6 Books for TV Lovers

By Jennifer J. Smith It is a truth universally acknowledged that there is so much great television. From limited streaming series to mainstays of broadcast networks, great storytelling is happening on the small screen. Episodic television tells big stories in…

The Rosetta Stone

By Jesse Schotter For the hordes of selfie-snapping tourists at the British Museum, one objects attracts more attention than any other: the Rosetta Stone.  Such fascination with the Stone and its hieroglyphs dates back centuries.  From the classical era through the…

James Benning's Environments

James Benning: A Cinema of Our Times

In James Benning’s film Concord Woods (2014), we watch a replica of Henry David Thoreau’s famous cabin at Walden Pond. The cabin is first shown during the summer solstice, graced by the golden sunlight. The shot lingers for sixty minutes…

The Qur'an and the Just Society

The Qur’an and the Just Society

I was standing in a library aisle in the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, my neck craning to read titles dropping vertically down the spines of books. A familiar experience for many students, even if it is being…

John Ray and Archives of Natural History

English naturalist John Ray was born in November 1627. Generally regarded as one of the earliest English parson-naturalists, he is credited as “the originator of the criterion of common parentage for conspecificity”. Ray wrote widely on botany, natural theology, taxonomy…

Literature and Psychoanalysis: Open Questions

A special issue of journal, Paragraph, guest edited by Elissa Marder, creatively re-imagines Shoshana Felman’s groundbreaking 1977 volume of Yale French Studies (Nos 55/56), Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise, in which Felman opened up the question of…

Children’s Gothic Fiction – Top 10 Must Reads

By Dr Chloé Germaine Buckley While researching my forthcoming book, Twenty-First-Century Children’s Gothic, I have read a lot of scary stories written for children and young adults. Although the Gothic has always been part of children’s literature, it has exploded in…