Featured posts
Pilgrimage to Barda
In 2016, Jesko Schmoller travelled to the village of Barda, in the region of Perm, Russia. There, he followed some inhabitants as they planned a pilgrimage. This article shows some drone footage recorded during that experience.
Sinophone Music in 2023: Old Wine in New Bottles?
As usual, here is a short review of the year 2023 in music. Not a “best of”, but rather a list of things that happened in 2023, some were good, some were bad. Some were weird (Shijiazhuang’s “rock city” project). We saw rock bands coming back after a (long) pause…
Do They Know When It’s Christmas?
by Chris Hann Ukraine’s official Christmas holiday has been shifted from 7th January to 25th December. This calendrical change is above all a way to assert difference from Russia, but the symbolic message is not without costs. Everywhere in Europe, rituals to mark the Winter solstice have long been focused on the…
Shame and History
Bennett Gilbert - We are inside of history; we are history in the becoming. We need to learn from the past, but we do not. Why do we hide history? Why does the power of the past to connect us to others often fail?
Fairness and discrimination, PhD Course, #1 Motivation
This week, we will start our MAT998P course, in Montréal, entitled “équité et discrimination des modèles prédictifs“. It will mainly be based on the forthcoming textbook, I can also mention the R package > library(devtools) > install_github("freakonometrics/InsurFair") And because it is the first course, this week, I will start with…
Three key notions of linguistics: Lexemes, inflection, and derivation
My paper on inflection and derivation as traditional comparative concepts has just been published (in Linguistics, in open access, 2024). What made me revisit this old question? (which had occupied me back in 1996, and of course in my 2002 morphology textbook, Chapter 4) Linguists have many technical terms that…
Which Writing System Did the Hobbits Use?
Which writing system did the Hobbits use? Did they write Tengwar, Cirth or did they have a script of their own?
Irish merchants, Breton seafarers and the salt trade at the end of the 16th century
The vast majority of surviving archival records refer to transactions between people of which we know little or nothing at all. They are, nevertheless, frequently very interesting in their own right as they offer a glimpse of practices and life during the Renaissance. One such case illustrates the vitality of…
Palestine and the Migrant Question in Postcolonial France
By Olivia C. Harrison My new book, Natives against Nativism: Antiracism and Indigenous Critique in Postcolonial France, examines the intersection of antiracist and pro-Palestinian activism in France from the 1970s to the present. Against the ubiquitous association of pro-Palestinianism with Islamism and anti-Semitism, I show that the Palestinian question has…
Water as a symbol of Jewish birth – The Mikvah in Erfurt
— Sophie Felgentreu, Nicolaus Zerlaut-Anders This blog post was researched and written by students participating in the 2023 lecture series “Global Exchanges – Trade, Knowledge, and Religion“. The lecture series was organised by Elisa Iori and Mateusz Fafinski of the UrbRel group. What is a Mikvah ? The mikvah is…
Christmas carols
— Jörg Rüpke Sometimes it is the absence that makes the obvious visible. On 4 December 2023, the music stopped at some German Christmas markets, including Erfurt. The reason for this was the protest against the high licence fees for the public – and undoubtedly sales-promoting – playing of music…
What are Conlangs Good For?
This blog post is a reply to a twitter thread titled “Here are 3 reasons why I hate conlangs”. I show where the author of the thread is wrong in my opinion and explore what conlangs are good for.
What is in a (family) name?
Nils Riecken Beginning with its census campaigns in the late nineteenth century, the Ottomans sought to identify all subjects of the Sultan, males, females, and children. In contrast, earlier imperial surveys only registered adult males for the purpose of military conscription and taxation. This shift had a global dimension, occurring…
From ex-doctorate to Prism: Interview with Brendan Geer about his journey to Prism
Brendan Geer, editor of the Prism research blog, was a doctorate student heading towards a career in Academia. What happened?
The Late Persianate World: Transregional Connections and the Question of Language
TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research By Maryam Fatima, Alexander Jabbari and Mehtap Ozdemir The Persianate world is a Eurasian zone connected by the historic use of the Persian language in various capacities, which produced a shared cultural vocabulary, forms, and sensibilities. The onset of nineteenth-century modernity and the contraction…
Trial and Error: The Federal Republic of Germany’s Failed First National Day of Remembrance and Where to Go from There
On 7 September 1950, the improvised West German parliamentary building—the Bundeshaus in Bonn—was packed with people. The Federal Chancellor with his cabinet, the majority of both chambers of parliament, as well as a significant number of honorary guests from high society had come together for the first ‘National Day of…