Winner of the 2024 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize

How can exhibitions stage encounters between art and science that not only make sense for visitors but encourage them to explore the intricate relationship between themselves and the world further? This book presents a collection of texts that explore exhibitions as a medium for new insights into connections between aesthetic and scientific knowledge production and how such insights facilitate new, more holistic understandings of entanglements between self and lifeworld. The texts all take their outset in a series of three exhibitions called Wunderkammer at Esbjerg Art Museum in Denmark from 2018 to 2022. The three main texts cover the conception, presentation, and reception of the exhibitions, respectively elaborating the curatorial process, the aesthetics of the exhibitions and the reception of the exhibitions by individual visitors. Also included is a written dialogue of a more associative nature between members of the research group of art historians who were invited to experience the exhibitions and contemplate and discuss the implications of the series of exhibitions.

This book is the first of three planned volumes from the project Gokstad Revitalised, which is an archaeological revisit at the famous Viking Age ship grave originally excavated in 1880. The volume collect experiences from other archaeological revisits over the last decades, including the ship grave sites from Hedeby, Ladby and Sutton Hoo, as well as the royal monument at Jelling. It also reports on the research history of the Gokstad find and on a number of methodological feasibility studies carried out as preparation of the project. These include iron provenancing, aDNA, isotope analyses, osteology and new dendrochronological results. The final part of the volume discusses the paradox of planning a multi-year, frontrunner project in a field where methodological development is rapid and uncertainty abound, and share the project's experiences so far.

The story of the “conflict thesis” between science and religion—the notion of perennial conflict or warfare between the two—is part of our modern self-understanding. As the story goes, John William Draper (1811–1882) and Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) constructed dramatic narratives in the nineteenth century that cast religion as the relentless enemy of scientific progress. And yet, despite its resilience in popular culture, historians today have largely debunked the conflict thesis. Unravelling its origins, James Ungureanu argues that Draper and White actually hoped their narratives would preserve religious belief. For them, science was ultimately a scapegoat for a much larger and more important argument dating back to the Protestant Reformation, where one theological tradition was pitted against another—a more progressive, liberal, and diffusive Christianity against a more traditional, conservative, and orthodox Christianity. By the mid-nineteenth century, narratives of conflict between “science and religion” were largely deployed between contending theological schools of thought. However, these narratives were later appropriated by secularists, freethinkers, and atheists as weapons against all religion. By revisiting its origins, development, and popularization, Ungureanu ultimately reveals that the “conflict thesis” was just one of the many unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation.

Human and animal lives intersect, whether through direct physical contact or by inhabiting the same space at a different time. Environmental humanities scholars have begun investigating these relationships through the emerging field of multispecies studies, building on decades of work in animal history, feminist studies, and Indigenous epistemologies. Contributors to this volume consider the entangled human-animal relationships of a complex multispecies world, where domesticated animals, wild animals, and people cross paths, creating hybrid naturecultures. Technology, they argue, structures how animals and humans share spaces. From clothing to cars to computers, technology acts as a mediator and connector of lives across time and space. It facilitates ways of looking at, measuring, moving, and killing, as well as controlling, containing, conserving, and cooperating with animals. Sharing Spaces challenges us to analyze how technology shapes human relationships with the nonhuman world, exploring nonhuman animals as kin, companions, food, transgressors, entertainment, and tools.

Winner of the 2023 Drue Heinz Literature Prize Small in Real Life invokes the myth and melancholy of Southern California glamor, of starry-eyed women and men striving for their own Hollywood shimmer and the seamy undersides and luxurious mystique of the Golden State. Exiled to a Malibu rehab, an alcoholic paparazzo spies on his celebrity friend for an online tabloid. Down to her last dollar, a Hollywood hanger-on steals designer handbags from her dying friend’s bungalow. Blinded by grief, an LA judge atones after condescending to a failed actress on a date. When hunger for power, fame, and love betrays the senses, the characters in these nine stories must reckon with false choices and their search for belonging with the wrong people. Small in Real Life offers an insider’s view of California and the golden promises of possibility and redemption that have long made the West glitter.

