Emil Nolde, Red Clouds, watercolour on handmade paper, 34.5 x 44.7 cm.

How a Postwar German Literary Classic Helped Eclipse Painter Emil Nolde’s Relationship to Nazism

While Nolde was one of the many victims of the Third Reich’s repressive responses to “degenerate art,” he was also one of Nazism’s great admirers.
Virginia Woolf

A Hundred Years of Mrs. Dalloway

An exemplar of modernism, Virginia Woolf's revolutionary novel explored ideas—psychology, sexuality, imperialism—that roiled the twentieth century.
A security officer keeps watch at the entrance of Tom Liquor store at the intersection of Florence and Normandy in South Los Angeles, 201

What Convenience Stores Say About “Urban War Zones”

The Korean-owned corner shop in a Black neighborhood serves as shorthand for racial conflict, obscuring Los Angeles’s intersectional histories.
From the poster for Black Girl by Ousmane Sembène, 1966

Ousmane Sembène: Feminism in African Francophone Cinema

Known as “the grandfather of African cinema,” Sembène created powerful female characters who challenged Western notions of gender and sexuality.
Lucille Clifton posing for a photograph; Louisa H. Bowen University Archives and Special Collections; Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

Remembering Her Memories: Lucille Clifton’s Generations in Our Time

The poet stares history down in an artful, Whitman-infused exploration of traumas her family endured and survived.
An orangutan attacks a woman and pulls her hair in an illustration for the murder scene in Edgar Allan Poe's short story 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue,' early 1840s. A victim lies on the floor, and a witness watches through a window.

“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” by Edgar Allan Poe: Annotated

Poe's 1841 story, arguably the first detective fiction, contains many tropes now considered standard to the genre, including a brilliant, amateur detective.
"Spirit" photograph, supposedly taken during a seance, actually a double exposure or composite of superimposed cut-outs, showing woman with portraits of men and women around her head

How Spirit Photography Made Heaven Literal

Are the departed watching over us, and if so, what are they wearing? Victorian spiritualists believed that ghosts could be captured on film.
A woman writing a letter at a table

The Ladylike Language of Letters

Letters reveal how language changes. They also offer a peek into the way people--especially women--have always constructed their private and public selves.
Leonid Pasternak - The Passion of Creation

7 Pieces of Expert Writing Advice

Great fiction-writing advice and commiseration from novelists that we dug out of the JSTOR vaults for you procrastinating, er, research pleasure.
Oxford spires

Old English Has a Serious Image Problem

Although studying the language known as “Anglo-Saxon” helped women advance in the academy, the subject is fraught with racist associations.