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An alternative history of Renaissance art from a Netherlandish perspective and focusing on printed images.

Through his treatises, letters, and support of printmaking projects, Bruges-born humanist Dominicus Lampsonius (1532–1599) tested the limits of what it meant to be an artist in the early modern period. This book—the first monographic study of Lampsonius to appear in the English language—investigates the convergence of art history, aesthetics, cultural politics, and theology in Lampsonius’s writings, with a particular focus on his novel theory of the printed image as a work of art.

In Lampsonius’s art history, painting recedes and engraving comes to the fore. This inversion of traditional hierarchies entailed a remaking of the Renaissance image as a graphic and replicable phenomenon. Here was a new way of looking at the image: not as a painted likeness of the sacred or the world, but rather as a graphic representation formed from the attenuated patterns of the engraved surface. In both meaning and making, printed images deflected the threats of iconoclasm precisely because, as manufactured objects, they could never be confused for what they represented—the sacred “prototype” they explicitly did not resemble. Tracing Lampsonius’s evolving views against the religious, political, and cultural upheaval of the Dutch Revolt, Edward H. Wouk considers the lasting implications of his efforts to change the course of art history.

A sweeping analysis of the lasting effects of neocolonial extractivism in Latin American aesthetic modernity from 1920 to the present

Looking to the extractive frontier as a focal point of Latin American art, literature, music, and film, Jens Andermann asks what emerges at the other end of landscape. Art in the Global South has long represented and interrogated “insurgent nature”—organic and inorganic matter, human and nonhuman life, thrown into turmoil.

In Entranced Earth: Art, Extractivism, and the End of Landscape, Andermann traces the impact of despaisamiento—world-destroying un-landscaping—throughout the Latin American modernist archive. At the same time, he explores innovative, resilient modes of allyship forged between diverse actors through their shared experiences of destruction. From the literary regionalism of the 1930s to contemporary bio art, from modernist garden architecture to representations of migration and displacement in sound art and film, Entranced Earth tracks the crisis of landscape and environmental exhaustion beyond despair toward speculative, experimental forms of survival.

2026 Association for Theatre in Higher Education Edited Works Award Winner

Enveloping Worlds is a collection of essays that analyzes the phenomenon of immersive, participatory performance as it has developed in the US. As this collection demonstrates, immersive performance offers three-dimensional multisensory experiences, inviting audience members to be participants in the unfolding of the story, and challenging pre-existing ideas about the function of performance and entertainment. Enveloping Worlds questions audience agency and choice, the space and boundaries of performance, modes of immersion, empathy and engagement, and ethical considerations through fifteen essays. 

Case studies in the volume include the Choctaw Cultural Center in Oklahoma and Choctaw sovereignty; a Black artist’s autoethnographic performance challenging White audiences’ entitlement to full inclusion; Immersive Van Gogh experiences and their scenographers; telephone performance during the COVID-19 lockdowns; Diane Paulus’s The Donkey Show; the Battle of Atlanta panorama; an antebellum-themed department store display from the 1920s; escape rooms; Disney Parks; remotely staged plays about aging and dementia; tiki bars; anachronistic costuming at Renaissance Festivals; the technologies that shape the boundaries of immersive worlds; and tabletop role-playing games. Taken together, these essays contribute a rich discussion of immersive performance across radically different contexts, offering analytical models and terminology with which to clarify and advance this emergent discourse.

Europe and Love in Cinema explores the relationship between love and Europeanness in a wide range of films from the 1920s to the present. A critical look at the manner in which love—in its broadest sense—is portrayed in cinema from across Europe and the United States, this volume exposes constructed notions of "Europeanness" that both set Europe apart and define some parts of it as more "European" than others. Through the international distribution process, these films in turn engage with ideas of Europe from both outside and within, while some, treated extensively in this volume, even offer alternative models of love. A bracing collection of essays from top film scholars, Europe and Love in Cinema demonstrates the centrality of desire to film narrative and explores multiple models of love within Europe's frontiers.

American landscape painter Mary Sipp Green, based in the bucolic Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts, has a superlative ability to engage the viewer in the emotive atmosphere of her landscapes and seascapes. The intensely saturated colors in her works evoke an immediate sense of place and a unique perspective on an intimate tableau. Sipp Green achieves an ethereal, nuanced quality in her paintings that imparts a refined and inimitable serenity. In Every Hour of the Light: The Paintings of mary Sipp Green, many of the subjects she paints—salt marshes, barns, meadows, rivers, and the occasional cityscape—are captured in the exquisite twilight of early evenings or a luminescent sunrise. The effect is dreamy yet grounded and familiar.

