Breath is an autonomic function that is essential for life. Luce Irigaray writes, in “The Age of Breath,” “breathing, in fact, corresponds to the first autonomous gesture of a human being.”1 In a less anthropocentric, more physiological sense, breath, as a term, catches and brings together all those processes by which beings with lungs take in…
The human body is an intricate network of multiple functioning sub-systems. Many unobserved processes quietly keep running within the body even while we remain largely unconscious of them. For decades, scientists have sought to understand how different physiological systems work and how they can be mathematically modeled. Mathematical models of biol…
This book explores what’s happening to ways of seeing urban spaces in the contemporary moment, when so many of the technologies through which cities are visualized are digital. It is by no means comprehensive. Its chapters all explore specif ic examples of different kinds of digital technologies and examine different sorts of images in different cities: many other technologies, images and cit…
This open access book explores how medieval societies conversed about the city and citizen in texts, visual imagery and material culture. It adopts a long-term, interdisciplinary, and cross-cultural perspective, bringing together contributions on the early, high, and later Middle Ages, covering both the medieval East and West, and representing a wide variety of disciplinary angles and sources. …
n an era where environmental sustainability and resource scarcity are becoming increasingly critical concerns, innovative approaches to wastewater treatment and energy recovery have gained significant attention. The convergence of nanotechnology and biotechnology has paved the way for revolutionary solutions that address these challenges in unprecedented ways. This book Nanobiohybrids for Advan…
The haunts of my youth have vanished, in two senses — they rest under layers of mental debris, accumulated along life’s way, and under the lava that flowed from the flanks of Mount Helgafell, “Holy Mountain,” in Iceland’s Westman Islands in 1973. These facts evoke in me both pure curiosity and a poignant sense of loss. Where is my home? As have so many ot…
A poorly designed bottle sits atop a mantelpiece, contents slowly leaking into the surrounding environment. Not toxic, but affective, this bottle contains air collected from the Irish countryside—captured, commodified, and trans-ported across the globe to lonely “expats” separated from families amid the shuttering of global borders in response to the COVID-19 pandem…
In the past few decades, scholars have celebrated the end of history and pro-claimed its rebirth. Outside the walls of the academy, in the media, it is easy to find claims that readers and viewers are “witnessing” (or consuming) history, that certain events, from pie- eating contests to war catastrophes and natural phenomena, are “historical.” Govern…
How do people make sense of works of art? And how do they write to make others see the same way? There are many guides to looking at art, histories of art history and art criticism, and accounts of various ‘theories’ and ‘methods’, but this book offers something very unlike the normal search for difference and division: it examines the general and largely unspoken norms shared by interp…