Category: Essays

Essays

#ILookLikeAProfessor: A Twitter Essay

There’s a wonderful hashtag on Twitter – #ILookLikeAProfessor – that has recently been doing the kind of good work that Twitter is so excellent at facilitating: creating conversation and community among an otherwise widely dispersed group of people. I wrote a short Twitter essay as a modest contribution to this lively conversation, and Eileen Clancy (@clancynewyork) generously Storified it so that you can read the whole thing … Continue reading #ILookLikeAProfessor: A Twitter Essay

Carla Nappi
Essays, Stories

The Elizabeths (A Working Paper)

On May 21 2015, I participated in a gathering at Princeton devoted to an experiment in “conjectural historiography”: imagining and memorializing historians who never existed, but should have. My contribution to this collective performance took the form of a memorial to four women, all named Elizabeth, all inspired by medical cases from The Casebooks Project, and all devoted to histories of and with basic material stuff. Here’s the text of … Continue reading The Elizabeths (A Working Paper)

Carla Nappi
Essays, News

Working Paper – “Magical History, A Lion’s Tail, and A Lock of Hair”

Last week, I was fortunate to be part of a truly magical gathering at the Smart Museum of the University of Chicago: a colloquium devoted to the theme of “Repurposing Magic.” It was an incredibly inspiring day, and I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to learn in such wonderful company. Here’s a prosed-out version of the 20-minute talk I gave at the colloquium, offered … Continue reading Working Paper – “Magical History, A Lion’s Tail, and A Lock of Hair”

Carla Nappi
Essays

Working Paper – “Paper Dolls: An Architectonics of Translation in Early Modern Eurasia”

Last week I was fortunate enough to participate in a session of the Sawyer Seminar on Critical Silk Road Studies at Georgetown organized by the wonderful Jim Millward and Michelle Wang. The seminars take the form of discussions (catered this time with delicious wine, dinnerfood, and cupcakes) of pre-circulated papers, prefaced by brief introductions by the authors (in this case, Pierce Salguero and me) and a commentary … Continue reading Working Paper – “Paper Dolls: An Architectonics of Translation in Early Modern Eurasia”

Carla Nappi
Essays

Exploded View Diagram 1: Please do not circulate.

I    just    participated    in    a    workshop    devoted    to    histories    of    transmission    and    circulation   .    Almost    every    one    of    us    framed    our    papers    with    the    phrase    “Please    do    not    circulate.” [The idea here is to click on the … Continue reading Exploded View Diagram 1: Please do not circulate.

Carla Nappi1 Comment
Essays

Recycling History: An Essay

Last year I published a short essay in the journal Tang Studies, occasioned by the publication of Valerie Hansen’s wonderful The Silk Road: A New History. The piece attempted to situate Hansen’s book within a broader consideration of contemporary research (and, importantly, teaching!) on Silk Road studies. You can find the issue in which the essay was published here. If you’d like to read it and can’t … Continue reading Recycling History: An Essay

Carla Nappi
Essays

Exploded View Diagram: Introducing A Series

I want, here, simply to write. Briefly. Clearly. Sincerely. Daily. Motivated by that desire, I offer the Exploded View Diagram series in a spirit of sharing and communication, of openness to the unpolished, of celebrating in-progress-ness, of following connections and connectivity, of agonism’s antonym. This is an attempt to create a space for articulating and disarticulating some of the pebbles in the soil from which … Continue reading Exploded View Diagram: Introducing A Series

Carla Nappi
Essays

The Global and Beyond: An Essay

Last year, I wrote a little piece on the “global turn” in the history of science, taking a moment to consider that turn not from the perspective of what we’re studying, but of how we’re doing it. It was published in a focus section of the journal Isis on “The Future of the History of Science” and you can find it here. The main take-away point, and one that I’m still … Continue reading The Global and Beyond: An Essay

Carla Nappi
Essays

Maggots, Jawbones, and a Multilingual Archive of Decay: An Essay

What has it looked like to translate expletives and curses across languages, and what might we learn from looking closely at an example of a text that tries to do just that? I recently (and very briefly) wrote about this phenomenon in the context of a Qing-era pentaglot dictionary. My thoughts on this text and phenomenon are very much in-progress, but you can find a snapshot … Continue reading Maggots, Jawbones, and a Multilingual Archive of Decay: An Essay

Carla Nappi
Essays

Bolatu’s Pharmacy: An Essay

I’m interested in the ways that recipes and other drug literature were spaces of translation and exchange for people who spoke and wrote different languages and lived in different healing contexts in the early modern world. Some years ago I wrote an essay on this that used the translation of theriac (an extraordinarily important compound drug and poison antidote in medieval and early modern Europe) into … Continue reading Bolatu’s Pharmacy: An Essay

Carla Nappi