Rhetoric and composition scholar Donna LeCourt combines theoretical inquiry, qualitative research, and rhetorical analysis to examine what it means to write for the “public” in an age when the distinctions between public and private have eroded. Public spaces are increasingly privatized, and individual subjectivities have been reconstructed according to market terms. Part critique and part road map, Social Mediations begins with a critical reading of digital public pedagogies, then turns to developing a new theory that can guide a more effective writing pedagogy. LeCourt offers a theory based in embodied relationality that uses information economies to develop public spheres. She highlights how information commodities generate value through circulation, orchestrate relationships among people, and support unequal power structures. By demonstrating how we can use information capital for social change rather than market expansion, writers and readers are encouraged to seek out encounters with cultural and political impact.

Study after study has shown that Scandinavia is the most trusting region in the world. Danes in particular trust other people and organizations—including strangers, businesses, governments, law enforcement, and media—more than the citizens of any other country. And countries with deep pools of social trust are populated by individuals who cooperate with each other in ways that allow public and private institutions to function more efficiently and cheaply. Is the Nordic countries’ high level of social trust just as important for creating prosperity and happiness within a population as other, more tangible economic factors? If so, where does this stock of social trust in Scandinavia come from? Does it help to explain the development of the universal welfare states and their surprisingly high business competitiveness? Can other nations learn from the region and apply that knowledge to settings where social trust levels are low or in danger of erosion? Social trust has proven economic value, and Gert Tinggaard Svendsen and Christian Bjørnskov warn that its benefits should never be taken for granted. Trust can dissolve and vanish quickly, and once gone, it is very difficult to rebuild. Governments and corporations are gradually increasing their control over people’s public and private lives, with predictably worrying results. When people feel taken advantage of or lied to, public confidence evaporates. Since strong social cohesion drives long-term prosperity, Nordic exceptionalism on maintaining and restoring trust offers valuable lessons.

South Sea Island. The Geography of Pleasure is a literary history of European, Russian and American travelogues, films, paintings, philosophical treatises, all fascinated by the Polynesian islands. Our ideas of nature, growth and sustainability are currently being challenged by climate change and sea level rise, with major identity and security policy implications that are particularly evident in the Pacific, but will also have consequences for the entire planet. The book is a contribution to a new global literary history and provides a historical in-depth perspective for highly topical discussions in interdisciplinary areas such as Pacific Studies, Island Studies, Ocean Studies and Planetary Studies.The Danish version of the book was nominated for 'Book of the year' in one of Denmark's most prominent newspaper and in another described as "epoch-making literary history" and shortlisted among the 5 non-fiction books in 2018, "which has made a difference". In addition, it was awarded the prestigious 'Georg Brande's Award' because it is "pioneering" and as the committee wrote: "Sydhavsøen [South Sea Island] is a book that conveys fascinating knowledge and theory in an exemplary way".

To study the built environment of the Americas is to wrestle with an inherent contradiction. While the disciplines of architecture, urban design, landscape, and planning share the fundamental belief that space and place matter, the overwhelming majority of canonical knowledge and the vernacular used to describe these disciplines comes from another, very different, continent. With this book, Fernando Luiz Lara discusses several theories of space—drawing on cartography, geography, anthropology, and mostly architecture—and proposes counterweights to five centuries of Eurocentrism. The first part of Spatial Theories for the Americas offers a critique of Eurocentrism in the discipline of architecture, problematizing its theoretical foundation in relation to the inseparability of modernization and colonization. The second part makes explicit the insufficiencies of a hegemonic Western tradition at the core of spatial theories by discussing a long list of authors who have thought about the Americas. To overcome centuries of Eurocentrism, Lara concludes, will require a tremendous effort, but, nonetheless, we have the responsibility of looking at the built environment of the Americas through our own lenses. Spatial Theories for the Americas proposes a fundamental step in that direction.

Staging Buenos Aires centers theater as a source of historical inquiry to understand how nonelites experienced and shaped a city undergoing dramatic transformations. Commercial theater constituted the core of the city’s public sphere, one in which middle-class playwrights and audiences assumed the leading role. Audiences and critics often disagreed about what was “acceptable” entertainment. Playwrights used theater to promote their own ideas of sociopolitical change, creating a space for working- and middle-class audiences to identify and push back against imposed regulations and attitudes. Cultural production on the city’s stages revealed fissures and social anxieties about the expansion of the political system and of the public sphere as women became increasingly visible in urban spaces. At the same time, theater also gave structure and meaning to these rapid changes, providing the space for the city’s playwrights and complex publics to play a key role in identifying, processing, and shaping the transforming nation. Plays helped audience members work through dramatic shifts in societal norms as urbanization and industrialization resulted in the visible decline of patriarchal social structures, made most visible in the urban sphere.

