Recovering ocean treasures
For many decades, even centuries, shipwrecks lying in coastal waters have been subject to human interference, very often because of the treasures they contain. However, the enormous advances that have taken place in deep-sea technology over the last twenty-five years have meant that human beings now have physical access to almost every part of the ocean floor. Read full article
Priestley, Enlightenment, and Counter-Enlightenment
In July 1791 the house, library and laboratory of Joseph Priestley (1733 - 1804) in Sparkbrook near Birmingham were sacked and razed to the ground. Before attacking Priestley’s house, a crowd had broken windows and heckled guests at a dinner commemorating the second anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. Read full article
Art and the senses in Renaissance Italy
During my Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship, I have been working on a book entitled The Sound of Marble: The Sensory Reception of Art in Renaissance Italy. This volume explores how works of art, especially sculpted objects, were physically encountered by their original beholders in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy. Rather than focusing only on how such works were seen, it considers how they were also touched, held, caressed—and, in some cases, heard, smelled and even tasted. Read full article
Voices from the Cuban Revolution
The voices of Cubans living on the island are largely absent from debates about the Cuban Revolution. This project redresses that silence. Drawing on more than one hundred in-depth life history interviews recorded from 2004 to 2008 with women and men of different walks of life, generations, racial, sexual and religious identities, and political views, the project aims to understand different people’s sense of the achievements, limitations and failures of the revolutionary process. Read full article
