• Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage
• Other research productsclose
• 2019-2023close
• University of Hertfordshire Research Archive close
• Scholarship@Western close
• Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage close

This article uses a collection of mementos curated by Robert James Tennent, a middle-class man, to interrogate how objects materialised love and sex in Ireland. It problematises readings of courtship tokens as simple objects of affection, and considers how individuals engaged in culturally-sanctioned courtship practices in extra-licit ways. Gifts and tokens took on new meanings when they were accessioned into the personal archives of their owners and catalogued as mementos of past relationships. Read as a collection of courtship mementos and a homemade pornographic archive, this article argues that the collection provides an unique insight into the curation of sexual memory. © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Peer reviewed

This article considers the career and life of Jessie White Mario. Her journalism and writing offer a unique perspective on the tumultuous period of Italian history, during the Risorgimento, yet are often overlooked. Her later work highlighting the terrible plight of workers in Sicilian sulphur mines was fundamental in raising awareness of their situation. Yet, it too is largely unknown in the country of her birth. Motivated by the love of a country that was not her own, defiant of the strictures and expectations placed upon her, because of her gender, White Mario is a figure that should be celebrated and remembered, not consigned to future neglect. © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis. This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Women's History Review on 31 Oct 2019, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2019.1684427. Final Accepted Version Peer reviewed

In this commercial space age, audiences increasingly expect realism in science fiction. Weightlessness is commonly simulated through physical or virtual special effects, but reduced gravity aircraft offer opportunities for capturing the effects of microgravity more authentically. While this poses practical challenges for costume designers, it also invites the possibility of creative engagement with weightlessness. Costume can be employed to visibly evidence the effects of weightlessness, but to take advantage of this opportunity, designers must discard many of the fundamental principles of fashion design. This article examines the effects of weightlessness on costume in sequences shot on board reduced gravity aircraft, from Apollo 13 (Howard, 1995), The Mummy (Kurtzman, 2017), and the music video for OK Go’s Upside Down & Inside Out (Kulash and Sie, 2016), as well as footage of real-life astronauts. It then identifies those features of clothing design which must be reconsidered when designing costume for microgravity. © Barbara Brownie 2020. The definitive, peer reviewed and edited version of this article is published in Film, Fashion & Consumption, Volume 9, Number 1, 1 May 2020, pp. 5-21(17): https://doi.org/10.1386/ffc_00009_1. Peer reviewed

This article brings together historical questions about the nature of assimilation and the medicalisation of migrants in the post-war era, with a focus on medical writings about migrant patients in Australia in the 1950s and 1960s. It argues that physicians adopted official assimilation ideologies to construct a “New Australian patient” whose beliefs and behaviours indicated a less sophisticated understanding of medicine, and who suffered particular psychosomatic illnesses and health risks linked to their migration, socio-economic status and linguistic isolation. By making assimilation medical, these doctors helped bridge the cultural gulf that existed between Australian doctors and their migrant patients, but they also perpetuated cultural stereotypes through which certain unassimilable groups were blamed for their own medical problems. Final Accepted Version Peer reviewed

This article scrutinizes the actor Kirk Douglas’s pro-Israeli advocacy over six decades, both on the screen and off it, setting this within the contexts of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the links between Hollywood and Zionism. It looks at why and how Douglas supported Israel and considers what the star’s advocacy says about the history of celebrity activism and the interconnections between the American Jewish community, Hollywood and Israel. The article argues that Douglas was a major player in the special relationship that developed between Hollywood and Israel after 1948, one that, despite recent troubles, endures to this day. © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Institute of Historical Research. All rights reserved Final Accepted Version Peer reviewed

Studies relating to female participation in sport are increasing, and there is an emerging body of work regarding women in the martial arts. Seeking to continue the work of Emelyne Godfrey, Wendy Rouse, and others, this article explores the lives of three Englishwomen, Phoebe Roberts, Edith Garrud, and Sarah Mayer, operating in the early twentieth-century. Chosen primarily for their innovative promotion of the discipline, these women shared a love of judo, jujutsu, and Japanese martial arts, and although this was manifest in different ways, they are linked both temporally and through their associations with others. Through an indepth study concerning the physical and cultural aspects of each of their lives, the Japanese martial arts can be seen as a form of defence for women, as a tool of empowerment and political propaganda, and even as a means of garnering international celebrity. Focused on the lives of women outside the competitive sporting arena, the article touches upon a wide range of topics from the Music Hall era, to the fight for female suffrage as well as Anglo-Japanese relations in the inter-war period. Peer reviewed

The 'Super Grid' network of high-voltage power lines transformed the landscapes of England and southern Scotland in the 1950s. This article examines debates over the siting of pylons, with a focus on the public inquiries into the proposed lines across the Pennines in Lancashire. It brings together archives on electrification from the newly nationalised British Electricity Authority, preservationist groups and local government to reveal deeper insights into processes of local and national decision-making about and popular attitudes to the rural landscape. It uncovers how the public inquiries exposed tensions and differences about the definition of amenity, not just between the electricity industry and preservationists, but also between interests representing urban industrial districts and the National Parks, northern and southern England, and within the preservationist movement. The conflicts over pylons and amenity shows how narratives of landscape preservation were contested and riven with class, region and economic differences in the postwar period. Peer reviewed

The article draws up an inventory of, and compares strategies for, the theoretical and critical treatment of the absence–presence interplay at stake in the literary and visual representations of absence. This brings to our attention a multiplicity of heterogeneous and, to a greater or lesser degree, marginal signify-ing phenomena that have in common patterns of disrupting and deviating from the standard conventions of creating and conveying meaning through figures of absence. Lacking a name for these disparate yet similar instances where meaning is created from empty signifiers, we have chosen to call them figural voids. This attempt to produce a critical inventory focuses on modern and contemporary approaches to the analysis of figures and figurations of absence in literature, visual arts, and cinema, relying on the works of Anne Cauquelin, Jean-Pierre Mourey, Philippe Le Roux, Maurice Frechuret, Bruno Duborgel, and Marc Vernet. Their theoretical positions stand in a variety of literary and artistic contexts that are seemingly disconnected yet can be brought together on the basis of their common affinity to figural voids. This calls for a comparative standpoint and can be illustrated with examples ranging across historical periods and disciplines: from Stoic writings to Alberto Moravia’s Boredom, from Mallarmé’s blank page to the controversial curatorial practices espoused by Yves Klein.

Review of Jeremy Zallen, American Lucifers: The Dark History of Artificial Light, 1750-1865.

© 2022 Angelopoulou, Kapetanios, Smith, Steuber, Woll and Zeller. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Peer reviewed