An exhibition catalog from Living by the Book: The Jewish Bible and the Everyday Power of Text at UC Berkeley’s Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life. Bringing together scrolls, ritual objects, clothing, furniture, ephemera, and tourist memorabilia, the exhibition showcased the ways the Bible serves as an archive and a powerful platform for s…[Read more]

This essay outlines five goals of publicly engaged humanities work. It was originally published in 2018 on the Humanities for All website, an initiative of the National Humanities Alliance Foundation. With the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Humanities for All documents and promotes publicly engaged humanities work in U.S. higher…[Read more]

This essay outlines five types of publicly engaged humanities work. It was originally published in 2018 on the Humanities for All website, an initiative of the National Humanities Alliance Foundation. With the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Humanities for All documents and promotes publicly engaged humanities work in U.S. higher…[Read more]

This is the submission (unedited) version of the article published in Times Higher Education on April 11, 2019, which argues that the market-based competition that fuels so much of academic life is doing us all far more harm than good.

Gino Bonichi, better known as Scipione after the Roman general Scipio Africanus, was born in Macerata in 1904. He moved to Rome in 1909, where
he studied for a short period at the Academy of Fine Arts. Together with Mario Mafai and Antonietta Raphaël he was one of the founders of the so-called ‘Roman School’ or ‘Via Cavour School’, a group of…[Read more]

This short article offers a perspective on the social organization of repair and re-use of public infrastructures in the UK today by focusing on an former public library now transferred to a social enterprise which also hosts a repair centre for the processing of used household goods.

The British State has been terraformed over recent decades through the changing spatio-temporal dynamics of capital accumulation in the world-system entailed in financialisation, neoliberalsiation, and the emergence of global cities. A new post-industrial constellation of political domination has thus emerged in that state that requires urgent…[Read more]

Print-friendly remediation and backup copy of my course site for “Digital Storytelling,” part of the Spring 2019 offerings in the Public Humanities MA program at Brown University. Course web site can be found here: http://digitalstorytelling2019.jimmcgrath.us. This course focuses on three particular areas within the larger topic of Digital…[Read more]

The presentation documents a community-based history project conducted by students to uncover the details of the reported lynching of Oscar Mack, an African American veteran reported lynched in Orlando. Reported lynched in Orlando on July 17, 1922, by a mob in Orlando, the newspaper accounts of the incidents gave little detail. In 2013, Julian…[Read more]

This paper explores how everyday religious narratives in post-disaster contexts can be interpreted as key sites of agency articulated in resistance to dominant discourses of disaster relief. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among affected communities after the 2010 floods in Pakistan, we argue that religious discourses code everyday actions with…[Read more]

In many US cities, especially those in the Rust Belt, the environmental goods and services (EGS) industry has played a significant role in restructuring local economies to promote new, flexible, and “creative” forms of service-based labour. And yet much of the environmental work conducted in these cities has been directed at an industrial pas…[Read more]

Current efforts in computational historical linguistics are predominantly concerned
with phylogenetic inference. Methods for ancestral state reconstruction have only
been applied sporadically. In contrast to phylogenetic algorithms, automatic reconstruction methods presuppose phylogenetic information in order to explain what has
evolved when…[Read more]

The argument against free will could as well have been eternal. In this short but incisive and analytical book, Alfred R Mele, a professor of philosophy, successfully and clearly critiques the rationale against free will put forward by psychologists and neuroscientists.

Family Values by Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift Book Review Prabuddha Bharata February 2015

This paper explores how one can go beyond social and other distinctions by the praxis of Advaita Vedanta

The United Nations cited the 2010 monsoon floods in Pakistan as the largest
humanitarian crisis in living memory. The environmental catastrophe effected
twenty million people and highlighted the complicated relationship between nature
and society. The lives of extremely vulnerable groups such as subsistence farmers
and unskilled labourers were…[Read more]