This chapter illuminates a different sense in which Gentili’s work was influenced by humanist sensibilities. Differentiating between legal humanism (the mos Gallicus) on one hand and rhetorical humanism on the other, it argues that Gentili did not subscribe to the rigid historical approach to legal sources as practised by the French humanist…[Read more]

This essay investigates why Thomas Hobbes translated Thucydides, published as Eight Bookes of the Peloponesian Warres, and why Hobbes chose it to be published in 1628. It argues that Hobbes’s translation should be seen not just as a precursor to his later treatises but as part of broader attempt on the part of English humanists in the mid-1620s…[Read more]

This article reads Albert Renger-Patzsch’s photographic theory and practice in the context of Benjamin’s and Brecht’s dismissals of his work in order to recover the paradoxical interplay between documentation and perceptual training central to debates about photography as a specifically modern medium during the 1920s. I argue that, rather than…[Read more]

Critics have long used the heuristic device of opposing John Milton and Thomas Hobbes, but this essay explores surprising affinities between the two. After observing that Milton and other Restoration dissenters often agreed with Hobbes on questions of ecclesiastic jurisdiction and toleration nearly as much as they disagreed with what seemed at…[Read more]

Undergraduate syllabus for a course combining media studies with creative production practices in digital narratives and culture. Designed for delivery online, with an emphasis on individual projects.

Visual Ethnography, Stereotypes, and Photographing Algeria

The poetics and esthetics of “natural occupancy” are relevant to the ways in which settlers’ colonists artistically and discursively produce their subsequent cultural formations. I focus on the decade of the 1950s to chart specific settler ideologies of ownership that emerged in
Israel after the establishment of the state in 1948. What are the v…[Read more]

I’m taking the word “synagogue” seriously, and read Erkenwald’s judge as symbolically “Jewish,” a figure of the sclerotic quality of the law, a foil for Christianity’s uncertain relationship to its own law. I’ll probably publish this before my career’s over, but clearly I’m in no hurry….

Balkan universities are in a hurry to beat Oxbridge and Ivy League universities. But, from their dire straits, can Balkan teachers afford the train ticket to compare and contrast? Therefore, in this paper we will talk about the situation in the higher education system in the Former Yugoslav countries which has lost its vigour and rigour with the…[Read more]

This paper analyzes Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer and how it relates to a new paradigm of trans-national blockbusters. I analyze the film using a cultural materialist lens with respect to the filmmaker’s previous films and their outward (international) trajectory. This methodology highlights a larger trend that we are now seeing with large-scale…[Read more]

For an MLA panel, January 2016, this talk recalls the 2014 crisis at the University of Virginia about an alleged fraternity gang rape, discusses the policy on sexual assault that designates “responsible employees,” and proposes measures: change drinking laws; avoid segregating any space by identity; offer responsible parties. Humanities professors…[Read more]

Vertov’s early years in film: the Kino-Nedelia newsreels, the work on the agitational trains, the anti-religious propaganda films.

Vertov in 1917, and an investigation of some of his shaping contexts: musical practice, Futurist poetry, early non-fiction filmmaking, and Marxism.