by Siddhesh Gooptu When cellist Yo-Yo Ma co-founded the Silk Road Project in 1998, it was in the context of a particular conjuncture between political and personal factors. On the one hand, Ma’s personal story of transnational migration and mixed cultural heritages prompted him to reflect on the Silk Roads as a metaphor for the kind of inter-cultural music he wished to play at the helm of a diverse ensemble of cultural voices and traditions. On the other hand, the project was also partially funded and politically supported by the US State Department’s Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs i ..read more

by Nilab Saeedi Mehmet Şakir Yılmaz is an associate professor in History and Politics at Istanbul Medeniyet University. His book “Koca Nişancı” of Kanuni: Bureaucracy and “Kanun” In The Reign of Suleyman the Magnificent (1520-1566) sheds new light on the complexity of Ottoman bureaucracy in the sixteenth century. In the book, Yılmaz focuses on the life and work of Celālzāde Mustafa Çelebi, a high-ranking official (nişancı) in the Ottoman administration. His research interests include Ottoman political culture, administration, and their broader implications for Ottoman political thought. Nilab ..read more

by Giovanni Lista When Bernard de Fontenelle published the Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes in 1686, little did he know that the roaring international success they would meet resulted in the creation of a plurality of worlds by way of the several translations of his work. Much like the renowned engraving by Juan d’Olivar depicting the cosmos as a multitude of Cartesian vortices constituted a new visual paradigm for a plurality of planetary systems, the numerous adaptations of the Entretiens formed a vibrant universe of semantic shifts, displacements of meanings, and structural changes wh ..read more

by Timothy B. Jaeger It must have been a moment of disbelief when the faculty of the University of Göttingen realized the identity of their prize-winning philosopher. In 1912, Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, established an anonymous essay contest, with first prize going to the overall best piece of philosophy. Over two hundred philosophers submitted essays, with presumably many of Germany’s best and brightest. The winner, to the surprise of many, was neither an established philosopher nor someone with an academic post–nor even a man! The winner was 24-year-old Hedwig Martius, a w ..read more

by Becca Palmer Historians have long recognized religion as a central element of life in the early British colonies in America. Some of these colonies were founded as havens for religious dissenters, making religious liberty central to colonial identities. Nevertheless, religion was not confined solely to the private sphere. Patricia Bonomi has recognized that religion and politics converged “as often as not”in colonial life, and Christopher Pearl has noted that “America’s pulpits served as political crucibles.” However, there has not been enough analysis on the political ideas expressed in re ..read more

by Andrew Barrette Introduction In my last piece for the Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, I suggested that the Belgian Jesuits Joseph Maréchal and Pierre Scheuer provide a method and model for increasing self-knowledge through historical reflection. Turning again to them and their confrères, I highlight the significance of “communication”in that task. By doing so, I qualify the concept of “knowledge producers,” the use of which means to include all meaning and value in the storehouse of knowledge, where, for a long time, entry was restricted by those who were gathering it. Without careful ..read more

by Jonathon Catlin Hans Kundnani is former Europe program director at London’s Chatham House as well as a visiting fellow at NYU’s Remarque Institute. He is the author of Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust (Columbia, 2009) and The Paradox of German Power (Oxford, 2014), and writes regularly for venues including The Guardian, The New Statesman, Foreign Affairs, and The Times Literary Supplement. His latest book, Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire, and Race in the European Project (Hurst, 2023; extract in The Guardian) explores racial and colonial dimensions of Europea ..read more

by Rukmini Swaminathan Earlier in 2023, a seventy-five-year relationship between India and Sri Lanka was celebrated. It culminated in an exhibition on architect Geoffrey Bawa titled “It is Essential to Be There.” It was the first time material from the Geoffrey Bawa Trust had arrived in the neighboring country and was made more accessible in the form of an exhibition for the National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi. A year later, in February of 2024, The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Sri Lanka, hosted an exhibition on Minnette de Silva, a lesser-known architect than Geoffrey Bawa yet a ..read more

by Sam Thozer In the mid-1920s, the luminaries of the New Negro Renaissance placed public faith in Harlem as the unique reserve of intellectual, cultural, and financial power for Black America. They hailed the Upper Manhattan neighborhood as “the Mecca of the New Negro,” a place of pilgrimage for those who wished to be part of the cultural vanguard of this Renaissance, an interwar period marked by the flourishing of African American literature, theater, music, and scholarship. And this “city within a city” was further distinguished, they claimed, by its effective enclosure from the damaging ou ..read more

by Alexander Collin Daniel Luban is an assistant professor of political science at Columbia University specializing in political theory. Luban is completing a book on early modern social theory entitled Children of Pride, under contract with Cambridge University Press. He is also in the early stages of a second book project on coercion and its role in social and economic life. Before entering the academy, he worked as a political journalist covering debates related to U.S. foreign policy, and he continues to write for a general audience in publications like Dissent, The Nation ..read more