Prepared for delivery at the 2017 Neutrality Conference: “Lessons from the Past and Visions for the 21st Century,” Instituto Complutense de Estudios Internacionales, Universidad Complutense,
October 27-28, 2017.

Although there were many handwritten, often informal catalogues of Sir Robert Cotton’s manuscripts and books during his lifetime and in the years afterwards, the desire for an official printed catalogue which could be circulated in the public realm did not really bear fruit until the late 1600s. And when two versions finally did appear — the…[Read more]

Conferencia dictada en el Instituto Cultural Peruano Norteamericano
Miraflores, Lima, 23 de febrero de 2017

This article focuses on the diplomatic mission of the Ragusean captain Casilari, to free the crew of a Ragusean ship captured by the Moroccan pirates. Through the relations between Ragusa and the empire of Morocco, the paper deals with an episode of the endemic piracy in the Mediterranean, but it also sheds light on the importance of the Ragusean…[Read more]

The Exhibition Library reimagines the medium of art exhibition as well as that of art catalogue. Catalogues carry exhibitions through time and space, figuring as tropes for imagining arrangements and the course of works and settings they describe. However, they rarely give us a clue about what really happened, since they are often made before the…[Read more]

This essay is partly a response + riposte to Johanna Drucker’s Jan. 2014 essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books, “Pixel Dust: Illusions of Innovation in Scholarly Publishing,” and partly a plea for the University, and the Humanities, along with their publishing “arms,” to be refashioned, not as sites of cultural Authority from which Knowledge…[Read more]

This essay argues for the consideration of energy and an energy-based humanities model in the study of water in the Middle Ages. It also proposes that ‘energy’, when discussed in the context of the Middle Ages, is in fact a study of ‘energies’, derived from technology, material culture, and intellectual culture in equal measure. It propose…[Read more]

Relative to many of the ongoing discussions and debates around the changing (and often precarious) landscapes of scholarly publishing, and especially around Open Access publishing, we at punctum books have put together a sort of “primer” (which also serves as our own, expanded vision statement) on what we see as the perils of the commodification…[Read more]

Module Summary: Using the aftermath of 9/11 and the US invasion of Iraq as a case study, this module asks why states engage in torture, giving particular consideration to why liberal states euphemise, conceal, and downplay this practice. We will examine the ramifications of 9/11 across multiple legal domains, domestically within the US and…[Read more]

This is the accepted manuscript version of my review of the edited volume Golden Middle Ages in Europe for History journal. Some wording may differ from the final published version. Please refer to the journal website.

This article explores a unique series of caricatures made between 1884 and 1896 by Yusuf Franko Kusa, a high-ranking Ottoman bureaucrat and a vener- ated member of n-de-siècle Pera’s high society. Yusuf Franko’s hitherto unstudied caricatures were comparable to contemporary European caricatures in style, but their subject matter was very loca…[Read more]

Analisa a trajetória de vida do ativista republicano José Leão Ferreira Souto (Natal, 1850 – Rio de Janeiro, 1904). Persegue o caminho trilhado por esse personagem, investigando seu caminhar nas três cidades em que viveu: Açu (Rio Grande do Norte), Rio de Janeiro e São Paulo. Privilegia as vivências nessas últimas cidades, nas quais ele concentro…[Read more]

This article provides an overview of design thinking as a component of, and contributor to, great library user experiences. When design thinking is used to shape the environment in which users connect with library spaces and personnel, the result is a better library experience—by design.

Good Night, Sleep Tight is an interactive virtual reality performance created by theatre and digital arts company ZU-UK. It was previewed at Gerry’s Kitchen in July 2017. Combining VR and binaural technologies, participants are put to bed and transported to a dreamscape composed of childhood imagery and aerial cityscapes. This artistic position r…[Read more]

While board games had been around for millennia, their popularization as a market commodity, with specilal themes and branding, had coincided with the formation of the global dominance of the British Empire as a maritime juggernaut. Early board game producers in the second half of the eighteenth century were mapmakers, and the board games shared…[Read more]

This work addresses the question of how the patron saint festivities in San Germán, Puerto Rico assisted in the reconstruction of the Puerto Rican nation during the 1950s. Particularly, I focus on how community leaders reproduced ideas of nationhood based on hispano-centric, white, Catholic, and patriarchal parameters. I investigate how an…[Read more]

This paper analyzes the 1774 Portugal Inquisition’s Regiment and its link with the cultural interventionism that marked the Pombalist reformism, whichstarted at the second halfof 18th century. These are allthe policiesthat influenced the public, social, cultural and religious institutions of Portugal and its colonies, based in…[Read more]

This essay offers an introduction to select disciplinary developments in the study of history and in historical study of the Hebrew Bible. It focuses first and foremost on “cultural history,” a broad category defined by nineteenth- and twentieth-century developments in anthropology and sociology, literary theory and linguistics, and other fie…[Read more]

The Music Library at the University of Washington is fortunate to count among its holdings a substantial collection of rare musical scores. A highlight of our special collections is the William Crawford III Music Collection. Given to the UW in 2014, the Crawford Collection includes over 700 rare, early-edition vocal scores, spanning six centuries…[Read more]

As librarians, we recognize that the ways in which our students access information are changing, rapidly and dramatically. The students we work with today face an information landscape that is often very different from what we remember from our student years. So much of what our music students need is seemingly readily available online through…[Read more]