To collect essays into a cluster, such as this one for Contemporaries, creates a casing for those essays to inhabit. Within this casing, the essays’s proximity to one another affects the…
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Contemporaries Essays, Web 2.0 and Literary Criticism
Issue 3: Stoppage Time: Timescales of the Present, Peer Reviewed Articles
Photographic Futures
The first illustration in Lydia Millet’s novel Mermaids in Paradise (2015) depicts the back of a man’s head as he gazes down at his laptop. What could be more representative of…
Issue 3: Stoppage Time: Timescales of the Present, Peer Reviewed Articles, Uncategorized
Geek Temporalities and the Spirit of Capital
Jeff Bezos begged to appear on Star Trek Beyond. Sergey Brin drew inspiration from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Elon Musk loves video games and cites Isaac Asimov, Douglas Adams, and…
Issue 3: Stoppage Time: Timescales of the Present, Peer Reviewed Articles, Uncategorized
Queer Times for the Straight Book: Maggie Nelson and Michel Serres
If you read a lot of Michel Serres – and you might: he’s written many books, about a lot of things – a conundrum emerges. On the one hand, he…
Contemporaries Essays, Public Humanities as/and Comparatist Practice
Afterword: Tight Spots and Privileged Spaces
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…
Contemporaries Essays, Public Humanities as/and Comparatist Practice
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…
Contemporaries Essays, Public Humanities as/and Comparatist Practice
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…
Contemporaries Essays, Public Humanities as/and Comparatist Practice
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…
Contemporaries Essays, Public Humanities as/and Comparatist Practice
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…
Contemporaries Essays, Public Humanities as/and Comparatist Practice
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…