A response to the decision of Wiley Global to “disappear” 1,300+ of their ebooks in the ProQuest catalog at the beginning of the Fall 2022 term without any communication to university libraries at all, thus taking libraries by surprise and indicating Wiley’s move away from libraries as repositories and lenders of their ebooks, passing on costs to…[Read more]

This monograph does not represent the 1979 Revolution as a rapture in Persian poetry, rather it sees the continuity; Shams demonstrates that Islamic Republican poetry was in fact in the making decades before the Revolution. In its study of war poetry, this monograph remains focused on official poets alone. For an understanding of other (official)…[Read more]

The drama of the Niger Delta region has enjoyed robust scholarship. This essay interrogates J. P. Clark-Bekederemo’s drama against the cultural milieu of the region and tries to investigate the connections between the rich folklore of the area and the wealth of poetry and imagery contained in his drama. The essay investigates the terrain,…[Read more]

manual guide for the annotation of biographies

Column on digital humanities and Jewish Studies, focusing on open data in digitized material.

For a long time, metaphors have played an important role in depicting language history. In this study, we contrast early metaphors on language history, such as the family tree or the wave model, with recent metaphors that were popularized after the quantitative turn, such as forests of trees or phylogenetic networks. Speculating about metaphors…[Read more]

Syllabus for ISS 222D Introduction to Digital Humanities, a survey course that introduces students to the many debates and methods of digital humanities and adjacent fields. Particular focus is on visualization.

Slideshow for a forthcoming invited presentation. ABSTRACT: Podcasting originated as a new form of audio broadcasting, but by 2006, issues of ease of use, proprietary technology, and finances slowed its momentum. Now podcasting is more popular than ever. This presentation therefore traces the author’s initial and current CALL podcasting p…[Read more]

The author does justice to a subject often mentioned, yet rarely studied. He succeeds in its purpose, i.e., providing “as genuine a picture as possible of the censorship of literature after the 1979 Revolution” followed by discussing “the effects of this unique censorship regime on the Iranian literature of the time” (9). Drawing from his experie…[Read more]

Through the case of Emerson’s appropriation of Persian poetry this volume provides a thought-provoking example of how the literary founding father of a nation is cosmopolitan and receptive of foreign cultures in what might seem a purely “nationalistic” agenda. It will appeal to those in the field of Persian literature, comparative liter…[Read more]

Text of my keynote talk at Universitas Negeri Semarang (UNNES) about video game cultures, focusing on the global south.

The Irish Sea which separates Great Britain and Ireland has often been written about in terms of divisions, threats, and hazards. Facing each other across that sea, the coast of Wales and Ireland’s eastern seaboard have a more complex story to tell, one characterised by intimate if troubled lines of connection. A place of passage for centuries, t…[Read more]

Reflections on artist Trevor Paglen’s (ab)use of the JAFFE dataset

Reflections on Trevor Paglen’s (ab)use of the JAFFE dataset

The article contains a historical account and commentary on Trevor Paglen and Kate Crawford’s unauthorized use of the JAFFE dataset.

The essay explores the use of digital history for the systematic study of the periodical press in the late Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean (1906 –1918) as a discursive field. It evaluates the methodological and practical challenges of digital history as rooted in the socio-technical infrastructures of the Global North when applied to the Global S…[Read more]

This paper renders the ancient folktale ‘Ama’ (Woman Diver) into English, investigates its origins, and interprets its timeless significance. From a prehistoric oral tradition, it evolved into a temple chronicle and a Noh play. The paper includes a summary in Japanese, and all the references are in Japanese. With a moving story and vivid…[Read more]