When a Florida treasure-hunting company dredged up half a billion dollars’ worth of gold and silver coins from a Spanish colonial frigate rotting on the ocean floor, Spain went to war — not with cannons, but with lawyers, curators, and museum lighting. In “Imperial Nostalgia as Patrimony: Shipwrecks and Treasures in the Colonial Museum” recently…

In an article published in the German edition of Jacobin, Robin Celikates and I argue that academic boycotts are legitimate tactics and practices of political protest. Against the claim that such boycotts—and especially the boycott of Israeli academic institutions—violate academic freedom, we contend that there are, on the contrary, strong academic-freedom-based reasons to support a…

My most recent article “What Is an Imaginary?” is out in the latest issue of Critical Inquiry. Here is the abstract: Over the last few decades, the neologisms social imaginary and political imaginary have become ubiquitous in the jargon of the humanities and the theoretical social sciences. And yet, despite the pervasive use, there is…