The Covid-19 pandemic, though less prominent in the headlines than in 2020 and 2021, is still with us today and has become part of our cultural memory. This essay looks at the loftily titled Decameron Project (2020), an international volume of what may be called ‘lockdown fiction’, commissioned by The New York Times Magazine. Special attention is…[Read more]

The pre-publication praise Natasha Brown received for her debut novel Assembly (2021) from renowned writers like Bernardine Evaristo or Ali Smith is quite remarkable. The author had been virtually unknown to the larger public before winning one of the London Writers Awards in the literary fiction category in 2019. As a young Black British woman of…[Read more]

Three years before the end of the Spanish presence in the Northern Hemisphere of America the territory of New Spain included the following modern States: Arizona, Belize, California, Colorado, Costa Rica, Cuba, El Salvador, Florida, Guatemala, Honduras, Louisiana, Mexico, Nevada, New Mexico, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Texas and Utah. This…[Read more]

Three years before the end of Spanish presence, the territory of New Spain included the following modern States: Arizona, Belize, California, Colorado, Costa Rica, Cuba, El Salvador, Florida, Guatemala, Honduras, Louisiana, Mexico, Nevada, Nicaragua, New Mexico, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Texas and Utah. This book provides comments on the…[Read more]

V. 1, N. 3 (March 15, 2020) is titled “Wallpaper Values” and compares and contrasts the values of wallpaper as decorative art, as avatar of social values, and as material culture.

V. 1, N. 4 (April 15, 2020) is titled “Bernard Jacqué, His Thesis, and His Methods.” It shows how Jacqué’s work relates to that of Jules David Prown, an art historian credited with formulating an influential approach to material culture in the pages of the Winterthur Portfolio in the early 1980s.

V. 1, N. 5 (May 15, 2020) is titled “Is Wallpaper Essential?,” answers in the affirmative, and argues for a new definition: “Wallpaper is affordable and flexible, modular in form and design, ordinarily covered with a printed pattern, and made for decorating domestic walls.”

V. 1, N. 2 (February 15, 2020) is titled “Wallpaper and America” and critiques Catherine Lynn’s standard text from 1980, “Wallpaper In America.”

Comments on the Lives and Governments of all the Spanish Viceroys in the Kingdom of Peru.

V.1, N.1 is titled “Three Views of Wallpaper” and contrasts the approach to wallpaper of Catherine Lynn, Phillippa Mapes, and Bernard Jacqué.

This article analyses the confluence of Islamophobia and anti-government conspiracy theory in the works of the far-right think tank, the Center for Security Policy (CSP). He argues that, rather than only being a contemporary form of the religious and racialized demonologies that code ‘Islam’ as being the constitutive outside of ‘the ‘West…[Read more]

Selections from DE LA MANUFACTURE AU MUR: Pour une histoire matérielle du papier peint 1770-1914 (From the Workshop to the Wall – Toward a Material History of Wallpaper 1770-1914) a thesis by Dr. Bernard Jacqué, University of Lyon, 2003. Translated by Robert M. Kelly.

PDF 3: The Scenic Revival of the Twentieth Century

Selections from DE LA MANUFACTURE AU MUR: Pour une histoire matérielle du papier peint 1770-1914 (From the Workshop to the Wall – Toward a Material History of Wallpaper 1770-1914) a thesis by Dr. Bernard Jacqué, University of Lyon (2003). Translated by Robert M. Kelly.

PDF 2: Zuber’s “Indépendance” (1853), a hand-painted restatement of “Scenic…[Read more]

Selections from DE LA MANUFACTURE AU MUR: Pour une histoire matérielle du papier peint 1770-1914 (From the Workshop to the Wall – Toward a Material History of Wallpaper 1770-1914) a thesis by Dr. Bernard Jacqué, University of Lyon (2003). Translated by Robert M. Kelly.

PDF 1: A Historiography of Wallpaper