Field
Biographic Data
| ID | 8690 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Field |
| FAMILY NAME | Field |
| SIGNATURE | FIELD |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Vermont |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0677-5256 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 60 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Carbonous Concealment
Drawing on ethnographic field research that I conducted in Houston, Texas since late 2018, I explore subterranean storage arrangements utilised by the US hydrocarbon industry. I argue that storage is vital not only to its pluri‐temporal strategies but to the outward projection of good governance. Natural gas, I show, has evolved from excess nuisance, to liability, to potential asset turned commodity in ways that parallel unfolding understandings …
Corpus franciscanum
Saint Francis of Assisi
Known for speaking with the birds, for professing poverty, receiving the stigmata and for initiating the Franciscan order, Francis of Assisi is one of the most radical and inspiring figures in Christianity. In this outstanding and celebrated biography, the distinguished medievalist Jacques Le Goff paints a fascinating picture of the life of Francis of Assisi. Locating Francis in the feudal world of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and explori…
Value as ethics
Drawing on ethnographic research in Houston, Texas, I contribute novel ethnographic insights into how oil and gas experts understand notions of value. I show that prevailing notions of value are normatively defined in economic terms and closely tied to understandings of an American "way of life." Questions of value, I suggest, reveal our idiosyncratic and shared ethical orientations toward what we think is important and the futures we are fightin…
Carbon capital
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, grant agreement No. 715146
Risk and responsibility
Drawing on ethnographic research in Houston, Texas, I explore how private equity financiers in the US hydrocarbon industry are empowered to define and take financial risks on our collective behalf. The US shale revolution could not have unfolded without the financial risk-taking activities of private equity financiers who channeled billions of dollars into US unconventional exploration and production ("fracking"). These financiers are motivated n…
Power and precariousness in the expert hierarchies of the US hydrocarbon industry
Drawing on ethnographic research in Houston, Texas, I explore how oil and gas experts negotiate social power and precariousness within the US hydrocarbon sector. In an industry long associated with corporate power, the careers of experts are precariously balanced on rising and falling hydrocarbon prices. This makes the social power these experts wield as fluid as the commodities they are premised on. I show that informal social networks solidifie…
Organizing the 1
In Organizing the 1%: How Corporate Power Works, Carroll and Sapinski (2018) argue that corporations unify the interests of the one percent, are the root of economic inequality, and shape the agendas of governments and public institutions, such as universities. The book has seven chapters and is written in a way that will likely be accessible to most undergraduate readers. The first chapter focuses on the concept of corporate power and begins wit…
Toxicity travels in a changing climate
Courting Sanctity
Courting Sanctity traces the shifting relationship between holy women and the French royal court across the long thirteenth century. It argues that during the reign of Louis IX (r. 1226-70) holy women were central to the rise of the Capetian self-presentation as uniquely favored by God, that such women’s influence was questioned and reshaped under Philip III (r. 1270-85), and that would-be holy women were increasingly assumed to pose physical, sp…
Courting Sanctity
Uncanny District Six
This chapter describes an excavation of photographic and oral remains obscured within the author's family archive by racism and overshadowed by the iconic District Six story. District Six originated in the 1830s and many early residents were emancipated indigenous KhoiSan and slaves from Asia and Africa, who gradually adopted the label ‘coloured’ and, by the late nineteenth century, ‘coloured identity had crystallized’. In 1995 a temporary exhibi…
Hidden Histories of Gordonia, land dispossession and resistance in the Northern Cape, 1800-1990
No abstract available
Critical empathy through oral histories after apartheid
Through a critique of empathy based on a ‘sharing of feelings’ or ‘identifications’ in search of rapport, this article rather frames ‘critical empathy’ as a discursive strategy to approach oral history dialogues and interpretation. Through interpretations of oral histories with survivors of apartheid violence, I argue that empathy for oral historians involves imagining past scenes through the positions and perspectives of the speaking other. Howe…
