intellectual history

Burning Diagrams in Anthropology: An Inverse Museum

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Published: 11/21/2024

Burning Diagrams in Anthropology examines the use of diagrams in anthropology to reimagine how we think about, and challenge, intellectual histories. Highlighting the impossibility of escaping what different disciplines and institutions deem to be “past,” the author combines critical analysis of selected diagrams with an expansive, exploratory reimmersion in their aesthetic, ethical, and political potential.[…]

Lifetimes: A Theory of Timescales and Life Forms

FORTHCOMING Summer 2025

At the beginning of the 21st century, many of our most well-known and dependable forms of keeping, managing, and representing time are losing their grasp on the real. Clocks cannot measure how societies speed up, or come to a standstill during crisis, modern historiography is unable to come up with meaningful narratives about mankind as[…]

Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, postSaxon Futures

Published: 12/30/2019

We are all, no matter how little we like it, the bearers of unwanted and often shunned memory, of a history whose infiltrations are at times so stealthy we can pretend otherwise, and at times so loud we can’t hear much of anything else. We’re still here — there differently than those before us, but[…]

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[…]

MATCHES: A Light Book

Published: 04/16/2019

A new, expanded edition, with a Foreword by Alexander Kluge. The match: little stick tipped with combustible stuff, sparked by friction; typically comes in a book or a box or a bundle (the point being: never alone). The highly portable match lighting more or less when required was a great nineteenth-century innovation. Before, we had[…]

Nicholas of Cusa and the Kairos of Modernity: Cassirer, Gadamer, Blumenberg

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Published: 09/05/2013

In this far-reaching essay, historian Michael Edward Moore examines modernity as an historical epoch following the end of the medieval period — and as a “messianic concept of time.” In the early twentieth century, a debate over the meaning and origins of modernity unfolded among the philosophers Ernst Cassirer, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Hans Blumenberg. These[…]