In the end of the 1980’s, the current hegemonic discourse about the environmental crisis settled the notion of “sustainability”. This notion was formulated in the Brundtland report, which argued that innovation in technology would overcome the impasses of environmental exploitation, in a way that could even result in social development. We choos…[Read more]

This report describes a collection of 210,305 volumes of fiction that researchers are encouraged to borrow for their own work. Alternately, readers can simply browse the report as a description of English-language fiction in HathiTrust Digital Library. For instance, how does the proportion of fiction written by British authors or by women change…[Read more]

Selections from DE LA MANUFACTURE AU MUR: Pour une histoire matérielle du papier peint 1770-1914 (From the Workshop to the Wall – Toward a Material History of Wallpaper 1770-1914) a thesis by Dr. Bernard Jacqué, University of Lyon, 2003. Translated by Robert M. Kelly.

PDF 3: The Scenic Revival of the Twentieth Century

Selections from DE LA MANUFACTURE AU MUR: Pour une histoire matérielle du papier peint 1770-1914 (From the Workshop to the Wall – Toward a Material History of Wallpaper 1770-1914) a thesis by Dr. Bernard Jacqué, University of Lyon (2003). Translated by Robert M. Kelly.

PDF 2: Zuber’s “Indépendance” (1853), a hand-painted restatement of “Scenic…[Read more]

Selections from DE LA MANUFACTURE AU MUR: Pour une histoire matérielle du papier peint 1770-1914 (From the Workshop to the Wall – Toward a Material History of Wallpaper 1770-1914) a thesis by Dr. Bernard Jacqué, University of Lyon (2003). Translated by Robert M. Kelly.

PDF 1: A Historiography of Wallpaper

Late twentieth-century social and linguistic theory tells us that the view from the tall building transforms us into analysts and historians, disembodied readers of the civic ‘text’. This paper argues that the proposition would have been familiar to seventeenth-century City-dwellers, and does so by pursuing the experience of the elevated obs…[Read more]

Alberto Pérez-Gómez’s 1983 Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science is used here as a vehicle for exploring the behavior of disciplinary boundaries in the context of crisis both historically and theoretically. Responding to his contemporaneous architectural crisis of the 1970s instigated by the rise of positivism, Pérez-Gómez uses Ale…[Read more]

Aris Konstantinidis’s Weekend House in Anavyssos (1962–1964) holds an emblematic place within his oeuvre. This article uncovers the architect’s own role in building the global reception of this project through a tripartite account of its global published life from the printed page to the digital website over the last five decades (1962…[Read more]

The aim of this special issue of Gothic Studies (23/3, to be published Nov 2021) is to bring together research that does not simply consider Gothic short fiction and its artistic and cultural brethren as incidental, but integral to the design and effect and/or cultural significance of the piece because the short form in the Gothic tradition has,…[Read more]

In the valuation of works of art, the setting of a price is the last step, the result of a discursive attribution of quality; in this regard, aesthetic and commercial evaluations merge. The structure of this mediation is characterised by the concept of the “knowledge market;” knowledge that is ordered and able to spread is essential in order to…[Read more]

A report published by the Sutton Trust and Social Mobility Commission this week, ‘Elitist Britain’, found that two fifths (39%) of Britain’s ‘leading people’ were educated privately, more than five times as many as in the population as a whole, with almost one quarter (24%) graduating from Oxbridge. I therefore thought it would be timely to publis…[Read more]

In the medical humanities, there has been a growing interest in diagnosing disease in fictional characters, particularly with the idea that characters in Charles Dickens’s novels may be suffering from diseases recognised today. However, an area that deserves greater attention is the representation of women’s ageing as disease in Victorian lit…[Read more]

The journal ‘English Literature: Theories, Interpretations, Contexts’, published at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, invites scholars to send article proposals on the topic of
‘Fictions, Facts and “Effects of Reality”: Questioning the Mimetic in the Nineteenth-Century Novel’.
We shall be happy to consider essays that address and probl…[Read more]

Personal perspective on the current state of open access and publishing practices in the fields of Television and Media Studies, and pointers to a variety of scholar-led initiatives and options of where scholars can actually publish open access in their field without the payment of Article Processing Charges (APCs).

Cities of InfraRed is an abstract for my proposed contribution to a book that is being put together by Cornelia Sollfrank, Shuhsa Niederberger and Felix Stalder. The book has the working title of Aesthetics of the Commons, and arises out of the Creating Commons research project at the Zurich University of the Arts.

A version of Cities of…[Read more]

Architecture Space and Society Research Centre, Birkbeck (University of London) Friday 1st March 2019
Keynes Library, School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square
Registration: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/conquest-and-construction-tickets-55022443610

This is a paper that I presented at the 2019 MLA in Chicago. In this paper I situate discussions of the field of Iberian Studies within the context of the crisis of the Humanities and the future of Cultural Studies.

What role does destruction play in the continued existence of a historical monument? Is destruction an inevitable part of its identity? Huyssen in his 2003 book, Present Pasts, suggests that, “…the only monument that counts, is the one already imagined as ruin.” On the other hand, the creation of the monumental itself is led by a quest for immor…[Read more]

Before the publication of The Time Machine (1895), H. G. Wells’s early works provide insight into the challenges of the late Victorian educational system. Wells benefited from a unique set of educational reforms intended to provide education for the lower middle class. He did so in the capacities of a student taking examinations to earn grants f…[Read more]