Since 2018, the Chicory Revitalization Project (CRP) has used vernacular poetry published in Baltimore’s Chicory magazine (1966–1983) as the centerpiece of a public humanities project. Chicory existed at the intersection of the liberalism of the War on Poverty, which funded it, and the radical esthetics of the Black Arts Movement, which inspired it. After digitizing the magazine, the CRP has used Chicory as the basis of poetry workshops, public events, a traveling exhibition, and a new magazine. Through our work, we have come to see the vernacular poetry in Chicory as emotional history and the basis for intergenerational dialogue in the present. More accessible than canonical poetry, vernacular poetry reflects its historical moment through emotion. Building on this emotional connection, we encourage young writers and activists in Baltimore to engage in intergenerational dialogue with the poems and project stakeholders. When we read, interpret, and respond to poems written in the same place decades apart, an essentially civic question arises: What has changed or not? What is the role of place-based art in social justice?

In Bangladesh’s southwest delta, climate adaptation unfolds less through mass migration or master plans than through everyday routes. In August 2023, 40 young people from 5 flood-prone villages mapped 120 geotagged journeys to water points, schools, clinics, markets, and cyclone shelters. Their stories reveal “routes of care” patterns of movement that sustain families and keep communities rooted under pressure. Three practices recur: staying, where repair and mutual support enable life in place; leaving and looping back, where seasonal departures strengthen ties through return; and protection, where circuits of water, health, and education provide survival. These everyday mobilities challenge the binary of migration versus immobility and explain why national strategies such as Tidal River Management and the Bangladesh Delta Plan 2100 succeed only when aligned with lived routes. Four design principles emerge: map real paths first, value staying as care, support looped mobility, and integrate water, health, and schooling.

America’s history and culture wars have escalated at pace since Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025. And while the President’s second term has been marked by a rapid stream of executive orders and supporting remarks, articles, and statements affecting all aspects of life, it has demonstrated a particular interest in the nation’s cultural assets and has coalesced on the Smithsonian Institution. This article argues that Trump’s attention to the Smithsonian Institution has arisen because 2026 is the 250th anniversary of American independence. It presents archival evidence from the Smithsonian alongside contemporary analysis to demonstrate that the political playbook being utilized by President Trump has an extensive history. To make its point, the article offers a case study of The West as America, an exhibition that was shown in 1991 at the Smithsonian and generated such political controversy that it ended up being the subject of extensive questioning in Congress. The article aims to show the clear similarity between political and public responses to the 1991 exhibition—which was designed to commemorate a national anniversary but occurred in a period of heightened history wars—with conservative attempts to regulate culture in 2025, ahead of “America 250.” It exemplifies how important historical inquiry is in informing decisions and responses to processes of cultural production in the current era.

Taylor Swift’s 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, marks a pivotal shift in her branding and marketing from selling intimate relatability to selling spectacle. Once defined by her relatability and diaristic storytelling, Swift now embraces spectacle, excess, and self-mythologizing. For her most recent album, controversy over its marketing and content is polarizing, where some seeing her as unrelatable. On the album, Swift embraces strategies rooted in exclusivity, luxury, and provocative, explicit themes. Swift will not get any more relatable as she ascends to superstardom, and the question remains: Can an artist who rose to power by being relatable and intimate with fans still thrive when that very success makes them increasingly unreachable?

Taylor Swift has dreamt of two things: fame and success, and a quiet life with someone she loves. She dreams of making it and of escaping it. The problem is that these dreams seem to conflict. Achieving one can feel like giving up on the other. Swift’s new album, The Life of a Showgirl, finds both dreams well represented. She wants immortality and a basketball hoop in the driveway. She also has a new insight for reconciling them. Happiness can be made, she tells us. And if you make it with another person, you might be able to live two dreams that once felt impossible to fit together.

“The Fate of Ophelia,” the opening track on Taylor Swift’s album The Life of a Showgirl, includes an unsettling Shakespearean allusion. Ophelia was the jilted lover of the melancholy prince in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a woman whose life ends in suicide. Swift’s song says her fiancé, Travis Kelce, saved her from the fate of Ophelia, positioning her previous boyfriends as moody philosophers and the fun-loving jock Kelce as the anti-Hamlet. This song also recuperates Swift as a reader of Shakespeare after the startingly bad account of Romeo and Juliet in “Love Story,” the song that started Swift’s career.

