In the last decade, digital media technologies and developments have given rise to exciting new forms of ludic, or playful, engagements of citizens in cultural and societal issues. From the Occupy movement to playful city-making to the gameful designs of the Obama 2008 and Trump 2016 presidential campaigns, and the ...

The Maritime Silk Road foregrounds the numerous networks that have been woven across oceanic geographies, tying world regions together often far more extensively than land-based routes. On the strength of the new data which has emerged in the last two decades in the form of archaeological findings, as well as new te...

This much-awaited second volume investigates the changes in subject, method and institutional context of the humanistic disciplines around 1800, offering a wealth of insights for specialists and students alike. Point of departure is the pivotal question whether there was a paradigm shift in the humanities around 180...

Language teaching and learning were crucial to Europeans’ colonial, national, and individual enterprises in the Levant, and in these processes, “Oriental language teachers” – as they were termed prior to the Second World War – were fundamental. European state nationalisms influenced and increasingly competed with ea...

Film archives are fast spreading around the world, and with them issues surrounding archival digitisation, artistic appropriation, and academic reinterpretation of film material that demand scholarly attention. Exploring Past Images in a Digital Age: Reinventing the Archive aims to fill this demand with a thought-pr...

To dismantle negative stereotypes of fans, this book offers a media ethnography of the digital culture, conventions, and urban spaces associated with fandoms, arguing that fandom is an area of productive, creative, and subversive value. By examining the fandoms of Sherlock, Glee, Firefly, and other popular televisio...

The essays in this volume analyze strategies adopted by contemporary novelists, playwrights, screenwriters, and biographers interested in bringing the stories of early modern women to modern audiences. It also pays attention to the historical women creators themselves, who, be they saints or midwives, visual artists...

Visions of Electric Media is an historical examination into the early history of television, as it was understood during the Victorian and Machine ages. How did the television that we use today develop into a functional technology? What did Victorians expect it to become? How did the 'vision' of television change on...

With the inclusion of twelve original articles by established and emerging international scholars, this volume offers critical reading of literary and cinematic texts produced in China and Sinophone communities between the 1950s and 2010s. The articles portray the lineage and mutations of the Chinese Bildungsroman, ...

Body, Capital and Screens: Visual Media and the Healthy Self in the 20th Century brings together new research from leading scholars from Europe and North America working at the intersection of film and media studies and social and cultural history of the body. The volume focuses on visual media in the twentieth cent...

A few months into the popular uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region in 2009/10, the promises of social media, including its ability to influence a participatory governance model, grassroots civic engagement, new social dynamics, inclusive societies and new opportunities for businesses and entre...

The influence of austerity measures and neoliberal ideologies has sparked discussions about the relevance and value of academic institutions, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. Universities are redirecting academic focus towards greater societal engagement. This book argues that academia has much to...

Featuring 28 leading international media scholars, Technics rethinks technology for the contemporary digital era, with cutting-edge theoretical, historiographical, and methodological interventions. The volume’s contributors explore the ideas of Walter Benjamin, Ursula Le Guin, Bernhard Siegert, Gilbert Simondon, and...

Examining women’s agency in the past has taken on new urgency in the current moment of resurgent patriarchy, Women’s Marches, and the global #MeToo movement. The essays in this collection consider women’s agency in the Renaissance and early modern period, an era that also saw both increasing patriarchal constraints ...

This book presents a new history of German film from 1980-2010, a period that witnessed rapid transformations, including intensified globalization, a restructured world economy, geopolitical realignment, and technological change, all of which have affected cinema in fundamental ways. Rethinking the conventional peri...

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...