Preclinical and clinical research have devoted limited attention to women’s health. Animal models centred on female-specific factors will improve our understanding of mental health disorders. Exploring the heterogeneity of mental health disorders, in concert with attention to female-specific factors, will accelerate the discovery of efficacious treatments for mental health disorders.

This article examines Bronisława Niżyńska’s (Bronislava Nijinska) ballet, Pieśń o ziemi (1937), in the Polski Balet Reprezentacyjny’s (Polish Representative Ballet) inaugural 1937–1938 season. The Polski Balet Reprezentacyjny was an ensemble instituted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to represent the Second Polish Republic as cultural diplomats. Domestic reviews betray conflicting opinions regarding Niżyńska’s role as an artistic representative of the Second Polish Republic. Therefore, this article argues that tepid reception of her choreographic work reveals an underlying hesitancy towards accepting her as a national artist. At the center of these questions remains the puzzling consideration of Niżyńska, who was situated between Europe’s modernist ballet tradition, heavily shaped by Russian émigrés, and Polish national culture. Examining Niżyńska’s choreographic praxis and complex biography suggests the reconsideration of Niżyńska as a purely Russophone artist, bringing to the fore the hitherto underexplored Polish dimension of her identity.

This article examines the cosmology of John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” in the context of the shift from a bright to a dark universe in the European cosmological imagination. While other comparable transformations—from geocentrism to heliocentrism, or a bounded to an unbounded universe—have been extensively studied, the turn from bright to dark space remains almost entirely neglected. Drawing on textual and visual evidence from antiquity to the present day, this article provides the first sustained exploration of the subject as well as a novel reading of Milton’s cosmology and the challenges it presents to the contemporary reader.

This analysis focuses on a young female portrait enclosed within an eight-pointed frame, located in the upper zone of a wall fragment discovered among a substantial assemblage of painted plaster within the fill of the torcularium of the Domus del Larario in the Municipium Augusta Bilbilis. The wall to which this fragment originally belonged likely formed part of a cubiculum within the same domus. The portrait is dated to the last quarter of the 1st c. BCE, making it the earliest known example of its kind to date. This study examines the potential significance of the portrait within one of the most prominent domus of the site, as well as its role in the broader figurative program of the wall it once adorned. In the middle zone of the composition, a couple is portrayed in a highly schematic manner. Together with the young female – likely their daughter – this may represent one of the earliest Roman depictions of a family group in a non-funerary context.