Cutting Words

Cutting Words

Polemical Dimensions of Galen's Anatomical Experiments

In Cutting Words: Polemical Dimensions of Galen’s Anatomical Experiments, Luis Alejandro Salas offers a new account of Galen’s medical experiments in the context of the high intellectual culture of second-century Rome. The book explores how Galen’s written experiments operate alongside their live counterparts. It argues that Galen’s experimental writing reperforms the licensing functions of his […]
Secrets of the ‘lost crops’ revealed where bison roam

Secrets of the ‘lost crops’ revealed where bison roam

Research from Washington University in St. Louis helps flesh out the origin story for the so-called “lost crops” of the Midwest and Northeast. These plants that may have fed as many Indigenous people as maize, but until the 1930s had been lost to history. Natalie Mueller, assistant professor of archaeology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, shares evidence that bison were “co-creators” — along with Indigenous peoples — of landscapes of disturbance that gave rise to greater diversity and more agricultural opportunities.
Porn Work

Porn Work

Sex, Labor and Late Capitalism

Every porn scene is a record of people at work. But on-camera labor is only the beginning of the story. Part labor history, part ethnography illuminating the lives of the performers who work in the medium, “Porn Work” takes readers behind the scenes to explore what porn performers think of their work and how they […]

WashU Expert: Our post-fact reality

The 2020 presidential election is over. Joe Biden has won. And yet the clarity and consensus that elections once brought, however grudgingly, now founders on the shores of post-fact partisanship, says Douglas Flowe, assistant professor of history in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.
Blue Song

Blue Song

St. Louis in the Life and Work of Tennessee Williams

In 2011, the centennial of Tennessee Williams’s birth, events were held around the world honoring America’s greatest playwright. There were festivals, conferences, and exhibitions held in places closely associated with Williams’s life and career—New Orleans held major celebrations, as did New York, Key West, and Provincetown. But absolutely nothing was done to celebrate Williams’s life […]
The Passion Projects

The Passion Projects

Modernist Women, Intimate Archives, Unfinished Lives

It’s impossible, now, to think of modernism without thinking about gender, sexuality, and the diverse movers and shakers of the early twentieth century. But this was not always so. “The Passion Projects” examines biographical projects that modernist women writers undertook to resist the exclusion of their friends, colleagues, lovers, and companions from literary history. Many […]
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