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Academic blogs

Author: The Editors

The Editors · HCA Graduate Blog

Dungeons & Dragons between Community and Commercialization

by Jula Maasböl Within the last decade, Dungeons & Dragons has turned from a relatively niche hobby that few people were aware of to a vastly popular game with renewed cult status. Helped along by the publication of a more accessible rule system with Dungeons & Dragons’ 5th Edition in…

The Editors · HCA Graduate Blog

The Founding Fathers are Back from the Dead: 19th-Century Spiritualism and the American Civil Religion

By E. H. Messamore The 4th of July brings with it the usual paeans to the foundational principles of the republic along with affirmations of its special destiny. Independence Day represents the holiest day in what sociologist Robert Bellah in 1967 dubbed America’s civil religion—a trans-denominational sanctification of the symbols,…

The Editors · HCA Graduate Blog

The Confinement of Outer Space

By Annika Elstermann To begin, let us look towards the stars. Culturally, the firmament has always held a fascination for writers and audiences, not just in a mystical sense, but also as a place which exists and which might be reached, traversed, visited, explored, but which is as yet uncharted.…

The Editors · HCA Graduate Blog

The Confinement of Outer Space

By Annika Elstermann To begin, let us look towards the stars. Culturally, the firmament has always held a fascination for writers and audiences, not just in a mystical sense, but also as a place which exists and which might be reached, traversed, visited, explored, but which is as yet uncharted.…

The Editors · HCA Graduate Blog

“What a nun is supposed to be”: Black Power and the National Black Sisters’ Conference

by Venus Bender In his 1971 speech “On the Relevance of the Church” at the Theological Union in Berkeley, California, the Black Power activist Huey P. Newton referred to the church as an essential institution for building a Black community after both the church and the Black Panther Party had…

The Editors · HCA Graduate Blog

Crime, Class, and the City: Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle (2021)

by Valentina Lopez Liendo Where do you go as a writer after being awarded back-to-back Pulitzer Prizes? Somewhere where you “get to be funny again,” as Colson Whitehead states (Feldman 2021). In his last two novels, Whitehead explored the horrors of slavery in Underground Railroad and the traumatic violence of…

The Editors · HCA Graduate Blog

Crime, Class, and the City: Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle (2021)

by Valentina Lopez Liendo Where do you go as a writer after being awarded back-to-back Pulitzer Prizes? Somewhere where you “get to be funny again,” as Colson Whitehead states (Feldman 2021). In his last two novels, Whitehead explored the horrors of slavery in Underground Railroad and the traumatic violence of…

The Editors · HCA Graduate Blog

Collision Course: Don’t Look Up and the Politicization of Science in America

By David F. Eisler On last Christmas Eve, Netflix released the star-studded satirical disaster movie Don’t Look Up about two American astrophysicists named Dr. Randall Mindy and Kate Dibiasky (played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence) who face ignorance, apathy, and political hostility as they attempt to persuade the government…

The Editors · HCA Graduate Blog

Civil Rights & Civil Wrongs

How the Right Responded and Responds to Demands by Civil Rights Activists[i] By Georg Wolff In an academia where fetishized innovation breeds sensationalist mediocrity, where ‘new’ and ‘good’ are used interchangeably, it is a rare occurrence that a historiographic work achieves the appropriate half-life to be considered a true classic.…

The Editors · HCA Graduate Blog

Breaking the Silence – #MeToo and the Reclaiming of the Feminist Framing of Sexual Harassment

By Nicole Colaianni In December 2017, Time magazine named “The Silence Breakers” as Person of the Year. It was the first time the magazine honored a group instead of just one person with the title. The magazine’s intention was to both celebrate these women (and some men) as individuals as…

The Editors · HCA Graduate Blog

Writing the modern mother: The complex struggles of motherhood in Brit Bennett’s The Mothers (2016)

By Johanna Decker Mothers have served as some of the most beloved heroines, but also as some of the most hated villainesses in film and literature. There is the loving, caring ‘angelic’ mother, who will sacrifice herself in a heartbeat for her cherished child – The Scarlet Letter’s Hester Prynne,…

The Editors · HCA Graduate Blog

Entertainment, Politics, and Power: Georgia’s Creative Industries in Light of the New Voting Law

By Aylin Güngör In March 2021, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed Senate Bill (SB) 202 that reformed the state’s voting laws. Put forward by Republican senators in the aftermath of Georgia’s Democratic swing and former president Trump’s allegations of voter fraud in 2020, the bill was born with the stated…

The Editors · HCA Graduate Blog

Memory-based urban planning: a case for memory culture in German military conversion

by Julian Kramer A city itself doesn’t remember its inhabitants, buildings, or events that have taken place in it. The physical entity of infrastructure and buildings can’t actively have memory. It needs its inhabitants to do the active work of remembering. At the same time, it is the material surroundings…