Recently, a renewed history of foreign immigration in Italy, focusing on the very first migration flows after the Second World War, has offered a more appropriate periodisation of the phenomenon. Women have been at the forefront of these flows, which were initially determined by the new postcolonial setting of the former Italian colonies (Eritrea, Somalia and Ethiopia). Subsequently, the immigrants came from various other countries (Spain, Cape Verde, Portugal, El Salvador, Peru, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Ceylon, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan). At the same time, the majority of them were employed in a specific sector of the labour market: domestic work. This article focuses on female immigrants who were employed as domestic workers, their presence in public discourse in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s, and government policies in this area. Drawing on statistical data and surveys, press and audiovisual materials, and feminist theory and practices, it aims to analyse the construction of paradigms – visibility, invisibility, subalternity, rights and racialisation – associated with female immigration and domestic work as a specific sector of employment.

This introduction to the special issue ‘Gender and Work in Twentieth-Century Italy’ draws on key strands of historical scholarship on gender and work, including women workers’ experiences, labour market discrimination, domestic work, the impact of gender norms, and ideas of masculinity and femininity on work identities. It traces the development of feminist influence within this scholarship, from making women workers’ experiences visible to challenging essentialist notions of gender identities. Drawing on post-structuralist and intersectional perspectives, particularly influenced by Joan Wallach Scott and Judith Butler, the scholarship on which this special issue is based understands gender as a system of power signified through language and social constructions, and builds on the critique of the dichotomies and essentialisations of traditional labour history, proposing a systemic and structural approach to understanding gendered experiences of work. By exploring the intersections of gender, work and power, this collection offers insights into wider European developments and challenges established historical concepts and narratives. It highlights the importance of understanding gender dynamics in shaping labour relations and social structures, ultimately contributing to a more nuanced understanding of labour and power dynamics in twentieth-century Italy and beyond.

This survey reflects on a creative workshop which the authors ran for the ‘The State of Urban History: Past, Present, Future’ conference (July 2023). ‘Making manifestos for urban history’ was an experiment to encourage small group work and co-operative outputs in a conference setting, allowing for an atypical ‘many-to-many’ model of participation. During the session, five groups each produced a manifesto poster addressing issues that they thought were important for the future of urban history. The survey sets out the form the workshop followed, considers those who were involved and comments on how successful the workshop was in fostering conference community and active learning. Feedback recorded at the end of the session indicated that it was indeed successful in both these areas. Overall, the workshop demonstrated that when urban historians work together across generations and continents, they produce work of real value, which is resilient and sustainable.

This paper investigates correlations between theme vowels and argument structure in Serbo-Croatian. Specifically, we focus on two different theme vowels, -i- and -ova-, isolating ‘minimal pairs’, that is cases where the same base combines with the two theme vowels to derive different verbs. Starting from two online corpora of Serbo-Croatian, we created a comprehensive list of -i-/-ova- minimal pairs. For all pairs in the list whose both members were attested at least 50 times in the corpora, we randomly selected 50 tokens per verb and annotated them for transitivity. A statistical comparison of -i- and -ova- verbs according to the proportions of transitive uses was carried out. The findings show that -i- verbs are much more likely to be used transitively than -ova- verbs. This finding corroborates the view that theme vowels are associated with argument structure properties and challenges the idea that they are universally ‘ornamental’ pieces of morphology without syntactic/semantic import. Based on these and supplementary (non-corpus) data, we claim that -i- derives transitives and unaccusatives, while -ova- derives unergatives. We propose a model couched in Distributed Morphology whereby these two theme vowels are treated as instantiations of different ‘flavors of v’.

The survey examines the past, present and future of the urban history field in Britain, mixing memories and reflections. I trace the global turn of that field and the challenges it brings. One argument concerns the impact of a global scale on the methods and the explanatory frameworks used. A second concern is the role of economic history and economic frameworks of analysis in the writing of urban history, and I advocate their continued relevance.

This article focuses on four digital resources for researching nineteenth-century women in music. Two are over two decades old and hail from the German-speaking world: Musik(vermittlung) und Gender(forschung) im Internet (MuGI) and the Sophie Drinker Institut online lexicon. The remaining pair are emerging digital resources based in the United States: Art Song Augmented and the Boulanger Initiative Database (BID).

