Olivia DrakeA book by Laurie Nussdorfer, professor of history and letters, will be discussed Dec. 16 in Rome. Her book, Brokers of Public Trust: Notaries in Early Modern Rome (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), examines the emergence of the modern notarial profession -- free market scribes responsible for producing original legal documents and their copies. Nussdorfer chronicles the training of professional notaries and the construction of public archives, explaining why notarial documents exist, who made them, and how they came to be regarded as authoritative evidence. In doing so, she describes a profession of crucial importance to the people and government of the time,…
Khachig Tölölyan, professor of letters, professor of English, founder and editor of Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, was interviewed by the French weekly publication L’Express about Thomas Pynchon on Oct. 6. The article is online, in French.
Khachig Tölölyan, professor of letters, professor of English, editor of "Diaspora," was one of two keynote speakers at a conference on “Diaspora as a resource: Comparative Studies in Strategies, Networks and Urban Space.” The international event was held in Hamburg, Germany June 4-6. Tölölyan’s interests include diasporas, transnationalism, the world/globe polarity and the Armenian diaspora.
Corrina KerrFor this issue, we queried Laurie Nussdorfer, professor of history, letters and medieval studies and author of Brokers of Public Trust: Notaries in Early Modern Rome (published by The Johns Hopkins University Press in 2009). She supplied her answers in writing, of course. Q: How did the idea for the book begin? A: Daniel Rosenberg ’88 wrote a senior honors thesis in the History Department about the historiography of literacy (how historians had interpreted and investigated the ability of people to read in the past). I was one of the readers of this fascinating thesis, and it occurred to me…
Berel Lang, visiting professor of letters, visiting professor of philosophy, is the author of the book Philosophical Witnessing: The Holocaust as Presence published by the University Press of New England, the fifth in a series of books by him on the Holocaust. The 260-paged book brings the perspective of philosophical analysis to bear on issues related to the Holocaust. Setting out from a conception of philosophical “witnessing” that expands and illuminates the standard view of the witness, he confronts the question of what philosophy can add to the views of the Holocaust provided in other disciplines. Drawing on the philosophical…