This book examines the political parties which emerged in the former Ottoman, Qing, Russian, and Habsburg empires and not only took over government power, but merged with government itself. It discusses how these parties, disillusioned with previous constitutional and parliamentary reforms, justified their takeovers with programs of controlled or…[Read more]

This study focuses on the Philippine artist Ricarte Puruganan’s reckoning with the ideas of “country,” “God,” and “the sublime.” It does so through a hermeneutic reading of the artist’s works as a cultural text. In order to fill the gaps in the historiographic record and to enrich the material on the artist that was already available, the…[Read more]

This monograph does not represent the 1979 Revolution as a rapture in Persian poetry, rather it sees the continuity; Shams demonstrates that Islamic Republican poetry was in fact in the making decades before the Revolution. In its study of war poetry, this monograph remains focused on official poets alone. For an understanding of other (official)…[Read more]

How do people make sense of works of art? And how do they write to make others see the same way? There are many guides to looking at art, histories of art history and art criticism, and accounts of various ‘theories’ and ‘methods’, but this book offers something very unlike the normal search for difference and division: it examines the general…[Read more]

The drama of the Niger Delta region has enjoyed robust scholarship. This essay interrogates J. P. Clark-Bekederemo’s drama against the cultural milieu of the region and tries to investigate the connections between the rich folklore of the area and the wealth of poetry and imagery contained in his drama. The essay investigates the terrain,…[Read more]

Walter Benjamin had much to say about the intelligentsia, from vicious reviews such as “Left-Wing Melancholy” to the more programmatic essays “Author as Producer” and the Artwork essay. But while the specific allegiances, the “strategies” in the literary battle have been plotted with great precision, a larger debate in which these texts repre…[Read more]

A unique dispute over ownership rights to artwork in the case of the Auschwitz Memorial Museum vs. former camp prisoner Dinah Gottliebova Babbitt illuminates underlying moral questions about the Holocaust and post-Holocaust culture.

War Culture and the Contest of Images analyzes the relationships among contemporary war, documentary practices, and democratic ideals. Dora Apel examines a wide variety of images and cultural representations of war in the United States and the Middle East, including photography, performance art, video games, reenactment, and social media images.…[Read more]

This essay examines select visual representations of refugees and migrants as embodied subjects in photography, art, and video. It focuses on American asylum politics and explores the questions of free movement, the right to have rights, and the ethics and efficacy of border walls. I argue that the catastrophe of global forced displacement makes…[Read more]

manual guide for the annotation of biographies

Seit fast vier Monaten herrscht Krieg in der Ukraine. Ein Blick in die Geschichte zeigt, warum Putin glaubt, dem Land die Eigenstaatlichkeit absprechen zu können – und weshalb sein Vorhaben nur scheitern kann.

Landscape and the Arts in Early Modern Italy: Theatre, Gardens and Visual Culture argues that theatre, and the new genre of opera in particular, played a key role in creating a new vision of landscape during the long seventeenth century in Italy. It explores how the idea of gardens as theatres emerged at the same time as opera was developed in…[Read more]

Tarih boyunca kentler, kültür ve medeniyetlerin doğduğu, geliştiği ve yayıldığı yerler olmuştur. Kentler, tarihsel süreçte insanların çeşitli gereksinimlerinin ürünü olarak sürekli bir gelişme göstermiştir. Bu gelişme sürecinde hem insanlığın birikiminin gelecek kuşaklara taşıyıcısı, hem de taşıdığı uygarlık birikimi ile insanoğlunun geleceğini şe…[Read more]

This paper proposes a novel source for – or at least influence on – the iconography of the Moon trump in the Rider-Waite Tarot deck, which preserves the design from the Tarot de Marseille. In fact, the Moon template appears to date back to the earliest days of the Tarot. The proposed source or prototype is a Greco-Roman talismanic design aga…[Read more]

Syllabus for ISS 222D Introduction to Digital Humanities, a survey course that introduces students to the many debates and methods of digital humanities and adjacent fields. Particular focus is on visualization.

The State Conference in Moscow, a one-time quasi-parliamentary assembly of over 2,500 delegates, was intended to help the Provisional Government resolve the military, political, and economic crises of the First World War and the Russian Revolution by building a broad public consensus. Due to the inadequate representation at the conference, its…[Read more]

Putin’s Russia suffered a bitter defeat in the first weeks of the Russian-Ukrainian war. However, the Kremlin will keep on trying to place Ukraine into its orbit, as well as project its influence further into the Western world. Unceasing and dynamic aggrandizement under strong leadership is one of the most functional approaches to statecraft in R…[Read more]

In a groundbreaking endeavour to triangulate three important traditions of our collective cultural heritage, the Arkeologisk Museum of the University of Stavanger presents Eden and Everything After, a conceptual exhibition organised around notions of the loss of – and slim hope of reconnection with – the lost paradise. Mirroring the boldly exp…[Read more]

Russian military aggression and diplomatic pressure against Ukraine stems from the neo-imperial thinking of Russian elites and ordinary citizens. This thinking requires reproduction of expansionist patterns that once led Russia to its “historical greatness”: construction of a territorially large state, rich in resources and demographically div…[Read more]