Research & Innovation

The book explores not only the print, pictorial art, and theater of early nineteenth-century England and Europe but also communicative technologies invented after the British Romantic period, such as photography, film, video, and digital screens. This proleptic abutting points to one way we can understand the implicit exceptionality wagered by reading Romanticism through media studies and media theory.

Techno-Magism argues that both media studies and the concept of mediation in general can benefit from a more robust confrontation with, or recovery of, the arguments of deconstruction, an unavoidable consequence of thinking about the relationship between Romanticism and media. The book thinks that relationship through the catachrestic practice of a techno-magism, a technics of inscription always outside the causalities of a dialectical economy. The book further pursues two interrelated ideas: the structural incommensurability of the cut and the unapologetic presentism of the constellation. Marked by its late capitalist moment of composition, the book explores the continuity between the social character of Romantic and post-Romantic media, in terms of commodity culture, revolution, and the ecological devastation of the anthropocene.

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Shortlisted, Marilyn Gaull Book Award.

Techno-Magism explores how British Romantic literature abuts and is organized around both print and non-print media. The book explores not only the print, pictorial art, and theater of early nineteenth-century England and Europe but also communicative technologies invented after the British Romantic period, such as photography, film, video, and digital screens. This proleptic abutting points to one way we can understand the implicit exceptionality wagered by reading Romanticism through media studies and media theory.

Techno-Magism argues that both media studies and the concept of mediation in general can benefit from a more robust confrontation with, or recovery of, the arguments of deconstruction, an unavoidable consequence of thinking about the relationship between Romanticism and media. The book thinks that relationship through the catachrestic practice of a techno-magism, a technics of inscription always outside the causalities of a dialectical economy. The book further pursues two interrelated ideas: the structural incommensurability of the cut and the unapologetic presentism of the constellation. Marked by its late capitalist moment of composition, the book explores the continuity between the social character of Romantic and post-Romantic media, in terms of commodity culture, revolution, and the ecological devastation of the anthropocene.

It takes as its point of departure the field-changing call to think more critically about the enduring legacies of chattel slavery, particularly how this imperative has cultivated an anticipatory logic that helps to forecast the conditions of blackness and to analyze the nature of black ontology. It argues that alongside the large-scale, transhistorical modes of structural analysis that characterize this approach, attention to the more local, everyday experiences of black people—particularly their feelings—is critical to understanding the ontological conditions of blackness. Examining plays and performances by black artists and civil rights activists Lorraine Hansberry and Nina Simone, it proposes that, while fleeting and ephemeral, these feelings not only inflect black existence but also are rife with epistemic value that is as crucial to understanding black ontology as the social, political, economic, and discursive structures that underwrite the modern racial order. Critically analyzing the shifting interrelation of time, feeling, and black ontology renders the act of proclaiming who is dead or alive, free or not, a more complex and reflexive enterprise. It shows that no singular structure or network of structural relations can fully anticipate or explain away black ontology. This calculation is always and everywhere a question of time.

Form Fitted: Postcolonial Aesthetics, Ethics, Politics.

Forthcoming.

South Asian "Refugee" Fiction and Film:  The Poetics and Aesthetics of Suffering.

In progress.

Examines the role of Byzantine punctuation in intertwining poetic performance with the rhythms of performed oratory and other prose discourse.

Ralph Bauer’s magisterial The Alchemy of Conquest: Science, Religion, and the Secrets
of the New World revises our understanding of the relation between the historical fact of
conquest and the paradigm of discovery in scientific and legal discourse. Drawing on an
impressive range of material from Greek philosophy and medieval scholasticism to early
modern literatures in Spanish, English, and French, Bauer demonstrates that, contrary to
conventional wisdom, conquest preceded discovery. That is, the modern paradigm of
discovery was made possible by the convergence, through the language of alchemy, of
science, religion, and geopolitics in the early modern period. Bauer’s work knits together
the late medieval and the early Renaissance period to forge a new understanding of the
relation between science and the state, even as it makes a crucial intervention in modern
discussions of the role of colonialism and imperialism in the production of knowledge.

"Simon first sees the woman in the big bookstore on the corner of Thirteenth and Broadway. He is browsing the table of new releases in the middle of the long high-ceilinged room when he suddenly has the sense of someone watching him."

Read the story in Bennington Review.

Through the lens of critical race theory, the essays collected here explore new analytical models, theoretical frameworks, and methodological approaches in attempting to reimagine the European Renaissance and early modern periods in terms of global expansion, awareness, and participation. Centering race in these periods requires that we acknowledge the people against whom social hierarchies and differential treatment were directed. This collection takes Europe as its focus, but White Europeans are not centered in it and the experiences of Black Africans, Asians, Jews and Muslims are not relegated to the margins of a shared history. Situating Europe within a global context forces the reconsideration of the violence that attends the interaction of peoples both across cultures and enmired within them. The less we are attentive to the cultural interactions, cross-cultural migrations and global dimensions of the late medieval and early modern periods, the less we are forced to recognize the violence, intolerance, power struggles and enforced suppressions that attend them.

Read more about The Cultural History of Race in the Renaissance and Early Modern Age (1350-1550).

The Rodler-Wood Scholarship provides $1,000 to support student success in their upcoming academic year. Selection is based on one or more of the following criteria: demonstrated financial need, hardship based on sexual orientation, academic interest in LGBT Studies and extracurricular activities on behalf of LGBT issues.

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