Haunted by Empire: Decentring ‘Early Russian Cinema’

This editorial introduces the double issue ( 15 and 16), which began in 2021. Opening with a general overview of existing scholarship in the field of ‘early Russian cinema’, it outlines the issue’s decentring approach to the study of cinema in the late Russian Empire and the intent to shed light on under-recognised contributors and overlooked aspects of the imperial film industry. The editorial critically reevaluates the term ‘Russian’ in the context of the Empire’s film production, fostering discussions on national identity and categorisation, including a shift in our spelling and naming habits, both scholarly and beyond academia. The editorial encapsulates the issue’s goal to inspire new cross-disciplinary and cross-national research, thereby enriching perspectives on the cinematic legacy of the Russian Empire. It offers a survey of the themes explored in the issue’s twelve articles and outlines how they collectively represent a starting point in the process of decentring our view of imperial film culture and contribute to expanding our understanding of it temporally, geographically, culturally, and – albeit to a lesser extent – methodologically and theoretically. The editorial concludes with summaries of each article

Cold War Sport, Film and Propaganda : A Comparative Analysis of the Superpowers

This document is the author's original submitted manuscript (pre-print) version. An updated version has been published by MIT Press in Journal of Cold War Studies, available online at doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/JCWS_a_00721.Films and sports played central roles in Cold War popular culture. Each helped set ideological agendas domestically and internationally while serving as powerful substitutes for direct superpower conflict. This article brings film and sport together by offering the first comparative analysis of how U.S. and Soviet cinema used sport as an instrument of propaganda during the Cold War. The article explores the different propaganda styles that U.S. and Soviet sports films adopted and pinpoints the political functions they performed. It considers what Cold War sports cinema can tell us about political culture in the United States and the Soviet Union after 1945 and about the complex battle for hearts and minds that was so important to the East-West conflict.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

A planet within the debris disk around the pre-main-sequence star AU Microscopii

AU Microscopii (AU Mic) is the second closest pre main sequence star, at a distance of 9.79 parsecs and with an age of 22 million years. AU Mic possesses a relatively rare and spatially resolved3 edge-on debris disk extending from about 35 to 210 astronomical units from the star, and with clumps exhibiting non-Keplerian motion. Detection of newly formed planets around such a star is challenged by the presence of spots, plage, flares and other manifestations of magnetic activity on the star. Here we report observations of a planet transiting AU Mic. The transiting planet, AU Mic b, has an orbital period of 8.46 days, an orbital distance of 0.07 astronomical units, a radius of 0.4 Jupiter radii, and a mass of less than 0.18 Jupiter masses at 3 sigma confidence. Our observations of a planet co-existing with a debris disk offer the opportunity to test the predictions of current models of planet formation and evolution.Comment: Nature, published June 24th [author spelling name fix