January 31, 2013

"Selections from Hannah Arendt’s Between Past and Future (1961) proved helpful in exploring the temporal operations of modern colonialism and its historicizing forces."

"Mythology of Modern Law by Peter Fitzpatrick, along with Mitchell's book, made explicit the colonizing powers of modernity and of modern law."

"Colonising Egypt by Timothy Mitchell, along with Fitzpatrick's book, made explicit the colonizing powers of modernity and of modern law."

"My inquiry into the authority and force of Egypt’s nature led me to The Moral Authority of Nature, edited by Lauren Daston and Fernando Vidal."

"Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern was useful for articulating a particular relationship between the human and nature in relation to law and politics."

"Maurice Leenhardt’s Do Kamo (1947) prompted me to search for a non-juridical vision of the human in Egyptian history."

"The relationship between pain and ethics in modern legal reform became more evident upon reading Cesare Beccaria’s An Essay on Crimes and Punishments (1764)."

"With Talal Asad’s Formations of the Secular I was able to examine the paradox of cruelty constitutive of modern, secular-liberal sensibilities and the human redeemed by the law."

"Kafka’s novella, The Metamorphosis (1915), was the first inspiration for my work. His exploration of the boundaries of the human in relation to the animal and the place of the inhuman in the human shaped my research questions."