The article focuses on the adaptation strategies used by Lope de Vega in his play El Gran Duque de Moscovia y emperador perseguido (1617). This tragedy, built on material acquired from travelogues, represents the first depiction of the Russian Time of Troubles in fiction. In it, one can follow Lope de Vega’s shift from preserving the factual d…[Read more]

In this essay I argue that the portrait of Arruntius as a passive Stoic is injudicious, and then I develop a new reading of Jonson’s depiction of Arruntius based on the textual evidence from both the quarto and folio editions of the play. The essay proceeds in three sections. In the first section, I question the commonly held view regarding A…[Read more]

In the late sixteenth century, the common law experienced a phenomenal growth, both in the number of practitioners and jurisdictional power. A comparison of popular and professional literature on legal administration or judicature reveals the complex and ambivalent cultural response to the “rise” of the common law. Despite the usual praise for the…[Read more]

Looking from a distance, as a condition of knowledge, participates within a long-standing Western tradition of power relations. This article considers the use of “distant reading” as theorized by Franco Moretti in his book by the same title and suggests that the method of literary analysis that uses such a metaphor should be aware and critical of…[Read more]

Brian Winston greift die Debatte um die Nicht-Darstellbarkeit der Gewalt des Holocausts auf und weist darauf hin, dass vor jeder moralischen Überlegung zunächst einmal die fast vollständige Abwesenheit von audiovisuellen Zeugnissen konstatiert werden muss. Wie kann der Dokumentarfilm dennoch ein Bild des Grauens zeigen? In Referenz auf den Ve…[Read more]

English title: “Transmedia Storytelling in the narrative universe of ‘Game of Thrones'” — This essay’s aim is to briefly introduce the concept of Transmedia Storytelling and to provide a showcase analysis and review of the serial TV narrative of GAME OF THRONES in order to show how a television series’ narrative universe, driven by both producers…[Read more]

Syllabus of BA seminar “Historische Entwicklung US-amerikanischer Fernsehserien von 1950 bis heute” aka. “TV or not TV? Historical Development of US American Serial Television from the 1950s up to today” held during Winter semester 2013/14 at Universität Hamburg, Germany.

Syllabus of BA seminar “Historische Entwicklung US-amerikanischer Fernsehserien von 1950 bis heute” aka. “TV or not TV? Historical Development of US American Serial Television from the 1950s up to today” held during Winter semester 2013/14 at Universität Hamburg, Germany.

Syllabus of BA seminar “Historische Entwicklung US-amerikanischer Fernsehserien von 1950 bis heute” aka. “TV or not TV? Historical Development of US American Serial Television from the 1950s up to today” held during Winter semester 2013/14 at Universität Hamburg, Germany.

This essay investigates Walter Scott’s writing, across several genres, as a contribution to an environmental historiography of Scotland. One of the main research questions is whether that writing provides any evidence for an early land ethic that anticipates Aldo Leopold’s twentieth-century use of that term. Scott’s response to aesthetic…[Read more]

This article argues that scholars must understand mass digitized texts as assemblages of new editions, subsidiary editions, and impressions of their historical sources, and that these various parts require sustained bibliographic analysis and description. To adequately theorize any research conducted in large-scale text archives—including r…[Read more]

Nordic Noir has, since the early-2000s, evolved into a globally-popular genre that now easily transcends media-specific boundaries. Television has always been at the forefront of that development: Scandinavian TV productions either turned literary successes into distinct and easily-recognizable television scripts, or developed independent shows…[Read more]

A contribution to Transition’s “I Can’t Breathe” forum, an online space for responses to the murders of unarmed black Americans by police. My piece, which was chosen for publication in the print edition of the magazine, reflected upon the similarities between the death of Eric Garner in New York City and the death of an enslaved sugar refiner nam…[Read more]