This article explores the tradition of Bacha Posh in Afghan culture as depicted in Afghan-American Nadia Hashimiʼs debut novel The Pearl that Broke its Shell (2014). In this novel, Hashimi shows how Afghan girls are obliged to cross-dress and live dual lives as boys for several years to lay claim for their rights to education and freedom of…[Read more]

In The Night Watchman (2020), Louise Erdrich continues to blur the lines between history and fiction as she has done in several of her novels. Erdrich introduces the reader to several magical elements that appear to be entirely real: two ghosts, a dog that talks, and an unearthly powwow with Jesus as one of the dancers. The main objective of this…[Read more]

Examines the intersection between Chan Buddhism and Neo-Confucianism during the Southern Song dynasty period (1126-1279) in China.

The fourth volume of the DH Benelux Journal. This volume includes seven full-length, peer-reviewed articles that are based on accepted contributions to the 2021 virtual DH Benelux conference. Contents: 1. Editors’ Preface (Wout Dillen, Margherita Fantoli, Marijn Koolen, Marieke van Erp); 2. Introduction: The Humanities in a Digital World (Lorella…[Read more]

The performing Arts encompass a wide range of disciplines which are invariably synonymous with creativity, thus, creativity is the hallmark of performance. For the sake of clarity, Performing Arts comprise Theatre Arts, Music, Dance and Choreography and the electronic media of Radio, Television and film commonly referred
to as the audio-visual…[Read more]

This 23-minute presentation at the University of Hyogo in Kobe goes more deeply into the biography of Steve McCarty than appears in his long chapter in the new book A Passion for Japan: A Collection of Personal Narratives. Formative influences discussed include Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, Tibetan yoga, and Zen. Places include Boston, the Taos P…[Read more]

New Aesthetics in African Drama and Theatre … is a unique work. It is a valedictory gift to a man who has paid his academic dues, and also a justification of these dues that he has paid. The contributions in the book come from both seasoned eggheads and academic neophytes. The book interrogates the oeuvre of Sam Ukala’s works. it also updates…[Read more]

This excel file contains structured and formalized data about all surviving and identified early medieval Western manuscripts containing the text of the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville, fully or partially. It records information about the place of origin, provenance, preservation, the date of origin, material properties, script, content, the…[Read more]

This excel file contains the raw data behind the digital scholarly edition of the glosses to the first book of the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville published at: https://db.innovatingknowledge.nl/edition

This is a slightly revised version of the text of a talk that I (Seo-Young Chu) gave as part of the Fall 2014 Franke Lectures in the Humanities at Yale University. I’m sharing the text here to make the lecture more accessible. Topics include: North Korea/the DPRK, the “uncanny body politic,” the uncanny valley, “dystopian poetics,” what it means…[Read more]

Compounding and derivation are frequent in many language families. As a consequence, words in different languages are often only partially cognate, sharing only a few but not all morphemes. While partial cognates do not constitute a problem for the phonological reconstruction of individual morphemes, they are problematic when it comes to…[Read more]

manual guide for the annotation of biographies

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

Johannesburg is a landlocked city, famously the largest human concentration in the southern hemisphere not located on a river. What opportunities does it afford for hydrocolonial analysis, given Isabel Hofmeyr’s anchoring of that term in oceanic studies? How might a hydrocolonial orientation defamiliarize the relations between surface and depths…[Read more]

In “I, Stereotype,” Seo-Young Chu applies Mori’s theory of the uncanny valley not to robots but to a different species of humanoid artifact: stereotypes of the “yellow peril.” Through analyses of stories by Sax Rohmer, World War Two propaganda, and films from the Bond franchise, Chu investigates ways in which the logic of the uncanny valley has…[Read more]

Reflexión breve sobre la experiencia de enseñanza durante la Pandemia Covid-19.

“Enseñar en Tiempos de Pandemia”, Protagonistas en medio de una Pandemia. Concepción: Ediciones UCSC, 2021.

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.

This article takes up the insurrection in Washington DC, and the paranoid politics of QAnon. It analyzes the gamification of paranoia across QAnon and related paranoid publics, tracking such gamification as a political-economic demand generated by neoliberalism. Taking seriously Sigmund Freud’s insight that delusional formations are attempts at…[Read more]