Picturing Feminism,Selling Liberalism: The Case of the Disappearing Holbein

Responding to recent scholarly and activist discussions of the public museum as a site of anti-feminism, this article examines the historical development of ‘feminist museology’ in Britain. Focusing on the mystery and controversies surrounding an anonymous woman’s gift of Hans Holbein’s Christina of Denmark to the National Gallery in 1909, this study investigates the dynamic of art, gender, and citizenship during the prewar Liberal crisis. The Holbein debates marked an important shift in the institutional status of feminism and the gendered parameters of cultural property, and offer a new perspective on our own practices of heritage and patrimony.     

The Singing War: Canadian Soldiers' Songs of the Great War

Singing was an important leisure activity for Canadian soldiers serving overseas in the Great War. Soldiers sang popular songs of the day and religious hymns, while also parodying them to better suit their wartime experience. Singing was a group activity that brought men together, forged bonds of comradeship, reinforced belonging in the group, and helped the soldiers endure the strain of unending combat and service. Wartime songs reveal the culture from below and shed new light on the soldiers' experience.     

The Forgotten History of the Protestant Crusade: Religious Liberalism in Ireland1

Irish historians do not generally identify religious liberalism as a feature of the 1820s. Instead, they have mapped religious conflict onto increasingly binary conflicts in the socio‐economic, cultural, and political spheres. The “Second Reformation” missionary movement put evangelicals and Catholics on a direct collision course and, consequently, historians have argued that it was a key factor in the emergence both of Irish Catholic nationalism and Protestant defensive co‐operation. However, the Crusade also produced a strong Protestant backlash alongside the growing sectarian conflict. In County Limerick, for example, two versions of Church of Ireland opposition emerged during 1820, among high church clergy including Bishop Jebb and among liberal Protestant gentlemen. Instead of closing down debate into rigid binary opposition along sectarian lines, the Limerick evidence shows that the Crusade produced a much more complex religious, social, and political debate than historians have recognised which, in turn, made possible a wider range of responses to key Irish problems.     

The Great War of Enclosure: Securing the Skies

Swarms of police drones, fleets of overhead delivery bots, and flocks of private security drones are set to multiply the complex interfaces between state, capital, and sense. This paper explores the military and economic enclosure of the atmosphere by drones. For centuries, capitalist enclosure has privatized and secured common spaces: territorializing new power relations into the soil. Enclosure now operates through an increasingly atmospheric spatiality. The birth of airpower enabled new vertical regimes of state power, capital accumulation, and violence. Now, drones are materializing both intimate and pervasive colonizations of local, national, and international airspace. Crucially, this discloses new morphologies and ontologies of urban (in)security, in which an atmospheric state polices deterritorialized aerial circulations. Such a reenchanted atmosphere collapses the geopolitical and geoeconomic in uncertain robotic orbits. This paper, which connects past and present, is driven by a deeper concern for the existential dimensions of dronified skyscapes, subjects, and violence.