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The retirement of Philip Roth in 2012 signifies a definite break with the past, the silencing of one of the last living links with the Jewish generation that dominated post-war American literary culture (Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Isaac Bashevis Singer et al.). This does not, however, …

The recent rise of the interdisciplinary subfield of “Energy Humanities” as a prominent critical endeavour has seen an efflorescence of academic and cultural production from around the world focussing on the crucial topic of energy resources. A major spur for this work is, of course, the …

The transition of popular television programmes to film is a familiar route, but one that has had mixed results. The list of examples is extensive, from The X Files and Sex In The City, to The Fugitive, Doctor Who, Star Trek and a host of ’70s British Sitcoms, and most recently, The Man F…

The composition of saints' lives in medieval literature was more than an act of devotion. Alongside allowing their authors to explore and express their faith, the writing of saints' lives provided opportunities to explore subjects such as the foundation myths of religious communities, tra…

The Open Library of Humanities – gold open-access, peer-reviewed, multi-journal library – seeks a broad range of contributions from scholars across the disciplines of art history and visual studies for their inaugural issue on visual culture. This special issue invites contributions in th…

In 1968, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and his colleagues at the University of Nairobi called for the abolition of the English department. They attacked an enduring colonial legacy and envisioned an intellectual renaissance in Africa. Conversely, in recent years, many departments have found themselve…

The last fifteen years have seen substantial changes in the way scholars have engaged with US literature and culture. In particular, the rise of two methodological paradigms, TRANSNATIONALISM and PRINT CULTURE STUDIES, have paved the way for exciting new approaches to key questions that h…

“Big picture” history is vulnerable to the distortion of the wide-angle lens and the grandiosity of the panorama. Microhistory has become the norm on account of offering fine-grained fidelity to “lived experience,” yet it can suffer from myopia and make a fetish of uniqueness, or overreac…

  The connection between belief and healing has featured in almost every human civilization. From its central presence in the narratives of the Abrahamic religions, through to studies of the placebo effect, societies have long been fascinated by the capacity of faith to heal, wheth…

  As the chorus of Aeschylus' Agamemnon reminds us through the maxim pathei mathos (“through suffering comes learning”), ancient notions of teaching and learning extend well beyond the walls of the classroom. Despite Aeschylus' concise formulation, the complex processes underlying …

  The first in a series of calls for papers for OLH special collections. In April 2013, the Society for the Anthropology of Religion held its biennial meeting in Pasadena, California, USA.  The theme was “Religious Syncretism and Synergies.”  This gathering of schol…