A return to the evidence for Marguerite Porete’s authorship of the Mirror of Simple Souls
In 1946 Romana Guarnieri identified Marguerite Porete as the author of the Mirror of Simple Souls. Since a small number of historians has recently expressed doubts about this identification, a fresh look at the evidence is warranted. This article first returns to Guarnieri’s announcement and subsequent statements on the subject in order to highlight both their strengths and their weaknesses. It then re-assesses the evidence, paying particular att…
Examining the influence of intellectuals on commodity speculation
Torture and Confession in the Templar Interrogations at Caen, 28–29 October 1307
Royal Agents and Templar Confessions in the Bailliage of Rouen
Through a close examination of the two extant documents generated by the Templar arrests and interrogations in the bailliage of Rouen, this article sheds new light on the way Philip IV's agents there interpreted their mandates in the uncertain atmosphere of the week following October 13, 1307. These crucial documents (reedited in appendices) are uniquely revealing, because they were produced entirely by the king's secular agents: the bailli of Ro…
The financialization of food and the 2008-2011 food price spikes
The treatment of recent global food price volatility in the neoclassical academic literature is problematic in its limited conceptual and empirical scope. This study presents new empirical data and analysis linking financial speculation by index swap dealers ('index funds') with US and global food price volatility. Marxian circuits of capital are used to illustrate the connection between index funds and food consumers. The findings show that fina…
Surviving Dictatorship
Memory and History
Memory studies emerged as a distinct field of intellectual enquiry in the 1970s, and since 1990 there has been a memory boom across academic disciplines and national boundaries; postconflict schola...
Questioning the Capetians, 1180–1328
The sharp ascent of Capetian power between the reigns of Philip II Augustus (r. 1180–1223) and Philip IV the Fair (r. 1285–1314) is an axiom of medieval French history. In the mid‐20th century, French and American institutional historians focused on governmental developments in analyzing the means by which the Capetian kings increased their real authority. But because Capetian power was also understood to have rested as much on ideological claims…
Public Forgetting
"Public Forgetting: The Rhetoric and Politics of Beginning Again." The Oral History Review, 41(1), pp. 159–160
Loose Bits of Shrapnel
This article traces the paradoxical effects of my father's World War II stories and a series of published photographs on my brother and me. It is a self-reflexive essay that also engages the Holocaust historiography on intergenerational legacies of the Holocaust and critiques the "transmitted trauma" concept. Instead, a vocabulary of gendered absence, anxiety, and disappointment is presented, and postmemories that were co-constructed in father-so…
Disappointed Remains
The apartheid regime in South Africa and the fight against the same, followed by the reconciliation is the crux of this article. The first democratic elections held on April 27, 1994, were surprisingly free of violence. Then, in one of its first pieces of legislation, the new democratic parliament passed the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act of 1995, which created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. At the outset, the South …
The Western Cape Oral History Project
2001). The Western Cape Oral History Project: The 1990s. African Studies: Vol. 60, No. 1, pp. 5-23
Carbon capital
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, grant agreement No. 715146
Value as ethics
Drawing on ethnographic research in Houston, Texas, I contribute novel ethnographic insights into how oil and gas experts understand notions of value. I show that prevailing notions of value are normatively defined in economic terms and closely tied to understandings of an American "way of life." Questions of value, I suggest, reveal our idiosyncratic and shared ethical orientations toward what we think is important and the futures we are fightin…
Risk and responsibility
Drawing on ethnographic research in Houston, Texas, I explore how private equity financiers in the US hydrocarbon industry are empowered to define and take financial risks on our collective behalf. The US shale revolution could not have unfolded without the financial risk-taking activities of private equity financiers who channeled billions of dollars into US unconventional exploration and production ("fracking"). These financiers are motivated n…
The financialization of food and the 2008-2011 food price spikes
