I first became interested in The Correspondents as the result of an essay in The Shandean, by Peter de Voogd, outlining the work’s several mentions of Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey. As the general editor of The Florida Edition of the…
Category: Guest Post
The Fourth School on Power
Since the cognitive revolution in humanity about 70,000 years ago, humans have mastered the art of cooperation on a massive scale. No species on Earth has the tendency to form as big cooperative societies as humans do, leading to the…
Light Pollution and Migratory Birds: Understanding the Impacts of Urban Environments on Aerial Migration Corridors
Between March and June 2024, areas across the United States will experience the highest aerial bird density of the year. In other words, the period from late spring to early summer is considered ‘peak bird migration’ season in the United…
Islamist Transformations of Ottoman History, Culture and Literature: Between Scholarship and Politics
Whether wholeheartedly embraced by the modern Turkish generation (or even by Turkish historiography itself) or not, Turkey’s Ottoman past is an indispensable part of its history and identity. Rising around 1300 in Northwestern Anatolia and becoming the most significant world…
Examining the Crossroads of Crime Writing
There is no doubt that crime writing is now one of the most widely read genres of writing; there is something for everyone in sheer variety alone. And, although in academic circles we know this literature has value beyond its…
Philosophy, Rhetoric and Aesthetics
The world we live in is not that of Plato’s Socrates. It is a world of fragments. The tropic language with which we try to put it back together testifies to our alienation in its very use. Philosophy depends upon…
America’s Once and Future King
My new translation of and commentary on Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws has been recently released (Anthem). I prepared the work upon the consideration that it would be only the third English translation of this seminal work in 275 years.…
A Life with Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein studies flourished in the second half of the twentieth century, as philosophers struggled with the interpretation of his two great masterpieces, the Tractatus Logico-philosophicus and the Philosophical Investigations. Many of his eminent pupils such as Georg-Henrik von Wright, Elizabeth…
Some thoughts on the writing of Subaltern Narratives in Fiji Hindi Literature by Vijay Mishra
I came to this book very much towards the end of my academic career. For many years, I had written on the Indian diaspora with, where possible, an emphasis on the old sugar plantation diaspora that began with the movement…
Reinventing Mary Wollstonecraft for the Twenty-first Century by Brenda Ayres
In 2017, I wrote Betwixt and Between the Biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft, identifying the disparities between 18 major biographies that reinvented Mary Wollstonecraft with each retelling of her life. In that book, I alluded to 16 other biographies as well…