In new book, UChicago’s Ada Palmer explores popular misunderstandings of the Renaissance and historical myths used for political gain
During the pandemic, Assoc. Prof. Ada Palmer kept hearing one question: If the Black Plague caused the Renaissance, will COVID cause a golden age? (more…)
Those who wish for revolution should be wary, a new book by Dan Chirot warns; they might come to regret that wish should revolution become a violent reality.
Chirot is a professor in the University of Washington Jackson School of International Studies and of sociology. His latest book, “You Say You Want a Revolution: Radical Idealism and its Tragic Consequences” was published in March by Princeton University Press. He is the author or co-author of many articles and several books, most recently “The Shape of the New: Four Big Ideas and How They Made the Modern World” (with Jackson School colleague Scott Montgomery, 2015). (more…)
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — In 2018, Mira Nikolova was at an academic conference in Tucson, Arizona, when it occurred to her: A Ph.D. student is a lot like a saguaro cactus. (more…)
On a hot day in 2004, Laurence Ralph, recently arrived in Chicago to attend graduate school, stood on the corner of Lawndale Avenue and Cermak Road. (more…)
In new book, alum Cecelia Watson examines history of punctuation’s polarizing mark
“The semicolon is a place where our anxieties and our aspirations about language, class and education are concentrated, so that in this small mark big ideas are distilled down to a few winking drops of ink,” writes Cecelia Watson, AM’05, PhD’11. (more…)
Incoming students in the undergraduate Class of 2023 will join many Brown faculty and staff in reading Elif Batuman’s first novel, the selected text for this year’s First Readings program. (more…)
Charles Johnson, University of Washington professor emeritus of English and award-winning author, has released a new book of short stories, his fourth.
The dozen stories in “Night Hawks,” published this month by Scribner, range from realism to light science fiction, myth and his own personal experiences, laced gently with humor and philosophy. Calling him a “modern master,” Kirkus Reviews wrote of the new book: “Johnson’s stories can be as morally instructive as fables, as fancifully ingenious as Twilight Zone scripts, and as elegantly inscrutable as Zen riddles.” (more…)
Sarah Rivett, an associate professor of English and American studies at Princeton University, specializes in early American and transatlantic literature, religion and indigenous history. (more…)