Taylor Swift’s new album The Life of a Showgirl is littered with musical nostalgia, harkening back to previous musical eras. Songs such as “Opalite” reference these musical genres of the past with specific combinations of musical parameters such as chord progressions, unusual vocal and instrumental timbres, and subtle text cues. In this essay, I will explore several different ways in which music theorists and musicologists have theorized nostalgia, before demonstrating the musically nostalgic effectiveness of the song “Opalite.” I conclude by speculating on this musical nostalgia as a possible broader reflection of current American culture.

At midnight on October 3, Swift released her 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl—a record that, in just 11 hours, achieved more streams than any other album of 2025—and by 7 AM the next morning, the internet was ablaze with some of its most scathing indictments of Swift’s songwriting. The Life of a Showgirl is the first album Swift has released after her record-breaking tour, The Eras Tour, and follows Swift’s 11th album, The Tortured Poets Department, an album that is deeply introspective, poetic, and saturated with literary references of the most “tortured” kind. In comparison, the internet is right to notice the tone shift in The Life of a Showgirl. Swift’s writing on The Life of a Showgirl gets into character as adroitly as she does on Folklore, Evermore, and The Tortured Poets Department. The difference is, where the culture has been settling into Swift’s nineteenth-century preoccupations and allusions for the last five years, she has now stepped into a mid-twentieth century story-world with the likes of Jacqueline Susann and her 1966 cult classic, Valley of the Dolls.

When announcing The Life of a Showgirl on the New Heights podcast, Taylor Swift called her 12th album “exuberant and electric and vibrant.” In the weeks leading up to the album’s release, fans wondered what this would mean for Swift’s notoriously vulnerable Track 5. How would we reconcile an “infectiously joyful” album with the admittedly somber concept of Track 5’s “Eldest Daughter”? One theory lies in the location of “Eldest Daughter” in the tracklist, specifically positioned as a Track 5 and following “Father Figure.” It maintains the vulnerability traditionally associated with the position, but does so in a way that redefines it: “Eldest Daughter” is Swift’s first Track 5 not to be rooted in pain or doubt, but instead offering hope and reassurance. Thie vulnerability of Swift’s Track 5s allows her listeners to experience others’ (specifically Swift’s) stories of pain (or hope), which in turn provides them with a language to verbalize their own pain, a necessary step for healing and growth.

Who’s Taylor Swift, anyway? In this article, the author will discuss her two most recent albums, The Tortured Poets Department (2024) and The Life of a Showgirl (2025), through the lens of women’s musical and literary madness. This article argues that The Tortured Poets Department was, in essence, a mad scene akin to that of Lucia or Ophelia, and The Life of a Showgirl is what happens when a heroine returns to sanity—if she can be allowed to return at all.

As technology continues to shape how we engage with the world, museums are increasingly encouraged to adapt in order to appeal to younger audiences. Promoting exhibits through platforms such as Instagram and TikTok can be an effective way to attract visitors, but that doesn’t mean museum spaces themselves need to become more digitally driven. For a generation already saturated with screens, adding more technology to exhibitions may actually detract from the experience. In this essay, I explore the effects that excessive screen use has on us and argue that museums can offer something more meaningful by providing a break from the digital overload. To support my argument, I conducted a straw poll survey to better understand how other young people feel about technology in museum settings.

This piece examines Gunn’s Superman through a historical perspective, placing it within the context of Superman’s appeal and place in American culture since his first appearance in 1938. I argue that Gunn draws on the work of numerous versions of Superman to craft a cinematic version that hews closely to creator Jerry Siegel’s naive New Deal liberalism while speaking to the need of the moment. In essence, the film’s appeal to “Truth, Justice, and the Human Way” replicates the ideologically slippery “American way” that Superman fought for after Pearl Harbor. Gunn’s spin is that we must invest hope in humanity, and the capacity for empathy and kindness, in the face of soulless amoral power. That such an appeal seems radical says something of the Trumpian moment and the hyper reliance on technology and the devaluing of humanities, which is to say what makes us human.

This article reflects on the emergence of volumetric capture as a means to render human experience in three dimensions and how its applications in medicine, performance, and digital archiving are reshaping our relationship to documentation and embodiment. From 360-degree imagery to the advanced rendering techniques of Gaussian Splatting, these tools raise questions about the ethics of visualisation and the power to represent. This article draws on the work of scholars such as Taylor, Schneider, Kenderdine, Holling, and DeNora to challenge the notion of archives as neutral or static repositories and asks: in an age where our movements can be stored and repurposed, how do we navigate the tension between visibility and consent, between preservation and autonomy?

