Landscape History and Theory: from Subject Matter to Analytic Tool

This essay explores how landscape history can engage methodologically with the adjacent disciplines of art history and visual/cultural studies. Central to the methodological problem is the mapping of the beholder � spatially, temporally and phenomenologically. In this mapping process, landscape history is transformed from subject matter to analytical tool. As a result, landscape history no longer simply imports and applies ideas from other disciplines but develops its own methodologies to engage and influence them. Landscape history, like art history, thereby takes on a creative cultural presence. Through that process, landscape architecture and garden design regain the cultural power now carried by the arts and museum studies, and has an effect on the innovative capabilities of contemporary landscape design

A different crossroads:Meeting the devil in cultural studies

The Crossroads Conference in Paris, July 2012 offered an international perspective on cultural studies. After the event, seeing mention of cultural studies in the context of Nazi Germany opened up questions about the history of cultural studies, its ambitions and position in the contemporary, neo-liberal academy. Drawing on various conjunctures in personal and social life, the article reflects on the challenges for cultural studies when set against knowledge of European history

Cultural ecology and Chinese Hamlets

This essay examines the critical potential of cultural ecology and cultural mobility studies for modeling the relations between literature and culture. It investigates the mobility and portability of literary effects across different media, periods, and cultural and geographical spaces. It intends to offer a glimpse of what a continentally informed view of cultural ecology can contribute to the understanding of literary history as a cultural history of media effects. With a view to the twofold promise of cultural ecology, it hopes to accommodate both the historical singularity of literary objects (mostly, but not exclusively, texts) and their multifarious continuations in other media configurations. As a paradigmatic example, it explores the global cultural mobility of Shakespeare. Using the example of the adaptation of Hamlet in recent Chinese films, the essay demonstrates how literary effects circulate in different media contexts across temporal and spatial distances, beyond the range of traditional literary history. In the larger framework of cultural mobility studies, these suggestions also attempt to overstep the self-imposed generic limits of current world literature studies and to find an alternative to their methodological problems

A return to materialism? Putting social history back into place

This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Bloomsbury Academic in New Directions in Cultural and Social History on 22 February 2018, available online at: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/new-directions-in-social-and-cultural-history-9781472580818/. The Accepted Manuscript is under embargo until 22 August 2019.Peer reviewe

Rethinking sport, empire, and American exceptionalism

This article examines the correlation between sports history and American imperialism and exceptionalism. More specifically, the author argues against a view of sport historiography which excludes debates within social and cultural history. It is the author's suggestion that established themes in sports historiography, when considered within the context of American imperialism, can expand the understanding of American sports within global history, in effect, allowing sports historians to generate effective cross-cultural analysis. Particular focus is given by the author to the emphasis on how historical generalizations and anecdotes establish imperialism in the sporting history of America

Cultural History of the Jews in the Early Modern Period

Review of David B. Ruderman. Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. ix + 326 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-691-14464-1.Rezension zu: David B. Ruderman. Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. ix + 326 pp.$35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-691-14464-1

The Powerful

History is written by the powerful. It is true that since the 1960s and the beginnings of the democratization of history, less powerful minorities have taken up the pen and more profusely expressed their views of history, but to a great extent, white males have engrained their view of history into people’s minds. Perhaps for this reason, perhaps because of its appealing nature, or perhaps for both reasons, the Renaissance stands out in people’s minds as a definitive period in history—a period during which, arguably, intellectual and cultural progress swept across Europe. The driving force behind much of the intellectual and cultural changes was the humanist movement; focusing on a devotion to and re-analysis of the classics, humanism arose between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. Through their devotion to the studia humanitatis (the study of rhetoric, grammar, history, poetry, and ethics), humanists strove to improve the human condition. These developments, most frequently identified in the cultural, intellectual, and social realms, altered many people’s lives for the better. These same developments, however, were also gender-biased

The application of Han Dynasty cultural elements to modern product design

Chinese Han Culture, as Chinese nation's "core culture", is the cultural symbol of Chinese nation, and played an important role in the history of Chinese cultural development, even in the history of world cultural development. Designing in the Han Dynasty, while inheriting Chinese traditional culture, but also having its unique style, are appreciated and respected by the people nowadays. In a modern society where the design is becoming more diversified, the innovative design based on traditional culture and art has its unique charm and vitality. This paper presented our recent research on the application of Han Dynasty cultural elements to modern product design, reflected the local design connotation of Han Dynasty cultural elements