The functioning of truth in a history text does not depend only on its episte-mological conditions, but also on an ethical relation between the historian and the reader. Paul Ricoeur proposed that such ethical relation is based upon a tacit reading pact, a contract in which the author ensures his reader that his narra-tive is…[Read more]

In Historians of Brazil, Francisco Iglésias reviews some of the great names in Brazilian historiography as divided by him into three distinct moments: up to 1838, from 1838 to 1931, and from 1931 onwards. This article shall focus on the third of these moments, which has traditionally been considered the moment of the “modern Brazilian hi…[Read more]

The abstract of my doctoral dissertation, which I defended on December 2018 at the University of Washington, with distinction.

This paper suggests ever increasing human knowledge of the world around us is the driving force for much social and cultural evolution. It examines the order of discovery of our knowledge of the world around us and notes this knowledge comes to us in a particular and necessary order from the easiest to discover to the more difficult to discover.…[Read more]

By way of the autobiographical writings of Bruno Schulz and the “resurrection” paintings of Stanley Spencer, this talk sketches out some of the ways in which literature and the fine arts situate themselves within the division, or series of breaks, that Michel de Certeau argued Western historiography inscribes between past and present, between the…[Read more]

Although the ultimate theme of “The Seven Sleepers” can be located in its medieval Christian doctrine—the bodily resurrection is real, and therefore it is in the afterworld where one finally, really “lives,” with shining body and soul together—I would like to argue that, in the Old English version’s emphasis on the highly individualized emotion…[Read more]

Through an analysis of Tony Kushner’s 2001 play “Homebody/Kabul” and the Old English “Ruin” poem, this essay explores the tension, anxiety, and isolation inherent in the aesthetic and philosophical enterprises of measuring the distance that separates myth from real being (a project that takes place, I would argue, against Levinas, not just o…[Read more]

Through a comparative analysis of Chaucer’s “The Clerk’s Tale” and Lars von Trier’s film “Breaking the Waves,” this essay wonders what happens when two texts and one reader happen to each other and open up a singular adventure that is also a moment of ‘futurition’ that opens up new horizons of meaning, both human and inhuman. How can we reckon the…[Read more]

An overview of the “state of the field” of critical post/humanist studies that also argues for the important intervention of premodern studies into contemporary post/humanist studies, and which serves as the Introduction (with chapter summaries) to “Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanism,” eds. Myra Seaman and Eileen A. Joy (Ohio State…[Read more]

Between 1880 and 1924, an estimated half million Arab migrants left the Ottoman Empire to live and work in the Americas. Responding to new economic forces linking the Mediterranean and Atlantic capitalist economies to one another, Arab migrants entered the manufacturing industries of the settler societies they inhabited, including industrial…[Read more]

On counterfactual conditional clauses in Turkish

On morphological features in Turkish dialects of Northeast Turkey developed by analogy.

On an Ottoman grammar book from 1730 written by a French Jesuit. The article focuses on the question whether the Ottoman language material given in Latin script reveals information on the state of the ongoing morphophonological changes from early Ottoman to modern Turkish.

Article on Turkish orthography and its acquisiton

This dissertation traces the emergence of transnational political institutions among Arabophone Ottoman emigrants living in New York City, São Paulo, and Buenos Aires, and analyzes the development of a long-distance nationalist politics among emigrant activists during and after World War I. Using socially-produced primary materials written and…[Read more]

Preface to Guy Beiner, Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster (Oxford University Press, 2018)

‘Dharma’ (Rightousness)1 sometimes takes the shape of ‘Adharma’ (unrighteousness ).”2 The Mahābhārata gives a subtle message through the stories. Sage Viśhwamitra justifies stealing of a piece of dog’s flesh to save his life during famine. (Śāntiparvan). Blind adherence of the sage Kauśika to his vow of speaking truth led to the killing of the vi…[Read more]

On structural similarities in Azeri of Iran and Gagauz due to contact with Indo-Iranan languages

On an isogloss of the Eastern Turkish dialects