• Profile half-length photograph of a man facing to the left wearing a dark jacket and tie, holding a cigarette in his hand, with a white handkerchief in his jacket breast pocket. The man has a prominent straight nose, slicked back hair and his tie forms a slight arch from the knot. In the background, on the left side of the image, there is another half-length frontal portrait of a man. He has white hair, also wears a jacket and tie, is looking to the right, and is smiling.
Challenging Cosmopolitanism

Challenging Cosmopolitanism

The temptation to look longingly to idealised visions of Islamic cosmopolitanism as the antithesis to the militant communal solidarity associated with contemporary groups, such as the Islamic State (IS), can be quite powerful. Many scholars and popular writers have pointed…

Józefów

Documentary Landscapes of the Holocaust

Journey to Poland: Documentary Landscapes of the Holocaust is about the journeys undertaken by survivors, members of the postgeneration, and filmmakers to the places where the Jews lived before the war and to the places where they were murdered. This…

Class and Feeling in the Films of Jia Zhangke

Class and Feeling in the Films of Jia Zhangke

In 2008, I saw Jia Zhangke’s film Still Life, and it changed my life. I had never seen a film that had affected me so intensely and knew that, after that moment, I needed to research this director and his films further. What impacted me the most about Jia’s films were their emotional and affective qualities, and how they evoked feelings that lingered long after the films had ended.

Nineteenth-Century Local Governance in Ottoman Bulgaria

Ninteenth-Century Local Governance in Ottoman Bulgaria

An account of how bureaucratic procedures created the space for political conflict and slander in nineteenth-century Ottoman Bulgaria and what can we learn from studying them. Why would a district head administrator arrest mules, or someone slander a governor with…

100 Years Since the Russian Revolution

Looking Back at the Russian Revolution 2017 marks the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, which occurred in March and November (Gregorian calendar) in 1917. The pair of revolutions saw the disassembly of the Tsarist autocracy in favour of the…

Viking Law and Order

Viking Law and Order

My new book, Viking Law and Order, paints a rather different picture of Viking Age society from the one we are used to. We often hear discussions of violent raids and systematic pillaging by warriors arriving in long ships. It…