Dear readers, This past Friday marked the 250th anniversary of the birth of Georges-Léopold-Chrétien-Frédéric-Dagobert, Baron Cuvier, or Georges Cuvier to his friends, a pioneering figure in comparative anatomy, paelontology, and the theory of catastrophism (the illustration above is from the 1834 edition of Cuvier's The Animal Kingdom). Let us consider the achievements of Georges Cuvier,…
Thanks for having me here today to give this talk on Why I Write. I don't know why you write - I would love to know why you write, actually - that would be helpful to me to hear. I'm hoping you will tell me your Why during the time we have for questions and answers. I wrote this essay on the topic of what was asked of me: why I write. And hopefully this will be helpful to you or, at the very least, not boring to you and if it is? Well, this too shall pass.
King's is taking Molly Lash-Burrows's curiosity to a whole new level. Sitting at home in the tiny island village of Sointula, B.C., Molly Lash-Burrows had a plan when she began applying for universities. "I wanted to kind of explore Canada," she said. "So, I specifically only applied to schools on the East Coast, and…
Dear readers, A current exhibition at the Design Museum in London devoted to the films of Stanley Kubrick features materials related to perhaps the greatest film Kubrick never made: a biopic of Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1969, a year after the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick composed a screenplay covering the life of Napoleon…
Dear readers, You may recall that I devoted an issue of Early Modern Times last month to the vainglorious Queen-Pine, on the occasion of a pineapple being grown in the Halifax Public Gardens. Global News Halifax has finally caught up to Early Modern Times, and reported Thursday on the 'Tropical fruit on display in downtown…
Marcellus Cogswell-Wright, a second-year Bachelor of Arts student, is having a busy summer working for King’s Facilities Department. One of his assignments was to repaint the Coat of Arms that has hung above the Library’s main entrance since its installment in the early 90s. This is the first time the crest has been removed.
Dear readers, This past week, the now-former UK Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt declared the Iranian seizure of a British-flagged tanker an act of 'state piracy'. The idea, however, that piracy could be committed by a state runs counter to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (1982), which defines piracy as 'illegal…
Acclaimed editor Jordan Ginsberg has been named Editor-in-Residence for this year’s MFA in Creative Nonfiction summer residency. The residency will take place at King’s College in Halifax from August 5-17, 2019. Ginsberg is currently both the editorial director of Strange Light, a new Penguin Random House Canada book imprint, and also the editor-in-chief of Hazlitt,…
Dear readers, In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, let us consider voyages to our beloved yet bashful satellite (since Luna only ever shows us half of its surface) and to outer space in early modern literature. As Dr. Kathryn Morris teaches her students in the EMSP course 'The Origins of Science…
