Alberto Pérez-Gómez’s 1983 Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science is used here as a vehicle for exploring the behavior of disciplinary boundaries in the context of crisis both historically and theoretically. Responding to his contemporaneous architectural crisis of the 1970s instigated by the rise of positivism, Pérez-Gómez uses Ale…[Read more]

As Kashmir faces new challenges, our forms of allyship must also evolve. Perhaps we can learn some lessons from its kitchens.

The abstract of my doctoral dissertation, which I defended on December 2018 at the University of Washington, with distinction.

This review explores usage of the term public in debates about science and society. Since the 1980s, there has been a broad shift from public understanding and science communication towards engagement, dialogue and participation. I explore the multiple meanings of public in these debates, including the transition from singular the public to plural…[Read more]

Disrupting Maize undertakes a critical interrogation of the symbol and the staple food of the Mexican nation. As the centre of origin and genetic diversification of maize, the Mexican territory is regarded today as being under threat of irreversible ‘contamination’ by genetically engineered maize, an imported biotechnological product. When the fir…[Read more]

Repair has visibly come to the fore in recent academic and policy debates, to the point that ‘repair studies’ is now emerging as a novel focus of research. Through the lens of repair, scholars with diverse backgrounds are coming together to rethink our relationships with the human-made matters, tools and objects that are the material mesh in whi…[Read more]

Distributed ledger technology and the development of digital smart contracts have the potential for a new disruptive technology. Applications based on them could find their way into the management of many areas of every day life. However, they also carry certain risks for sustainable development of our society. This paper is intended as a…[Read more]

A report published by the Sutton Trust and Social Mobility Commission this week, ‘Elitist Britain’, found that two fifths (39%) of Britain’s ‘leading people’ were educated privately, more than five times as many as in the population as a whole, with almost one quarter (24%) graduating from Oxbridge. I therefore thought it would be timely to publis…[Read more]

Based on a cluster of Great Peace (taiping 太平) and Weft (wei 緯) materials dealing with stages in human reproduction (impregnation, gestation, intrauterine infancy, birth) and the logic governing annual cycles, this study shows how ontological and cosmological representations were translated into religious discourse and practice in early medie…[Read more]

Gabor Lukacs’ 2008 book on “Kaitai Shinsho: The Single Most Famous Japanese Book of Medicine & Geka Sōden: An Early Very Important Manuscript on Surgery” is a bibliographical contribution to the comparative history of the introduction of Western science in East Asia. It focuses on two illustrated manuals of anatomy and surgery in Japanese, adap…[Read more]

Gabor Lukacs’ 2008 book on “Kaitai Shinsho: The Single Most Famous Japanese Book of Medicine & Geka Sōden: An Early Very Important Manuscript on Surgery” is a bibliographical contribution to the comparative history of the introduction of Western science in East Asia. It focuses on two illustrated manuals of anatomy and surgery in Japanese, adap…[Read more]

In ancient China, portentology was a “science” in its own right, a specialised field of knowledge developed by rational individuals who endeavoured to fathom the concealed mechanisms at work beneath the spectacles of history and the world at large. This paper focuses on the nomenclature of portents (observed phenomena interpreted as auspicious or…[Read more]

The rapid development and adoption of technological care equipment for remote monitoring, self-diagnosis and other forms of telemedicine risks splitting care work: on the one hand, well-paid professionals developing or operating new technologies; on the other, much poorer and much less qualified assistants to take care of the operations that are…[Read more]

This article explores three facets of green space within a medieval monastic context: its origin, its effects and properties and the way it was shaped into an expression of power. We learn a great deal about the history of green space through the nuances of monastic thought and vice versa. The term ‘green space’ in a medieval context may ini…[Read more]

This article explores three facets of green space within a medieval monastic context: its origin, its effects and properties and the way it was shaped into an expression of power. We learn a great deal about the history of green space through the nuances of monastic thought and vice versa. The term ‘green space’ in a medieval context may ini…[Read more]

This essay ruminates the ethics of a co-implicated, bounded dependence between objects (human and otherwise) that are always in some sense withdrawing from each other but also always together in a some-place labeled “here”: the world (where no Absolute or Outside vantage point is possible or habitable). This essay also considers the possibility,…[Read more]

This is a chronological comparative study of five visual artefacts spanning about a millennium in Chinese history and retrieved from various sources included in the mid-fifteenth century collection called in English the Taoist Canon. All five specimens are basically titled “Taiping fu” 太平符 in Chinese, literally “Great Peace Symbol”. By briefly in…[Read more]

“Buddho-Taoism” is a neologism that appeared in Western academic discourse during the late nineteen-forties, was put to various uses without being consensually defined, enjoyed a brief vogue around the turn of the twenty-first century, and began to fall from grace in recent years. This neologism implicitly created new epistemic repertoires der…[Read more]

Diplomatische Transkription und Leseversion nach Freiburg, Universitätsbibliothek, Hs. 1500,7, fol. 38r-43v

Das Wunderbare in der deutschsprachigen Rezeptliteratur des 15. Jahrhunderts, in: Stefanie Kreuzer und Uwe Durst (Hg.), Das Wunderbare. Dimensionen eines Phänomens in Kunst und Kultur (Traum – Wissen – Erzählen 3), Paderborn: Fink 2018, S. 233–250.