Stanford Humanities Center
Pitkin examines hope in the early Christian thought with special attention to its elusive quality.
In this special issue of Dibur on Jewish ecologies, we have set out to bring together studies by scholars working on Jewish texts from different time periods and cultural contexts, adopting perspectives that extend beyond the human, in an effort to explore what Jewish literatures might offer in relation to environmental and ecological thought.
Previous seminars in our series have attended to divisions, but also possibilities, engendered by data along various fault lines and contexts (from 19th-century statistical thinking to biases in archives, from the challenges of quantification to the history of data governance). With this seminar on ‘Recuperating Forgotten Narratives’ we focus on what happens to text when it is digitized and turned into data. What new possibilities open up with this type of textual data? What new narratives can be written about past and present textual traditions? What remains irretrievable? Ayesha Hardison addresses these questions through her work on digitizing and making accessible the history of Black writing.
On August 18, 1963, Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) described in a letter to Dan Jacobson (1929-2014), a South African writer residing in London, what she believed was “the greatest difference between South Africa and the [United] States.” She had just returned from a rejuvenating vacation in Europe, only to find herself in a ferocious firestorm over Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). Readers of this “report” were accusing her of antisemitic self-hatred, historical inaccuracy, heartlessness, and rhetorical flippancy.
Penelope’s wonder encapsulates both her amazement and an act of speculation, of reckoning her position among others in her social world.
Can you recall your earliest gesture? Perhaps not consciously, but traces of these first attempts to orient our bodies in space linger in our everyday experiences.
As a reflection on representations on biodiversity in art, this contribution considers the breadth of marine species highlighted in one work by British Surrealist, Eileen Agar (1899-1991). Much of her work relates to the natural world, especially the sea as an ecosystem and all the life within it, referred to here as the marine.
Contreras considers the short story "La máquina de la felicidad" by the Venezuelan writer Jesús Enrique Lossada, discussing its tale of mankind’s liberation through an apparatus.
Greenfield reflects on hope as manifested by her young daughter.