A new addition to the University of Pittsburgh Press Composition, Literacy, and Culture series.

Six years of excavations in Tell F3 have uncovered several occupation phases belonging to the middle of the 2nd millennium BC, Failaka period 3B (c. 1600 BC). Though the material culture of Dilmun was heavily influenced by South Mesopotamia, this was a period where Dilmun regained its former importance after the economic and political collapse around 1700 BC, perhaps leading up to a final conquest by the Sealand Dynasty. The end stages of the development of Dilmun stamp seals are documented, e.g. the first find of a Style III Dilmun seal in a safe period 3B context. The renaissance in stamp seal Style III is paralleled in stone vessels decorated in the Failaka Figurative Style.

Volumes 15,4 (134 pages) and 15,5 (247 pages, 259 ill., 45 A3 plates) are conceived as a single volume (III.1–2) comprised of two fascicules. III.1: The Harbour Fortifications of the Mounichia and Kantharos Harbours – Architecture and Topography.The primary objective of this fascicule is to present the results of the Zea Harbour Project’s investigations of the harbour fortifications at Mounichia in 2005 and the period 2007 to 2012 and to re-examine what can be known about the fortifications of Kantharos, which continues to serve as the Piraeus’ principal harbour to the present day. Chapter 1 (Introduction) considers the objectives, textual sources, archaeological evidence, terminology, and methodology involved, introducing two new terms: “fortified mole” and “fortified breakwater.” Chapter 2 presents the textual evidence relating to the fortifications of the Piraeus, contextualising these structures within the history of the Piraeus from the late 6th century BC until their destruction by Sulla’s forces in 86 BC. Chapter 3 offers an overview of the documentation created by travellers since 1589, topographers since 1686, and scholars since 1881, focusing on their descriptions of the structural remains of the harbours in the Piraeus, but also bringing relevant cartographic, photographic, and artistic documents into consideration. Chapter 4 explores the topography of the fortifications at Kantharos Harbour based on published data. Chapter 5 does likewise for Mounichia, drawing on the findings of the Project’s fieldwork there to provide a detailed analysis of the harbour fortifications’ architecture, supported by feature catalogues of the northern and southern fortified moles. These monumental structures were probably initially constructed in the early 5th century BC. Two later building phases belonging to the 5th century BC (in all probability 429/28 BC or shortly thereafter) and the 4th to 3rd centuries BC have been identified.III.2: The Themistoclean Shipsheds in Group 1 at Mounichia Harbour – Architecture, Topography and Finds.This fascicule presents the findings of the Project’s 2010–2012 investigations on the northern side of Mounichia Harbour to discuss the architecture and topography of Shipsheds 1–7 in Group 1. Chapter 1 is devoted to the survey and excavation of this set of shipsheds. Shipshed 1(α), dated to terminus post quem 500–480 BC, represents the Zea Harbour Project’s most important discovery: of all the Classical-period structures in the Piraeus, only Shipshed 1(α) has a compelling claim to be linked to Themistocles’ building programme. Chapter 2 offers a survey and catalogue of the ceramics and other small finds discovered during the excavation of Shipshed 1(α) and of the northern fortified mole at Mounichia. Appendices, Figures, and Plates complete the volume.

This publication offers a comprehensive presentation of the architecture of the theatre at Kalydon in Aitolia, which was excavated recently in a Danish-Greek collaborative project. The volumes contain main chapters on the architecture with detailed plans, sections, photographs, and reconstructions, as well as thorough presentations of the small finds, such as coins, pottery, glass, metals, and figurines found in the excavations of the theatre. The publication also includes special studies on the theatre’s acoustic properties and an anthropological study of the osteological evidence from a Byzantine grave. The theatre, dating to the Classical and Hellenistic periods, is unique among ancient Greek theatres due to its unusual pi-shaped auditorium, and its place in the general development of ancient Greek theatres is discussed in great detail. This publication of a unique building in ancient Greek architecture will not only enhance our knowledge on ancient Greek theatre architecture in general but also add new evidence pertaining to the activities of the ancient Kalydonians and the historical development of their city.