700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
I have always been interested in applying the techniques of archaeology to understand peoples who were described by others but who left no written record themselves. Julius Caesar’s descriptions of...
The Civil Contract of Photography is about the relations between photography and citizenship in disaster contexts. The book proposes a historical and theoretical analysis of the relation between photography and...
I am an engineer. I design and build things that never before existed (mostly software, these days). For most of my life, I thought these things were my personal creations,...
We increasingly live in a culture of metric fixation: the belief of so many organizations that scientific management means replacing judgment based upon experience and talent with standardized measures of...
Some readers may think that the first chapter on participatory politics and legal reform is the key, as these laid the foundation for an open and civil society in China....
My interest in the topic of public art and modernism in Los Angeles grew out of a lifelong concern with artistic and literary censorship. Early in my career, I learned...
Of my various publications, this is the work that is most meaningful to me; the book is my synthesis of what I believe ecology to be, and why it is...
At an American Literature conference about eight years ago, I presented a paper with the title “No Place Like Home”, which proposed that what the field of Poe biography had...
The Word on the Streets enters in a rather thorny place in modernist studies. In my mind—and I make the claim in the book—the field of modernist studies has been...
On December 30, 2019, the Chinese scientist Jiankui He was sentenced to three years in jail and fined three million yuan. His crime? Creating the world’s first CRISPR-edited babies. My...
In the book’s preface I dive into what I has been much overlooked in the modern period: the importance of friendship, how it seems to differ for women, and not...
Given the declining number of new drugs, and the crisis in the pharmaceutical industry, many are asking what can be done.The Obama administration has proposed a new initiative to help...
The book offers, using a cartographic metaphor, a ‘map’ of wellbeing. In that respect, I don’t have a particular preference for which ‘region’ I would hope a reader first encounters....
For me, the key chapter of Twilight is the short chapter on Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb.Many people today have only the vaguest notion of the these two young men...
I never smoked crack. I did live in New York City in the 1980s and 1990s at the height of the crack era. Until my wife and I discovered it,...
How I came to write the book was that I was asked about 10 years ago to give a lecture about real women who masqueraded as men and who took...
The book is illustrated with original photographs of “Poe places” by Michelle Van Parys; it also contains a number of archival images, including contemporary maps of the cities where Poe...
Newlyweds on Tour is the first historical study to trace the origins and growth of the American honeymoon from 1820 to 1900. Rather than treating the honeymoon as a simple...
My book is a biography of Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), the influential Egyptian ideologue of Islamic revolution.No other Islamist thinker, with the possible exception of the South Asian Abu l-A‘la Mawdudi...
The fields of design and urban history are dominated by public housing enmity. Public housing projects are key proofs, for instance, in the theory that design determines social behavior. When...
One of my favorite moments in the book—and in researching it—appears on pages 97-98. On Tuesday, May 21, 1940, FDR had summoned his attorney general, Robert H. Jackson, to the...
Counterfactuals are “what-ifs.” They change a feature of the past in the expectation of changing the present. The antecedent (the change introduced in the past) is connected to the consequent...
Futurism’s outsized ambition responded to the limited and limiting conditions of Italian modernity. It was a still chiefly agrarian country, unified for less than half a century. Its identity remained wedded to...
I have long been struck by how much and how deeply English borrows from French. My training was in French and English literature. My first book explored the literary and...
As a pianist who loved to perform the music of Debussy, Ravel, and Fauré, and as a modernist who studied Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Mallarmé, I grew up inspired by their...
The book really does reflect my years of thinking and training as an intellectual—as a public intellectual. Each of the essays evolved in response to a place and then to...
The introduction will give readers the best overview of the issues and questions that the book engages, as well as its broader intellectual context. Nevertheless, I attempted to write the...
As a work of political theory, When the State Meets the Street is unusual in that it combines normative reasoning with ethnographic fieldwork. Political theory is often criticized for operating...
There are two sections that I hope browsers would encounter. The first is from a section at the beginning called the Year of Two Presidents. It is a fictional vignette...
I would hope that a reader browsing in a bookstore would first look at the range of subjects explored in the book’s seven chapters and look more closely at one...
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