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Ridley Scott’s Napoleon: From Uniformed Soldier to Costumed Emperor
Read more: Ridley Scott’s Napoleon: From Uniformed Soldier to Costumed Emperorby Brontë Hebdon Early in Ridley Scott’s Napoleon (2023), Bonaparte and Josephine de Beauharnais see each other for the first […]

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…

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…

Robert Burns’s Memory: A Matter of State
by Paul Malgrati Every year, on 25 January, Burns Night offers a remarkable opportunity for Scottish political parties to issue a statement about the Scottish nation, its identity, and its situation. Last year, in 2022, Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon,…

Five things you (probably) didn’t know about crossroads

The Importance of Legacy in the Histories of Mycologists
By Nathan Smith How many animals can you name? How many plants? The answer to both questions is probably quite a few and, indeed, the total would probably number in the hundreds for both were you to sit down and…

Making the Census Count: Edinburgh 1760-1900
By Richard Rodger You might think that with a commitment to Open Data and Open Access from the Scottish Government and Local Councils that you would be able to consult Census records from 150 years ago. You might think that…

A Brief Discussion of University Art, Design and Media Archives as Catalysts for Creativity and Research
By Louise Chapman In 2012, I uncovered an array of boxes containing 177 items of dress in the School of Fashion and Textiles archives at Birmingham City University (BCU). Found in a store cupboard the assemblage included a large selection…