Archive - Learning of Words

My learning journey at Stanford continued in the late spring with a class on gender issues in Imperial China. Also: the meaning of time!

Jul 31, 2023 •

Ramanan Raghavendran

January 2023

What is a nation? It's complicated...

Jan 13, 2023 •

Ramanan Raghavendran

October 2022

Where Do Emails Go When You're Gone?

My learning journey at Stanford continued over the summer with an intense course on “the archive”, a highly fetishized subject in the humanities. The…

Oct 28, 2022 •

Ramanan Raghavendran

June 2022

Year Two: Poems!

I’ve been using my blog to chronicle, in an episodic way, a learning journey I have been on at Stanford. The adventure continues! *** The second year of…

Jun 28, 2022 •

Ramanan Raghavendran

March 2022

World Simulations: Iain M. Banks

Did life in your great Utopia really get so boring you needed a war? — Iain M. Banks, Consider Phlebas Recently I wrote about how some of the best…

Mar 25, 2022 •

Ramanan Raghavendran

December 2021

Why Do I Speak English?

The header of my Twitter profile contains a quote by Michel Foucault that I reference often. Like most great philosophers, he took a hundred words to…

Dec 12, 2021 •

Ramanan Raghavendran

June 2021

Looking Back: A Year of Learning

Last week, I finished the first year of a learning journey in the form of a part-time degree program designed for working professionals with an interest…

Jun 17, 2021 •

Ramanan Raghavendran

April 2021

Freud, Hegel and Eddie Murphy (also, James Brown)

I often feel the English language — or pretty much any other human language — is singularly unequipped to deal with metaphysical concepts. This is one…

Apr 18, 2021 •

Ramanan Raghavendran

Tilting, Gently: On Don Quixote

This brief essay is adapted from a longer paper I wrote on the subject. As I go through a learning journey, I find myself looking below the surface …

Apr 5, 2021 •

Ramanan Raghavendran

February 2021

A Hundred (and one ) Stories -- Reading the Decameron and 1001 Nights

I read sections of the Decameron recently along with the story of The Little Hunchback from the 1001 Nights, as part of an ongoing learning journey. I’d…

Feb 22, 2021 •

Ramanan Raghavendran

January 2021

Biden and Beowulf: Three Thoughts on the Elections

We are still pagans I’ve been reading Beowulf recently, in the very fine Heaney translation, as part of an ongoing learning journey. One discovery has…

Jan 24, 2021 •

Ramanan Raghavendran

November 2020

Reading Confucius in Translation: Something New This Way Comes

Decades ago the issue of “translation effects” came to lodge in my brain, in the course of reading Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy. This is a…

Nov 2, 2020 •

Ramanan Raghavendran

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