Tag: Public Humanities
Empathy and the Danger(s) Disengagement
For the past couple of years, I’ve been keeping a list. Admittedly, it’s not an original concept, being a mental exercise adapted from one of many optimistic Pinterest boards encouraging meditative mindfulness and gratitude in the upcoming New Year. Instead of coming up with a soon-to-be neglected resolution, this effort at self-improvement
Machiavelli’s “Small Volume”: The Legacy of the Stage Machiavel
“Bearing in mind all the matters previously discussed, I ask myself whether the present time is appropriate for welcoming a new ruler in Italy, and whether there is matter that provides an opportunity for a few-seeing and able man to mold it into a form that will bring honour to him and its inhabitants.” -Machiavelli
Privileged Positions: House of Cards and Frank Underwood’s Machiavellian Monologues
“Since a ruler, then, must know how to act like a beast, he should imitate both the fox and the lion, for the lion is liable to be trapped, whereas the fox cannot ward off wolves…[b]ut foxiness should be well concealed: one must be a great feigner and dissembler. And men are so naïve…that a
Part II: Wicked Women and the Negotiation of Female (Dis)empowerment
“Not only did she dupe me into believing she still loved me, she actually forced me to implicate myself. Wicked, wicked girl. I almost laughed. Good Lord, I hated her, but you had to admire the bitch.” – Nick Dunne Gone Girl, (Flynn 345) [1] The majority of Gone Girl’s masterful storytelling depends on Flynn’s
Zen and the Art of the Course Description
Course descriptions bridge the gap between the university’s corporate model and the classroom’s pedagogical space, aiding in achieving satisfactory enrollment “numbers.” In this way, the description of a class has to do the work of both an advertisement and an infomercial, appealing to students as well as cuing them about the course’s content. Despite our
Don’t Eat The Flatware: Balancing Instruction and Interpretation in the Classroom
For this month’s posts, I will focus on how engagement with social media, popular culture, film, and video games can inform the work we do in humanities classrooms. This week, I look at how criticism of humanities instruction on Reddit might help us understand why the practice of interpretation leaves some students with a negative
Coda: The Human in the Humanities
My first semester of grad school was kind of a wreck: I was constantly sick, my nerves were bound tight with anxiety, and my back and wrists were in pain from the Soviet-era metal chair-desks in a basement classroom. None of this was helped by the ideological distress I found myself in. Two pieces of
Common Knowledge?: EEBO, #FrEEBO, and Public Domain Information
If you work in the humanities and you’ve used a database, a dictionary, or Google Docs in the past ten years, congratulations! — you’re already doing digital humanities. This was a point emphasized by Syracuse University professor Chris Hanson in a panel discussion on the digital humanities that I attended after the Six Degrees of
The Dust-Heap of the Database and the Specters of the Spectator
In 2014, networks launched some 1,715 new television series, a staggering number that prompted many articles to declare variations on the theme “there are too many shows to watch.” Same story, different medium, I say. Franco Moretti, a contemporary literary scholar, writes that while twenty-first century Victorianists may (may) read around two-hundred Victorian titles, that
Adventures in academic-land
No one likes to come off as stupid (or not smart enough) at a gathering, big or small. Right now, you might be disagreeing with my statement and telling yourself or whoever is sitting beside you, “That’s not true! I don’t mind being ignorant because not everyone knows everything. At least, I get rid of