Among the many issues within academia, one that is particularly frustrating for us in the humanities is the ways various institutional forces demand that our work fit into narrower and narrower categories. Within our disciplines we shrink into our fields, eras, methodologies, texts, claims, and politics, staking out smaller and smaller territories so that we […]
Among the many issues within academia, one that is particularly frustrating for us in the humanities is the ways various institutional forces demand that our work fit into narrower and narrower categories. Within our disciplines we shrink into our fields, eras, methodologies, texts, claims, and politics, staking out smaller and smaller territories so that we
“There’s no chance anyone in authority approved this [excavation of a Nordic burial site],” complains Onmund, an NPC from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. “Our ancestors should be allowed to rest in peace.” As a Nord, himself, Onmund voices the sole objection to the College of Winterhold’s entry into Saarthal, a Nordic ruin and tomb.
Released in 2011, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is an RPG (i.e. role-playing game) whose impact on the video-gaming world cannot be understated. In it, you play as a custom character in a fictive Scandi world who discovers they are “dragonborn,” one who speaks the tongue of dragons and is fated to slay them and
On January 15th, 2025, the private aerospace company Firefly launched its first ever lunar lander aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. At my time of writing, the rocket is currently en route to the surface of the moon. This collaboration between Firefly and SpaceX is the latest example of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative,
“Humans,” art historian Glenn Peers contends, “have slipped into a modern faith in knowingness that thinks it exceeds the scale and complexity of our world…, blind[ing] us to other human possibilities.” The statement embodies the recent artworks of Pakistani multimedia artist Huma Bhabha in her 2024 exhibition entitled, “Welcome…to the one who came.” Primarily a
Referencing his mother’s passing in 1992, Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s “aim as an artist [was] to make a work that [was] so palpable and so dynamic and so incredibly felt that [his] Mom could literally walk off the surface of the canvas and back to life.”[1] The result was Untitled (Portrait of the Artist’s Mother) from
Babak Anvari’s 2022 film I Came By tells the disjointed story of graffiti artists Jay and Toby. Set in the contemporary United Kingdom, the story addresses colonialism, race, and the curious characteristics of modern, industrial societies in this follow-up to Anvari’s 2016 debut film Under the Shadow. In many ways, I Came By resembles recent
Tracey Emin, Like A Cloud of Blood, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 59 7/8 x 71 5/8 in. (152 x 182cm) The difficulty in comprehending Tracey Emin’s Like A Cloud of Blood (2022) is the paradox of witnessing a disappearing figure coming into being. In Emin’s painting, an incomplete and empty body lies isolated in curled
Pericles (1608), one of Shakespeare’s and co-author George Wilkins’s romances, dramatizes the tumultuous life of Pericles, the Prince of Tyre. Over five acts, it stages his acquisition of love, its tragic loss, and its ultimate rediscovery. Strikingly, the play opens with incest—Antiochus, the king of Antioch, instructs Pericles to solve a riddle whose answer reveals
At its root, the “Bury Your Gays” trope is simple: in a work with an overt or implied same-sex couple, by the end of the story at least one of the lovers “must die or otherwise be destroyed” (Hulan 17). Today, it is often used in film for shock value, as seen with Tara’s death
