Compared with other Jewish Communities in the diaspora, the Argentine Jewish community presents a remarkable paradox: Although it is the largest, most plural and probably the most highly institutionalized Jewish community in Latin America, it has lacked a tradition of academic Jewish studies. Taking this paradox as our point of departure, in this lecture we […]

Current wisdom has it that syntactic agreement between one head and multiple dependents (Multiple Agree) is possible and perhaps empirically required. In this talk, I will consider data from West Flemish that bear on this issue and argue that such agreement does not exist. I will then address the question of why grammars forbid such […]

Using Mikhail Bakunin’s theorization of authority as a starting point, this talk explores secrecy as a strategy for political enlightenment, and calls attention to earlier conceptions of “propaganda” as education that were lost with the militarization of the term in the twentieth century. Megan C. Thomas is Associate Professor of Politics at UCSC. Sponsored by the Center for Cultural Studies with […]

Would you like an opportunity to become (re)acquainted with some of the library's electronic resources for humanists and also learn about some of the less-known features of these databases?

Professor Love, author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard, 2007), is at the Stanford Humanities Center this year. She is working on a book on the source materials for Erving Goffman’s Stigma: On the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963). Stigma serves as a methodological case study for thinking through the […]

When does it make sense to be uncertain whether it's possible that p? On many accounts of the semantics of epistemic modals, including the one favored by Professor MacFarlane, epistemic modal uncertainty should be appropriate only when one is (a) uncertain about what one knows, or more generally about what is contained in the body […]

How did Algerian Jews respond to and appropriate France's newly conceived "civilizing mission" in the mid-nineteenth century? The mission to civilize may have been rooted in French Revolutionary ideals of regeneration, enlightenment, and emancipation, but it developed "on the ground" as a strategic response to the challenges of controlling the diverse and unruly populations of […]

Nick Montfort will read from his recent book, Riddle & Bind (Spineless Books, 2010), which contains poems that relate to his work in digital media. These include riddles (figuratively describing something that is left for the reader to guess) as well as constrained writing à la Oulipo. Then, he'll read some of the output of […]

The customary critique of Mother Teresa reads her image as a compromised mass commodity, the anointed saint who habitually produces the “third world” as her necessary gutter. While it is certainly the case that global icons of her ilk lure consumers into commodity fetishism, isolating them from social relations, we see these recursive images routinely […]