Pics or It Didn't Happen: On the Objectivity of Photographs
How do we interpret the information we take from a photograph? How have we interpreted photography differently throughout its history?...
Latin: A lost language for a privileged class?
I learnt my first piece of Latin without knowing it was Latin. I was reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and Hermione cast...
Finding My Feminist Anger Over the Stanford Rape Case and Sara Ahmed’s Goldsmiths’ Resignation
[tw: discussions of rape, sexual assault] Sara Ahmed’s making-visible of the willful subject’s feminist role in her widely-cited 2010...
Hungry for Murder: Interrogating America's Obsession with True Crime
In 1798, Charles Brockden Brown published the first novel written by a professional American author: Wieland: or, The Transformation....
Punished or Not? The Problematic Ending of Mozart’s "Don Giovanni"
Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787) is one of the most frequently performed operas of our time. Based on the Spanish legend of Don Juan, it also...
Authors, Readers and the Ethics of Imagination
Roland Barthes' influential essay 'The Death of the Author' presents a compelling argument against prevailing attitudes about literature...
Defying The Canon: Fanfiction As The New Literature
The history of literary fandoms is long and varied. Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther is often credited as the novel which produced...
You are what you read? Why reading is a fundamental threat to identity
In a moving passage of Dickens' novel, the ill-treated David Copperfield remembers ‘sitting on my bed, reading as if for life’.[1] His...
Transferable Skills: A Fool's Gold?
A recent post on the brand-new SGSAH blog highlights a growing trend amongst those seeking to acquire ‘transferable skills’, namely, ...
Scrapped Histories: Why and How Scrapbooks Matter
What do you think of when you hear the word ‘scrapbook’? Why might an archive save a scrapbook and why would researchers turn to archived...
