Stanford Humanities Center
Interventions
Welcome to Interventions, an experimental space where authors rehearse new ideas, reframe questions, or play unbridled within Arcade’s field of the humanities in the world. These short posts embrace the incomplete, the imperfect, and the indeterminate, but they may become much more: for example, the record of a thinker’s turn toward a new paradigm or the rough draft of a chapter in a new book. Rapid publication and immediate responses permit Interventions to foster conversation. The tone of the posts may range from personal to political, while maintaining a critical edge.
Published regularly, Interventions are often freestanding contributions to Arcade, but some may join our feature called Colloquies. Inquiries and submissions are received by the editor of Interventions.
I am a professor at the University of Texas who happens to be Latino with a son in Travis Heights Elementary (hereafter THES, Austin, Texas).
In 2017, I enrolled my 9-year old son in kindergarten at THES and without my knowledge, he (who was born in Austin and is a native English speaker), was...
2021 marked the 80th anniversary of Farhud*—a two-day pogrom against Baghdad Jewry. Following a failed pro-Nazi coup d’état in 1941, angry Muslim rioters killed 175 Jews, injured 1000, and robbed and destroyed 900 Jewish homes. Many Jewish girls were raped and children maimed in front of their...
Euripides’ Medea has generated endless debate about its patriarchal depiction of Medea in general and her deeds—the betrayed wife and woman who kills her own children to punish her husband. However, a closer examination of the sources of Medea’s myth as well as her Pelasgian culture gives us a...
We owe others our language, our history, our art, our survival, our neighborhood, our relationships, … our ability to defy social conventions as well as support these conventions. All of this we learn from others. None of us is alone; each of us is dependent on others.
The challenge was...
At the time of Pearl Harbor, during December 1941, around 700 Japanese Americans were enrolled at the University of California, and at least thirty were at Stanford University.[1] Within weeks, Japanese American faculty and students at the University of California, Berkeley, and nearby Stanford...
The Nettie Lee Benson Collection is a library that originated as part of the larger collections of the University of Texas at Austin since the 1890s. The Library began initially as a typical colonial archive, namely, Anglo Hispanists interested in things Iberian in the colonial Southwest (USA)...
