Tuesday, April 11, 2017

Signing Off

I wanted to post a final note at the end of my guest blogging stint here at LHB. I am appreciative for the opportunity to write about some of the issues that came up in the process of producing Futility and reflect on the many challenges and rewards of doing transnational and global legal history in the contemporary moment. Especially coming from the less traditional legal interdisciplinary perspective of anthropology, it was productive to discipline into words some of the internal dialogue that had accompanied my particular process of becoming a legal historian.

Intro: What Are You?: Producing A First Book Amid Disciplinary and Geographic Migrations (link)
  1) The Affinities and Disjunctures of History and Anthropology (link)
  2) Subjectivity, Intent and Impact: The Gordian Knot of Empathy and Interpretation (link)
  3) Functionalism and Synthetic History (link)
  4) The Challenges of Comparative Law and Transnational History (link)
  5) Empire and Imperialism: (Mis)Framing Cross-Cultural Engagements (link)
  6) The Young Interdisciplinary Scholar in a Global Academic Market (link)

I think all scholars can relate to the fact that we have many potential inspirations that will never quite make it into formal writing projects, and exist in the hazier space between the personal and professional. LHB provides this distinct type of space for its guest bloggers, and I have enjoyed working through my thoughts therein, and hope they find some resonance out there in the digital ether.

And my thanks to the lead bloggers for the steady work of putting together a high-quality community resource which takes so much time out of our already impacted academic lives. The internet has the potential to both further silo and broaden our perspectives as scholars, and as catholic as the field of legal history has become this type of collective work helps us all take better advantage of the latter. Until next time!