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The Best & The Brightest Failure

The Best & The Brightest Failure

I felt a small sense of Schadenfreude when reading about European politics throughout 2016. Perhaps other Americans felt the same way: there was something deeply satisfying about watching the right wing ride on a wave of populist anger at austerity in Hungary, France, and most spectacularly in the UK. Without thinking too much about the political implications, watching from across the ocean felt…

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Five Thoughts on Orlando

Five Thoughts on Orlando

I. Regardless of a filibuster against terrorists (by which I mean people the government has decided are terrorists)  having access to weapons, or whether the average voter believes in regulation of weapons like the AR-15, neither of these concerns are particularly well-placed to deal with gun violence in American society. Vox and The Trace have shown that spectacles like Orlando are hardly…

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Politics and Ethics in the Digital Era

Politics and Ethics in the Digital Era

I remember a comment my mother often made in the early years of the Bush administration. Living in the heathen amoral hellhole that is New York, there was little question about the liberal socialist feminist perspectives of all our close friends, and in the early ’00s, some of them sought brief refuge by reminiscing about the Clinton administration. Not my mom: “I voted for him with my nose…

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Notes on Eurocentrism and Its Avatars

Notes on Eurocentrism and Its Avatars

Immanuel Wallerstein, “Eurocentrism and Its Avatars: The Dilemmas of Social Science”New Left Review, 1997 Eurocentrism has a prominent relation to the academy. The Western university remains the premiere space for the academy, and hardly an educational space exists anymore that doesn’t mirror some element of Western curriculums and educations. The concept of research as we do it presently in both…

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Star Wars VII and Corporatizing Diversity

Star Wars VII and Corporatizing Diversity

I am a bit of a nerd. Instead of doing sportsball with my almost-5’6 balling height, I spent a good deal of high school and college helping organize and play Real-Time Strategy games like Warcraft III and Starcraft II. A good Friday night to me is finding an awesome gaming store and playing in a Magic: the Gathering draft. Our Christmas tree currently has ornaments of Captains Picard, Janeway,…

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Revamping lots of the organization on this blog, if links stop working or what have you do let me know! #justocdthings #holyshitthisbloghasbeenupalongsecond #wow

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The Function (or lack of) of Context-less Theories of Justice

The Function (or lack of) of Context-less Theories of Justice

I often hate the phrase “awkward elephant in the room” (or its close cousin, the eight-hundred pound gorilla) because it does not really capture the essence of most things it is used to describe. To ascribe something like a former suicide, or a religious practice, or a form of systemic privilege as an elephant seems to put it in some corner of the room, and not having real impact on the…

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An article I wrote at some point about Neutral Discourse

An article I wrote at some point about Neutral Discourse

So I go to the University of Chicago, an institution which often prides itself on the “life of the mind”.  This has been both a lifesaver, and a very oppressive sort-of mentality. One of my very good friends put it this way, humorously: “At the University of Chicago, you are only as good as your last argument”. We clearly (hopefully) don’t validate forms of life solely based on the arguments that…

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Failure to Comprehend: The Asymmetry of Historical Experience

Failure to Comprehend: The Asymmetry of Historical Experience

A few weeks ago, this article, titled “The Banality of Butter” was published in response to the controversy surrounding Deen and her commonplace use of the word “nigger” amongst other things. The author, Professor Strauss of NYU, focused on using Arendt as a lens to understand why a group of individuals, who were aware of Deen’s use of racist terms, and her desire to have a plantation wedding…

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Freedom of Speech is Digital: thoughts on Yale and Missouri

Freedom of Speech is Digital: thoughts on Yale and Missouri

Note: Will likely be late on this week’s grad school post, but I have no class this week so it will come up! I’d been working on this since the events at Yale and Missouri spread, but Paris threw my ability to write and the timing of this out the window. When all is said and done, we will likely look back on 2015 as the year that universities became re-politicized. With the renewal of focus on…

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Week 8: Three classes again!

Week 8: Three classes again!

Early American History: Terri Snyder, “Refiguring Women in Early American History,” The William and Mary Quarterly 69:3 (2012): 421-450. Todd Romero, ” ‘Ranging Foresters’ and ‘Women-Like Men’: Physical Accomplishment, Spiritual Power, and Indian Masculinity in Early-Seventeenth-Century New England.” Ethnohistory 52:2 (2006): 281-329. Emily Clark, The Strange History of the American Quadroon:…

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Intellectual Biographies Part I: Getting to History and Getting to the Atlantic World

Intellectual Biographies Part I: Getting to History and Getting to the Atlantic World

This will be part I of an X-part blog post series on… me. Or rather, on my intellectual journey from another silly undergrad to my work here at Brown. It was inspired in part by the 2015 preface to Nirenberg’s Communities of Violence in which he briefly describes his exposure to the topic of violence and convivencia in medieval Iberia: “My undergraduate studies had introduced me to a world of…

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Whoops

I missed a week because I was in New York for the weekend, and this one has been intense as all hell. Still figuring out how best to make things up; maybe I’ll go back-to-back today and tomorrow? Also there are like five different things I want to write about and am still trying to figure out a schedule in which they’ll all be attainable~~~

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Week 5: Talking about Gender and Thinking about Race in Graduate School

Week 5: Talking about Gender and Thinking about Race in Graduate School

Graduate Readings in Early North America: Catherine Brekus, Sarah Osborne’s World: The Rise of Evangelical Christianity in Early America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013) David D. Hall “From ‘Religion and Society to Practices: The New Religious History,” in Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America ed. Robert Blair St. George (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000) 148-159 Jon…

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Hamilton

Is really good. Just. Please. Listen. It’s not on YouTube just yet. But Spotify. Please. Let me tell you how good Hamilton is: despite its availability on Spotify for free basically whenever I could want it, I AM BUYING THE SOUNDTRACK. It’s making me happy how historically well developed it is, how much success it’s having, and how imagined each of the characters are. In the day and age of…

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Grad School and the (Not) Research Parts

Grad School and the (Not) Research Parts

This is a quick post to think about the non-class, non-reading elements of being a graduate student. There are some glorious moments like, giving a talk at the conference that happened this past weekend, or listening to professors and activists talk about issues about which they are deeply passionate. There are some less glorious moments, like yesterday, when the latter half of my day was caught…

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Week 4: Professors, Eurocentrisms, and Conferences

Week 4: Professors, Eurocentrisms, and Conferences

Graduate Readings in Early North America: Gregory O’Malley, Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014) Introduction, Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Edward B. Rugemer, “The Development of Mastery and Race in the Comprehensive Slave Codes of the Greater Caribbean during the Seventeenth Century,” The…