Stan Lai has been called ‘the major contemporary Asian playwright of his time, perhaps of all time’ (Robert Brustein), ‘the best Chinese-language playwright and director in the world’ (BBC) and ‘Asia’s top theatre director’ (Asiaweek). Born in the US and raised in America and Taiwan, Lai earned a PhD from UC Berkeley before launching a […]

This is a guest post by Tony Fry, author of Disappearing Cities While the arrival of climate change is recognised by vast numbers of people globally, the scale and diversity of its impacts are not well comprehended. There is now a lot of data, and only a limited understanding, and very little visual evidence, of […]

This is a guest post by Duncan McDuie-Ra, author of Insurgent Play: Social Worlds of Urban Disruption   Play is intrinsic to human existence and to some non-human animals too. We can think of play in different ways; as creative and destructive, as individual and collective, as production and consumption, as organised and spontaneous, as […]

This is an author interview by Keith McDonald and Wayne Johnson, authors of The Spectral West: Super-Nature and the Gothic and the Western Film   Q1. What was the importance of writing this book now? The Western has always been cyclical in terms of its popularity and the ways that it responds to socio/political/cultural tensions. […]

This is a guest post by Marty Branagan, author of The Cultural Dimensions of Peacebuilding Most of us – maybe even arms dealers – want to live in peace and safety. Yet violence is in epic proportions, particularly towards women, producing widespread fear and despair. Should we rely on governments and the United Nations to […]

Dubai-based Art Historian Maie El-Hage speaks to Sophie Kazan Makhlouf about her forthcoming book, The Development of An Art History in the UAE: An Art Not Made To Be Understood. ME-H: Though I know you have been writing articles and papers for a while, this is your first book, which is about the development of […]

The guest author for this post is Maryam Farahani, She is a Research Associate at the University of Liverpool and co-editor of Psycho-Literary Perspectives in Multimodal Contexts. During the long nineteenth century, Western Orientalists designed intimate portraits of the East, informed by new aesthetic principles. William Holman Hunt (1827-1910), for instance, painted a striking icon of Oriental romantic […]

  In late nineteenth-century Britain, theorist and critic John Ruskin and the designer, writer and activist William Morris began pioneering new approaches to design and the decorative arts. But what sort of relationship did they have and how did their approaches to crafts and politics differ? Dr Mark Frost, author of The Lost Companions and John Ruskin’s […]