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.
A drawing of a microphone

Performing Memory in Refugee Rap

Hip-hop and other performative arts offer Southeast Asian American immigrants a way to construct richer narratives about the refugee experience.
Garrett Hongo

I Hear America Singing

Japanese American poet Garrett Hongo is a guiding spirit to a glorious cacophony, an exuberant collective thrum made of different tongues and peoples.
The Goddess Nekhbet, Temple of Hatshepsut

Vulture Cultures

By turns worshipped and reviled, the bird frequently associated with death has appeared in art works for thousands of years. Here’s a short history.
Impression, Sunrise by Claude Monet

The Art of Impressionism: A Reading List

The first exhibition of paintings that would come to be described as Impressionism opened in Paris on April 15, 1874.
Taj Mahal, 2007

The Taj Mahal Today

In parallel with the recent shift in political attitudes toward Islamic heritage, India’s most famous monument may need to find a new place in history.
Joseph Bologne de Saint-George

Fencer, Violinist, Composer: The Life of Joseph Bologne

As a musician of color during the Ancien Régime and French Revolution, Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, lived a life unlike those of his peers.
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 Garden of Verses

As commonplace books evolved into anthologies, they developed reputations as canonical works, their editors curating tomes as vibrant as the loveliest bouquets.
Art Nouveau image of a person looking at a book of poetry, 1898 Velhagen Monatsheft

Make Your Own Poetry Anthology

Teaching students to make their own poetry anthologies in the form of a commonplace book gives them insight into the power, and problems, of curation.