This article presents the frontispiece of the Leviathan, the emblem of the Body Politic,
in new contexts. S tarting from a detail mostly overlooked in previous analyses, the masks of the
plague doctors, the author sketches a new picture of sovereignty, establishing a connection to
sanitation and biopolitics. As the crux of his interpretation…[Read more]

This case study looks at the march of the Paris women to Versailles in October
1789
as a paradigmatic point in the history of demonstration. The march of the market
women is also an expression of their long tradition of political participation as
members of a corporative estate as well as of the experience of loss of power. The
focus is above…[Read more]

In this essay the theoretical focus of postcolonial theory has been shifted
from the cultures and societies of former formal colonies to those countries
that have an explicit self-understanding as an outsider within the European
colonial power constellation. Using the example of Switzerland, it analyses
the presence and perseverance of…[Read more]

Introduction to special issue

Instead of preventing protest, deportations on political grounds could – under certain
circumstances – help to spread dissent. Accordingly, the spaces deportees were sent
became fertile ground for new coalitions. Analysing such spaces furthers our understanding
of how resistance may be contained, dispersed and re-constituted. The main
part of…[Read more]

Can we imagine a Blue Humanities that takes the non-relation as a starting point for ecological thought? I believe we can. Following Shakespeare and Deleuze, this essay engages in a thought experiment that, if it is not too absurd, might, like the ship of fools of medieval times, unmoor the Blue Humanities from its current safe harbor by putting…[Read more]

This essay examines how the rhetoric of animalization in Shakespeare’s Othello compels us to think early modern categories of race in connection with early modern discourses of “human” versus “animal.” Beginning with Shakespeare’s representation of Iago, I suggest that it is the potential for sameness conditioned by Iago’s counterfactua…[Read more]

Veit Harlan zählte zu den wichtigsten Regisseuren des Nationalsozialismus, insbesondere mit seinem antisemitischen Propagandafilm „Jud Süss“. Nach dem Krieg musste sich Harlan wegen Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit vor Gericht verantworten, wurde jedoch aus Mangel an Beweisen 1950 freigesprochen und konnte seine Regietätigkeit fortse…[Read more]

The plague doctors’ masks on the frontispiece of the “Leviathan”, John Locke’s empty land, the photographs by Carleton Watkins, a military policeman’s protective mask, the colonial history of the deportation camps, the plague policies and the Sans-Papiers – these are the seemingly disparate pieces that Francesca Falk assembles into a mosaic to…[Read more]

In this essay Queen Margaret’s curses in Richard III become part of a feminist ethics on the early modern stage. As a parrhesiast, in Foucault’s terms, Margaret speaks truth to power and claims a right of citizenship. That Margaret elicits universal revulsion from the other characters while also holding a unique, though not untroubled, pos…[Read more]

This dissertation ‘Inns and Innkeeping in North Hertfordshire: 1660-1815’ addresses the lack of a localised study on this building type and supplements the wider body of work that has been undertaken, on inn form, function and innkeeping lifestyles in other regions of England during the long eighteenth century.

Traditionally read as a poem about laboring subjects who gain power through abstract and abstracting forms of bodily discipline, John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, 1674) more compellingly foregrounds the erotics of the Garden as a space where humans and nonhumans intra-act materially and sexually. Following Christopher Hill, who long ago pointed t…[Read more]

Turning to Walter Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana (1596) and The History of the World (1614), I reframe such biopolitical factors as Ralegh’s “dissability” around a concept that has less to do with human world-making and more to do with the “states of exception” (Giorgio Agamben) under which inhuman agencies come to matter for world history (of…[Read more]

Though the verbal icon has a long and robust multisensory history extending beyond Milton, my goal here is to challenge ableist readings of Milton’s poetry by linking his poetic ekphrasis to the politics and aesthetics of disability.

Young Michelangelo Buonarroti’s experience was deeply marked by his cult of Antiquity, reverberated in the creation of artworks such as the Sleeping Cupid and the Bacchus and shared with Raffaele Riario and Jacopo Galli, his patrons during his first stay in Rome (1496-1501). The cardinal-camerlengo Raffaele Riario was an important promoter of t…[Read more]

The peculiar iconography of the winged horse surmounted by several puttos, as appears in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili sixth woodcut, turns out to be unprecedented and enigmatic at a glance and it’s the result of the depth and complexity of the author’s concepts. Considering the iconographic details of the sculptural group as well as the text sca…[Read more]