The spread of the Omicron variant this winter was met with renewed calls for the UK Government to fund the arts and culture through the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic and beyond. ‘We are in crisis mode’, Nicolas Hytner, former artistic director of the National Theatre, told the BBC’s Newsnight programme. ‘We need to see short-term finance, we need to see loa…[Read more]

This is meant for researchers and also for anyone who is writing pretty much anything for offline or online publication. The post is a reaction to often hazy ideas about what constitutes plagiarism and gives detailed pointers about how to avoid plagiarism. Plagiarism is not always apparent even in anti-plagiarism software. To be against plagiarism…[Read more]

While many in academia around the U.S. may anchor themselves in cynical opposition to the proliferation of neoliberal discourse and the policies that accompany, I propose that language departments are in a uniquely privileged position within the humanities to assert the value of our programs within the neoliberal paradigm. Specifically, the…[Read more]

The neo-Kantian Susan Neiman pointed out to this reviewer the danger that Carl Jung studies pose to contemporary scholars. It is keeping in mind Neiman’s cautionary advice that this review establishes Jung’s contributions to Romanticism. “[Craig] Stephenson’s analysis of Aurélia has now superseded Arthur Lovejoy’s (1873–1962) and Mario Praz’s…[Read more]

More than ten years have passed since the 2007 MLA Ad Hoc Committee of Foreign Languages report recommended structural and curricular change initiatives to counteract the growing crisis in postsecondary world language education. Almost a decade earlier, Heidi Byrnes had already expounded on the need to replace persistent bifurcated curricular…[Read more]

This is a comprehensive critique of the Heidegger problem and while putting forward a critique of Heidegger; it establishes the sanctity of Levinas. In the process of doing so; the reviewer touches on the problems of not considering Edith Stein in a book of this sort. When I got my tenure in India, one wisecrack on the board of interviewers asked…[Read more]

Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, Bruce H Kirmmse, David D Possen, Joel D S Rasmussen, and Vanessa Rumble working with the Princeton University Press and the Søren Kierkegaard Research Center at the University of Copenhagen have produced this huge work with facsimiles etc. The review comments on Kierkegaard’s shrewd observations which ar…[Read more]

Agamben is slowly entering the English academy. This review shows how Agamben’s understanding of poetry can and should inform the eschatological nature of the lyric. The review does its cultural work by rethinking poetry and the poetic impulse. The book under review by Claire Colebrook and Jason Maxwell, prepare us for messianic times and shows…[Read more]

This is a review of a book which in today’s COVID 19 world takes up issues which could have been neglected as meant only for scholars when this book was published. Now with homeschooling and social distancing and race relations going for a toss all over the world; we need to relook virtue and how to cultivate that in our lives and in our children.…[Read more]

Today’s academia is obsessed about writing and speaking gobbledygook. It has little time in sitting still and actually reading fiction, poetry and say, Wittgenstein. One pretends to say fancy things about these authors but one does not actually read books anymore. COVID 19 Lockdown prompted this author to answer queries from students and peers…[Read more]

This is made open access for students worldwide. The bulleted points deal with Fowles’ engagement with Victorian morals. This draft which will not be published shows how this novel is not a historical novel, though it portrays historical facts. This is for self-study during this ongoing COVID 19 pandemic. Students are advised to follow the…[Read more]

A very critical overview of seemingly disparate films

A report published by the Sutton Trust and Social Mobility Commission this week, ‘Elitist Britain’, found that two fifths (39%) of Britain’s ‘leading people’ were educated privately, more than five times as many as in the population as a whole, with almost one quarter (24%) graduating from Oxbridge. I therefore thought it would be timely to publis…[Read more]

This is a reading of Spivak as an heir to Sri Avinavagupta and Sri Ramakrishna. We ignore the fact that Spivak is a Shakta in her corpus. This review corrects/revises our understanding of Spivak and reinstates her as she really deserves to be read: she is within the traditions of Tantra. Spivak, in her own writings and interviews, has long spoken…[Read more]

Personal perspective on the current state of open access and publishing practices in the fields of Television and Media Studies, and pointers to a variety of scholar-led initiatives and options of where scholars can actually publish open access in their field without the payment of Article Processing Charges (APCs).

Cities of InfraRed is an abstract for my proposed contribution to a book that is being put together by Cornelia Sollfrank, Shuhsa Niederberger and Felix Stalder. The book has the working title of Aesthetics of the Commons, and arises out of the Creating Commons research project at the Zurich University of the Arts.

A version of Cities of…[Read more]

This is a paper that I presented at the 2019 MLA in Chicago. In this paper I situate discussions of the field of Iberian Studies within the context of the crisis of the Humanities and the future of Cultural Studies.

We live in an increasingly übercapitalist society. It’s übercapitalist in that a specific version of neoliberalism, characterised by low pay, zero-hours and fixed-term contracts, is growing ever more aggressive; and that the disruptive technology firm Uber offers one of the most high-profile examples of this intensified form of deregulated cap…[Read more]