Introduction to Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe

Reading the representation of New York City in J.D. Robb’s/Nora Roberts’s sci-fi detective romance In Death series via Andrew Karmen’s critique of the 1990s’ New York crime wave/crash narrative pushed by Giuiliani and Bratton’s “broken windows” policing.

La prestigiosa colección de textos medievales y renacentistas del Centro de Estudios de Arizona se engalana en esta ocasión con una de las obras más exitosas de la literatura medieval hispánica: la Crónica de Flores y Blancaflor (BETA, Texid 4157), cuya versión castellana, situada en plena época de la dominación islámica de España, es un verdadero…[Read more]

The vernacular online videos produced by the Arab revolutions constitute an unprecedented (though not unproblematic) historical resource for understanding the subjective experience of the ordinary people who find themselves on the front line of revolutionary struggle. But they also effect a sea-change in the way in which we view and understand…[Read more]

A close reading of a video collaboration by two citizen journalists, one from Libya, the other from the US, as a form of audiovisual solidarity. This article draws in particular on concepts developed by Laura Marks and Hito Steyerl.

This study is an attempt to explore the changes digital technologies are having on the experience of watching television. When new technologies are introduced, revolutionary claims are often made for the new media they help form. A frequent claim is that new media are more ‘progressive’ than older media forms, and encourage more democratic par…[Read more]

Emphasizing the peculiar, the perverse, the clandestine and the scandalous, this volume opens up a critical discourse on sexuality and visual culture in early modern Italy. Contributors consider not just painted (conventional) representations of sexual activities and eroticized bodies, but also images from print media, drawings, sculpted objects…[Read more]

Questo volume propone un discorso critico sulla sessualità e sulla cultura visiva dell’Italia rinascimentale. I saggi raccolti tentano di fare luce su una serie di zone d’ombra, dando spazio a tutte quelle pratiche o preferenze considerate in genere come alternative o anomalie, e a un’ampia varietà di scenari “scandalosi”. Particolare attenzione…[Read more]

A short cultural history of the impact of Ethical Investment and Consumers over the years. Primarily from a UK based perspective looking at the evolution of ethical business issues and their contemporary impact. Topics covered include impacts in books, films and foreign policy. History of Influencing the market via international conventions and…[Read more]

In 2013 the Israeli historian Otto Dov Kulka published a recollection of his childhood in concentration camps, Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death. Historians and general audiences praised the poetic and reflective tone of the book. Deported at 11 years of age from Theresienstadt, Kulka spent a year and half at Auschwitz and is one of the very…[Read more]

This is (to my knowledge) the first piece of scholarship to systematically analyze victim masculinity in the Holocaust.
Survivor testimonies paint a picture of Terezín as a society dominated by an elite strata of dynamic young men, respected by almost everyone in the ghetto. This is a surprise, since the cultures from which all deported Jews…[Read more]

This article examines the relationship of Benjamin Murmelstein and the SS. Murmelstein, the deputy chairman of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde in Vienna, was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto in January 1943, and became the ghetto’s last Elder of the Jews during the large transports to Auschwitz in fall 1944. He had a long and prominent p…[Read more]

This article takes the 5,000 Jews from the Netherlands whom the Nazis deported to Theresienstadt as a point of departure to examine larger issues of citizenship, ethnicity, and habitus in the camp society. About two thirds of this group were German and Austrian emigrants, the other third people born in the Netherlands: While the former accustomed…[Read more]

How are we to understand the concept of “citizenship” in the context of women victims in the Holocaust society?

What was Jewish belonging in Central Europe, and how was it influenced by the Holocaust? This article examines the ways in which Czech Jews negotiated their bonds with Jewishness immediately before, during and after the Second World War. Building on a theoretical framework of affiliation developed by Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, the essay…[Read more]

There is a wealth of problems with Claude Lanzmann’s recent film The Last of the Unjust, on Benjamin Murmelstein, the last Elder of the Jews of Theresienstadt. Yet the most aggravating of them is that it portrays Murmelstein as someone who he was not, namely as a heroic figure. In styling Murmelstein as a tragic hero, Lanzmann projects his own p…[Read more]

Given widespread labor market precarity, contemporary workers—especially those in the media and creative industries—are increasingly called upon to brand themselves. Academics, we contend, are experiencing a parallel pressure to engage in self-promotional practices, particularly as universities become progressively more market-driven. Aca…[Read more]

Analysing diverse modes of walking across a wide range of texts from the Enlightenment period and beyond, this article explores how the practice of walking was discovered by philosophers, educators and writers as a rich discursive trope that stood for competing notions of the morally good life. The discussion proceeds to then investigate how…[Read more]