Contemporaries Essays

Let’s call the lists that we encounter and produce on a day-to-day basis ordinary lists. Examples might include shopping lists, contact lists, to-do lists, bucket lists, packing lists, mailing lists,…

Compression counts, and not just for poems and tourniquets. In “RT = Endorsement,” Kinohi gives us a version of academic Twitter as the distillery of good scholarship and good sentence-craft,…

“We are at stake to each other.”— Donna Haraway “The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.” — Deleuze &…

Let me begin with a true story: when I was teaching in Berlin, a colleague there shared his lecture notes with me for a large introductory seminar. I couldn’t believe…

4In July of last year, Saidiya Hartman published an article titled “The Anarchy of Colored Girls.” It was an accumulation of a style of writing and an approach to the…

For this forum, we were asked to reflect on “how we write (well).”1 To make sure there was no evading or finessing the first person plural, we were encouraged to…

Academia is not immune to today’s breakneck pace of content generation and dispersal. I confess to feeling pulled in that direction, devoting far more of my reading during “work hours”…

It’s become something of a platitude to say that scholarly writing is currently undergoing dramatic change. Diminishing university press budgets and the pressures of the academic job market have pushed…