course focuses on three particular areas within the larger topic of Digital…[Read more]

The presentation documents a community-based history project conducted by students to uncover the details of the reported lynching of Oscar Mack, an African American veteran reported lynched in Orlando. Reported lynched in Orlando on July 17, 1922, by a mob in Orlando, the newspaper accounts of the incidents gave little detail. In 2013, Julian…[Read more]

Essay for the online manual on how to open a pirate kindergarden, commissioned by Soprasotto and WeMake, Milan (IT).

In this Visual Arts Journal Invited Lecture, I conduct a reading of art education historiography through two concepts, dis-appearance and re-turn, as an attempt to think philosophical research in art education historically and historical research in art education philosophically.

On the phenomenon of online hashtag syllabi as a digital tool used by recent political movements, particularly in the US, to instigate processes of political pedagogy.

This article shows how I have been lately combining my research in the cultural
history of the Spanish Middle Ages and Early Renaissance with the TV show Game
of Thrones for teaching purposes. I have been able to design a capstone seminar to
attract students interested in the popular medievalising TV fiction, proving them
than most of the…[Read more]