In: “Connecting Territories: Exploring People and Nature, 1700-1850,” eds. S. Boscani Leoni, S. Baumgartner and M. Knittel, Leiden, Brill, 2021, pp. 54-57.

Text to a presentation on the misrepresentation of ancient Egyptian psychoactive consumption in academic publications and public media that was given by me at the Alternative Egyptology Symposium, hosted by the Allard Pierson Museum, Amsterdam, 14-04-2021. There is an academic paper in preparation.

REASON, IDEA, PHILOLOGY INTELLECTUAL HISTORY IN LITERARY CONTEXTS (WRITTEN
ON THE MARGINS OF CYPRIAN NORWID’S “MILCZENIE” (“SILENCE”))
The article examines the 19th century evolution of history of ideas and its relatedness to literary studies.
The debate whether philology, philosophy, and history are autonomous humanistic disciplines or
they…[Read more]

Pestilential diseases formed a category of epidemic and often fatal diseases, whose outbreak, causes and treatment were challenging to explain in the Renaissance. In exploring this theme in sixteenth–century Galenic medicine, I examine the Platonic account of “occult” diseases and treatment that was proposed by the French physician Jean Ferne…[Read more]

This article argues that May Kendall’s comic verse presents a sustained consideration of one of the most prominent intellectual trends in late-Victorian Britain: the revival of idealist philosophy. Kendall’s poetry encapsulates and interrogates the connections between several important aspects of late-Victorian culture. Her thinking about idealism…[Read more]

Focusing on the work of John McWhorter and, to a lesser extent, Peter Trudgill, this paper critically examines some common themes in language complexity research from the perspective of intellectual history. The present-day conception that increase in language complexity is somehow a “natural” process which is disturbed under the “ab…[Read more]

The writings of Arthur Hugh Clough display a sustained interest in the relations between an individual, his or her generation, and the processes of historical change that distinguish and demarcate one generation from another. As someone who spent much of his life as a student and teacher, Clough was self-consciously aware of his location within an…[Read more]

This chapter examines the use of vegetal analogy in late Renaissance physiology through the case of the German physician Daniel Sennert (1572–1637). It is centered on Sennert’s explanation of generation, in particular the transmission of life through the vegetative soul within the seed, as developed in his early works on medicine and alchemy, the…[Read more]

Philology haunts the humanities, through both its defendants and its detractors. This article examines the construction of philology as the premier science of the long nineteenth century in Europe. It aims to bring the history of philology up to date by taking it seriously as a science and giving it the kind of treatment that has dominated the…[Read more]

For centuries, continental Europeans have come to Wales for numerous reasons. During the Romantic period some came seeking a rural idyll, whilst others in the Victorian era travelled as industrial spies, and during times of war many refugees escaped to Wales to find shelter from persecution. Not only have continental Europeans left their traces…[Read more]

Medicine has long framed race relations in the Caribbean-that basin where African and European cultures have met from the beginning of the Colonial Period to the twentieth century. Whether Sir Hans Sloane, founder of the British Museum and President of the Royal Society of London, who as a physician wrote about African medical beliefs and…[Read more]

Gonzalo Fernós Maldonado (1887-1966) fue uno de los arquitectos más destacados en Puerto Rico durante las primeras dïcadas del siglo XX, cuyos logros y habilidades lamentablemente han quedado en el olvido colectivo. Este libro, escrito por su nieto, trata de resucitar la historia de su vida en un momento histórico muy diferente al con…[Read more]

The Pan-American Scientific Congresses ushered a new scientific era in Latin America. Bringing together scientists, engineers, and medical researchers from both South and North America, they facilitated the exchange of ideas between the two regions at the beginning of the twentieth century. Nobel Prize thinkers such as Albert Michelson and others,…[Read more]

Science and democracy are two of the most cherished values of Western Civilization, so much so that they are often associated with each other. With science, it is held, comes democracy. But, will democracy necessarily blossom with the seed of science? Inversely, does the collapse of the Arecibo Observatory on December 1, 2020 represent a predictor…[Read more]

When the same $9 billion allocated to a nation’s annual budget (Puerto Rico 2015) is spent on a single scientific instrument (Hubble telescope) or to administer a single scientific facility for a year (CERN), we might presume that science is today a monolithic enterprise, akin to what the pyramids of Ancient Egypt had been in their day. Yet when…[Read more]

Los Congresos Científicos Pan-Americanos abrieron una nueva época de intercambio científico no solamente dentro de los pa?ses de América Latina sino entre estos y los Estados Unidos. Figuras importantes como Albert. A. Michelson, ganador del Premio Nobel en 1907, regularmente atendieron estas conferencias, así ayudando a difundir los últimos avanc…[Read more]

Biology and Ethics provides a historian’s perspective of the attempts to ground an ethics within a biological framework. Aside from its analysis of schools as social Darwinism, eugenics, and sociobiology, it attempts to evaluate their veracity using cases as Japan’s Unit 731, the Guatemala Syphilis study, and others. In spite of the much disputed…[Read more]

The purpose of this book is to analyse the role which the development of the German Altertumswissenschaft at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries had (in combination with the English-French intellectual base) on the birth of the Romantic reception of the ancient traditions in Poland.

This paper considers the use of Boym’s formulations of reflective and restorative nostalgia as a productive lens for viewing the tensions within folk horror texts and their appeals. Considering folk horror texts such as The Wicker Man, Midsommar and The Living and the Dead, the paper will demonstrate that Boym’s two conceptions help to draw out…[Read more]

One of the recurring themes in the public perception of containment policies during the current COVID-19 pandemic are the supposedly uneven and everchanging measures taken up by international, national and local authorities. This is especially the case in countries with a federal structure, like Germany. Not surprisingly, historical containment…[Read more]