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This special issue explores the developments in the conversation on iconic images in Modern Italy in the fields of art history, film studies and history of photography in Italian cultural studies, concerning the ways in which we perceive and interpret such images in relation to perceptions of 'Italianicity'.

In the photographs of British sisters Agnes and Dora Bulwer taken at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, I argue for an early humanist vision of the peasants, children and workers that they photographed on their travels around Italy.

The British photographers Agnes Bulwer (1856– 1940) and her sister Dora Ellinor Bulwer (1864– 1948) left a legacy of circa 1300 photographs and 890 negatives, date from 1890 to 1913, to the British School at Rome. The photographs are principally of landscapes taken in Rome and the surrounding countryside (the Roman Campagna) but also further afield in Italy and abroad. Many include archaeological and natural sites as well as monuments, art works, and homes and gardens in urban or rural scenes. Their landscape photographs offer a perspective that challenged the existing masculine gaze as developed in landscape photography under the colonial project of the British Empire. Unfettered by the archaeologist’s need for ascetic facts, the Bulwers pioneered an unusual vision of landscape, inspired by the progressive international environment of post-Unification Italy. Agnes and Dora Bulwer often photographed women, whether Italian peasants or travelling companions, presenting a social and gendered gaze that helps to reconsider this period in the light of a dawning international humanitarianism. In spite of their photographic legacy, Agnes and Dora Bulwer remain relatively unknown in the growing field of rediscovered early female photographers connected to archaeology or travel photography. This article reveals their work within a cross-cultural, historical and phenomenological analysis, contributing a new chapter to women’s photographic history, to travel and landscape photography and to the history of British photographers working in Italy.

In the lecture we explore how digital humanities can bring us a new understanding of intimacy in literary works and women writers.

Book review of Orazio Condorelli, Franck Roumy & Mathias Schmoeckel (Hg.), Der Einfluss der Kanonistik auf die europäische Rechtskultur. Band 6: Völkerrecht [Norm und Struktur. Studien zum sozialen Wandel in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit;, Hg. Gert Melville], Wien/Köln/Weimar, Böhlau/Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020, XXV + 392 p. ISBN 9783412518905

From an Ancient Egyptian plague to the Black Death and Spanish flu, epidemics have often spurred societal transformations. Understanding why can help us create a better world after covid-19

Review of Gabriela Frei's monograph on Britain and international law applied to maritime strategy from the Declaration of Paris to World War One.

In an era of total surveillance, being in possession of a biometric ID document can still result in denial of one’s basic civil protections and human rights. The discovery of systematic errors in state-implemented facial recognition programs—such as in recognizing faces of color (Joy Buolamwini)—suggests the failure of current practices of global intelligence and mobility. This paper offers an archaeological investigation of the contemporary photo ID document. Returning to its invention in the 1920s, it examines the issues of conjectural knowledge (Carl Ginzburg), embodiment or tact (Béla Balázs) and the optical unconscious (Walter Benjamin) behind early “physiognomic” media.

One of the most acclaimed Eastern European directors of the late 1960s, Miklos Jancsó became known for his abstract long-take style which explored the intersections of power, politics, history, and myth. (“Radical form in the service of radical content,” as the Village Voice film critic, James Hoberman, put it back then.) Now that the Beacon Cinema in Columbia City is hosting a retrospective of six of his films (including Red Psalm, which won him the best director prize at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival), Red May has invited three film scholars--Eszter Polonyi, Zoran Samardzija, and Steven Shaviro—to discuss Jancsó’s boldly stylized film language with Tommy Swenson, Film Curator of the Beacon Cinema