Soon after Bloomsday 2019, a spoken word poet in sparkling brown boots performed for an academic gathering in Dublin. Her lush Irish speech accented what she knows as a working-class…
Archive for July, 2019
The Public and Possible Institutions of Practice
Humanities in the Public In my research with literature festivals in India I ask: why have writers, translators, artists, academics, publishers, and concerned citizens come together to produce a network…
Why Write for the Public
1 There’s this quote from Borges I used to love. “I do not write for a select minority, which means nothing to me, nor for that adulated platonic entity known…
What Academic Humanists Can Learn from Nonprofits
“Tenure. Is. Over.” I recently attended a panel discussion about the future of public humanities. Afterward, I asked a question about how a presenter’s work might help rebuild tenure in…
Public Humanities and Crossing Borders
The camp is about twenty minutes outside of Larissa village, in the midst of dried and irrigated fields, beyond a four-lane road that is silent but for the occasional car…
Introduction: Public Humanities as/and Comparatist Practice
Is public humanities a discipline, an intellectual movement, a social justice movement, or a professional and institutional corrective to an unsustainable economic model in higher education? Can it be more…
Global China as Genre
Sunny Xiang
Sean Bonney’s Hate Poems
We are [. . .] unalterable rebels, without gods, master or fatherland; irreconcilable enemies of all despotism, moral or material, individual or collective, in other words, of law and dictatorship…
Introduction: How to Be Now
“What’s happening with the special issue? The ‘now’ of its title keeps changing its referent!” So one of our contributors complained in June, after we had predicted an April publication…
The Ecology of the Upside Down; or, The Possibility of Black Life in Stranger Things
Stranger Things is a show invested in the biopolitics of black life in the United States, though we watch its racial engagements through 1980s visions of white suburbia and explorations in…