This article details the efforts made to map a project that commemorates the network of women and their collaborators who played a major role in shaping the post-war designed landscapes of the British Welfare State. It argues that despite the value attached to some parks and green spaces created in the twentieth century, many more have been overlooked and remain “unseen,” regardless of what we now know about their health and well-being benefits following the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, the role of an online open-access archive is explored as an innovative tool of public inquiry, in which the complexity of both archives and the passage of time are explored. The Women of the Welfare Landscape Historypin site was not solely focused on landscape architects and landscape architecture but also sought to communicate the perspectives of the communities that inhabit, work in, or recreate in landscapes that these pioneers developed. Through a contextualisation of the role of digital open-access mapping and archiving, along with local and social history, the project demonstrates the utility and opportunity of using an online and publicly accessible archive to show the humanities at work in public life.

The phrase “much ado about nothing” in popular discourse attempts to dispel suspicion, including in response to high-profile sexual assault allegations such as those against Harvey Weinstein. This article explores how Shakespeare’s play Much Ado About Nothing speaks to this trend. In the play, Claudio falsely accuses Hero of infidelity, abandoning her at the altar. For this play to be a comedy with a “happy” ending, Claudio must admit that he was mistaken. He discovers that consent (or, in the play’s vocabulary, “good will”) is a relational agreement between two equals, not a mediated exchange of property. Claudio’s mistake, the subject of Beatrice and Benedick’s teasing, is inherent to Weinstein’s defense arguments and other usages. Much Ado About Nothing provides a model for reforming our cultural concept of consent.

It has long been acknowledged that the past can be a weapon. In Palestine, reports of the targeting of archaeological sites, museums, archives, and other locations of cultural heritage by Tel Aviv have been increasing drastically since 7 October 2023 (although they took place before). This article seeks to contextualise these destructions of heritage within a larger project of controlling history and understands this project to be a cornerstone of European colonialism, comparing it with Britain’s colonial control over how ancient sites are interpreted in what is now Zimbabwe. It asks what the role of the historian is in a time of genocide and revisits what it means to do “decolonial” work while history is being weaponised for colonial occupation. And it requires those of us who are interested in the past (and especially the ancient past) to reckon with our position in the belly of the beast.

It is often claimed that public history represents a democratisation of historical knowledge, but how is “the public” being imagined here? This short article provides a report from a collaborative, student–staff research project that investigated how key stakeholders involved in public history—students, academics, and heritage professionals—understood their publics. It reflects on two key themes that emerged from the testimonies: issues of inclusion and positionality. We analyse a selection of telling cases, situating these extracts in the context of financial pressures, neo-liberal marketisation and the politicisation of DEI agendas. We suggest that there is a need for more open, reflexive, and cross-disciplinary dialogue between different stakeholders about the various publics they construct and engage.

This brief piece addresses the dispute sparked by Donald Trump’s executive order denying birthright citizenship to two classes of people traditionally included under the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. A primary goal is to provide a historical perspective on arguments made by both sides that are too frequently neglected in media coverage of the dispute. The piece does not predict how SCOTUS might rule, but it does make a case for the nation’s responsibility to children who have violated no law. Through textual and historical analysis, it also refutes two law professors who propose an originalist interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment that supports Trump’s effort to deny birthright citizenship to children born to undocumented immigrants. Drawing on works of literature, this article hopes to clarify the consequences of the complicated legal issues involved, including the bigoted history of previous efforts to restrict birthright citizenship.

This article argues that, as they are currently designed, UN climate talks fail to address the environmental catastrophe they aim to address. While dialogue is the primary means through which the world’s population can get together, discuss the scope and nature of the problem, and put appropriate measures into action, these talks are, year after year, employed as a way to create the illusion that democratic decision-making occurs. As a result, these kinds of events can only succeed in entrenching positions, exacerbating the impasse at which we currently find ourselves. This, in turn, solidifies the notion that we indeed need to engage in a dialogue about climate change, thus perpetuating a never-ending cycle that protects, under the veneer of planetary engagement, the continuation of capitalist business as usual. The article, therefore, proposes that a dialogic path to finding a solution to the climate catastrophe can only be successful if climate talks are rethought, placing at the helm voices from the most affected populations in the Global South. Otherwise, these talks will continue to fail in making a significant change that ensures the possibility of an environmentally just and viable future for the planet.