On the vital role of the arts and hermeneutics in the current political climate. 

Why do we do what we do? Why do we labor to read, and teach students to read, slowly, attentively, philologically, and speculatively? What are literary studies’ practical epistemologies? My hypothesis is that answers to questions like these are sedimented in disciplinary activity.

Babies are usually the stuff of private life, clichés, and endearing memories that we check out as we set foot on campus grounds. Yet babies are the greatest--and arguably the cutest--hermeneutic subjects.