In 2019 you began your service as Director of the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CMRS), one of the most venerable centers of its kind. Now you are overseeing its transformation into the UCLA CMRS Center for Early Global Studies (CMRS-CEGS). What prompted the change? How did you...

Today more than ever, we have to remember that the strict distinction between public and private still holds only in theory. It is not that the public and the private are hopelessly entangled; it is just that the public and the private bleed into each other. I am interested in how the non-scientist, the non-philosophers, the non-political scientists of the world can share the basic consistencies of a reasonable polity: the public sphere.

In “Rationality,” Charles Taylor defines reason in two ways: consistency, which is shared by all cultures; and theoretical reason, rationality.[1] For rationality, leading to “theoretical cultures” in the heritage of Plato, he has a higher claim and uses it to show that “one culture can surely lay...

How do we speak and write in a way that is concise and accessible to a wider audience and that can make an impact on social movements and on life in society?

Having just returned from a trip to Los Angeles for the Modern Language Association convention, I decided to follow others' cues and post my presentation online.