London vs. Paris : imperial exhibitions, transitory spaces, and metropolitan networks, 1880-1930

Defence date: 11 December 2004Examining Board: Prof. Peter Becker, European University Institute, Florence ; Prof. John Brewer, California Institute of Technology, Los Angeles (Supervisor) ; Prof. Jürgen Osterhammel, Universität Konstanz ; Prof. Luisa Passerini, Università di Torino ; Prof. Bernd Weisbrod, Georg-August-Universität GöttingenPDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digitised archive of EUI PhD theses completed between 2013 and 201

Fleeting cities : imperial expositions in fin-de-siècle Europe

Imperial expositions held in fin-de-siècle London, Paris and Berlin were knots in a world-wide web. Conceptualizing exhibitions as meta-media, Fleeting Cities undertakes a transdisciplinary investigation into how modernity was created and displayed, consumed and disputed within the European metropolis. Focusing on five such expositions – the Berliner Gewerbeausstellung (1896), the fifth Parisian Exposition Universelle (1900), the Franco-British Exhibition in London (1908), the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley (1924/25), and the Exposition Coloniale Internationale in Paris (1931) – this award-winning book examines their specific aims and aspirations, evolving forms and execution, and the public debates they engendered. Who shaped these mega-events, how were exposition venues inscribed into the urban fabric, what legacies did they bequeath? Taken as dense textures stretched over time, these expositions undergo both a close hermeneutic reading and broad spatial analysis. Fleeting Cities weaves extensive empirical research with underlying theoretical concerns, investigating their individual meanings in a new form of transnational network analysis.-- Figures and Plates -- Abbreviations -- Acknowledgments -- 1 Introduction: How to Read an Exposition -- 2 Berlin 1896: Wilhelm II, Georg Simmel, and the Berliner Gewerbeausstellung -- 3 Paris 1900: The Exposition universelle as a Century's Protean Synthesis -- 4 London 1908: Imre Kiralfy and the Franco-British Exhibition -- 5 Wembley 1924: The British Empire Exhibition as a Suburban Metropolis -- 6 Vincennes 1931: The Exposition coloniale as the Apotheosis of Imperial Modernity -- 7 Conclusion: Exhibition Fatigue, or the Rise and Fall of a Mass Medium -- Coda: Pictures at an Exhibition -- Appendix -- Bibliography -- IndexPublished version of EUI PhD thesis, 200

Esposizioni in Europa tra Otto e Novecento: spazi, organizzazione, rappresentazioni

Numero monografico della rivista di storia contemporanea "Memoria e Ricerca". ISSN 1127-019

Modern Magie: Sites of the Occult and the Epistemology of the Supernatural, 1880-1930

This article serves as a thematic, conceptual and historiographical introduction to the entire volume. A brief presentation of its three central questions (the representation of the supernatural in the medja, the contingent boundary between the sensuous and the extrasensory, and the spatial conditions of the occult in an urban context) is followed by an epistemological examination of four heuristical concepts (occultism and science, spiritism and belief, mysticism and experience, esotericism and knowledge) and a discussion of the volume's four leitmotifs (religion versus science, personae versus networks, this world versus the next, metropole versus province). Rather than insisting on an analysis of the occult and its urban sites in the context of modernity, a more productive approach explores questions of the epistemology of the occult.This article serves as a thematic, conceptual and historiographical introduction to the entire volume. A brief presentation of its three central questions (the representation of the supernatural in the medja, the contingent boundary between the sensuous and the extrasensory, and the spatial conditions of the occult in an urban context) is followed by an epistemological examination of four heuristical concepts (occultism and science, spiritism and belief, mysticism and experience, esotericism and knowledge) and a discussion of the volume's four leitmotifs (religion versus science, personae versus networks, this world versus the next, metropole versus province). Rather than insisting on an analysis of the occult and its urban sites in the context of modernity, a more productive approach explores questions of the epistemology of the occult

Laboratories for global space-time: science-fictionality and the World’s Fairs, 1851-1939

This article examines the world’s fair movement between The Great Exhibition of 1851 and The New York World’s Fair of 1939, suggesting that these sites are science-fictional spaces that expose their mass audiences to forms of space-time compression that enable early figurations of globalization. Fair sites embody specific forms of economic transfer and exchange that anticipate dreams of the borderless flows of capital in some current versions of globalization theory. This “sfnal” condition of the world’s-fair site is not just in the futuristic displays of techno-scientific “progress,” which became an insistent form of spectacle in the world’s fair, but also in the spatialization of developmental histories, reading conceptions of modernity remorselessly through hierarchies of racial “progress” or spectacles of anachronistic “arrest” or degenerative “decline.” Long before the famous Futurama of 1939 New York, world’s fairs were one of the first spaces in which large populations experienced deliberate and sustained disadjustment in time within a bounded zone, an early sense of immersion in the “science-fictional.