In the summer of 1864, fourteen-year-old Jacob Stroyer was sent to work in Fort Sumter. He did not go willingly. Stroyer was a slave owned by the wealthy Mrs. Matthew R. Singleton and was sent from the large Kensington plantation outside Columbia, SC to labor for the Confederate cause. The Confederate Corps of Engineers called upon slave owners to…[Read more]

Arrested for treason against the British Crown and deported to the penal colonies of Australia, the Irish revolutionary John Boyle O’Reilly managed to escape to the United States and within a few years became one of Boston’s most prominent political and literary figures, one of the best known Irish immigrants in the United States and one of the…[Read more]

This article explores editorial practice in the British and North American periodicals between c.1800 and c.1850. The article uses a Transatlantic studies approach.

In a follow-up installment in 1839 to the anonymously authored Recollections of Slavery by a Runaway Slave, the narrator testifies that a Charleston slave speculator known as “Major Ross” had sold his brother. The narrator notes that Ross lives in “a nice little white house, on the right hand side of King street as you go in from the country…[Read more]

Franz Waxman composed over 150 film scores, the most famous of which is Billy Wilder’s film noir Sunset Boulevard (1950). The film plot bears a striking resemblance to Rod Serling’s teleplay for The Twilight Zone, “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine” (1959). Waxman, composer of the film, was approached to compose a score for a television episode…[Read more]

This essay explores how the early American stage functioned as an incubator for ideas about national identity, artistic expression, and masculinity. Reading four plays from the early years of the Republic – Royall Tyler’s The Contrast, William Dunlap’s Andre´, John Augustus Stone’s Metamora, and Robert Montgomery Bird’s The Gladiator, I demonstrat…[Read more]

This chapter explores how a culture of transatlantic environmental journalism emerged during the early to middle decades of the nineteenth century. How did interest in science, travel and exploration during those years shape the ways in which North American and British magazines represented the natural environment? To what extent did articles in…[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]

Editorial Article to the special issue “Mise en geste. Studies of Gesture in Cinema” (ed. by Ana Hedberg Olenina and Irina Schulzki) in journal “Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe” 5 (2017). 1. Gesture as a Figure of Speech. About this Issue 2. Liberated Gestures: Theories of Bodily Statements beyond the…[Read more]

The split screen is a well-known multi-frame technique used in film, television, and video. This essay focuses on cases in which this denomination seems incorrect, but that are currently classified under the same heading. In these instances, images of usually distinct characteristics are arranged on screen. The aim is to explore and define this…[Read more]

Las películas de Maddin absorben al espectador inmediatamente al mismo tiempo que su complejidad resulta agotadora. Dejan una impresión perdurable de un mundo efímero y distanciado, extrañamente cercano al nuestro —como una sombra profunda de él—. Nuestro propósito es reflexionar sobre esta impresión, dando cuenta de cómo la obra del cineasta ca…[Read more]