Author Archives: jbk2191

We Are All Foucauldians Now

Of all the writers on the Contemporary Civilization syllabus, few are as misunderstood and routinely misappropriated as Michel Foucault. That should come as a surprise, given that Foucault is one of the most frequently cited academic authors of all time, … Continue reading

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In Plain Sight: Finding the Core Where You Least Expect It

The Core Curriculum has a simple job: condensing thousands of years of human thought and culture into 8 semesters of coursework (or really 6, if you don’t count University Writing and Frontiers of Science). One of the many things that … Continue reading

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Oh the Movies You’ll See: Columbia’s Video Streaming Resources

When visited in person or even online, the Columbia libraries are huge, dense, and endlessly intimidating. Interesting books populate every shelf of Butler and CLIO search, and while you’d love to read them all—and incorporate them into your latest research … Continue reading

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Toodling in Tubingen (on Hegel’s removal from the Core and its relation to his ideas)

It was a balmy August day in Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg, a sleepy (but immensely wealthy) Western European metropolis with the skyline of a much smaller city and one of the more incoherent transport networks I had encountered in Germany (which, given … Continue reading

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A Trip to Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum

Last spring, while studying abroad at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, I decided to pay a visit to the Pitt Rivers Museum—one of the largest remaining monuments to Britain’s history of violent subjection and extraction of cultural artifacts from imperial territories. … Continue reading

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