The treatment of recent global food price volatility in the neoclassical academic literature is problematic in its limited conceptual and empirical scope. This study presents new empirical data and analysis linking financial speculation by index swap dealers ('index funds') with US and global food price volatility. Marxian circuits of capital are used to illustrate the connection between index funds and food consumers. The findings show that fina…
Loose Bits of Shrapnel
This article traces the paradoxical effects of my father's World War II stories and a series of published photographs on my brother and me. It is a self-reflexive essay that also engages the Holocaust historiography on intergenerational legacies of the Holocaust and critiques the "transmitted trauma" concept. Instead, a vocabulary of gendered absence, anxiety, and disappointment is presented, and postmemories that were co-constructed in father-so…
Remembering Experience, Interpreting Memory
Critical empathy through oral histories after apartheid
Through a critique of empathy based on a ‘sharing of feelings’ or ‘identifications’ in search of rapport, this article rather frames ‘critical empathy’ as a discursive strategy to approach oral history dialogues and interpretation. Through interpretations of oral histories with survivors of apartheid violence, I argue that empathy for oral historians involves imagining past scenes through the positions and perspectives of the speaking other. Howe…
Turning up the Volume
This article sketches an overview of South African oral history since the 1970s and argues that while oral history projects have grown rapidly since 2000, insufficient attention has been given to international debates about memory, myth and subjectivity. It then explores the conception of oral history being constructed by ‘dialogues about memory’, and how this furthers our understanding of narrative, agency and identity formation. This conception…
Carbonous Concealment
Drawing on ethnographic field research that I conducted in Houston, Texas since late 2018, I explore subterranean storage arrangements utilised by the US hydrocarbon industry. I argue that storage is vital not only to its pluri‐temporal strategies but to the outward projection of good governance. Natural gas, I show, has evolved from excess nuisance, to liability, to potential asset turned commodity in ways that parallel unfolding understandings …
Power and precariousness in the expert hierarchies of the US hydrocarbon industry
Drawing on ethnographic research in Houston, Texas, I explore how oil and gas experts negotiate social power and precariousness within the US hydrocarbon sector. In an industry long associated with corporate power, the careers of experts are precariously balanced on rising and falling hydrocarbon prices. This makes the social power these experts wield as fluid as the commodities they are premised on. I show that informal social networks solidifie…
Royal Agents and Templar Confessions in the Bailliage of Rouen
Through a close examination of the two extant documents generated by the Templar arrests and interrogations in the bailliage of Rouen, this article sheds new light on the way Philip IV's agents there interpreted their mandates in the uncertain atmosphere of the week following October 13, 1307. These crucial documents (reedited in appendices) are uniquely revealing, because they were produced entirely by the king's secular agents: the bailli of Ro…
The Master and Marguerite
This article examines the evidence for the intellectual and practical relationship between Marguerite Porete and the secular master of theology Godfrey of Fontaines. It analyses the nature, timing, and importance of Godfrey's response to The Mirror of Simple Souls, and argues that considering the interaction between these two figures has important consequences for our understanding of both of their careers
A return to the evidence for Marguerite Porete’s authorship of the Mirror of Simple Souls
In 1946 Romana Guarnieri identified Marguerite Porete as the author of the Mirror of Simple Souls. Since a small number of historians has recently expressed doubts about this identification, a fresh look at the evidence is warranted. This article first returns to Guarnieri’s announcement and subsequent statements on the subject in order to highlight both their strengths and their weaknesses. It then re-assesses the evidence, paying particular att…
Questioning the Capetians, 1180–1328
The sharp ascent of Capetian power between the reigns of Philip II Augustus (r. 1180–1223) and Philip IV the Fair (r. 1285–1314) is an axiom of medieval French history. In the mid‐20th century, French and American institutional historians focused on governmental developments in analyzing the means by which the Capetian kings increased their real authority. But because Capetian power was also understood to have rested as much on ideological claims…
