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…
Contemporaries Essays
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…
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…
White Nostalgia
My relationship to Stranger Things is ambivalent. As a child of the 1980s, I remember the analog technologies and cultural objects that the show obsessively brings back to life. Now I’m old…
Recovering ‘The Body’: Generic Convergence and Parental Reassurance in Stranger Things
It has become commonplace to lament the loss of an American childhood in which unsupervised play and everyday encounters with moderate danger build independence, resilience, and creativity. Today’s highly-regulated kids…
Analog Nostalgia and the Promise of Props in the Digital Age
“To create an authentic period world requires thousands of specific decisions — that sheet, that cassette tape on that bedroom dresser.” — Shawn Levy1 “It has always been something of a lifelong dream to create a…
The Violence of Nostalgia, or, the Crisis of Middle-Class Modernity
1. Vanishing from the charts only to appear again years later, pop songs are good at evoking memories of the past. When George Michael’s “Freedom 90” resurfaces now, decades after…
Boys, Fractured: Stranger Things and Nostalgia Now
1 After a game of Dungeons and Dragons, two boys bike home from their friend’s house on a night in 1983. They are unaware of the awful and awesome events…