In a talk he gave in 1995 at a conference at Georgetown University, “Cultural Frictions: Medieval Cultural Studies in Post-Modern Contexts,” Paul Strohm asserted that “postmodernism is preoccupied with history, endlessly obsessed with history, and with the nature of the claims the past exerts upon us; it might almost be called a way of thinking…[Read more]

This essay argues that literary narratives can serve as ideal sites through which to explore the emergence of time’s dissonant conjunctions and surprising forks, arising as they do from minds that are both transhistorical and rooted in particular times and places, and because literary texts are also objects that, as Jonathan Gil Harris has a…[Read more]

“Liquid Beowulf” serves as the Introduction to “The Postmodern Beowulf: A Critical Casebook” (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2006), and makes an argument for the Old English poem as a richly inter- and cross-temporal cultural response to historical traumas that still haunt our present moment and which also poses always important (and…[Read more]

This is the accepted manuscript version of my review of the edited volume Golden Middle Ages in Europe for History journal. Some wording may differ from the final published version. Please refer to the journal website.

This article explores a unique series of caricatures made between 1884 and 1896 by Yusuf Franko Kusa, a high-ranking Ottoman bureaucrat and a vener- ated member of n-de-siècle Pera’s high society. Yusuf Franko’s hitherto unstudied caricatures were comparable to contemporary European caricatures in style, but their subject matter was very loca…[Read more]

Analisa a trajetória de vida do ativista republicano José Leão Ferreira Souto (Natal, 1850 – Rio de Janeiro, 1904). Persegue o caminho trilhado por esse personagem, investigando seu caminhar nas três cidades em que viveu: Açu (Rio Grande do Norte), Rio de Janeiro e São Paulo. Privilegia as vivências nessas últimas cidades, nas quais ele concentro…[Read more]

While board games had been around for millennia, their popularization as a market commodity, with specilal themes and branding, had coincided with the formation of the global dominance of the British Empire as a maritime juggernaut. Early board game producers in the second half of the eighteenth century were mapmakers, and the board games shared…[Read more]

This paper is a critical examination of two antithetical theories on the role of authorial intention in the criticism and interpretation of literature: the New Critics’ “intentional fallacy” and E. D. Hirsch’s historicist objectivism. A third way is put forward: a regulative objectivism which emerges as a a result of critical debate.

This work addresses the question of how the patron saint festivities in San Germán, Puerto Rico assisted in the reconstruction of the Puerto Rican nation during the 1950s. Particularly, I focus on how community leaders reproduced ideas of nationhood based on hispano-centric, white, Catholic, and patriarchal parameters. I investigate how an…[Read more]

This paper analyzes the 1774 Portugal Inquisition’s Regiment and its link with the cultural interventionism that marked the Pombalist reformism, whichstarted at the second halfof 18th century. These are allthe policiesthat influenced the public, social, cultural and religious institutions of Portugal and its colonies, based in…[Read more]

This essay offers an introduction to select disciplinary developments in the study of history and in historical study of the Hebrew Bible. It focuses first and foremost on “cultural history,” a broad category defined by nineteenth- and twentieth-century developments in anthropology and sociology, literary theory and linguistics, and other fie…[Read more]

Part of a larger roundtable series on Arab American histories for the Journal of American Ethnic History.

Review of “Follow the Money: A Spatial History of In-Lieu Programs for Western Federal Lands.” Stanford University, Jay Taylor, Erik Steiner, Krista Fryauff, Celena Allen, Alex Sherman, and Zephyr Frank. Western Historical Quarterly, Volume 49, Issue 3, 1 July 2018, Pages 344–345, https://doi.org/10.1093/whq/why049.

This paper seeks to explain why Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People constitutes a valid historical work, rather than a religious text. It starts by addressing the nature of historical vs non-historical narrative, focusing on a concept of “genealogy of information.” It couples ideas from narrative theory, historiography, and…[Read more]

When the United States took possession of Puerto Rico in 1898, an aggressive
Americanization project introduced cultural practices, including
American sports. However, although Puerto Ricans incorporated U.S.
sports to their sporting profile, they did so adhering to a larger Hispanic-
American ideology. Although soccer, or f ´ utbol, was…[Read more]

Personal and object biographies can be interwoven and reveal much about the transnational connections between Australia and other places. This chapter features two interwoven biographies: Guna Kinne, a Latvian Displaced Person who began making a national dress as a school girl in Latvia and continued to make it as she fled the Soviet army to…[Read more]

The Museum of Chinese Australian History reopened on 29th August 2010 with newly refurbished exhibitions displaying Chinese Australian history and contemporary Chinese Australian identities. This article reviews the new exhibitions in comparison with the Gum San Heritage Centre at Ararat and the Golden Dragon Museum at Bendigo and specifically…[Read more]

SHOWING OFF: QUEENSLAND AT WORLD EXPOSITIONS 1862 TO 1988 BY JUDITH
MCKAY. ROCKHAMPTON AND SOUTH BRISBANE: CENTRAL QUEENSLAND UNIVERSITY
PRESS AND THE QUEENSLAND MUSEUM, 2004; 128PP, APPENDIX, NOTES,
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND INDEX; PAPERBOUND, $29.95

The ultimate cause of much historical, social and cultural change is the gradual accumulation of human knowledge of the environment. Human beings use the materials in their environment to meet their needs and increased human knowledge of the environment enables human needs to be met in a more efficient manner. The human environment has a…[Read more]

Clark Ashton Smith—unlike the more famous H.P. Lovecraft—engaged with the medieval as a setting for his fiction. Lovecraft admired classical Roman civilization and the eighteenth century, but had little time for medieval themes. As Brantley Bryant has related, Lovecraft wrote contemptuously that the Middle Ages was a period that “snivel[ed] along…[Read more]