As machines take over the work of producing, organizing, and curating culture, it becomes increasingly important to examine the influence of algorithms in public memory work, through which the past is selectively and subjectively reconstructed to make meaning in the present. Accordingly, this dissertation intervenes at the intersection of public...
This project addresses the uses of coalition in US political imaginaries throughout the 1930s and 1960s. Throughout this period, public familiarity with “coalition” undergoes a marked transformation: whether deployed as argument, performance, or organizational form. Analysis focuses on three case studies: accounts in the national and Black press of a...
Pablo Escobar is not only part of Colombia’s cruel past but also of its very difficult present. Escobar was one of the first major modern drug traffickers, and the founder and head of the Medellín Cartel. He was responsible for more than four thousand deaths. He had an incalculable fortune...
There is a paradox at the center of twenty-first century American poverty. On the one hand, American poverty seems to have become an object of significant interest (at least to scholars and to the reading public)—as evidenced through the surge of wildly successful non-fiction books about poverty. On the other...
Recent decades have seen fan and “geek” culture become widely popular as the science fiction, fantasy, and superhero stories that used to be the preserve of a smaller subculture of die-hard fans conquered the box office, our televisions, and the best-seller lists. In that same time period, the Internet has...
They Left Us Dead: Anti-Black Violence, Black Evidence, and The Insistence of Black Life examines the mercurial, though seemingly fixed, notion of evidence as it is brought into relation with anti-blackness, Black death and, ultimately, Black life. They Left Us Dead queries how and why certain forms of documentation and...
Public memory studies in rhetoric have typically neglected how we use shared memories to form, maintain, and pass down social norms through the objects we encounter and the practices we participate in during our everyday lives. This is especially true for children’s toys, because they are understood as essential objects...