Tag
Humanities
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Against Babel: Or, How to Talk to Strangers
Allegedly, some 45% of languages descend from one, ancient ”Proto-Indo-European“ tongue. But why focus on a hypothetical lost language, when we can work instead to hear one another today?
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On Not Asking “Should I Insert Myself in the Text?”
“We are obliged to acknowledge what we see and how we organize what we see.”
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As Society Evolves, So Too Does the University
Faculty and students can—and must—govern their own institutions, so that universities maintain their vital power.
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Now the Humanities Can Disrupt “AI”
The world’s humanists might just be the new MVPs in the struggle for the future of critical thinking.
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Grounding the Humanities
A “regional” humanities abandons academia’s tepid globalism, and confronts local oppressions like prisons, schools, housing, and the police.
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Do the Humanities Need Experts or Skeptics?
Why are Anglophone novels more worthy of attention than Ottoman shadow puppetry or the art of knot-tying? Just what are the humanities for?
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Mission Impossible
The university has been changing, to be sure. But has the proportion of students who want to devote themselves to acts of humanistic creativity?
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Don’t Save the University—Transform It
“Why read and write about literature while the world burns?” Because, in working to end the oppression faced by so many, the humanities can help.
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Plants and Other Science Fictions
Can thinking like a plant save the world?
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Toward a Cellular Humanities
Are our phones the bane of critical thought? Or might they be our latest texts to read and interpret—objects worthy of inquiry and analysis?
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Academic Generosity, Academic Insurgency
During the summer of 2019, funding for the University of Alaska was slashed by the state legislature. With 41 percent of the annual budget, or $130 million …
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From Slate to Silicon?
Everyone loves to hate school. Jean-Jacques Rousseau certainly did. In Émile (1762), his treatise on the nature of education, he declared vociferously that he “hate[d] books” and that reading was the “curse of childhood.” The irony …
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Public Thinker: Matthew Engelke on Thinking Like an Anthropologist
Matthew Engelke is one of the leading anthropologists of his generation …
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The Book Is a Time Machine
When we are not actually holding them, books are things over which we like to wring our hands. They stand, in their very solidity, for what might be precarious …
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Editor 2 Editor: Lindsay Waters and Peter J. Dougherty
What does it take for a scholarly book to reach a broad audience? What should …
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How to Predict a Bestseller
Literary theory is not a field that creates many bestsellers. Biographies of Shakespeare will always have a market, and now and then a work like Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae rides a wave of controversy. But literary research is hard to popularize: Malcolm Gladwell doesn’t write page-turners about narrative theory. The Bestseller Code tries to become…
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Against Careerism, For College
Having just seen a new crop of students graduate from my university, and seeing them now off into the world—to jobs, internships, and further study—I find myself thinking about what college is for, what it results in, and the feelings that swirl around the event of graduation. In the longest single section of David Foster…
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“Democracy and Education” @100
The rallies during Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign feature exuberant call-and-response exchanges. Denouncing immigrants from south of the border, Trump shouts, “We’re going to build a wall.” He pauses to let the crowd’s emotions storm up. Then he asks, “And, by the way, who’s going to pay for that wall?” The crowd roars back, “Mexico.”…
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Show Me Where It Hurts: Part 1
Illness, mental and physical, is arguably comics’ invisible master theme, deeply woven into their genome and shaping the stories they tell, from the earliest newspaper strips (chronic allergies in Winsor McCay’s Little Sammy Sneeze) through the rise of superhero comics (from Batman’s PTSD in 1939 through the Fantastic Four’s radiation poisoning in 1961). It is…
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Stop Hyping Academic Freedom
Universities may be among the oldest of our institutions, but they have changed significantly during the millennium or so since they were established. Roughly speaking, the history of the European university proceeds through four phases. First, the medieval ecclesiastical-juridical phase in which, first in Italy and gradually across Europe, universities were granted and then claimed…
