In “Culture Is Ordinary,” Raymond Williams challenged the then prevalent notion that “culture” is a phenomenon possessed only by social elites and educated highbrows, and attempted to replace it with a more expansive vision of culture as something commonly found at all levels of a social hierarchy. A truly democratic society, he insisted, could n…[Read more]

A handbook chapter discussing the relationship between “cultural studies” and “historical theory,” with a specific focus on four facets of cultural studies that help to shape its approach to scholarly research, evidence, and analysis: (1) its overtly political nature, (2) its interdisciplinarity, (3) its constructivism, and (4) its radical contextualism.

A chapter on “Histories” in an edited collection on key terms in popular music studies. I make an argument for the need to always historicize the study of popular music, with 4 major points of emphasis:
1. Doing history is about interpreting facts, not just reporting them.
2. Historical contexts are things that we have to construct in our…[Read more]

In 1838 Thomas Mulledy, S.J. signed his name to an agreement selling the 275 enslaved persons who resided on Jesuit-owned estates in Southern Maryland to Louisiana. The sale served as the culmination of the Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus’s fraught experience with slaveholding in the colonial and early national period. While much h…[Read more]

A través de la estrategia bufonesca de hacerse el tonto (to play the fool), analizo las obras “Optimistic vs Pessimistic” y “Kairós, sísifos y zombis” de la Compañía L’Alakran en términos de las posibilidades que abren para construir un tiempo más allá del cronológico. Es una temporalidad lagunosa, que no permite ser aprehendida en el tiempo h…[Read more]

The relationship between culture and policy has long been a major topic for media and cultural studies. With
this issue, we hope to broaden the meaning of cultural policy, from policies that are explicitly regulating
something we call the “cultural” (including media or traditional rituals or symbols) to include the practice of
policy-making and…[Read more]