As a vernacular dwelling form, the historical hutong districts in Beijing have represented local people’s traditional ways of living and thinking. However, in recent decades, such urban memories have dissipated as the old cityscape has gradually been overwritten by modernist, international-style designs. To ensure that locality and identity are not forgotten, this article examines the potential role of fiction films as a form of digital ‘lieux de mémoire’ (sites of memory), which not only archives but also evokes nostalgia for memories lost in urban transition. This interdisciplinary study rereads the extensive modernist transformation of Beijing’s historical hutong area through the lens of film (1940s–2010s), and thus brings a humanized, historical insight into this vernacular cityscape by focusing on reviving and strengthening the fading urban qualities.

Islamic veiling has attracted a remarkable degree of international and domestic attention in the current political climate. In the popular and political climate, the argument for social cohesion (or living together) is frequently invoked to justify bans on wearing Islamic veils. For example, the social cohesion argument was widely used in parliamentary debates leading up to the bans on wearing Islamic full-face veils (such as burqa or niqab) in France and Belgium. In response to the French and Belgian bans, the European Court of Human Rights has ruled that a ban on wearing Islamic full-face veils is justified on the grounds of living together, rulings that many academic circles have criticized. Yet in this extensive commentary on the bans of Islamic veiling, one important question remains unanswered: Is social cohesion (or living together) a valid argument for banning the wearing of Islamic veils? The author explores this question through the lens of the European human rights framework and analyzes the ECtHR’s approach to French and Belgian anti-veil legislation enacted on the grounds of social cohesion.

This article examines some of the racist features of nineteenth-century medical school curricula in the United States and the imperial networks necessary to acquire the data and specimens that underpinned this part of medical education, which established hierarchies between human races and their relationship to the natural environment. It shows how, in a world increasingly linked by trade and colonialism, medical schools were founded in the United States and grew as the country developed its own imperial ambitions. Taking advantage of the global reach of empires, a number of medical professors in different states, such as Daniel Drake, Josiah Nott and John Collins Warren, who donated his anatomical collection to Harvard Medical School on his retirement in 1847, began to develop racial theories that naturalised slavery and emerging imperialism as part of their medical teaching.

This article conducts an exploratory multidimensional (MD) analysis of four interactive online registers, namely newspaper comments, tweets, web forums and text messages, originating from four South Asian countries (Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka) and two Inner Circle (Kachru 1985) English-speaking countries (UK and USA). A principal component analysis (PCA) has been performed on the interactive registers using linguistic features tagged by a modified version of the MFTE tagger (Le Foll 2021a). The dimensions resulting from the PCA show that nominal, literate and informational features are generally more common in the South Asian data – which represent varieties belonging to the Outer Circle (Kachru 1985). Additionally, different features are used for expressing persuasion or opinion compared to the two reference varieties.

Although not studied by the generative approach (Shlonsky 2017), the embedded Wh- in situ clause nevertheless belongs to the French language spoken in a large amount of areas, and, we believe, to “français tout court” (Blanche-Benveniste & Jeanjean 1987): until now, it has mainly been studied in Quebec (Lefebvre & Maisonneuve 1982; Blondeau & Ledegen 2021) and in Reunion Island (Ledegen 2007a, 2007b, 2007c, 2016; Ledegen & Martin 2020), but it has recently been massively attested in the Multicultural Paris French project in the suburbs of Paris (Gardner-Chloros & Secova 2018) and Strasbourg (Marchessou 2018). These new data could be read as a language contact, as a recent linguistic change, or as a long-established “popular” structure (Guiraud 1966), different analytical hypotheses that will be detailed in this study. These recent data also argue in favour of the methodology of ecological corpora, obtained within the framework of a strong acquaintanceship and located at the pole of communicative proximity (Koch & Oesterreicher 2001). The examination of various existing corpora will reveal the structural functioning of the structure and contrast the corpora following the modes of interaction, the oral or written medium, as well as on the chronological axis.