Two art exhibitions, “Training Humans” and “Making Faces,” and the accompanying essay “Excavating AI: The politics of images in machine learning training sets” by Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen, are making substantial impact on discourse taking place in the social and mass media networks, and some scholarly circles. Critical scrutiny reveals,…[Read more]

BIS REPETITA PLACENT! * QRt by PRURITUS MIGRANS * CC: BY-NC-SA

Syllabus for Japanese Mythology Spring 2021

This study is a fresh analysis of a collection of scrolls and fragments grouped under the rubric, The Community Rule or Serekh ha-Yaḥad. As part of the manuscripts discovered in the Judean Desert, the Community Rule manuscripts are all fragmentary to various degrees, yet attest to important issues of legal dispute and community formation in the S…[Read more]

In this essay, I consider the ideal ascetic leader depicted in the Life of Moses attributed to Gregory of Nyssa: that leader is not a bishop, but a leader who has more experience with the day-to-day struggles of monks, particularly the kind of struggles described by Evagrius and writers influenced by him.

The field of Chinese Historical Phonology is traditionally dealing with a large number of complex and diverse types of data. While the data diversity can be conveniently dealt with in qualitative approaches, computational possibilities that have arisen during the past two decades offer new possibilities and new challenges for the field. In the…[Read more]

In an early version of his article “Harlem Literati in the Twenties,” first published in the Saturday Evening Review in 1940, Langston Hughes offers the curious suggestion that Wallace Thurman was the ghostwriter of Men, Marriage and Me (erroneously written as Men, Women and Checks in Hughes’ article), the tell-all memoir ostensibly by the origi…[Read more]

From the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the caliphal status and the legitimacy of the Ottoman sultans were constantly and increasingly challenged. One of the most effective and powerful tools that they utilized in order to strengthen their diminishing image in the eyes of their subjects was the re-appropriation of sacred places, either by…[Read more]

This paper follows Francois Laruelle’s non-philosophy and his non-religion and non-theology to suggest a non-philosophical approach to the sociology of religious pluralism. The entanglements of experiences of the religious end-user are analyzed vis-a-vis Laruelle’s thought and a dogma-free inclusive approach to religion is envisaged.

Course Description
In this seminar we shall read and discuss a selection of recent important works on and around Buddhism and material culture (in English). In addition we shall survey trends in recent Buddhist Studies scholarship produced in other languages (Chinese, Japanese, French, German, etc.). Students will be required to write regular,…[Read more]

The concept of class has been progressively erased in contemporary discussions around art — and other topics. The explanatory power of this economic and social category, as articulated by Karl Marx, has been annulled precisely at a time when the contradictions of late capitalism are growing, composing an ideological background that creates c…[Read more]

This talk reads Robert Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematographer, not as a mere collection of thoughts, but as spiritual reflections. These brief meditations record aspects of his film practice in condensed form and reveal the connection between contemplation and action. The contemplative tone of the book becomes perceptible through the careful o…[Read more]

Projects that bridge the humanities and sciences often attract attention from journalists, but evoke dismay from humanists who feel that their subjects of expertise have been misinterpreted. For the humanities to reclaim a place of pride in public conversation, humanists themselves need to embrace interdisciplinarity and take the lead in this…[Read more]

Highlights and insights from the author’s unique Global Faculty Development position at Kansai University in Osaka from 2016-2020. The article, published in Australia, summarizes data on the expressed needs of faculty clients, cites international research on English-Medium Instruction programs, and shows how globalization pressures reach the level…[Read more]