There is little dispute that photography is a material practice, and that the photograph itself is ineluctably material. And yet “matter,” “material,” and “materiality” have proven to be remarkably elusive terms of inquiry, frequently producing studies that are disparate in scope, sharing seemingly little common ground. Although the wide methodological range of materialist study can be dizzying, it is this book’s contention that that multiplicity is also the field’s greatest a...

Contrary to general belief, the history of the Florentine patriciate did not end with the establishment of the State of Tuscany under de’ Medici in 1532. Proud and self-confident patricians did not become subservient courtiers overnight, but remained significantly influential for a long period. They retained their urban identity and longstanding family traditions, while acquiring noble titles, estates, and villas at the same time. The mark that these patricians continued to leave on the cit...

Julián Romero, Sancho Dávila, Cristóbal de Mondragón, and Francisco de Valdés were prominent Spanish military commanders during the first decade of the Revolt in the Low Countries (1567–1577). Occupying key positions in this conflict, they featured as central characters in various war narratives and episodical descriptions of the events they were involved in, ranging from chronicles, poems, theatre plays, engravings, and songs to news pamphlets. To this day, they still figure as protag...

This edited volume documents the state of the art in research on translation policies in both legal and institutional settings. Offering case studies of past and present translation policies from all over the world, it allows for a compelling comparison of attitudes towards translation in varying contexts.

It highlights the virtues of integrating different types of expertise in the study of translation policy: theoretical and applied, historical and modern, legal, institutional, and political...

Portugal's vibrant comics scene originated as early as the 19th century, bringing forth brilliant individual artists, but has remained mostly unknown beyond Portugal’s borders to this day. Now a new generation employs this medium to put into question hegemonic views on the economy, politics, and society. Following the experience of the financial crisis of the past decades and its impact on social policies, access to and rules of public discourse, and civil strife, comics have questioned wha...

Imagine a world in which each individual has a fundamental right to be reborn. This idle dream haunts Hilde Van Gelder’s associative travelogue that takes Allan Sekula’s sequence Deep Six / Passer au bleu (1996/1998) as a touchstone for a dialogue with more recent artworks zooming in on the borderscape near the Channel Tunnel, such as those by Sylvain George and Bruno Serralongue.

Combining ethnography, visual materials, political philosophy, cultural geography, and critical analysis, Gro...

Fiction has a major social impact, not least because it co-shapes the image that society has of various social groups. Drawing on a collection of 170 contemporary Dutch-language novels, Character Constellations presents a range of data-driven, statistical models to study depictions of characters in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, class, age, sexuality, and other identity categories. Incorporating the tools of network analysis, each chapter highlights an aspect of fictional social networks t...

From its invention to the internet age, photography has been considered universal, pervasive, and omnipresent. This anthology of essays posits how the question of when photography came to be everywhere shapes our understanding of all manner of photographic media. Whether looking at a portrait image on the polished silver surface of the daguerreotype, or a viral image on the reflective glass of the smartphone, the experience of looking at photographs and thinking with photography is inseparabl...

Colonialism advanced its project of territorial expansion by changing the very meaning of borders and space. The colonial project scripted a unipolar spatial discourse that saw the colonies as an extension of European borders. In his monograph, Mohit Chandna engages with narrations of spatial conflicts in French and Francophone literature and film from the nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. In literary works by Jules Verne, Ananda Devi, and Patrick Chamoiseau, and film by Michael H...

Translating and interpreting are unpredictable social practices framed by historical, ethical, and political constraints. Using the concepts of situatedness and performativity as anchors, the authors examine translation practices from the perspectives of identity performance, cultural mediation, historical reframing, and professional training. As such, the chapters focus on enacted events and conditioned practices by exploring production processes and the social, historical, and cultural cond...