Mocking the Monarch: What Do Memes About Queen Elizabeth II Have In Common With Unruly Spectators of Renaissance Spectacle?

“My hobby is Netflix, so what?” – Stranger Things and platformized fandom

You might have seen it around on someone’s Tinder profile or overheard it in a nearby train conversation: “My hobby is Netflix.” Does being active on a streaming platform count as an actual hobby now? Mitchell van Vuren argues that it is – most of us might have already become a ‘Netflix fan.’

Georges Perec and his Sites of Memory

Lieux, by the 20th-century French author Georges Perec, is an experimental collection of texts and photographs describing the author’s sites of memory. In this blog, Annelies Schulte Nordholt introduces you to Perec’s and to her own book Georges Perec et ses lieux de mémoire (Brill, Leiden, 2022).

The Evolving Videogame Input – Motion as Means of Interaction

Videogames dominate the entertainment industry because they necessitate interaction, transforming spectators into players. This interaction has assumed multiple forms. Miguel Mira explores how motion as a means of interaction seems to have found a home as an integral part of virtual reality.

Off-Beat: Did Galen Really Pioneer Diagnostic Use of the Pulse?

The internet presents a maelstrom of misinformation when it comes to ancient medicine. In this blog, Glyn debunks a claim about an important ancient medical author: Galen. He examines several older biological texts to refute that Galen was the first to use examination of the pulse in diagnosis.

Quartiere Vittoria, a Little-Known Italian Novel with German Roots

There are many novels in danger of being forgotten. In this blog, Carmen Van den Bergh sheds light on one of these endangered books: Quartiere Vittoria (1936) by the Italian writer Ugo Dèttore. Van den Bergh will re-vitalize this book by positioning it in the context of European Modernism.

After dark falls: the night as a space-time of migrant community building, reflection and resistance

Even though we mostly sleep through it, the night is an important space-time for different communities to get together, to remember and share experiences. As a PhD Candidate for the NITE project, Seger Kersbergen rediscovers the centrality of the night for Cape Verdeans in Rotterdam through music.

MUNGANGA - a documentary

Francianne dos Santos Velho shares her experiences as a research assistant in the HERA project Night Spaces: Migration, Culture and Integration in Europe. She directed the documentary MUNGANGA (2022), which connects with her PhD project on migrant workers in Brazil and the Netherlands.

How Do we Know What Fictive Characters Feel? The Reader as ‘legilimens’ of Rowling’s Cho Chang and Vergil’s Dido

‘One person can’t feel all this at once, they’d explode’. Hermione Granger is met with disbelief, after explaining a friend’s many emotions. Her snappy retort: ‘Just because you’ve got the emotional range of a teaspoon, doesn’t mean we all have’. But how (by Merlin’s beard) can she explain all this?