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Why family ties in Kūfa mattered for early Islamic politics
Read more: Why family ties in Kūfa mattered for early Islamic politicsAliya A Ali explores how kinship and marriage alliances shaped political power and governance in the early Islamic city of Kūfa.

I Like Your Idea. Here’s Mine – Film-Philosophy and a World of Cinemas
By David Martin-Jones At the heart of “Film-Philosophy and a World of Cinemas” is discussion of a contentious and at times heated debate between Hamid Dabashi and Walter Mignolo on the one hand, and Slavoj Žižek on the other. The…

The Devils Reconsidered
By Christophe Van Eecke Ken Russell is often considered more or less the court jester of British film history, and his films have not always been taken quite as seriously as they deserve. This holds true even of The Devils…

Spatial Film History
By Christian B. Long My article in the new issue of International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing is part of my broader research in the spatial history of film. In “Where Is France in French Cinema, 1976-2013” and in my research…

A Tale of Two Kens: Drama, documentary and the subversion of the status quo
By John Hill My interest in writing about the work of the film and television director Ken Russell partly derived from writing about another Ken in my book, Ken Loach: the Politics of Film and Television (2014). The two Kens…

Nuancing Ken Russell
By Kevin M. Flanagan Director Ken Russell (1927-2011) tends to evoke extreme reactions. Critics, academics, and fans lavish a few of his works with rapturous praise. His adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1969), or some of his composer…
Cinema – An Extract from The Badiou Dictionary
Badiou's interventions on cinema are scattered over a large time span, dispersed in myriad film reviews, short articles and conferences, and for the main part are devoted to discussing one or several individual films, as evidenced by his recently published collection, Cinema.

Dai Vaughan, John Berger, and disciplinary boundaries
Three years ago, Richard Macdonald and I compared Dai Vaughan (1933-2012) with two other ‘outstanding figures of his generation’, Robin Wood (1931-2009) and V F Perkins (1936-). The comparison is worth extending. Wood and Perkins are now regarded as key figures…

Austerity Bites: Two 1980s British Road Movies
By Ieuan Franklin Where are the films being made today about ‘Austerity Britain’ that combine social realism and humour, as in The Full Monty (1997)? In my article for the Journal of British Cinema and Television last year I looked…

‘Don’t pump up the emotion’: The creation and authorship of a sound world in The Wire
The HBO TV series, The Wire, is well known for capturing a realistic slice of Baltimore life in and around the city’s drug trade. The show is considered to be more in touch with the world it portrays than previous…