The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson)

Doctor Who, the Traveling Time Lord

Though they each arrive with an individual sense of humor and fashion, the fifteen Doctors reflect the political and social issues of their respective eras.
María Telón and María Mercedes Coroy in Ixcanul

The Development of Central American Film

A new collection of essays examines the reasons behind the recent boom in feature and documentary film-making from Belize to Panama.
A collage of cover images from Johns Hopkins’ Collection of Middle East-inspired Sheet Music

Sheet Music: the Original Problematic Pop?

A Johns Hopkins University curator of sheet music and pop culture discusses a “Middle East-inspired” sheet-music collection that’s anything but.
Hand drawn illustration of african woman with pink hair

Going “Black to the Future”

How has Afrofuturism supported the imagining of other worlds in the face of the anthropogenic climate crisis?
A cartoon illustration of Brigid in Puck, 1883

From Saint to Stereotype: A Story of Brigid

Caricatures of Irish immigrants—especially Irish women—have softened, but persist in characters whose Irishness is expressed in subtle cues.
Academy Award statue

A Night at the Oscars

All (or at least a lot) of what you need to know before going to this year’s Academy Awards watch party.
J. Robert Oppenheimer

The Annotated Oppenheimer

Celebrated and damned as the “father of the atomic bomb,” theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer lived a complicated scientific and political life.
Burt Lancaster in a scene from the film Birdman Of Alcatraz, 1962

Freeing Birdman of Alcatraz

Neither the Bureau of Prisons nor the Production Code Administration could stop the production of a movie about murderer and ornithologist Robert Stroud.
A vintage reel tape recorder on a pirate flag

Land of the Free, Home of the Bootleggers

When technology made music mobile, the American South changed from one type of bootlegging industry to another: copying and selling records.
Photo of Bob MARLEY; performing live on stage,

From Jamaica to the World: Contextualizing Bob Marley

Bob Marley’s life and music intersected with Pan-Africanism, the Rastafari movement, and post-colonial politics around the globe.