Humanity Rearranged: The Polish and Czechoslovak Pavilions at Expo 58

This article explores the ways in which ʻcinematicʼ exhibition techniques exploited by Czechoslovak and Polish designers in schemes for the Brussels Worlds Fair in 1958 can be understood as part of a new political project to produce active citizens after the trauma of Stalinism in Eastern Europe. Its originality lies in extending a discussion on the work of celebrated figures like Le Corbusier and Charles and Ray Eames by scholars like Marc Treib in Space Calculated in Seconds (1996) and Beatrix Colomina in Domesticity at War (2007) to the context of Eastern Europe. It examines, for the first time, the historic coincidence of multimedia architectural and exhibition design practices on both sides of the East-West divide. Based on research in the archives of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Art and on press reports from both sides of the so-called Iron Curtain, this 8,000 word article brings hitherto unresearched architecture and design practices to an international readership. Crowley takes an interdisciplinary approach by bringing contemporaneous theories of space developed by architects and theories of the image developed by film makers in Poland and Hungary to bear on exhibition design. Crowley was invited to present this research at a symposium at the Central European University in Budapest in 2010. Developed from this paper, this article appears in West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, published by University of Chicago Press. In recent years, this refereed journal has become a central forum for the discussion of modernist design

Paris or Moscow?: Warsaw Architects and the Image of the Modern City in the 1950s

This article sets out to explore the ways in which Polish architects and writers on architects imagined the future during the early Cold War period. During the Stalin years, Soviet cities were presented by communist ideologues as the future face of the progressive urbanism. By contrast, during the destalinising Thaw after 1956, Paris and other Western cities were understood as centres of architectural invention. Crowley’s essay is based on reports and photographs gathered by young architects to Paris and Moscow before and after the dramatic events of 1956. The article also explores how the knowledge that they gathered in both settings was used in the production of new buildings in the course of the 1950s. This article was commissioned as part of international research project called 'Imagining the West' which was sponsored by the Norwegian Academy of Science. Scholars from various fields and national contexts were asked to explore the image of 'the West' from the perspective of Eastern Europe during the C20th. Adopting a post-colonial perspective, the project was an attempt to reverse the conventional viewing position of much scholarship. The article was first published in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History in 2008. It was then reproduced in a book edited by György Péteri called Imagining the West in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), pp. 105-130. A review of Peteri's volume from The Russian Review (autumn 2011) described it as a study in ‘both trans-national and trans-systemic history rendered with insight and subtlety that make for an important contribution to scholarship’

Pleasures in Socialism: Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc

This book is a significant contribution to the studies of everyday life in Eastern Europe under communist rule. It is the third in a series of volumes edited and written with Susan E. Reid, which examine the material culture of the Eastern Bloc: see Style and Socialism (Berg, 2000) and Socialist Spaces (Berg, 2003). Reviewing these titles in the London Review of Books, Sheila Fitzpatrick credits Crowley and Reid as ‘two cultural historians who have played a leading role in the development of studies of the everyday in the former Soviet bloc’. The 14 essays explore how leisure and the consumption of luxury goods formed zones that communist states sought to shape, and thereby to extend the reach of their authority. Yet at the same time, they also presented opportunities for people to assert their individuality and enjoy unlicensed pleasures. This contrasts strongly with the conventional scholarship on the Soviet Bloc, which stresses poverty and repression. Crowley's contribution was to write, with Reid, a 21,000-word critical review of existing debates about leisure and luxury in the Bloc and make a number of propositions about the way in which these concepts and practices need to be further conceptualised and researched. This essay also functions as an introduction to the book. The origins of the book lie in a conference organised by Crowley and Reid at the V&A Museum in London in 2007. Following publication, Crowley was invited to talk about the themes in this volume at Södertörn University, Centre for Baltic and East European Studies in Stockholm (2012). A review of this book was published in Slavic Review (2011). Crowley and Reid were also interviewed about the volume in an hour-long podcast for New Books in Eastern Europe Studies (2012)

Positive Ricci curvature on highly connected manifolds

For $k \ge 2,$ let $M^{4k-1}$ be a $(2k{-}2)$-connected closed manifold. If $k \equiv 1$ mod $4$ assume further that $M$ is $(2k{-}1)$-parallelisable. Then there is a homotopy sphere $\Sigma^{4k-1}$ such that $M \sharp \Sigma$ admits a Ricci positive metric. This follows from a new description of these manifolds as the boundaries of explicit plumbings.Comment: Corrected some minor typos and changed document class to amsart. The new document class added 10 pages, so the paper is now now 46 page

A spatial analysis of agriculture in the Republic of Ireland, 1991 to 2000

End of year projectBy linking farm census and administrative data from the CSO and DAF to a geographic information system and analysing the mapping output, this project shows the continued broad division of farming in the state into marginal farming areas in the north and west and more commercial farming areas in the south and east. While this division was compounded by the 1992 CAP reforms, and commercial farming became more spatially concentrated over the 1990s, the influence of the development in the non-farm economy, particularly in peri-urban rural areas across the state, provided local drivers of change that encouraged enterprise substitution to beef production, the farming system most readily combined by farm holders with another job. A full report on the mapping output will be produced in a forthcoming publication (see publications list)

How hard is the euro are core? An evaluation of growth cycles using wavelet analysis

Using recent advances in time-varying spectral methods, this research analyses the growth cycles of the core of the euro area in terms of frequency content and phasing of cycles. The methodology uses the con-tinuous wavelet transform (CWT) and also Hilbert wavelet pairs in the setting of a non-decimated discrete wavelet transform in order to analyse bivariate time series in terms of conventional frequency domain measures from spectral analysis. The findings are that coherence and phasing between the three core members of the euro area (France, Germany and Italy) have increased since the launch of the euro.time-varying spectral analysis; coherence; phase; business cycles; EMU; growth cycles; Hilbert trans-form; wavelet analysis

Návrat Modernismu

This 4,500 word essay explores the 'late' take-up of postmodernist theory in design in Czechoslovakia / Czech Republic after the Velvet Revolution in November 1989. Setting the scene by tracing the samizdat publication of the writings of Charles Jencks and others in Eastern Europe under communist rule, it argues that the enthusiastic but short-lived adoption of postmodern theory was closely connected to the political discourses of the immediate post-communist years. Focusing on the work of the design group Olgoj Chorchoj, it considers how designers and design theorists drew on legacy of the interwar period to provide images of modernity and pluralism after 1989. Crowley was commissioned to write this essay by Lada Hubatová-Vacková and Rostislav Koryčánek, the curators of a major Olgoj Chorchoj retrospective at the Moravian Gallery in 2016-17. The exhibition and the research involved was part funded by CEZ grant. The essays forms part of Crowley's ongoing research interest into parallels between postmodernism and post-communism in Eastern Europe

Analysis of airborne imaging spectrometer data for the Ruby Mountains, Montana, by use of absorption-band-depth images

Airborne Imaging Spectrometer-1 (AIS-1) data were obtained for an area of amphibolite grade metamorphic rocks that have moderate rangeland vegetation cover. Although rock exposures are sparse and patchy at this site, soils are visible through the vegetation and typically comprise 20 to 30 percent of the surface area. Channel averaged low band depth images for diagnostic soil rock absorption bands. Sets of three such images were combined to produce color composite band depth images. This relative simple approach did not require extensive calibration efforts and was effective for discerning a number of spectrally distinctive rocks and soils, including soils having high talc concentrations. The results show that the high spectral and spatial resolution of AIS-1 and future sensors hold considerable promise for mapping mineral variations in soil, even in moderately vegetated areas