Narrative account of Imam Shamil, published in Russia’s People of Empire: Life Stories from Eurasia, 1500 to the Present, eds. Steve Norris & Willard Sunderland (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), 117-128.

About four decades ago, the two modern editions of the Cancionero de obras de burlas (19OB),2 of Domínguez (1978) and Jauralde Pou-Bellón
Cazabán (1974), finnally condemned to its deserved obscurity Usoz y Río’s 1841 edition. Even though both his edition and his library on spiritual
topics have an evident archaeological interest (Vilar), the q…[Read more]

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

This essay examines Giambattista Vico’s philology as a contribution to democratic legitimacy. I outline three steps in Vico’s account of the historical and political development of philological knowledge: first, his merger of philosophy and philology, and the effects of that merger on the relative claims of reason and authority; second, his use…[Read more]

Prepared for delivery at the 2017 Neutrality Conference: “Lessons from the Past and Visions for the 21st Century,” Instituto Complutense de Estudios Internacionales, Universidad Complutense,
October 27-28, 2017.

Conferencia dictada en el Instituto Cultural Peruano Norteamericano
Miraflores, Lima, 23 de febrero de 2017

This article focuses on the diplomatic mission of the Ragusean captain Casilari, to free the crew of a Ragusean ship captured by the Moroccan pirates. Through the relations between Ragusa and the empire of Morocco, the paper deals with an episode of the endemic piracy in the Mediterranean, but it also sheds light on the importance of the Ragusean…[Read more]

This article focuses on the diplomatic mission of the Ragusean captain Casilari, to free the crew of a Ragusean ship captured by the Moroccan pirates. Through the relations between Ragusa and the empire of Morocco, the paper deals with an episode of the endemic piracy in the Mediterranean, but it also sheds light on the importance of the Ragusean…[Read more]

An overview of the “state of the field” of critical posthumanist studies that also argues for the important intervention of premodern studies into contemporary critical posthumanism studies, and which serves as the Introduction (with chapter summaries) to “Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanism,” eds. Myra Seaman and Eileen A. Joy (Ohio…[Read more]

My poetic Preface to Kathleen Biddick’s book, “Make and Let Die: Untimely Sovereignties” (punctum books, 2016), which is indebted to and adapted from Adrienne Rich’s poem “Diving into the Wreck,” which sketches out the exploratory soundings of a sea-wreck of forgotten histories that bears uncanny resonances with Kathleen Biddick’s own acediou…[Read more]

My poetic Preface to Kathleen Biddick’s book, “Make and Let Die: Untimely Sovereignties” (punctum books, 2016), which is indebted to and adapted from Adrienne Rich’s poem “Diving into the Wreck,” which sketches out the exploratory soundings of a sea-wreck of forgotten histories that bears uncanny resonances with Kathleen Biddick’s own acediou…[Read more]

This essay argues for the consideration of energy and an energy-based humanities model in the study of water in the Middle Ages. It also proposes that ‘energy’, when discussed in the context of the Middle Ages, is in fact a study of ‘energies’, derived from technology, material culture, and intellectual culture in equal measure. It propose…[Read more]

The introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Narrative Theory, edited by Eileen Joy and Christine Neufeld, on “Premodern to Modern Humanisms: The BABEL Project.” This essay sketches out a blueprint for pursuing new “critical humanisms” in a post/human age.

This special issue of the “Journal of Narrative Theory” represents one of the BABEL Working Group’s first forays into a collaborative and “baggy” humanistic scholarship between medieval studies, more contemporary humanistic studies, and the sciences, with the objective of interrogating together the open terms, “human,” “humanity,” “humanism,”…[Read more]

This essay considers Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of hospitality in relation to the “isolated and heroic being that the state produces by its virile virtues,” through an analysis of female Chechen suicide terrorists in contemporary Russia and the figure of Grendel in the Old English poem “Beowulf,” in order to raise some questions about the relat…[Read more]

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]

“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]

Extending an argument presented in two articles published Studies in Art Education and Visual Arts Research, I discuss what would a poetic historiography mean for art education research.