Marie of Saint-Pol and her Books
Journal Article Marie of Saint-Pol and her Books Get access Sean L. Field Sean L. Field University of Vermont Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume CXXV, Issue 513, April 2010, Pages 255–278, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceq045 Published: 02 March 2010
Introduction
At its dialogic centre, oral history research methodology involves interactions between an interviewer eliciting and listening to a narrator framing and performing their memories through spoken words, sentences and stories. But oral history per se, as this South African Historical Journal collection will demonstrate, is much more than interface between interviewer and interviewee. This is because oral history is constructed through dialogues abou…
Agnes of Harcourt, Felipa of Porcelet, and Marguerite of Oingt
Three vernacular religious biographies were written by women about other women around the year 1300: Agnes of Harcourt's FrancienVie d'Isabelle de France(ca. 1283), Felipa of Porcelet's ProvençalVida de la benaurada sancta Doucelina(begun ca. 1297), and Marguerite of Oingt's Franco-ProvençalVia seiti Biatrix virgina de Ornaciu(between 1303 and 1310). Although a limited number of similar texts had been composed in Latin dating back to the early Mi…
Devotion, Discontent, and the Henrician Reformation
The relationship between popular religious attitudes and the English Reformation has long been the subject of a fierce historical debate. The older “Whig-Protestant” view, championed most notably by A. G. Dickens, draws on evidence for clerical corruption and the spread of Lollardy to show that large numbers of English people were dissatisfied with the state of Catholicism, eager for religious change, and on the whole receptive to Protestant idea…
From the ‘Peaceful Past’ to the ‘Violent Present’
People do not face the present as an isolated and empty space, sandwiched between the past and future. Rather, ‘the present’ is ‘itself historical: a complex series of interlocking histories whose interactions have to be reconstructed, not assumed’.2 ‘All present awareness’ as Lowenthal puts it, is grounded in past perceptions and acts’,3 or as Tonkin states, ‘All understandings of the past affect the present. Literate or illiterate, we are our m…
The Western Cape Oral History Project
2001). The Western Cape Oral History Project: The 1990s. African Studies: Vol. 60, No. 1, pp. 5-23
Remembering Experience, Interpreting Memory
Devotion, Discontent, and the Henrician Reformation
The relationship between popular religious attitudes and the English Reformation has long been the subject of a fierce historical debate. The older “Whig-Protestant” view, championed most notably by A. G. Dickens, draws on evidence for clerical corruption and the spread of Lollardy to show that large numbers of English people were dissatisfied with the state of Catholicism, eager for religious change, and on the whole receptive to Protestant idea…
Discerning Spirits
A Pernicious Sort of Woman
Agnes of Harcourt, Felipa of Porcelet, and Marguerite of Oingt
Three vernacular religious biographies were written by women about other women around the year 1300: Agnes of Harcourt's FrancienVie d'Isabelle de France(ca. 1283), Felipa of Porcelet's ProvençalVida de la benaurada sancta Doucelina(begun ca. 1297), and Marguerite of Oingt's Franco-ProvençalVia seiti Biatrix virgina de Ornaciu(between 1303 and 1310). Although a limited number of similar texts had been composed in Latin dating back to the early Mi…
Introduction
At its dialogic centre, oral history research methodology involves interactions between an interviewer eliciting and listening to a narrator framing and performing their memories through spoken words, sentences and stories. But oral history per se, as this South African Historical Journal collection will demonstrate, is much more than interface between interviewer and interviewee. This is because oral history is constructed through dialogues abou…
Turning up the Volume
This article sketches an overview of South African oral history since the 1970s and argues that while oral history projects have grown rapidly since 2000, insufficient attention has been given to international debates about memory, myth and subjectivity. It then explores the conception of oral history being constructed by ‘dialogues about memory’, and how this furthers our understanding of narrative, agency and identity formation. This conception…
The Master and Marguerite
This article examines the evidence for the intellectual and practical relationship between Marguerite Porete and the secular master of theology Godfrey of Fontaines. It analyses the nature, timing, and importance of Godfrey's response to The Mirror of Simple Souls, and argues that considering the interaction between these two figures has important consequences for our understanding of both of their careers
