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…
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.
Re-imagining World Spaces: The New Relevance of Eurasia
Although we often think about geographical continents as fixed natural entities, they are in fact also the product of imaginative construction. The most recent example of this process is the emergence of the continental concept of "Eurasia."
“Starving the Beast” University Finances and Public Education Colloquium
This Humanities Futures colloquium opened with the projection of Steve Mim’s 2016 documentary “Starving the Beast: The Battle to Disrupt…
End of Translation
Translation lies at the core of contemporary humanistic study and serves also to define and guard its boundaries.
An Alternative Paradigm for Studying and Performing Athenian Drama
Using the communal rather than professional paradigm for the study of this drama yields important results…
