Category Archives: English

Snow fell on New York in the last week of December 1883. Some forty men made their way to Columbia College, then still a cluster of buildings on Madison Avenue at Forty-Ninth Street, to read a dozen papers to one … Continue reading →

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote: My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary … Continue reading →

In the early 1950s, a graduate student at Yale got a paper back from his professor. The professor stood six feet eight inches tall. He filled doorframes. He moved through the Gothic corridors of the Yale English department like a … Continue reading →

On the first day of the fall semester in 1971, a student walked up to a professor of English at Johns Hopkins University and asked, “Is there a text in this class?” The professor answered that there was. It was … Continue reading →

On June 5, 2019, in the university aula in Bergen, Crown Prince Haakon of Norway handed the Holberg Prize to a Black Englishman whose life’s work argues that the slave ship sits at the center of the modern world. The … Continue reading →

On the morning of February 18, 2014, faculty at the University of Illinois at Chicago walked out of their classrooms for the first strike in the school’s history. A reporter from WBEZ found Walter Benn Michaels (b. 1948) on the … Continue reading →

In December 2005, in a Washington, D.C. convention hotel, the Modern Language Association stages a panel that people in queer theory still argue about. Robert Caserio organizes it and gives it a name that sticks: The Antisocial Thesis in Queer … Continue reading →

Picture a chemistry lab in Southern California in 1968. Beckman Instruments, Fullerton. Fluorescent light on stainless steel. A young woman in a white coat runs analyses for a company that builds the machines other scientists use to measure the world. … Continue reading →

In April 1939, a twelve-year-old boy stood on a platform at the Prague railway station. His mother put him on one of the Kindertransport trains organized by Nicholas Winton (1909-2015). The boy was Heini Halberstam (1926-2014), son of a Viennese … Continue reading →