The genealogy of board games in Britain is also an expression of its imperial past. Built on colonialist and orientalist tropes that reinforce a hierarchy of race, their legacy is still discernible in the worlds created for the games played today.

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An updated version of my Portolan piece from 2018.

The chapter deals with the image of the personal union between Saxony and Poland as portrayed in the novels of the Polish writer Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, who emigrated to the Saxon capital of Dresden in the 19th century. His so called Saxon Novels are an important source for popular conceptions of history until today.

Georg Leibbrandt (1899-1982), one of the leading figures in the NSDAP Office of Foreign Affairs and the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, claimed his status as an expert for questions concerning Eastern Europe on the basis of his origin: Born as a Volksdeutscher in the Ukraine, he devoted himself early to racial thinking and to…[Read more]

Monarchy – Republic – Dictatorship. The District of Görlitz between 1900 and 1939

The article deals with the images and perceptions of Paris and London as seen by German intellectuals in the era of the French revolution. It discusses the key concepts “freedom” and “equality”, using the examples of Joachim Heinrich Campe and Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz.

The chapter gives a biographic account of Georg Leibbrandt (1899-1982), one of the leading figures in the NSDAP Office of Foreign Affairs and the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories. It deals especially with his involvement with the infamous Wannsee conference of 1942.

The articles of the volume deal with the German-Polish relations in and after World War I until the first years of the Nazi regime.

The article deals with the different images and perceptions leading figures of the Nazi regime made themselves of Russia, and with their political consequences. A special focus lies on those of Adolf Hitler, Jospeh Goebbels, and Alfred Rosenberg.

This study presents the results of a marine geophysical survey performed in the Igaliku fjord in southern Greenland in order to understand the harbour setting of the former Norse settlement Garðar (modern Igaliku). The aims of the survey were (a) to reconstruct the former coastline during the first centuries of the Norse settlement period (c.…[Read more]

Quakers enjoy their work. They tend to work in places which share their ambitions to make the world a better place. But how do Quakers respond when things go wrong? What we find is that the work organisation sets out the terms upon which Quakers try to improve the world. Quakers generally accept these terms. But when Quaker and work horizons…[Read more]

Seung-Hui Cho, the mass murderer who called himself Question Mark, left a lot of questions behind him. One of them obviously speaks for itself: what motivated him to kill thirty-three strangers at Virginia Tech? Another question almost goes without saying: why do we seek refuge behind moral explanations? Like ‘the question mark kid’ the adult…[Read more]

The abstract of my doctoral dissertation, which I defended on December 2018 at the University of Washington, with distinction.

A literary and historical introduction to the printed and manuscript materials composing the Great Peace (Taiping 太平) textual corpus, with a critical assessment of several modern Chinese editions thereof, followed by a revised review of THE SCRIPTURE ON GREAT PEACE: THE TAIPING JING AND THE BEGINNINGS OF DAOISM, translated by Barbara Hen…[Read more]

Review of “L’itinéraire de Marco Polo dans sa traversée de la Chine”, by Philippe Ménard (MEDIOEVO ROMANZO, vol. 26 [3rd Series, vol. 7], fasc. 3 [2002]: 321–360).

Based on a cluster of Great Peace (taiping 太平) and Weft (wei 緯) materials dealing with stages in human reproduction (impregnation, gestation, intrauterine infancy, birth) and the logic governing annual cycles, this study shows how ontological and cosmological representations were translated into religious discourse and practice in early medie…[Read more]

Historiography, morphological analysis, textual study and full translation into French of Chinese manuscript Stein no. 4226 from Dunhuang in the British Library (Or.8210/S.4226/R.1).

A state-of-the-art study of popular movements and religiosity in Late Antiquity China (1st–2nd cent. CE), focused on issues of theology, practice, sources and terminology, and including a critical assessment of received scholarship.

Review of MAKING TRANSCENDENTS: ASCETICS AND SOCIAL MEMORY IN EARLY MEDIEVAL CHINA. By Robert Ford Campany. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009. Pp. xviii + 300.

Review of THE CHENWEI RIDDLE: TIME, STARS, AND HEROES IN THE APOCRYPHA. By Licia Di Giacinto. (Deutsche Ostasienstudien, vol. 13). Gossenberg: Ostasien Verlag, 2013. Pp. xi + 332. 25 Figures, 40 Tables, 4 Appendices, List of Illustrations, Bibliography.