With the rising tide of scholarly and societal interest in the history and legacy of colonialism and slavery, this collection offers a much-needed diachronic analysis of the cultural representations of the lives and afterlives of those subjected to slavery and indenture. It focuses on the history of the ‘neerlandoph...

We live in an age of lists, from magazine features to online clickbait. This book situates the list in a long tradition, asking key questions about the list as a cultural and communicative form. What, Liam Cole Young asks, can this seemingly innocuous form tell us about historical and contemporary media environments...

This book offers a discussion of the screens, installations, and media architecture that populate contemporary urban public spaces. It proposes a methodological approach and conceptual toolset for the critical examination, not only of what these screens do, but also of what we can do with them. The book contains a c...

With machines mediating most of our cultural practices, and innovations, obsolescence and revivals constantly transforming our relation with images and sounds, media feel more unstable than ever. But was there ever a 'stable' moment in media history? Inventing Cinema proposes to approach this question through an arc...

This timely volume engages with one of the most important shifts in recent film studies: the turn away from text-based analysis towards the viewer. Historically, this marks a return to early interest in the effect of film on the audience by psychoanalysts and psychologists, which was overtaken by concern with the ‘e...

Against the grain of the growing literature on screens, Screen Genealogies argues that the present excess of screens cannot be understood as an expansion and multiplication of the movie screen nor of the video display. Rather, screens continually exceed the optical histories in which they are most commonly inscribed...

Dutch cinema, when discussed, is typically treated only in terms of pre-war films or documentaries, leaving post-war fictional film largely understudied. At the same time, a Hollandse school, a term first coined in the 1980s, has developed through deadpan, ironic films like those of director and actor Alex van Warme...

New online technologies have brought with them a great promise of freedom. The computer and particularly the Internet have been represented as enabling technologies, turning consumers into users and users into producers. Furthermore, lay people and amateurs have been enthusiastically greeted as heroes of the digital...

The Middle Dutch term schaec referred to abduction with marital intent. This book explores this phenomenon to understand wider attitudes towards marriage-making in the fifteenth-century Low Countries. Whilst exchanging words of consent was all that was required legally, making marriage was a social process that evok...

Making the Palace Machine Work: Mobilizing People, Objects, and Nature in the Qing Empire brings the studies of institutions, labour, and material cultures to bear on the history of science and technology by tracing the workings of the Imperial Household Department (Neiwufu) in the Qing court and empire. An enormous...

Living Standards in Southeast Asia: Changes over the Long Twentieth Century, 1900-2015 examines changes in living standards across the ten countries of Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Thailand, Brunei, Myanmar, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos) from the early years of the 20th century to the e...

In an effort to fight climate change, many cities try to boost their cycling levels. They often look towards the Dutch for guidance. However, historians have only begun to uncover how and why the Netherlands became the premier cycling country of the world. Why were Dutch cyclists so successful in their fight for a p...

Increasingly, young people live online, with the vast majority of their social and cultural interactions conducted through means other than face-to-face conversation. How does this transition impact the ways in which young migrants understand, negotiate, and perform identity? That's the question taken up by Digital ...

The massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft has become one of the most popular computer games of the past decade, introducing millions around the world to community-based play. Within the boundaries set by its design, the game encourages players to appropriate and shape the game to their own...

In this accessible, unique study of a forgotten but noteworthy figure, the author tells the story of the life of Kurt Baschwitz (1886ー1968), a scholar who fled from the Nazis. He wrote six books, never translated into English, on four related themes: the press, propaganda, politics, and persecution. Baschwitz indep...

The drums beat, an old man in a grand robe mutters incantations and three brides on horseback led by their grooms on foot proceed to the Naxi Wedding Courtyard, accompanied, watched and photographed the whole way by tourists, who have bought tickets for the privilege. The traditional wedding ceremonies are performed...