Religion, language, and race have been among the most crucial factors behind the formation of various national and communal identities in modern South Asian history. Just like the political division of British India, the complex interplay of these factors also culminated in a bifurcation of linguistic boundaries along the religious lines according…[Read more]

Three types of academic sources are crucial for understanding the Hindu tradition in our times: a) scriptures and the classical texts that are available mostly in Sanskrit b) works in the English language produced by orientalists, religious studies scholars, and some modern Hindu religious leaders themselves, and c) writings of…[Read more]

The traditional configuration of content on top and comments on the bottom on most websites often dismiss comments as of secondary importance to content. This article looks at how comment culture(s) in China operate outside of the top-bottom dichotomy where comments are increasingly supplanting content as the main form of consumable media. Through…[Read more]

Objective. The purpose of this study was to adapt and validate the New Indices of Religious Orientation Revised (NIROR) scale, which has been developed in different cultural settings, for a study of Pakistani university students. The NIROR was developed by Francis, Fawcett, Robbins, and Stairs (2016), consisting of 27 items for Canadian-Christian…[Read more]

Muslim study of religions before modern times has claimed the attention of some modern Western scholars. At least three developmental phases of this nascent discursive field are discernable. Firstly, Western views of Muslim writings on different religions started appearing as prefaces, marginal notes, and introductions to the edited manuscripts…[Read more]

The Muslim study of religions has claimed the attention of some modern Western scholars. Patrice C. Brodeur, a scholar of religious studies, based at the University of Montreal, is one of them. He delves into the historical realities and epistemological developments that shaped the Muslim study of other religions in the past as well as in…[Read more]

Spanish abstract: ‘Lone Star’ (John Sayles, 1996) es una película sobre la etnicidad y sobre el peso del pasado tratado aquí de manera reflexiva. Es un tema inevitablemente presente en las películas norteamericanas (o en muchas de ellas) pero a menudo sólo como parte del trasfondo, o evitado en el desarrollo de la historia principal. Aquí está…[Read more]

The publication of my book, Sublime Truth and the Senses: Titian’s Poesie for King Philip II of Spain, ( Harvey Miller: 2019), with a new reading of the heightened meaning of ecstatic imagery for the Hapsburg court, coincides with the exhibition of Titian’s magnificent mythological paintings that are reassembled for the first time since 1704 a…[Read more]

Fomeshi, Behnam M. “Green Apples, Red Apples: Politics of Comparative Literature in Iran.” Comparative Literature Around the World: Global Practice. Eds. Eugene Eoyang, Gang Zhou, and Jonathan Hart. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2021. 201-218.

Spanish abstract: Dos hombres en lados opuestos de la ley están infiltrados —en la Policía y en la mafia— pero hierven la violencia y la sangre derramada cuando la información sale a la luz, y se envía a cada topo a averiguar quién es el enemigo interior. ‘Infiltrados’ es una película de Martin Scorsese que explora la ‘paradoja del espía’, a…[Read more]

Review of Mike Wayne’s “Marxism Goes to the Movies”.

Abstract: Insofar as Walter identifies with this myth, his rational imperative is profoundly interrupted. However, this representational interruption also operates on a larger level. Since the film opens and closes with the western actor Sam Elliott (The Stranger) and is shot through with western stylistic motifs, it can be seen as striving toward…[Read more]

This chapter examines the portrayal of Ireland’s mother-and-baby homes in Stephen Frear’s film Philomena (2013) and the biography on which the film is based, the British journalist Martin Sixsmith’s account of Philomena Lee’s life and search for her son, who was given up to an American couple for adoption under coercive circumstances. Enforced a…[Read more]

As with many of the Kinoks’ films trains often appear in Dziga Vertov’s 1929 masterpiece, ‘Man with a Movie Camera’. Used to create dynamism, criss-crossing the screen, often at dramatic angles, and acting as a counterpoint to previous and following scenes. Train sequences also signpost a journey to Odesa by the eponymous cameraman. The paper…[Read more]

Dziga Vertov’s 1929 masterpiece ‘Man with a Movie Camera’ is a staple of film studies courses and academic papers but there has been no research until now into the important ‘co-stars’ of the film, the movie cameras. This paper discusses in detail the Debrie Parvo and other cameras used by the film’s cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman.

The definitive timeline for the early screening of Dziga Vertov’s 1929 masterpiece has been established for the first time. This illustrated paper looks at the details of the first showing of the film in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Moscow, and Germany. The earliest (pre-release) review of the film in 1928 has been translated into English for the first time,…[Read more]

Following extensive research and detective work, most of the locations used in Dziga Vertov’s 1929 masterpiece have been discovered. Described by leading film academics as ‘extraordinary and exciting research’ and ‘a huge step ahead in knowledge of the film’ the paper describes each location in detail including contemporary and current views. The…[Read more]

In July 1944, the Red Army was advancing through Eastern Poland when they discovered the first traces of the camps. On reaching Lublin they found an enormous compound behind barbed wire in the city’s suburb of Majdanek. Embedded with the Soviet army were film crews, who made the first images of a Nazi camp, among them the “flight survivors” Olga a…[Read more]

Two fifths of Britain’s leading people were educated privately: that’s five times the amount as in the population as a whole, with almost a quarter graduating from Oxford or Cambridge. Eight private schools send more pupils to Oxbridge than the remaining 2894 state schools combined, making modern Britain one of the most unequal places in Eur…[Read more]

This article examines the link posited by Virilio and others between the camera shot and gun shot, arguing that this link operates differently in the context of Soviet vs. Western fantasies of agency, community and technology. Comparing THE LOST PATROL (USA 1934, John Ford) with TRINADTSAT (THIRTEEN, UdSSR 1936, Mikhail Romm), it asks what kind of…[Read more]