I’m taking the word “synagogue” seriously, and read Erkenwald’s judge as symbolically “Jewish,” a figure of the sclerotic quality of the law, a foil for Christianity’s uncertain relationship to its own law. I’ll probably publish this before my career’s over, but clearly I’m in no hurry….

Here’s a key paragraph:
“This chapter will be an exploration of the heritage function of Vikings in America. It will look at their presumptive whiteness, from the early nineteenth century, through the real mania for all things Viking in the mid to late nineteenth century, and on to present day fascinations with the Norse in popular music,…[Read more]

My response to “New Materialisms and the End of Critique,” MLA 2015, Session 454. http://newmaterialisms.mla.hcommons-staging.org/2015/01/07/hello-world/

The purpose of this graduate course is to examine key texts of the twentieth century that established the fundamental connection between language structures and practices on the one hand, and the formation of selfhood and subjectivity, on the other. In particular, the course will focus on theories that emphasize the role of formal elements in…[Read more]

Vertov’s early years in film: the Kino-Nedelia newsreels, the work on the agitational trains, the anti-religious propaganda films.

Vertov in 1917, and an investigation of some of his shaping contexts: musical practice, Futurist poetry, early non-fiction filmmaking, and Marxism.

Dziga Vertov’s education during the early years of World War: his changing personal situation as a war refugee, the connections he made at the Institute, the ideas that exerted an influence.

On Dziga Vertov’s early life and the city (Bialystok) and situations in which he grew up.

A reflection on the state of the archive in the state of post-theory.

A reflection on the state of the archive in the state of post-theory.

A reflection on the state of the archive in the state of post-theory.

Proposing an alternative phraseology of “unbecoming” to accent the risky, tentative, epigenetic processes of human development.

Proposing an alternative phraseology of “unbecoming” to accent the risky, tentative, epigenetic processes of human development.

contribution to roundtable on “Becoming Human” co-sponsored by the Middle English and Chaucer forums

contribution to roundtable on “Becoming Human” co-sponsored by the Middle English and Chaucer forums

Read 8 January 2016 in Austin, TX, at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, session number 218, “Quantity in English Verse: Linguistic and Neuroscience-Based Challenges to the Accentual Paradigm.” This short historiographical paper was the half-time show in our roundtable—an interlude between the session’s more substantive linguis…[Read more]

The chapter offers a close reading of two cinematic cases, Andrei Zviagintsev’s Elena (2011) and Govorukhin’s Voroshilov Sniper, in order to demonstrate in a reverse engineering move how publically executed punishments of the late 1990s were translated into quiet murders a decade later. This transition from ‘punishments outside the law’ to ‘crimes…[Read more]