Why has Argentina suffered so much political and economic instability? How could Argentina, once one of the wealthiest countries in the world, failed to meet its potential over decades? What lessons can we take from Argentina's successes and failures? Argentina’s economy is - irresistibly - fascinating. Argentina's economic history - its crises and its triumphs cannot be explained in pu…
Serious degradation mechanisms can severely reduce the service life of concrete structures: steel reinforcement can corrode, cement matrix can be attacked, and even aggregates can show detrimental processes. Therefore, it is important to understand how damage can occur to concrete structures and to appreciate the timing of the actions leading to damage. Damage to Concrete Structures summarizes …
At the end of the nineteenth century, Italy welcomed an official embassy sent by the government in Tokyo to make Japan more integrated into the new world scene it was entering. The cultural and political elites of the peninsula had the chance to discover, or rather rediscover, the charm of a world that had been lost over the centuries. This essay aims to reflect on the means and meanings of thi…
How can narrative theory account for the changing roles of storytelling and storysharing in the public sphere? This essay proposes a new concept of narrative dynamics, one that generates well-constrained descriptions of specific elements, features, or qualities of narratives, as well as programmatic claims concerning their potential uses and effects. Narrative dynamics research is equally inter…
I welcomed with enthusiasm the invitation to participate in the project of the young dantisti of the University of the Witwatersrand, as described by Chariklia Martalas: “To think critically about how the 21st century would change our views of Dante’s Divine Comedy if we interpret it through creative form.†I like to think of this project as a way, or method, that at once dep…
The essay concerns two drawings by the Florentine baroque painters Cesare and Pietro Dandini, coming from the Dandini-Targioni Tozzetti collection. The naturalist Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti (1712-1783), consort of Maria Brigida, daughter of Ottaviano Dandini, brought together the impressive set of drawings belonging to the Dandini family, which were divided into twenty volumes, probably dismemb…
Food Heritage and Nationalism in Europe contends that food is a fundamental element of heritage, and a particularly important one in times of crisis. Arguing that food, taste, cuisine and gastronomy are crucial markers of identity that are inherently connected to constructions of place, tradition and the past, the book demonstrates how they play a role in intangible, as well as tangible, herita…
"Learning by Design and Second Language Teaching establishes theoretical, research, and practice connections between the multiliteracies framework Learning by Design and L2 teaching and learning. A comprehensive introductory chapter presents the theoretical tenets of the approach and is followed by four chapters devoted to the establishment of connections between the framework and L2 instructio…
This essay aims to present the first results of an ongoing research project devoted to study the evolution of the economic inequality in Catalonia based on different documentary sources and parameters. Here we focus on the strengths and limits of the rich fiscal sources preserved between the 14th and 18th century allowing us an analysis of inequality. This study is limited to the period before …