Essays

From Ashes to Lessons

Remembrance is not just about looking backward. It’s about looking forward. It is a commitment to shaping a just and equitable future. Mehak Burza ·

Building to Inspire

Some of the most important spaces on campuses are the spaces in between the buildings, the walkways, plazas, green spaces. For the buildings within the Athenaeum to be successful, they need to be connected to these exterior spaces.Nils Roemer and Arne Emerson · Issue 10 ·

“My Side of the Line”

By this definition, heroic and inspirational characters such as Batman and Spider-Man, among many others, are all vigilantes, but, on the other hand, so are the vigilantes who comprised the mob that stormed the Capitol, and the Punisher seems closer in his methodology to these real-life vigilantes.Peter Jay Ingrao · Issue 8 ·

The People’s Choice

The fatal weakness in social contract theories is that no one remembers ever making such a contract.Al Martinich and Tom Palaima · Issue 8 ·

Can the Humanities Flourish in Prison?

After a Shakespeare performance class in prison, it is about going to bed with, not sugar plums dancing in your head, but with an iambic rhythm that echoes through the night against the blare of a loudspeaker that rarely quietens amidst the bright lights outside your cell that never dim. Karen Hamer and Cedric Martin · Issue 8 ·

Rage against the University Machine

As far back as 62 BC, the Roman statesman, philosopher, and orator Cicero had announced that the studia humanitatis (“the studies of humanity”) were valuable because they instilled the crucial quality of humanitas (“benevolence,” “kindliness,” “humaneness”) in their devotees. Eric Adler · Issue 8 ·

Form Fatigue

For the Yup’ik of Alaska, objects and human experiences constituted a complex and unified worldview inextricably weaving together the material, spiritual, and personal. Thomas Riccio · Issue 8 ·

Dark Posthumanism and the Novel

What updates are required of the novel — a technology allegedly designed as a vehicle of liberal humanism — in the era of dark posthumanism? Erin Greer · Issue 8 ·

Insider Exile

Melville’s narrator is someone whose secular critique is just strong enough to needle the professional class but too weak to do more than lament the plight of labor. Ashley Barnes · Issue 8 ·

A New Horizon for the Study of the Arts and Humanities

The original work will not change and does not have to change in order to maintain its power, whereas the translation needs to be revitalized as the cultural and social standards and energies of each century change.Rainer Schulte · Issue 8 ·

From STEM to STEAM

Science fiction has the benefits of both worlds—those of sciences and humanities, and its popularity among the reading public is the consequence of both technological advancement and the innate drives of the human desire to control one’s world and destiny in the postmodern and posthuman age of media and telecommunications. Ming Dong Gu · Issue 8 ·

The Flash Mob, A Novel Art Form

Just as historians usefully identity precedents for monochrome or still life painting, so we can construct a pre-history for the flash mob. In nineteenth-century Italian opera’s crowd scenes and in numerous dancing scenes in Hollywood films, you see music animating urban life. Suddenly the crowd is brought together by a song.David Carrier ·

Evelyn Longman’s Genius of Electricity

Longman’s unusual choice to personify victory as an exuberant athlete instead of the traditional winged female figure exemplifies one key to her success: her ability to capture an institution’s message in a novel visual form.Margaret Samu · Issue 7 ·

Lightness, Panache, and Glistening Sonorities

Keeley’s music is genial and filled with lightness and panache… While Carl’s work is post-impressionistic, and about space and time, it utilizes materials in a most sophisticated and, dare one say, classical way. Daniel Asia · Issue 7 ·

Philokleon Goes Viral

Aristophanes scholar Matthew C. Farmer has suggested that the Trump campaign slogan “Make American Great Again” finds parallels in several passages in Wasps in which supporters of Kleon express a nostalgic longing for the “good old days” of the Athenian past.Daniel B. Levine · Issue 7 ·

The Bitter Sweetness of Life

For the classical composer, the aural idea is transformed and finalized in the process of composition, but the jazz improviser is involved in finding the idea in the process of its birth.Daniel Asia ·

The Evolution and Extinction of Lady Liberty

Abstracted women as symbols of liberty on U.S. coins contrasted starkly with the personification of British and Spanish monarchs on their coins.Robert J. Stern · Issue 6 ·

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