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Decolonizing Money Through Deana Lawson's “Portal”

by Scott Ferguson | 10.04.2021

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.

“Suddenly and Deliberately”: What Campus Evacuations during Japanese American Concentration Can Teach Us about Digital Humanities and Remote Learning

by Rhae Lynn Barnes | 08.16.2021

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 received shocking news: they had mere days to “evacuate,” from campus to concentration camps for their protection, as Roosevelt’s administration euphemistically put it.

'English Learners': Hispanics, Title III Funding, Vocational Schools, and the Return of Separate but Equal

by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra | 11.08.2021

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 enrolled as an English Learner. Children born in the USA whose households have more than just English as the language of everyday communication are by default considered inherently deficient all over the USA.

Postindustrial Medea: Going Back to Matriarchal Proto-Iberian Civilization

by Irakli Zurab Kakabadze | 10.18.2021

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 different view.

Race on Campus and the Tale of Two Libraries: Briscoe and Benson at UT-Austin

by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra | 09.20.2021

A few months ago, I visited Dr. Melissa Guy, the Benson Librarian. I wanted to chat with her about my vision of the Benson’s Centennial (see my letter published in NEP). After listening to me, Dr. Guy recommended I read A Library for the Americas: The Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection (University of Texas Press, 2018). There were a few things I might learn from reading the book, she said.

On certainty

by William Flesch | 08.16.2021

How interesting John Milton's use of the word "certain" is.

I am Saint Wolf: Poetry Dwelling of Zurab Rtveliashvili

by Irakli Zurab Kakabadze | 08.02.2021

The Georgian poet and multimedia artist Zurab Rtveliashvili (1967-2021) represents how poetry's power to dwell confronts authoritarianism.

Can a Colonial Archive be an Anti-Colonial Archive? The Centennial of the Nettie Lee Benson Library at UT-Austin

by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra | 07.19.2021

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).

"Parentheses" (and quotations)

by William Flesch | 07.18.2021

Geoffrey Nunberg (somewhere) makes the point that parentheses and quotations follow similar typographical, and, you could say syntactic rules: If you open a parentheses (with a lunula) you have to close it (with another, facing the opposite way). Likewise if you open a direct quotation (with raised, inverted commas (auf Englisch, zumindest), you have to close it (with reverted commas, but at the top of the line as well (das gilt auch für Deutsch für die „Gänsefüßchen”)).

"I wish to be cremated": On Writing My Un-Islamic Will

by Ali Shakir | 03.25.2021

It was raining heavily that May morning in 2019. I reluctantly walked into the law firm’s office in Auckland, greeted Joy, the receptionist and legal assistant, and took a seat, waiting for the lawyer to witness my will. I heard him talking to a client in French, which I’d studied many years ago at the Centre Culturel Francais in Baghdad, but could hardly communicate in anymore. I wondered what might have happened to our Profs there. … Damn it! I hate that my thoughts always end up taking me back to my days in Iraq.