As the prominent social psychologists, Baumeister and Leary, point out, “Groups can share food, provide mates, and help care for offspring (including orphans). Some survival tasks such as hunting large animals or maintaining defensive vigilance against predatory enemies, are best accomplished by group cooperation…. Competition for limited res…[Read more]

The term ‘affective politics’ is sometimes used to dismiss political strategies as being directed merely at affects at the expense of rational analysis (Massumi 2015: 65f). While such uses are meant to criticize certain politics, appeals to the affects – and consequently, forms of propaganda or populism – do not have to be bad at all. The point h…[Read more]

Since 2016, the academic narrative emerging from the Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities in Eatonville, Florida, has increasingly relied on a public scholarship model to bridge the gap between institutional practice and community knowledge. Inspired by Zora Neale Hurston’s legacy as an interdisciplinary scholar, these a…[Read more]

This paper aims to examine models by which symbolism of light and lamp in
the Mediterranean region was manifested in the early Christian visual culture,
i.e. lamp representations from Central Balkans. Lamps with Early
Christian representations are considered in the context of transculturality
of Late Antiquity, as well as political and…[Read more]

Elements of Christian visual culture appeared in
various media in monumental and applied art during the late
antique period, from painted decoration in the catacombs,
through funerary monuments, to utilitarian objects such as
jewellery and lamps. The paper analyses the symbolic meaning
of fish and maritime motifs in the context of the late…[Read more]

On a number of pilgrimage objects from Late Antiquity, St Thecla, a highly revered saint, also known as Thecla the Protomartyr, is shown accompanied by St Menas, whose tomb in Egypt was the pilgrimage centre associated with healing miracles. The saintly couple appear in ad bestias compositions or in a simplified variant as two saints with a cross.…[Read more]