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Posts Tagged ‘humanities’

The letter A and the pronoun I

Posted in Science & society, tagged , , , , , , on August 6, 2025 | Leave a Comment »

I’m organizing a two-day academic retreat focusing on “Generative AI, Techno-authoritarianism, and the Future of the Critical Humanities.” It will take place in late September, partly under the auspices of Simon Fraser University’s Joanne Brown Symposium series on violence and its alternatives. We’re stretching the mandate of that series in that we aren’t focusing directly […]

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Woodsworth Chair: Three challenges

Posted in Academe, Manifestos & auguries, tagged , , , , , , , , , on November 22, 2023 | 6 Comments »

I’m delighted to formally announce that I have accepted an offer to take up the position of J. S. Woodsworth Chair in the Humanities at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, beginning next year. (Simon Fraser recently, once again, took the top spot among comprehensive universities in Macleans’ Canadian university rankings.) The chair is named after J. S. Woodsworth (1874-1942), […]

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Posthumanist redistributions of the sensible

Posted in Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on March 31, 2021 | 3 Comments »

Theory has a mobile army of metaphors that account for its own importance. The vanguardist notion of a “cutting edge” has long served as a paradigmatic metaphor for theoretical innovation, and it’s one I take issue with in my article “Is the Post- in Posthuman the Post- in Postmodern? Or What Can the Human Be?,” […]

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What are the humanities? (Two cultures, redux)

Posted in Academe, Science & society, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 14, 2020 | Leave a Comment »

As a humanistic scholar within an interdisciplinary school, I’m often put in a position to distinguish how the humanities differ from the social and natural sciences. There is a long tradition of distinguishing between these “two cultures,” with the most frequent point of focus, for humanists, being that they concern themselves with human meaning and […]

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What we ask students to read…

Posted in Academe, tagged , , , , , , , , , on March 19, 2016 | 3 Comments »

Both Open Culture and The New York Times have reported on the Open Syllabus Project, which has tallied over a million college course syllabi to determine the 10,000 or so most commonly assigned texts. The project also provides a cluster map of these texts, which is probably less interesting (and more confusing) in its large form than when one pokes […]

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Top humanists: final results

Posted in Academe, tagged , , , on June 3, 2014 | Leave a Comment »

Since most of us love lists — or at least love and hate them simultaneously — here is the updated version of the “Top humanities theorists of the last century” list. See the previous version for the full criteria and the caveats. Briefly: it’s a list of the most cited humanities theorists of the last 100 years (roughly) according to their […]

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Prize announcement

Posted in Academe, tagged on May 19, 2014 | 1 Comment »

Announcing a competition: Which scholars should be on the list of “Top humanists of the last century” but are not? The person who names the greatest number of such names by the end of the day (12 midnight) EST next Sunday — using the methodology specified there (a simple Google Scholar search) — will win a copy […]

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Top humanists of the last century

Posted in Academe, tagged , on May 18, 2014 | 18 Comments »

A theme that’s been coming up in my conversations recently (including when visiting UC Davis) is the question of the “humanities canon”: i.e., who are the theorists whose views have been most influential in shaping the humanities disciplines, especially over the last century or so? And more specifically, is there anything approximating an “environmental humanities canon,” and who are […]

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