This open access book brings together an international team of experts, The Middle Ages in Modern Culture considers the use of medieval models across a variety of contemporary media – ranging from television and film to architecture – and the significance of deploying an authentic medieval world to these representations. Rooted in this question of authenticity, this interdisciplinary study …
Carl Franz Bally founded a shoe factory in Switzerland in 1851. Within decades, the Bally name had achieved worldwide recognition for its high-quality footwear. The history of modern footwear can be traced through the lens of Bally's corporate evolution. This book brings together the results of research on such topics as the economic importance of fashion, Bally's fortunes in the US, the career…
How does the US make sense of its elite educational system, given that it seems to be at odds with core American values, such as equality of opportunity or upward mobility? Sophie Spieler explores scholarly and journalistic investigations, self-representational texts, and fictional narratives revolving around the Ivy League and its peers in order to understand elite education and its peculiar p…
Since the early transformation of European music practice and theory in the cultural centers of Asia, Latin America, and Africa around 1900, it has become necessary for music history to be conceived globally - a challenge that musicology has hardly faced yet. This book discusses the effects of cultural globalization on processes of composition and distribution of art music in the 20th and 21st …
What is the heritage of our cities? Which are the monuments, places, and spaces in which it accumulates, and by which practices is it formed, handed down, appropriated? Gerhard Vinken takes the readers to twelve cities on three continents and analyses the diverse and contradictory heritage formations that have had a lasting impact on urban life. The vitality of urban heritage, as these vivid an…
What role can the humanities play in shaping our common future? What are the values that guide us in the 21st century? How can we unleash the potential the humanities offer in a time of multiple crises? This volume tackles some of these fundamental questions, acknowledging and developing the changing role of academic discourse in a turbulent world. This timely book argues that the humanities en…
Scale matters. When conducting research and writing, scholars upscale and downscale. So do the subjects of their work - we scale, they scale. Although scaling is an integrant part of research, we rarely reflect on scaling as a practice and what happens when we engage with it in scholarly work. The contributors aim to change this: they explore the pitfalls and potentials of scaling in an interdi…
With a novel quality theory of consumption which treats opulence and self-restraint in consumption styles symmetrically, Ernst Mohr shows how social distance and proximity are communicated by consumption and produced by communication. He positions fringe styles with those of the mainstream in an overall stylistic system of society and analyses their encounters. Rigorously derived, the approach …
The concept of »postmigration« has recently gained importance in the context of European societies' obsession with migration and integration along with emerging new forms of exclusion and nationalisms. This book introduces ongoing debates on the developing concept of »postmigration« and how it can be applied to arts and culture. While the concept has mainly gained traction in the cultural s…
Gaming no longer only takes place as a ›closed interactive experience‹ in front of TV screens, but also as broadcast on streaming platforms or as cultural events in exhibition centers and e-sport arenas. The popularization of new technologies, forms of expression, and online services has had a considerable influence on the academic and journalistic discourse about games. This anthology exam…