“The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages”—a two-part article—questions the widely held belief in critical race theory that “race” is a category without purchase before the modern era. Surveying a variety of cultural documents from the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries—chronicles, hagiography, literature, stories, sculpture, maps, canon l…[Read more]

Dietrich, like Madonna, has been called gender‐bending and androgynous, but Dietrich’s on‐ and off‐screen fluidity of gender identity, as reflected in her adoption of the “double drag,” upsets the traditional dichotomy encoded more generally as that of male or female and more particularly as that of the butch or femme.

An examination of crime and criminality in colonial and postcolonial India through life-writing and the examples of Thugs and Phoolan Devi, the Bandit Queen.

Johannesburg, Chicago of South Africa
Chicago, Johannesburg by the Lake

The Modern Language Association (MLA) and the Columbia University Libraries / Information Services’ Center for Digital Research and Scholarship (CDRS) have been working together on a prototyped user interface that connects a library-quality repository system (Humanities Commons Open Repository Exchange, or CORE, modeled on Columbia’s Academic Com…[Read more]

.Using the concept of “third culture” from social theory, this article examines Charles Kingsley’s use of displacement in his children’s book The Water Babies (1863). In trying to portray the site of moral formation, Kingsley displaces his central character Tom – the new, interstitial “third culture” subject. Through Tom’s displacement, Kingsle…[Read more]

This article examines Allen Say’s use of cultural displacement in his books Tree of Cranes and Grandfather’s Journey. Allen Say is an award-winning, Japanese-American, picture book author and illustrator.

Adam Smith closes the first chapter to Theory of Moral Sentiments, ‘Of Sympathy’, with a harmless enough assertion: ‘We sympathize even with the dead’. Death is not a topic that much interests Smith in Theory of Moral Sentiments. With the exception of a few miscellaneous thoughts in the text, the one paragraph Smith devotes to it is the extent of…[Read more]

“Disinformation: The Limits of Capitalism’s Imagination and the End of Ideology” analyzes the post-9/11 U.S., a state of massive income inequality, waging endless war at home (the militarization of the police) and abroad, within the context of two terms: “Disinformation” and “ideology.” The theoretical matrix of the essay distinguishes…[Read more]