Can the World Truly Run on Kindness?
The immigration and “woke” controversy is certainly not about Superman’s “immigration status”—Superman is a fictional character, after all. The real problem is what Superman means for the United States in 2025. In…
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I Did It For Love
In the last couple of months, I’ve lived through a few milestones and accomplishments that are puzzlingly, wonderfully hard to process. On May 16 (which happens to be my Coming to America…
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Teen Angst Revisited
Some common experiences come to us later in life. Netflix’s Young Royals has inexplicably allowed me to remember and appreciate a kind of love I don’t have access to and never did. In a…
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Work in Progress
Refashioning. That’s the thread that ties together the six blog posts that I have listed below. Four of these posts are about my own intellectual process, while the other two seem to…
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Just When I Thought I Was Out…
Reader, it turns out dissertations have a great big gravity well, with the pull of a 1,000 black holes. Light can’t escape. Thoughts can’t escape. I can’t escape. Just a few weeks…
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Custom and the Law: Some Speculations
In 2012, at the end of a dissertation regarding the relationship between the literary custom sketch and the novel in the nineteenth century, I speculated that “the struggle between local laws and…
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To Network or Not to Network?
There’s nothing quite like a graduate seminar for encouraging you to like one approach one week, see it as intellectually bankrupt the next one, only to be redeemed weeks later. I have…
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Javier Jiménez Westerman, PhD 