Sipp Green states, "While my preferred medium has always been oil on linen, my methods, techniques, and aesthetic aims have all undergone significant transformations since I first began. I learned my craft in the studio, painting still lifes and portraits, as well as landscapes drawn directly from nature. Over time, I became increasingly engaged with more abstract and spiritual aspects of the landscape form and I began to pursue a less representational, more expressive style." When describing her "diffuse quality of color," she explains, "I use many layers of paint, allowing each to dry before the next is applied. Along the way, the surface of the paint is often refigured in unpredictable ways, and there is much that has to be scraped, sanded, destroyed and reapplied before the essence of a place, its mood and atmosphere, finally emerges onto the canvas."

Forceful and eloquent essays on the American Indian in culture and history

In this sweeping work of memoir and commentary, leading cultural critic Paul Chaat Smith illustrates with dry wit and brutal honesty the contradictions of life in “the Indian business.”

Raised in suburban Maryland and Oklahoma, Smith dove head first into the political radicalism of the 1970s, working with the American Indian Movement until it dissolved into dysfunction and infighting. Afterward he lived in New York, the city of choice for political exiles, and eventually arrived in Washington, D.C., at the newly minted National Museum of the American Indian (“a bad idea whose time has come”) as a curator. In his journey from fighting activist to federal employee, Smith tells us he has discovered at least two things: there is no one true representation of the American Indian experience, and even the best intentions sometimes result in catastrophe.

Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong is a highly entertaining and, at times, searing critique of the deeply disputed role of American Indians in the United States. In “A Place Called Irony,” Smith whizzes through his early life, showing us the ironic pop culture signposts that marked this Native American’s coming of age in suburbia: “We would order Chinese food and slap a favorite video into the machine—the Grammy Awards or a Reagan press conference—and argue about Cyndi Lauper or who should coach the Knicks.” In “Lost in Translation,” Smith explores why American Indians are so often misunderstood and misrepresented in today’s media: “We’re lousy television.” In “Every Picture Tells a Story,” Smith remembers his Comanche grandfather as he muses on the images of American Indians as “a half-remembered presence, both comforting and dangerous, lurking just below the surface.”

Smith walks this tightrope between comforting and dangerous, offering unrepentant skepticism and, ultimately, empathy. “This book is called Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong, but it’s a book title, folks, not to be taken literally. Of course I don’t mean everything, just most things. And ‘you’ really means we, as in all of us.”

Evoking Newark is a systematic photographic documentation of Newark, NJ, from 1977-2024. This project creates a flexible framework for tracing Newark’s evolution. In this ambitious volume, award-winning photographer Camilo José Vergara creates an indelible record of the city, beginning along its most important commercial thoroughfares, such as Broad, Market, Springfield Ave., Clinton Ave., Central Ave., and MLK Jr. Blvd. He also takes a closer look at landmarks as well as more modest buildings whose folksy character caught his eye. As an urban documentary photographer, Vergara frequently returned to re-photograph Newark in order to track changes over time. For almost fifty years, he identified multiple street intersections that were particularly revealing settings for charting developments in the city.
 
Vergara examines in particular the slow renewal of these main thoroughfares, the demolition of high-rise housing projects, the ruination and clearing of industrial sites, the building of multi-family houses in once-vacant lots, and the construction of skyscrapers and cultural institutions. To complete the project, he added photos of graffiti and murals that comment on local and national events celebrating African American and Hispanic heroes and heroines and memorials remembering the dead. With these efforts at careful documentation, Brick City demonstrates the usefulness of a time-based documentary approach to the study of post-industrial urban areas. The photographs are accompanied by detailed captions about the locations portrayed, and in many cases by Vergara's own observations and transcripts of his interviews with local people as well as overheard conversations. The photos and captions are one way of telling us that “this happened,” and a means of refreshing the memories of viewers who have experienced Newark generations ago--recollections that contribute to their sense of identity.

András Koerner is the author of a number of critically acclaimed, award-winning CEU Press titles on the cultural history of Hungarian Jews and Jewish cuisine. This volume continues that tradition by discussing the phenomenon of exhibits on Jewish culinary culture in museums and galleries around the world.
The first part of the book provides an overview of the cultural history of "foodism" and the proliferation of Jewish museums. In addition, it examines the role of cuisine in Jewish identity. It offers an analysis of the history and recent examples of exhibitions on Jewish culinary culture, a subject that has not received scholarly attention until now.
The second part complements this by offering a detailed case study of the book’s subject. It showcases a 2022 exhibition in Budapest on the History of Hungarian Jewish Culinary Culture. András Koerner was the co-curator of the show, thus he is able to offer an insider’s account of its implementation – concept, scope, goals, audience, and design. He also openly discusses the compromises made and mistakes committed in the exhibition’s preparatory work.
This subjective account, quite different from the dry objectivity of catalogues, offers an unusual, behind-the-scenes look at how a complex exhibition like this is prepared. At the same time, the book’s appendix includes images of the display boards and some of the exhibited objects – thus it can also stand for a valuable ex-post catalogue.

