Think Piece – Page 40

Apes, Jews, and Others: a reading of Franz Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy” and Bernard Malamud’s “God’s Grace”

by guest contributor Yaelle Frohlich On the surface, Franz Kafka’s short story “A Report to an Academy” (1917) and Bernard Malamud‘s last finished novel, God’s Grace (1982), appear quite different, but they each boast a striking similar feature: Both… Continue Reading →

Intellectual History from Below

by Emily Rutherford When he came to give a lecture at Columbia University last month, Chris Hilliard was introduced as “an intellectual historian from below.” “From below” is a term to conjure with in modern British history: a field whose… Continue Reading →

May 18, 2016 13

Mai-mai Sze and Irene Sharaff in Public and in Private

by contributing editor Erin McGuirl I’ve written about Mai-mai Sze on this blog three times, and in those pieces I have focused on her life as a reader and writer. I am neither a historian nor a biographer by training… Continue Reading →

May 16, 2016 6

Shame, Memory, and the Politics of the Archive

by guest contributor Nicole Longpré During a research trip to the University of Leeds in the spring of 2014, I requested access to a selection of files from the papers of former Labour MP Merlyn Rees which are held by… Continue Reading →

May 4, 2016 2

We Have Never Been Presentist: On Regimes of Historicity

by guest contributor Zoltán Boldizsár Simon It is great news that François Hartog’s Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time has finally come out in English. The original French edition dates back to 2003, and my encounter with the… Continue Reading →

May 2, 2016 3

Chronology’s Forgotten Medieval Pioneers

by guest contributor Philipp Nothaft According to a metaphor once popular among early modern scholars, chronology is one of the “two eyes of history” (the other being geography), which is an apt shorthand for expressing its tremendous utility in imposing… Continue Reading →

April 27, 2016 1

Comparative Difficulties in the Global Academy

by guest contributor Nicholas Bellinson [Fu Xi] looking up… observed the images in the heavens and looking down he observed the models in the earth. He looked at how the markings of the birds and animals were appropriate to the… Continue Reading →

April 25, 2016 0

Historicizing Failure

by guest contributor Disha Jani Making meaning out of the past requires sifting: turning flotsam and jetsam into units of time and entities of subjecthood. One of the most basic ways in which historians sift is with beginnings and ends… Continue Reading →

April 20, 2016 1

Dressing Up in Late Antique Egypt: A Review of ISAW’s ‘Designing Identity’

by contributing editor Jake Purcell One of the joys of being in New York is the relative plethora of late-antique objects scattered throughout the city. The Met does not exactly have a late antique room, but, in a corridor gallery… Continue Reading →

April 18, 2016 1

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