With three roads and a population of just over 500 people, Shishmaref, Alaska seems like an unlikely center of the climate change debate. But the island, home to Inupiaq Eskimos who still live off subsistence harvesting, is falling into the sea, and...

From the 1798 Sedition Act to the war on terror, numerous presidents, members of Congress, Supreme Court justices, and local officials have endorsed the silencing of free expression. If the connection between democracy and the freedom of speech is su...

On the South Side of Chicago in the 1960s, African American artists and musicians grappled with new language and forms inspired by the black nationalist turn in the Civil Rights movement.  "The Freedom Principle", which accompanies an exhibition on t...

As one of Africa's few democracies, Senegal has long been thought of as a leader of moral, political, and economic development on the continent. We tend to assume that any such nation has achieved favorable international standing due to its own merit...

Ila Arab Mehta is an award-winning Gujarati author most noted for her explorations of feminist thinking. In this new translation of her beautiful and skillfully crafted novel Fence, we meet Fateema Lokhandwala, a young Muslim woman in present-day Guj...

How have online protests – like the recent outrage over the Komen Foundation's decision to defund Planned Parenthood – changed the nature of political action? How do Facebook and other popular social media platforms shape the conversation around curr...

In a cemetery on the southern outskirts of Paris lie the bodies of nearly a hundred of what some have called the first casualties of global climate change. They were the so-called abandoned victims of the worst natural disaster in French history, the...

In "Fragments and Assemblages", Arthur Bahr expands the ways in which we interpret medieval manuscripts, examining the formal characteristics of both physical manuscripts and literary works. Specifically, Bahr argues that manuscript compilations from...

What does it mean to be free? We invoke the word frequently, yet the freedom of countless Americans is compromised by social inequalities that systematically undercut what they are able to do and to become. If we are to remedy these failures of freed...

To read accounts of late medieval banquets is to enter a fantastic world where live lions guard nude statues, gilded stags burst into song, and musicians play from within pies. Such vivid works of art and performance required collaboration among arti...