Julian Posada spent the COVID lockdown researching the working conditions of Latin Americans who do much of the data work needed for the growing artificial intelligence industry. And he became increasingly frustrated that discussions about the ethics of...
You’re staring at your officemates from the comfort of your home. They’re lined up on the Zoom screen, each against their preferred backdrops, each exposing only as much of their surroundings as they like.
You’re in your own space, but partly in theirs as...
Richard Deming was at work on an essay about the 2008 film “Synecdoche, New York” when he received an unexpected phone call from an old friend. Philip Seymour Hoffman, the star of that very film, had just been found dead of a drug overdose.
The news was...
It was a 2006 exhibition focused on melancholy in Western Art at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin that planted a seed for Nana Adusei-Poku thinking about how grief, mourning, and sadness are expressed by artists of the African Diasporas.
“No artists of...
As a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Cambridge, Nicole Sheriko had access to vast archives relevant to her specialty: early English puppetry. But not all the puppet treasure was on campus.
As an undergraduate at Oberlin College and Conservatory, Daniel Walden spent a lot of time playing music written before 1900, sometimes on instruments dating back to the same period. One day he sat down at a harpsichord that was tuned in what’s called...
Shortly after Pericles Lewis became a full professor in Yale’s Departments of English and Comparative Literature, in 2007, he was recruited by Martin Puchner, a Harvard professor and author, to help edit the third edition of the Norton Anthology of World...
It’s the final class of “American Opera Today: Explorations of a Burgeoning Industry.” A dozen students are munching on German Christmas cookies, courtesy of Professor Gundula Kreuzer, while taking turns presenting overviews of their final papers.
Their...
When the United States claimed sovereignty over a handful of overseas territories around the turn of the 20th century, object lessons in American patriotism followed straight away.
The American flag was immediately raised above schoolhouses and government...
Santiago Acosta left his native Venezuela in 2011 to continue his graduate studies in the United States. He started out at San Francisco State University, then headed to the opposite side of the country to do his Ph.D. at Columbia University, and then...