Trash Matters: Residual Culture in Latin America
This article addresses the concept of trash from both an environmental and biopolitical perspective. It underscores the importance of trash in our daily lives as a key component of modern technology, habits of consumption, and disposability.
On Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Chinese Body as Surplus
This essay introduces the idea of biopolitical aesthetics and argues for a more nuanced attention to the figure of the medically commodified body in contemporary Chinese and transnational literature, art, and popular culture.
Visions of the Body: Embodied Simulation and Aesthetic Experience
This essay addresses the questions raised by the distinctly human trait of creating images.
When Angels Speak with Tanya Luhrmann
This talk examines the phenomenological features of voice-hearing in different settings—religious and secular, modern and medieval. Prof. Tanya Luhrmann drew…
Symposium on Race & Transgender Studies
Transgender Studies + Humanities Series Symposium on Race and Transgender Studies, at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke…
From Boxes to Bytes: Creating the Digital Transgender Archive
Keynote address of the 2016 symposium of the FHI-NCCU Digital Humanities Fellowship Program. The program supports the development of digital…
Entangled Bodies: Animals as Humans
The Entangled Bodies symposium is part of Entanglements: The Art of Between and Beyond, a year-long series (2016-17) organized by…
Entangled Bodies: The Embodied God of the Hebrew Bible
The Entangled Bodies symposium is part of Entanglements: The Art of Between and Beyond, a year-long series (2016-17) organized by…
Entangled Bodies: Sufism and Yogic Bodies
The Entangled Bodies symposium is part of Entanglements: The Art of Between and Beyond, a year-long series (2016-17) organized by…
Almost Citizens: Racial Translations, National Belonging, and the Global "Immigration Crisis"
The article examines some of the ways in which racialized immigrants and their descendants translate hegemonic ethnoracial terms to assert belonging and citizenship in the nation.
Afro-Pessimism and the End of Redemption
This essay addresses the tenets of Afro-Pessimism in relation to the condition of slavery, Blackness, and Black nonexistence.
Islamicate Cosmopolitan: A Past Without a Future, Or a Future Still Unfolding?
Islamicate is a term invented by world historian Marshall Hodgson. At once precise and woolly, it invokes Islam—its past, present, and future—yet marks its influence as exceeding any creedal or cultural limits.
Linguistic Hospitality: Reflections on Voice, (Early) Modernities, and the Future of Italian Studies
As émigrés currently adopt Italian to relate their personal experiences, a new edginess and perceptivity is developing in the arts, particularly in the cinema and in literature.
Towards a Materialist History of Music: Histories of Sensation
This essay examines the history of auditory sensation, specifically music, in materialistic terms related to sensory communication and raw physicality.
A Liberian Journey
In this essay, the author relates a journey to retrace the steps of a 1926 Harvard medical and scientific expedition to Liberia.
Building a Union at Duke
Eileen Anderson is currently teaching language, writing, and culture courses in the Spanish Language Program at Duke University. She was…
The Campus as Social Factory: Monetizing the Student
Students create institutional value most obviously by paying tuition, adopting debt, performing waged work, submitting to compulsory volunteerism, donating to…
Public Anthropology in the Time of Trump
What responsibility do scholars have in times of political crisis? To whom, why, and how do we reach our intended…
A Black Feminist Politic of Teaching & Organizing with Emotion
University of Colorado-Boulder Associate Professor of Anthropology Bianca Williams is a teacher/organizer with Black Lives Matter, and a mobilizer for…
How Should We Read a Painting Now?
How does today’s global art world help open up questions about the global reach of art and artists in the past? And, linking past and present, how do we most effectively use language to convey, and interpret, the always elusive affective impact of art?
Against Digital Art History
This article responds to two issues affecting the field of contemporary art history: digital technology and the so-called computational turn in the humanities.
