Prologue: Our Time
May 4, 2023
In a small front room, amid the unfamiliar smells of Gauloise tobacco smoke and strong black coffee, I sit with my French host family staring at a small black-and-white television… READ MORE
Category: European History
Aleksandr Rodchenko’s “shadow oeuvre”
February 27, 2023
Aglaya K. Glebova — What should the modern world look like? The Soviet artist Aleksandr Rodchenko, like many of his avant-garde comrades both east and west of Moscow, had strong… READ MORE
The Last Days of Mankind
February 14, 2023
Karl Kraus— EPILOGUE The Final Night Battlefield. Craters. Smoke clouds. Starless night. The horizon is a wall of flames. Corpses. Dying soldiers. Men and women in gas masks appear. A… READ MORE
Chemical Lace and Connecting St. Gallen to New York and New Jersey
November 29, 2022
A New York Times best art book of 2022! Emma Cormack — Now on view at Bard Graduate Center Gallery in New York, the exhibition Threads of Power: Lace from… READ MORE
“Digging Europe’s Grave:” Thomas Piketty on Franco-German Tax Policy
November 16, 2022
Thomas Piketty— To love Europe is to want to change it. The French and German governments which have been in power for the past ten years claim to be Europhiles,… READ MORE
Italy in the British Imagination
November 9, 2022
Beth Saunders— In their introduction to The Idea of Italy: Photography and the British Imagination, 1840–1890, editors Antonella Pelizzari and Scott Wilcox explain that the very idea of Italy was,… READ MORE
The Neighborhood as Social Network: Excerpt from The Little Street
August 30, 2022
The neighborhood takes center stage in Linda Stone-Ferrier‘s interdisciplinary study, The Little Street: The Neighborhood in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art and Culture. Engaging the work of Johannes Vermeer—from whose painting View… READ MORE
Casanova for Our Time: An Interview with Leo Damrosch
July 28, 2022
The life of the iconic libertine Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) has never been told in the depth it deserves. An alluring representative of the Enlightenment’s shadowy underside, Casanova was an aspiring… READ MORE
The Russia-Ukraine Crisis: A Reading List
February 25, 2022
To better understand the Russia-Ukraine crisis, we have put together a list of the most relevant books that shed light on the history, socio-economic and political relations of these two… READ MORE
The History of Economic Sanctions as a Tool of War
February 24, 2022
Today, economic sanctions are generally regarded as an alternative to war. But for most people in the interwar period, the economic weapon was the very essence of total war. The… READ MORE
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