An illustration from Christine de Pizan's The Book of the City of Ladies, 1405

Medieval Friendships: No Girls Allowed

Medieval European elites inherited the classical concept of friendship as something possible only for men. Christine de Pizan and Margery Kempe beg to differ.
Hand Holding a Pocket Watch

Keeping Time: A New Year’s Collection

A selection of stories that chronicle our complicated notions of time.
William Butler Yeats with his wife Georgie Hyde Lees, 1923

Yeats and the Occult Imagination

Beneath his poems lay a lifelong devotion to magic, divination, and a visionary system that shaped his most prophetic work.
Snowflake Waltz in the White Forest (The Nutcracker Act I, Scene III) performed by The New York City Ballet in 1954.

Making Sense of The Nutcracker’s Libretto

Early audiences loved it, even as critics questioned its structure. Returning to the story helps illuminate what makes the ballet so strangely captivating.
Amanda Gorman, Walt Whitman, and Joy Harjo

Poetry’s Vital Role in Politics

Like Walt Whitman before them, Joy Harjo and Amanda Gorman are reimagining what it means to be a poet in this democratic republic.
An illustration from the cover of Amrita Pritam's Pinjar

Caught in Partition’s Violent Fray

Published seventy-five year ago, Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar explores the devastation suffered by the women of India and Pakistan after political rupture.
Lobby card for 1932 film Freaks

Tod Browning’s Freaks

Freaks asked audiences to think about the exploitative display of human difference while also demonstrating that the sideshow was a locus of community.
A selection of images from the Heinz Gaube Lebanese Architectural Photographs Collection, housed at Notre Dame University-Louaize

Documenting a Disappearing Architecture

The Heinz Gaube Lebanese Architectural Photographs Collection, supported by an innovative mapping project, details threatened buildings across Lebanon.
Engraved scene from the works of William Shakespeare; the death of Caesar in 'The Tragedy of Julius Caesar', 1599.

The Lessons of Due Process in Julius Caesar

Shakespeare's tragedy offers a telling parable about the administration of justice—and rife mishandling thereof—in our day.
A portrait of Frances Brooke beside the cover page for the book The History of Emily Montague

The First Canadian Novel

Often considered the first Canadian novel, The History of Emily Montague revealed its author’s true feelings about colonial Quebec.