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...Keith Thomas; Jeffrey M. Perl This guest column comprises both a review of the English translation of Carlo Ginzburg’s book Threads and Traces: True False Fictive (2012) and some general comments on the merits and demerits of microhistory as a genre poised between historical writing and fiction...

...Keith Thomas This guest column comprises both a review of the English translation of Carlo Ginzburg's book Threads and Traces: True False Fictive (2012) and some general comments on the merits and demerits of microhistory as a genre poised between historical writing and fiction. The column...

...Anders Blok This guest column asks how Bruno Latour has contributed to any present and future refiguring of relations between the sciences and the humanities. To answer the question, it traces three select and shifting figures of knowledge by means of which Latour himself has been charting his...

...Miguel Tamen In this guest column, the author argues, first, that being at the place of an event does not guarantee that one understands what is going on and, second, that something's happening with or to me does not guarantee that I understand what has occurred. He shows that it is generally...

...William M. Chace This guest column, written by a former president of Emory University, examines arguments made by Jonathan Cole, a former provost of Columbia, in his book The Great American University . Cole illustrates his history of the modern American research university with a vivid comparison...

...Mikhail Epstein In this guest column, Epstein offers “a new sign” that, he argues, resolves difficulties that have arisen in many theories and practices, including linguistics, semiotics, literary theory, poetics, aesthetics, ecology, ecophilology, eco-ethics, metaphysics, theology, psychology...

...Brett Bourbon The academic dominance of cultural studies and the increasing interest and significance of cultural conflict in our world has encouraged various theories of culture, the most pervasive being theories of transculture and hybrid cultural forms and entities. In this guest column, Bourbon...

...Colin Richmond This Common Knowledge guest column is a partly comical, partly biographical speculation on how Anthony Woodville, brother-in-law of King Edward IV, passed the time while being held under guard at the “Newe Inn” Norwich, from August 20 to 25, 1469. © 2017 by Duke University Press...

...Lionel Gossman The topic of this guest column is Beaumarchais's endeavor, as a dramatist, to overcome the irreconcilable polarities of high and low, spirit and body, noble and base, tragedy and comedy that are essential to French classical theater by adapting traditional comedy to the less rigid...

...Julia Kristeva This guest column suggests that we should follow Hannah Arendt in resisting the urge to expound doctrines or systems and, instead, should disclose the processes of our thought as they are “in motion.” While we should not hesitate to express judgments, our aim in intellectual work...

...Václav Havel; Adam Michnik This guest column amounts to a conversation between two of the crucial figures in the world of Soviet bloc dissidents about developments in their part of the world since the overthrow of communism there in 1989. They agree that a “creeping coup d'état” is underway...

...Colin Richmond To commemorate the five hundreth anniversary of the accession of Henry VIII to the English throne, this guest column reviews the inventories made, upon his death, of the king's possessions at Hampton Court, the Tower, and other locations. Focusing on extensive equipment for royal...

...Caroline Walker Bynum Written two days after the women's march in New York on January 21, 2017, this essay — a guest column in Common Knowledge — describes the event and emphasizes two aspects: its multi-issue focus and its response to the denigration of women's expertise represented in much...

...Andrew Pickering This Common Knowledge guest column concerns performance , understood in its simple ur-sense of “doing things” in the world. It continues the author's analysis, in his book The Mangle of Practice (1995), of cultural evolution as a “dance of agency”: a performative, decentered...

...Barry Allen This Common Knowledge guest column examines Richard Feynman’s tabletop experiment, performed during the inquiry into the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, as a means of demonstrating some of the fundamental qualities of a scientific experiment. Experiments have been interpreted...

... to the essay in which the term was coined: “Art, as Device” (1917). This Common Knowledge guest column attempts to remedy the situation by introducing anglophone readers to some lesser-known, somewhat later writings of Shklovsky in which he returns to the concept of ostranenie and its cognitive and social...

... Mascetti’s guest column revisits that controversy through a historical and theological reading of the ecclesiological conceptions of Ratzinger and his successor Jorge Bergoglio (Pope Francis). Ratzinger’s Platonism and his idealist, Christocentric ecclesiology is posed against Bergoglio’s Aristotelianism...

...Václav Havel; Adam Michnik; Translated by Clare Cavanagh; Jeffrey M. Perl This guest column amounts to a conversation between two of the most crucial Soviet bloc dissidents about developments since the 1989 overthrow of communismin their part of the world. They agree that a “creeping coup d’état...

...Natalie Zemon Davis; Jeffrey M. Perl Responding to a quip by a fellow historian, who feared that Martin Guerre might become better known than Martin Luther, this guest column, by the author of The Return of Martin Guerre , affirms that they are part of the same universe of historical inquiry...

...Belle Randall In memory of Stanley Cavell, a family friend of more than a half-century’s standing writes about his years in Berkeley (1944 to 1964), when he was deciding between music and philosophy as his field and then, eventually, joined the philosophy faculty as a lecturer. This guest column...