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univerCity

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  Decline Scenario

  02.27.08 | Permalink | 18 Comments

  In a rather half-hearted piece for TNR, Imperial Illusions, Amartya Sen spends some time ruminating on the good/bad of British colonialism in India with an eye towards comparison with the American imperialism. He offers a sketch of the 2,000 year old pre-history of British rule in India as a “country” with “global influence”. Though, he [...]

• univerCity

  Free JSTOR

  02.15.08 | Permalink | 3 Comments

  A few weeks ago, danah boyd wrote her resolve to publish only in Open Access journals. I couldn’t agree more - being an ardent supporter of scholarship that is freely accessible. One of my biggest complaint about our academic world is about the inaccessibility of research to anyone without institutional affiliation or a hefty bank [...]

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  In Review: Academic Tools

  01.16.08 | Permalink | 17 Comments

  I haven’t really rolled the mental rolodex over into 2008. Something scares me about that number. It portends change, maybe dislocation, perhaps an end to the way things were. I embrace change with the same fatalism as when a human, lacking the natural means to flight, jumps out of a plane strapped to a parachute. [...]

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  AHA

  01.08.08 | Permalink | 6 Comments

  This past weekend, I was on a panel at the annual historian’s shindig, the AHA: Contested Pasts and Constructed Presents: Memory in the Local. It was the last panel on Sunday afternoon - colloquially termed the “Luggage Panel”. And yet, it still managed to be a good one - with up to 6 attendees!
  Dresner’s [...]

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  Teach In at Chicago

  11.19.07 | Permalink | 4 Comments

  On Friday, we organized a Teach-In on Pakistan at the University of Chicago, The Past and Future Emergencies in the State of Pakistan“. Alongside me were Atiya Khan, Aqil Shah, and Naim Sahib speaking on various historical and political aspects of this here crisis.
  We hope to have another event on campus after Thanksgiving. If [...]

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  Examining Iqbal

  11.02.07 | Permalink | Comment?

  Naim Sahib forwarded a correspondence in which he answers a question about the Urdu poet and intellectual Iqbal (1877-1938). I reproduce it below without his consent. He can yell at me later:
  Q: I have a question for you. Attached is (supposedly) Iqbal’s Tarana-e-Hindi (The Song of India) written out in his own hand. What [...]

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  Documents of 1857

  10.03.07 | Permalink | 3 Comments

  Naim sahib has a scathing review in Outlook India of S.M. Azizuddin Husain’s 1857 Revisited/دستاويزاتِ غدر . The book is a compendium of 150 primary documents relating to the uprising and its aftermath, with translations and an introductory essay. A fine idea, in principle, but the problem, as Naim Sahib points out, is in the [...]

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  Story

  08.30.07 | Permalink | 1 Comment

  That ’story’ bit in history:
  Villemessant, the founder of Le Figaro, characterized the nature of information in a famous formulation. “To my readers,” he used to say, “an attic fire in the Latin Quarter is more important than a revolution in Madrid.” This makes strikingly clear that it is no longer intelligence coming from afar, but [...]

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  Operation Academic Freedom

  08.27.07 | Permalink | 5 Comments

  Seriously. How many more things can the DePaul administration do wrong? They denied tenure to Finkelstein in June expressly against the recommendations of his department and his college. And now they have cancelled his classes and re-assigned his office space - in apparent violation of AAUP rules. The mind boggles at the sheer ineptitude of [...]

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  YearlyKos

  08.06.07 | Permalink | 11 Comments

  As billed, I was at the podium at 4:00, ready to change the discourse in our nation. Well, it may take a little more than that. I presented a rant-free version of the post below which tried to highlight the fallacies in Obama’s argument. My co-panelists were Juan Cole - who gave a wonderfully off-the-cuff [...]