Note: Written in June 2021 as a final exam for Making of the Modern World 15 — the last course in the sequence, submitted online, at the tail end of my sophomore year and what felt like the tail end of coherent reality. The question was essentially: how do you fulfill social responsibility while staying autonomous? I had Sartre, Eleanor Roosevelt, Mike Davis, and a year of pandemic fatigue to work with. The essay is more honest than most because exam conditions have a way of

Author's Note: Written in December 2020 — the tail end of a genuinely chaotic year — this essay is addressed, loosely, to the incoming Biden administration, using historical analysis of imperialism, labor hierarchies, and racial ideology to argue that the United States needs to reckon with its past in order to navigate its present. It pulls together King Leopold's Congo, Heart of Darkness, Karl Marx, Herbert Spencer's social Darwinism, and Ernest Renan's theory of nationhood

Author Note: Written in early 2020 for MMW 12 — the same survey sequence I would later teach as a graduate teaching assistant. The essay takes up a deceptively simple question: did the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita actually translate into how people lived? The answer, via the monk Faxian's travel writings from Gupta-era India, is a qualified yes. I'll note that the title was written with a provocation in mind that the essay then happily subverts. Tell the Elders to Practice