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This article discusses the research project Change the Setting: Polish Theatrical and Social Set Design of the 20th and 21st Centuries, carried out by a team led by Dariusz Kosiński, and concluded with a three-volume publication. The author presents the project’s theoretical premises and subject matter. She introduces and analyzes the concepts of theatrical scenography and social scenography, drawing on the example of the publication’s last volume, which re-enacts in book form an exhibition shown at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in 2019. The exhibition presented the transformations of Polish theater set design in the 20th and 21st centuries, juxtaposing them with records of political and social events. The author of the article focuses on the volume’s value in terms of culture research: she is primarily interested in its approach to the idea of social scenography and the method of translating the reality of the exhibition into a book.

The lighting environment has transcended purely functional illumination and has evolved into a critical medium for orchestrating narrative rhythm and modulating audience emotional responses. However, existing studies often examine photometric properties and human emotional responses in isolation, failing to establish a quantitative coupling mechanism to elucidate the relationship between light distribution, visual attention, and emotional states. This study aims to quantify the coupling mechanisms between luminous environmental parameters (illuminance and CCT), visual attention distribution, and emotional states (PAD) in immersive narrative exhibition spaces for the optimization of visitor experience. Four screen-based simulated narrative scenes were constructed with different illumination levels (low/high) and four levels of correlated color temperature (2700 K, 3000 K, 4000 K, and 5000 K). Using the SIFT algorithm, the illuminance pseudo-color map and the eye-tracking heat map were spatially registered to quantify the spatial correlation between the physical light field and the visual attention field. The results demonstrate a significant nonlinear coupling effect: high-illuminance cold light (4000 K, 544 lx) establishes a strong guidance mechanism, with a high spatial correlation between visual attention and brightness (r = 0.82), which significantly enhances physiological arousal and perceived dominance. Conversely, low-illuminance warm light (2700 K, 150 lx) leads to a weak coupling state (r = 0.62), which promotes free visual exploration, thereby improving pleasure and perceived immersion. These results suggest that lighting design should not be treated as a fixed set of parameters, but rather as an adjustable strategy that responds to changes in visual attention and emotional experience. By modifying the strength of visual and optical interaction, lighting conditions can influence how visitors move from initial perception to emotional engagement. This provides practical support for applying evidence-based lighting strategies in the design of cultural heritage spaces.

From the moment a child in ancient Rome began to speak Latin, the surrounding world became populated with objects possessing grammatical gender-masculine eyes (oculi), feminine trees (arbores), neuter bodies (corpora).Sexing the Worldsurveys the many ways in which grammatical gender enabled Latin speakers to organize aspects of their society into sexual categories, and how this identification of grammatical gender with biological sex affected Roman perceptions of Latin poetry, divine power, and the human hermaphrodite. Beginning with the ancient grammarians, Anthony Corbeill examines how these scholars used the gender of nouns to identify the sex of the object being signified, regardless of whether that object was animate or inanimate. This informed the Roman poets who, for a time, changed at whim the grammatical gender for words as seemingly lifeless as \"dust\" (pulvis) or \"tree bark\" (cortex). Corbeill then applies the idea of fluid grammatical gender to the basic tenets of Roman religion and state politics. He looks at how the ancients tended to construct Rome's earliest divinities as related male and female pairs, a tendency that waned in later periods. An analogous change characterized the dual-sexed hermaphrodite, whose sacred and political significance declined as the republican government became an autocracy. Throughout, Corbeill shows that the fluid boundaries of sex and gender became increasingly fixed into opposing and exclusive categories. Sexing the Worldcontributes to our understanding of the power of language to shape human perception.

When the mind turns more than one would wish towards questions of - as W.G. Sebald puts it - the \"natural history of destruction\", comparative consideration by artists and interdisciplinary scholars is directed to the interstices between images, novel, essay, (auto)biography, memorial and travelogue. Artists have been among Sebald's most prolific interpreters - as they are among the more fearless and holistic researchers on questions concerning what it means never to be able to fix an identity, to tell a migrant's story, or to know where a historical trauma ends. Sebald has - as this book attests - also given artists and scholars a means to write with images, to embrace ambiguity, and to turn to today's migrants with empathy and responsibility; as well as to let academic research, creation and institutional engagement blend into or substantially inform one another in order to account for and enable such necessary work in the most diverse contexts.

