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‘Beware of the ninnies!’ – Thoughts on ballet history
Read more: ‘Beware of the ninnies!’ – Thoughts on ballet historySebastian Cody explores the challenges of ballet historiography, emphasising the need for rigorous scholarship amidst widespread inaccuracies
James Joyce and the two McCarthys
by Derek Attridge There are two names in the subtitle of my book Forms of Modern Fiction: Reading the Novel from James Joyce to Tom McCarthy. One of these is less well-known than the other; in fact, for many readers,…
Decolonising human rights: a Q&A with Benjamin P. Davis
Mediated intimacy: Lessons for the future from lockdown creativity
by Emily Goodwin and Sarah Brophy Video calls. Collaborative docs. Memes. “Live” concerts. Vaccine selfies. Netflix. Case rate data. Digital media provided lifelines during the COVID-19 global public health crisis. Yet as everyday life became more screen-centric than ever, the…
How to Get Banned from Teaching the Quran: Medieval Cairo Edition
by Shuaib Ally, McGill University Around the turn of the 15th century in Cairo, a hadith scholar named Salah al-Din al-Aqfahsi heard Salah al-Din al-Kalai, a scholar associated with the Sufi Shadhili order, teaching the Quran. Part of his teaching…
Situating the crusades in Syrian history: a Q&A with James Wilson
Tell us a bit about your book My book is about the situation in Syria before, during and after the first crusaders arrived in the near east. The crusader armies arrived in Syria in 1097 and immediately began interacting with…
Sexual Desire and Romantic Love in Shakespeare – Q&A with the author
by Joan Lord Hall What inspired you to research eros in Shakespeare’s work? Knowing that I had taught Shakespeare for about 40 years and had authored several guides to his play, a friend provocatively asked me “Why don’t you write…
Sticky Screen Media in the Age of Personal Devices
by Nick Jones Screens are sticky. When we look at our phone, open our laptop, boot up our PC, turn on our games console, or sit in front of the television, we often get glued to the content, and end…
Roland Barthes’ Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse: Translating Again, Writing Again
Abstraction for all? Thoughts from the author of Abstraction in Modernism and Modernity
by Jeff Wallace When you’ve written something exploratory, it can take a little while to work out what it is that you’ve done. This blog about my new book Abstraction in Modernism and Modernity: Human and Inhuman is written from…
Threads that Bind: Women and their Clothing in Sixteenth-Century Scotland
by Cathryn Spence and Cordelia Beattie The saying goes, ‘Clothes make the man’, but in early modern Scotland, many women would have considered clothing to be a central part of their identity. According to early modern legal treatises, married women…