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Contemporaries Essays, Ecologies of Neoliberal Publishing

Bibliologistics: The Nature of Books Now, or A Memorable Fancy

In The Nature of the Book, his landmark study of the printing industry in early modern London, Adrian Johns delivers a rich recreation of what it would have been like…

Contemporaries Essays, Ecologies of Neoliberal Publishing

Megativity and Miniaturization at the Frankfurt Book Fair

The Frankfurt Book Fair, or in its native German, the Frankfurter Buchmesse, restarted in the aftermath of the Second World War as a symbol of post-war reconstruction, an engine of…

Contemporaries Essays, Ecologies of Neoliberal Publishing

Introduction to Ecologies of Neoliberal Publishing

Right about now, you might be thinking: “not more neoliberalism!” Come to think of it, you might be getting a little tired of “ecologies” too. But pulling together these two…

Contemporaries Essays, The Pain Cluster

The Wisdom Narrative

The stories that we tell about illness are almost entirely about overcoming it, but in the event that it can’t be overcome, they are about growing wiser as a result…

Contemporaries Essays, The Pain Cluster

Ugly Stories, Boring Pictures, Invisible Illness

What does pain look like? Often, nothing at all. Many people experience illness and pain but don’t look sick, as the phrase goes. Visibility seems an insurmountable aim. It’s not….

Contemporaries Essays, The Pain Cluster

Pain Studies

* All pain is simple. And all pain is complex. You’re in it and you want to get out. How can the ocean be not beautiful? The ocean is not…

Contemporaries Essays, The Pain Cluster

The Job Market is Killing Me

It was midnight on Halloween. The muffled chants of frat boys clued me in to the scene outside. I shut my computer, my second big round of job market deadlines…

Contemporaries Essays, The Pain Cluster

Puzzles with Pain Reports

We all know what pains are, don’t we? We act as if we do; we tell other people that we are in pain and we accept others’ reports of pain…

Contemporaries Essays, The Pain Cluster

How is Pain Social?

I study those who study pain. For most of the past decade, I have conducted an ethnographic study on the neuroscience of pain, conducting observations in neuroimaging pain labs and…

Contemporaries Essays, The Pain Cluster

Intro to Pain

Pain’s inexpressibility has dominated its discourse as long as people have attempted to write about it — yet we continue to do so, robustly. While completing a book manuscript on the…