Theorizing the Ideal Sovereign
Daisy Delogu. Theorizing the Ideal Sovereign: The Rise of the French Vernacular Royal Biography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. viii + 300 pp. index. bibl. $70. ISBN: 978–0–8020–9807–8. - Volume 63 Issue 1
The Cultural and Political Legacy of Anne de Bretagne
Cynthia J. Brown, ed. The Cultural and Political Legacy of Anne de Bretagne: Negotiating Convention in Books and Documents. Gallica 16. Rochester: D. S. Brewer, 2010. x + 228 pp. index. append. illus. bibl. €55. ISBN: 978–1–843–84223–1. - Volume 63 Issue 4
Marie of Saint-Pol and her Books
Journal Article Marie of Saint-Pol and her Books Get access Sean L. Field Sean L. Field University of Vermont Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume CXXV, Issue 513, April 2010, Pages 255–278, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceq045 Published: 02 March 2010
Disappointed Remains
The apartheid regime in South Africa and the fight against the same, followed by the reconciliation is the crux of this article. The first democratic elections held on April 27, 1994, were surprisingly free of violence. Then, in one of its first pieces of legislation, the new democratic parliament passed the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act of 1995, which created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. At the outset, the South …
Oral history, community, and displacement
PART I: OPENINGS Imagining Memories: Oral Histories of Place and Displacement in Post-Apartheid Cape Town PARTII: COMMUNITIES AND IDENTITIES UNDER APARTHEID Remembering Experience, Interpreting Memory: Life Stories from Windermere Fragile Identities: Memory, Emotion, and Coloured Residents of Windermere From the 'Peaceful Past' to the 'Violent Present': Memory, Myth and Identity in Guguletu Disappointed Men: Masculine Myths and Hybrid Identities …
Oral History, Community, and Displacement
This book uses oral history methodology to record stories of people who experienced the brunt of racist forced removals in the city of Cape Town, South Africa. Through life stories and community case
Court of Remorse
Questioning the Capetians, 1180–1328
The sharp ascent of Capetian power between the reigns of Philip II Augustus (r. 1180–1223) and Philip IV the Fair (r. 1285–1314) is an axiom of medieval French history. In the mid‐20th century, French and American institutional historians focused on governmental developments in analyzing the means by which the Capetian kings increased their real authority. But because Capetian power was also understood to have rested as much on ideological claims…
Public Forgetting
"Public Forgetting: The Rhetoric and Politics of Beginning Again." The Oral History Review, 41(1), pp. 159–160
Loose Bits of Shrapnel
This article traces the paradoxical effects of my father's World War II stories and a series of published photographs on my brother and me. It is a self-reflexive essay that also engages the Holocaust historiography on intergenerational legacies of the Holocaust and critiques the "transmitted trauma" concept. Instead, a vocabulary of gendered absence, anxiety, and disappointment is presented, and postmemories that were co-constructed in father-so…
Surviving Dictatorship
Memory and History
Memory studies emerged as a distinct field of intellectual enquiry in the 1970s, and since 1990 there has been a memory boom across academic disciplines and national boundaries; postconflict schola...
Torture and Confession in the Templar Interrogations at Caen, 28–29 October 1307
Royal Agents and Templar Confessions in the Bailliage of Rouen
Through a close examination of the two extant documents generated by the Templar arrests and interrogations in the bailliage of Rouen, this article sheds new light on the way Philip IV's agents there interpreted their mandates in the uncertain atmosphere of the week following October 13, 1307. These crucial documents (reedited in appendices) are uniquely revealing, because they were produced entirely by the king's secular agents: the bailli of Ro…
The financialization of food and the 2008-2011 food price spikes
The treatment of recent global food price volatility in the neoclassical academic literature is problematic in its limited conceptual and empirical scope. This study presents new empirical data and analysis linking financial speculation by index swap dealers ('index funds') with US and global food price volatility. Marxian circuits of capital are used to illustrate the connection between index funds and food consumers. The findings show that fina…
History (22 works) · Political science (20 works) · Art (17 works) · Law (17 works) · Sociology (17 works) · History (16 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Law (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Computer Science (10 works)