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What the Middle Ages Can Tell Us About Racial Reconfiguration and Political Realignment Today
We are living in an era of renewed “flexible definitions,” when everything old is new again — “a moment in which cultural race and racisms, and religious race, jostle alongside race-understood-as-somatic/biological determinations — uncannily renews key medieval instrumentalizations in the ordering of human relations.” The Welsh weren’t the first cornered into renouncing their identity to…
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Saying Goodbye to America, and Finding Our Town in Cymru
As a bi-national couple, our story has never been a simple one—but it’s always been good.
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Americans are the frog in the pot, part I: Grand Rapids
Grand Rapids is a weird place to call home. Today it’s all breweries and hipsters and weed dispensaries and overpriced apartments. But growing up, it was Bland Rapids. A place so boring and unimaginative that corporations would come to town to trial new products. If the straight-laced, God-fearing people of Grand Rapids, Michigan, will buy…
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Thoughts from the 60th Annual International Congress on Medieval Studies
The 60th Annual International Conference on Medieval Studies. It all comes down to an awful lot of hurry to talk about some very old texts. But that’s America. An insistent drum whose beating makes you forget the pounding of your pulse, the rhythm of your breath, and cadence of the seasons.
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America, and the joy of missing out
This Sunday was something quite special for me: the first time in my adult life that I was completely unaware that the Super Bowl was happening. Social media ruined it for me in the end—but what joy, what bliss to be ignorant of American goings-on for just a heartbeat.