I’ve just posted the first little glimpse from The Elizabeths, a collection of little stories about and by historians of the elemental world who never existed but should have. You can find the first little history by Elizabeth Sanders, a historian of liquids, by heading over to “The History of Dew.” For more on the project, check this out. Continue reading The History of Dew: A Little Story
There’s a new storypost up at “Reading Notes: The Intertwining – The Chiasm”: this is the first in what will be a series of origin stories for color-constellations. Check out the new story by clicking the link (in red) embedded below for “with which it forms a constellation.” There you’ll find a link to the first constellation, “Bailey’s Moonburn.” “And, now that I have fixed it, if … Continue reading with which it forms a constellation
The pages of Matthew C. Hunter’s wonderful new book are full of paper fish, comets, sleepy-eyed gazes, drunk ants, and a cast full of fascinating (and sometimes hilarious) members of the experimental community of Restoration London. Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London (University of Chicago Press, 2013) maps the visual traces of drawing, collecting, and building practices between 1650 and 1720 to … Continue reading Wicked Intelligence: An Interview
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
There’s a new storypost up at “Reading Notes: The Intertwining – The Chiasm”: what if clothing could evolve, and speciation got out of hand? Check out the new story by clicking the link (in red) for “a punctuation in the field of red things” embedded below. “It is a concretion of visibility, it is not an atom. The red dress a fortiori holds with all its fibers onto the … Continue reading a punctuation in the field of red things
There’s a new storypost up at “Reading Notes: The Intertwining – The Chiasm”: what if vision were a liquid with its own tides? You can check it out here. Continue reading an intimacy as close as between the sea and the strand
In June 2015 – thanks to a workshop organized by Judy Farquhar, Volker Scheid, and me, and funded by the Wellcome Trust and the University of Chicago and the Canada Research Chair program – a phenomenal group of doctors and anthropologists and artists and historians and others gathered to create work together around the theme of “Translating Vitalities: Touch.” This became a kind of pop-up laboratory, a … Continue reading Introducing “Reading Notes: The Intertwining – The Chiasm”
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)
On April 29, Cabinet Magazine in NYC hosted a conversation among Dominic Pettman and I (punctuated and elevated by gorgeous films created by Merritt Symes) about our respective books, each inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. (Dominic’s beautiful book was recently published, and mine is in progress and should be out soon.) Better put, it really wasn’t a conversation between us, but between those books: we wove our writing together … Continue reading The City as Phantasm
On May 21, a handful of historically-minded people will gather at Princeton to participate in an experiment in “conjectural historiography”: imagining and memorializing historians who never existed, but should have. It will be fabulous, it will be the beginning of something, it will be an experiment, and anyone who is in the area is warmly invited to join us. I’ll be sharing some reflections on a group … Continue reading What History Could Have Been: A Symposium
Carla Nappi 