In Exit of a Hero, Okechukwu Nwafor explores the cultural, political, and socioeconomic implications of photography in commemorative practices in southern Nigeria from the nineteenth century to the present. Focusing on obituary and commemorative photographs of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Lagos to contemporary funeral posters, booklets, and social media posts, Nwafor tracks the historical evolution of the iconic and heroic image. He argues that the quest to produce an ideal memorial body is not just a personal aesthetic choice but a deliberate photographic project that resonates with the Igbo aspirations for heroic achievement. 

Exit of a Hero asserts that the visual canonization transforms the deceased from a fallible being to an unimpeachable character who transcends underachievement, imperfection, and failed social performance to emerge as a saintly icon of the Igbo public sphere. In seeking an alternative, hyper-visible public self, social media reclaims the lost hero image of the deceased, reconstituting the contested Igbo public space as a lived reality where heroes and icons are actively and eternally commemorated. Nwafor unveils the creative imaginations of colonial subjects and postcolonial citizens as memorialization has become entangled within the intersecting discursive spaces of print culture and the public sphere.

In Austin, Texas, in 2002, a group of artists, activists, and academics led by performance studies scholar Omi Osun Joni L. Jones formed the Austin Project (tAP), which meets annually in order to provide a space for women of color and their allies to build relationships based on trust, creativity, and commitment to social justice by working together to write and perform work in the jazz aesthetic.

Inspired by this experience, this book is both an anthology of new writing and a sourcebook for those who would like to use creative writing and performance to energize their artistic, scholarly, and activist practices. Theoretical and historical essays by Omi Osun Joni L. Jones describe and define the African American tradition of art-making known as the jazz aesthetic, and explain how her own work in this tradition inspired her to start tAP.

Key artists in the tradition, from Bessie Award–winning choreographer Laurie Carlos and writer/performer Robbie McCauley to playwrights Daniel Alexander Jones and Carl Hancock Rux, worked with the women of tAP as mentors and teachers. This book brings together never-before-published, must-read materials by these nationally known artists and the transformative writing of tAP participants. A handbook for workshop leaders by Lambda Literary Award–winning writer Sharon Bridgforth, tAP's inaugural anchor artist, offers readers the tools for starting similar projects in their own communities. A full-length script of the 2005 tAP performance is an original documentation of the collaborative, breath-based, body work of the jazz aesthetic in theatre, and provides both a script for use by theatre artists and an invaluable documentation of a major transformative movement in contemporary performance.

What kind of history are photographs? Experiments in the Dark explores this question through the lens of a twentieth-century East African Indian Ocean photo studio collection, Capital Arts Studio (CAS), and its proprietors Ranchhod and Rohit Oza in Stone Town, Zanzibar. Pamila Gupta gathers and reads a range of photographs and genres from the studio, exploring how they relate to Zanzibar’s vibrant visual cultures during the Omani sultanate, British colonial, and postrevolution periods. Gupta’s reading of this little-known photographic archive brings the work into a broader historical context of the Indian Ocean in a visual archive that has endured despite the forces of history.

Through a blend of archival reconstruction and curation, personal reflection, and interviews with Rohit Oza, the son of the studio’s founder Ranchhod Oza, Gupta focuses on the construction and curation of the CAS collection and what this archive can tell us about the South Asian and Goan diasporas, the wider Indian Ocean world, African fashion, urban lives, and image making in Zanzibar from 1930 to 2024.

An accessible starting point for those interested in the past, present, and future of digital cultural heritage.

The digitization of cultural heritage has reshaped humanities research and professional practice, though its full impact is still emerging. As more cultural heritage becomes born-digital, new archives and collections introduce complexity, challenges, and shared methods across sectors. Exploring Digital Cultural Heritage examines interpretations, contexts, and uses across four themes—access, use and reuse, value(s), and sustainability—spanning digitized and born-digital materials. Drawing on case studies and practical examples, it provides an overview of the concepts, processes, and technologies shaping digital cultural heritage, as well as its future challenges and directions.