Bojan Srbinovski // The past three months have given people in the United States good reasons for cautious optimism. After a disastrous winter season that saw the number of recorded cases of COVID-19 rise over 300,000 per day and the total number of deaths exceed half a million people, the pandemic and the country seem…
Author: Bojan Srbinovski
Bojan Srbinovski is a doctoral candidate at Cornell University’s English Department. He studies the relationships between Romanticism and trauma, the histories of mourning and bereavement, and the impact of Christian hermeneutics on our understanding of the body. His dissertation, titled Figures of Catastrophe, explores “catastrophe” as an overlapping name for traumatic upheaval and dramatic collapse as it appears in the writings of several nineteenth-century British authors.
The Virus, the Market, and the Body
Bojan Srbinovski // What has the COVID-19 pandemic taught the medical humanities about the body? On Monday, November 9, the American pharmaceutical company Pfizer announced the encouraging preliminary findings of a COVID-19 vaccine study that suggested an efficacy of more than 90 percent. This welcome news came as a bright spot against the background of…
Glossier No More: Following the Leadership of Retail Workers
Bojan Srbinovski // Things are happening at Glossier, the cosmetics giant famous for its millennial pink brand palette and its repeatedly stated goal to “democratize beauty.” A recent open letter published by a group called Outta the Gloss, a collective of former Glossier retail employees, indicates that these workers, whom Glossier calls “offline editors,” were…
Literature After the Era of Roe v. Wade
Bojan Srbinovski // “The right of privacy,” writes Justice Harry Blackmun in the majority opinion for Roe v. Wade, “whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action…or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment’s reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to…
Coronavirus at the Border: The Nation-State as Involuntary Quarantine
Bojan Srbinovski // On the evening of November 13, 2015, a series of coordinated terrorist attacks occurred in the metropolitan area of Paris. Six different locations were targeted in a combination of mass shootings and a suicide bombing. In the deadliest attack on France since World War II, and the deadliest attack on the European…
The Crisis of Waiting in North Macedonia
The public health consequences of North Macedonia’s political crisis would be considerable.
Black Mirror and the Therapies of Distraction
Bojan Srbinovski // “San Junipero,” the fourth episode of the third season of the techno-dystopian television series Black Mirror, opens with a series of distractions. It is the year 1987, and Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven is a Place on Earth” is playing on the radio. Yorkie, one of the episode’s protagonists, walks out onto the street…