Mythodologies: Methods in Medieval Studies, Chaucer, and Book History

Published: 05/31/2018

Mythodologies challenges the implied methodology in contemporary studies in the humanities. We claim, at times, that we gather facts or what we will call evidence, and from that form hypotheses and conclusions. Of course, we recognize that the sum total of evidence for any argument is beyond comprehension; therefore, we construct, and we claim, preliminary[…]

The Ballad of the Lone Medievalist

Published: 08/23/2018

Are you a Lone Medievalist? Working medievalists are often the only scholar of the Middle Ages in a department, a university, or a hundred-mile radius. While working to build a body of focused scholarly work, the lone medievalist is expected to be a generalist in the classroom and a contributing member of a campus community[…]

Disrupting the Digital Humanities

Published: 11/06/2018

All too often, defining a discipline becomes more an exercise of exclusion than inclusion. Disrupting the Digital Humanities seeks to rethink how we map disciplinary terrain by directly confronting the gatekeeping impulse of many other so-called field-defining collections. What is most beautiful about the work of the Digital Humanities is exactly the fact that it[…]

Manifesto for a Post-Critical Pedagogy

Published: 01/11/2018

The belief in the transformative potential of education has long underpinned critical educational theory. But its concerns have also been largely political and economic, using education as the means to achieve a better – or ideal – future state: of equality and social justice. Our concern is not whether such a state can be realized.[…]

Dear Professor: A Chronicle of Absences

Imprint:

Published: 12/19/2016

What an absolutely brilliant idea for a book. I wish I’d had it and feel full of envy that I didn’t. These compulsively readable messages are part of the pathetic and poignant pornography of our time. ~ Simon Critchley, Professor of Philosophy, The New School for Social Research Dear Professor: A Chronicle of Absences is a collection[…]

The Pedagogics of Unlearning

Published: 05/23/2016

What does it mean to unlearn? Once we have learned something, is it ever possible to unlearn that something? If something is said to have been unlearned, does that mean that it is simply forgotten or does some residual force of learning, some perverse force, also resonate in ways that might help us to rethink[…]

Rumba under Fire: The Arts of Survival from West Point to Delhi

Published: 02/29/2016

A professor of poetry uses a deck of playing cards to measure the time until her lover returns from Afghanistan. Congolese soldiers find their loneliness reflected in the lyrics of rumba songs. Survivors of the siege of Sarajevo discuss which book they would have never burned for fuel. A Romanian political prisoner writes her memoir[…]