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Originality and Artistic Impulse: From a Medieval Scottish Friar to Malevich’s Black Square
Read more: Originality and Artistic Impulse: From a Medieval Scottish Friar to Malevich’s Black SquareIs there any such thing as a new idea? Bryony Coombs discusses similarities in artistic expression, centuries apart.
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…
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…
Excavating a lost classic: Interview with Le Retour director, Daniel Goldenberg
by Mani Sharpe and Daniel Goldenberg Read the original interview in French Shot in 1959, Le Retour is a short film directed by Daniel Goldenberg, in collaboration with the ex-paratrooper, Yann le Masson, who was responsible for cinematography, alongside Georges…
Adam Smith and Scotland in the Age of Enlightenment
by Craig Smith 2023 is the 300th anniversary of the birth of Adam Smith. Smith is one of the very few writers whose name is genuinely famous all over the world. He is known as the father of economics, the…
Journalism under hybrid politics
by Kjetil Selvik, Jacob Høigilt Only a few years ago, Tunisia was the freest country in the Arab world, with a flourishing media scene. Journalists were scrambling to reinvent their role in the public sphere that emerged after the Jasmine…
Emotion, Mission, Architecture: Building Hospitals in Persia and British India, 1865-1914
by Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi How did patients feel when visiting mission hospitals built by British missionaries in Asia and Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? I am preoccupied with this question in my book, Emotion, Mission, Architecture:…
Making the News – A History of Scottish Newspapers
by Hamish Fraser With the readership of daily newspapers at the present day falling drastically and local newspapers struggling to survive, a study of Scottish newspapers in their heyday is timely. In the century after 1850, it was from newspapers…
Writing about the People of Iraq
by Catherine Cobham and Fabio Caiani 23 March 2023 marked the twentieth anniversary of the attack on Iraq. Predictably, western mainstream media made little or no reference to contemporary Iraqi culture. Recently, however, there has been a growing interest in…