Reading of two medieval Spanish ballads featuring fairies in light of ethnographic evidence of fairy consciousness in Spain

Syllabus and Course Reader (Creative Commons Licensed) of survey course of premodern Hispanic literature and culture taught as a series of debates on social questions (see https://davidwacks.uoregon.edu/2017/12/14/survey4/)

Course description: This class introduces students to a variety of texts written in Spain and the New World from 1100-1600…[Read more]

Reading of two medieval Spanish ballads featuring fairies in light of ethnographic evidence of fairy consciousness in Spain

A contribution to Transition’s “I Can’t Breathe” forum, an online space for responses to the murders of unarmed black Americans by police. My piece, which was chosen for publication in the print edition of the magazine, reflected upon the similarities between the death of Eric Garner in New York City and the death of an enslaved sugar refiner nam…[Read more]

Postcolonial theory has a people problem. By this, I am unabashedly suggesting that postcolonial theoreticians’ overemphasis on people as the site of analysis lies at the heart of the limitations of the field’s key terms, epistemological boundaries, and approach to understanding phenomena as a whole. Indeed, if postcolonial theory and its rel…[Read more]

Very short essay on the way Deleuze uses images in his book on Bacon. In the original French edition, the images are in a separate volume; he does that in order to mime, or enact, the theory of sensation in his text. It seems to me this is an unusual and promising strategy for art history (disposing images so their sequence and arrangement…[Read more]

This essay explores the cultural legacy of Hindustani, which names the intimate overlap between two South Asian languages, Hindi and Urdu. Hindi and Urdu have distinct religious identities, national associations and scripts, yet they are nearly identical in syntax, diverging to some extent in their vocabulary. Hindi and Urdu speakers,…[Read more]

In the article, we trace some aspects of development of eventivity and narrativity in Medieval and early Modern Era travel literature. Dissecting episodes of Sir Thomas Smithes Voiage and Entertainment in Rushia (1605), A Travel of Anonimous Citizen of Suzdal to The Council of Florence (15th century), Russian Primary Chronicle (12th century), and…[Read more]

In this paper I look at how “Exenplo XI” is both product and reflection of the various traditions and cultures of medieval Iberia and how Juan Manuel forges a new version of this story from these inherited traditions in order to showcase problems of concern to his fourteenth-century audience, namely, the tension between ecclesiastical and And…[Read more]

In this paper I look at how “Exenplo XI” is both product and reflection of the various traditions and cultures of medieval Iberia and how Juan Manuel forges a new version of this story from these inherited traditions in order to showcase problems of concern to his fourteenth-century audience, namely, the tension between ecclesiastical and And…[Read more]

This study imagines a Sephardic archive not as a physical site that houses the artifacts, texts, and history of a nation-state or Empire, but one that allows us to access those objects (or exposes their absence) and to bring artifacts from different official archives into dialogue in a different, virtual space, thus creating an additional, but not…[Read more]

This study imagines a Sephardic archive not as a physical site that houses the artifacts, texts, and history of a nation-state or Empire, but one that allows us to access those objects (or exposes their absence) and to bring artifacts from different official archives into dialogue in a different, virtual space, thus creating an additional, but not…[Read more]

From the original paper presentation: In this paper I discuss the figurative language used in Louise Erdrich’s novel Tracks with a particular focus on the figures and symbols associated with food and food practices. This paper performs a textual analysis of figurative language and symbols and the themes of food and food practices to reveal the…[Read more]

This paper presents the state of the art regarding questions such as: How much do we know about the continuity of Latin in Northwest Africa between the 5th and the 10th centuries? How well do we know Afro-Romanic? Could we determine some basic linguistic features of Afro-Romanic and, if yes, which ones? Which data are consistent with the presence…[Read more]

This paper presents the state of the art regarding questions such as: How much do we know about the continuity of Latin in Northwest Africa between the 5th and the 10th centuries? How well do we know Afro-Romanic? Could we determine some basic linguistic features of Afro-Romanic and, if yes, which ones? Which data are consistent with the presence…[Read more]

This paper presents the state of the art regarding questions such as: How much do we know about the continuity of Latin in Northwest Africa between the 5th and the 10th centuries? How well do we know Afro-Romanic? Could we determine some basic linguistic features of Afro-Romanic and, if yes, which ones? Which data are consistent with the presence…[Read more]

This paper presents the state of the art regarding questions such as: How much do we know about the continuity of Latin in Northwest Africa between the 5th and the 10th centuries? How well do we know Afro-Romanic? Could we determine some basic linguistic features of Afro-Romanic and, if yes, which ones? Which data are consistent with the presence…[Read more]

This paper presents the state of the art regarding questions such as: How much do we know about the continuity of Latin in Northwest Africa between the 5th and the 10th centuries? How well do we know Afro-Romanic? Could we determine some basic linguistic features of Afro-Romanic and, if yes, which ones? Which data are consistent with the presence…[Read more]