„Political Correctness“, „Identitätspolitik“ und „Cancel Culture“ werden heutzutage überwiegend als Waffen von Konservativen eingesetzt, um ihre Privilegien gegen emanzipative Neuregelungen zu verteidigen. Solche Neuregelungen als Einschränkung der Kunst- und Meinungsfreiheit zu kritisieren ist deshalb meist falsch. Tatsächlich tragen „Politic…[Read more]

Since the nineteenth century, stage and film directors have mounted hundreds of adaptations of Shakespeare drawn on East Asian motifs, and by the late twentieth century, Shakespeare had become one of the most frequently performed playwrights in East Asia. There are five striking themes surrounding cultural, racial, and gender dynamics. Gender…[Read more]

This book is about an unusual police investigation, in which a certain suicide, found in the bunker of the Imperial Chancellery, as it should be before the establishment of the truth, was called “victim”. This is a story about the work of Stalin’s special services in Germany, about palace intrigues and the hopes of people who imagined at the end…[Read more]

Four themes distinguish post-1950s East Asian cinemas and theaters from works in other parts of the world: Japanese innovations in sound and spectacle; Sinophone uses of Shakespeare for social reparation; the reception of South Korean presentations of gender identities in film and touring productions; and multilingual, disability, and racial…[Read more]

The idea that Shakespeare is a global author has taken many forms since the building of the Globe playhouse in London in 1599. Performances of Shakespeare not only create channels between geographic spaces but also connect different time periods. Divided into two major sections, Shakespeare and World Cultures and Shakespeare and Genres, the…[Read more]

The project ‘The Sculptor Speaks’ takes its source from a 1961 tape by British sculptor Barbara Hepworth. Unearthed at the British Library, the tape’s initial purpose was for a pre-recorded talk with slides for the British Council. Every recording is a priori an archival object, which can potentially resound anew through a contemporary carrier, p…[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]

This book aims to uncover and assess changes in the EU’s foreign policy towards Ukraine in the times of wide-scale social protests in Kyiv. To accomplish this task, this book enlists and analyses documents, agreements, and treaties which establish the frameworks for EU-Ukraine cooperation. It also identifies the interests of lobbying groups in…[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]

The political system of early socialist-era Mongolia, established by the first Constitution in 1924, can be interpreted as a vernacular version of the Soviet system, in which the formally supreme representative body, the State Great Khural (“assembly”), was sidelined by the standing Presidium of the Small Khural and the Cabinet and eclipsed by the…[Read more]

This is the PowerPoint presentation to accompany my comments for the Theoretical Foundations of Victorian Studies roundtable on January 7, 2021.

This essay draws on formalist cultural studies and material feminism to argue for a new approach in modernist studies, which I call formalist materialism, an approach that reads ecological forms alongside aesthetic forms. Such an approach may have distinct advantages. Formalist materialism illuminates a new direction for formalists by connecting…[Read more]

In Nobel laureate Kawabata Yasunari’s novel Snow Country, the protagonist Shimamura refers to an “old book” which gave him in-depth knowledge about the region known in Japan as the “Snow Country”. The name of the book is not disclosed by Kawabata, but it is now known that the “old book” is Hokuetsu Seppu (first published in 1837), written by Su…[Read more]

In the early part of the reign of Alexander I (1801-1825), the emperor sought to reform Russia through the creation of new European-style institutions. The aim was to ensure that Russia’s great-power status would be retained through updating its institutions, in line with a reform impulse dating back to Peter the Great and before. Among the new i…[Read more]

Introduction to a special issue on Renaissance post-humanism and its afterlives.

Housing as a trophy: the housing issue in bureaucratic practices and personal strategies of the Soviet military administration in Germany (1945-1949)

Collected volume review. Paweł Kowal, Georges Mink and Iwona Reichardt (eds.) “Three Revolutions: Mobilization and Change in Contemporary Ukraine.” Volume one. Stuttgart, Ibidem Verlag, 2019.