Tracing the history of northern slavery in a narrative exhibition at the New-York Historical Society required overcoming the silence of archival and museum collections. Despite the centrality of slavery to the colonial city, the first two centuries of black lives left few traces. In the archival record, African voices were unheard and never registered. A careful deployment of interpretive media--display techniques, audio-visual programs, graphic annotations, commissioned art objects, and architectural design--aimed to bring visitors physically and emotionally ever closer to the experience of New York blacks, while staying rooted in primary sources. The sequence of media elements thus itself paralleled the historical narrative. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

From the names of cruise lines and bookstores to an Australian ranch and a nudist camp outside of Atlanta, the wordserendipity--that happy blend of wisdom and luck by which something is discovered not quite by accident--is today ubiquitous. This book traces the word's eventful history from its 1754 coinage into the twentieth century--chronicling along the way much of what we now call the natural and social sciences. The book charts where the term went, with whom it resided, and how it fared. We cross oceans and academic specialties and meet those people, both famous and now obscure, who have used and abusedserendipity. We encounter a linguistic sage, walk down the illustrious halls of the Harvard Medical School, attend the (serendipitous) birth of penicillin, and meet someone who \"manages serendipity\" for the U.S. Navy. The story ofserendipityis fascinating; that ofThe Travels and Adventures of Serendipity, equally so. Written in the 1950s by already-eminent sociologist Robert Merton and Elinor Barber, the book--though occasionally and most tantalizingly cited--was intentionally never published. This is all the more curious because it so remarkably anticipated subsequent battles over research and funding--many of which centered on the role of serendipity in science. Finally, shortly after his ninety-first birthday, following Barber's death and preceding his own by but a little, Merton agreed to expand and publish this major work. Beautifully written, the book is permeated by the prodigious intellectual curiosity and generosity that characterized Merton's influentialOn the Shoulders of Giants. Absolutely entertaining as the history of a word, the book is also tremendously important to all who value the miracle of intellectual discovery. It represents Merton's lifelong protest against that rhetoric of science that defines discovery as anything other than a messy blend of inspiration, perspiration, error, and happy chance--anything other than serendipity.

Human Plants, Human Harvest: The Hidden History of California Eugenicsis the first-ever exhibition on the history of eugenics in California. The disappearance of this history for half a century, and the consequent absence of a “collective memory,” were the primary factors determining the exhibit's structure and content. Responses to the exhibit confirmed that most visitors “never knew” about this history. The exhibit is described in some detail, with selected imagery from the exhibit reproduced. After the initial exhibition, responses of other museums and foundation officials revealed a continuing resistance to this history being publicly displayed, though the sources of resistance varied.

Here David Ellison explores the problems encountered by France's best experimental authors writing between 1956 and 1984, when faced with the question: \"What should my writing beabout?\" These years are characterized by the rise of the \"new novelists,\" who questioned the representational function of writing as they created works of imagination that turned in upon themselves and away from exterior reality. It became fashionable at one point to affirm that literature was no longer about the world but uniquely about the words on a page, the signifying surface of the text. Ellison tests this assumption, showing that even in the most seemingly self-referential fictions the words point to the world from which they can never completely separate themselves. Through close readings Ellison examines the novels and theoretical writings of authors whose works are fundamental to our perception of contemporary French writing and thought: Camus, Robbe-Grillet, Simon, Duras, Sarraute, Blanchot, and Beckett. The result is a new understanding of the link between the referential function of literary language and the problematic of the ethics of fiction.

Culture, 1922traces the intellectual and institutional deployment of the culture concept in England and America in the first half of the twentieth century. With primary attention to how models of culture are created, elaborated upon, transformed, resisted, and ignored, Marc Manganaro works across disciplinary lines to embrace literary, literary critical, and anthropological writing. Tracing two traditions of thinking about culture, as elite products and pursuits and as common and shared systems of values, Manganaro argues that these modernist formulations are not mutually exclusive and have indeed intermingled in complex and interesting ways throughout the development of literary studies and anthropology. Beginning with the important Victorian architects of culture--Matthew Arnold and Edward Tylor--the book follows a number of main figures, schools, and movements up to 1950 such as anthropologist Franz Boas, his disciples Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Zora Neale Hurston, literary modernists T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, functional anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, modernist literary critic I. A. Richards, the New Critics, and Kenneth Burke. The main focus here, however, is upon three works published in 1922, the watershed year of Modernism--Eliot'sThe Waste Land, Malinowski'sArgonauts of the Western Pacific, and Joyce'sUlysses. Manganaro reads these masterworks and the history of their reception as efforts toward defining culture. This is a wide-ranging and ambitious study about an ambiguous and complex concept as it moves within and between disciplines.

Research summary: Constructing narratives of transformative change is an important but challenging practice through which strategy-makers attempt to influence acceptance of an ongoing transformation. To understand whether and how strategy-makers can construct a steady influx of captivating narratives of transformative change, we analyzed how one noted strategy-maker assisted the successful transformation of his organization over three decades by orchestrating the production of change narratives. Our analysis reveals that the strategy-maker constructed and reconstructed meanings of change over time using three sets of distinct but interconnected narrative practices. We develop a dynamic model linking the simultaneous mobilization of these practices to strategymakers' ability to harness the persistent tension between novelty and familiarity in a transformative change, and thereby, win endorsement from key audiences. Managerial summary: How can storytelling be used to influence acceptance of an ongoing organizational transformation? In this article, we try to answer this question by examining how, over three decades, Italian company Alessi documented its transformation from a manufacturer of kitchen steel utensils to a producer of a variety of household objects purchased also for their symbolic value. The leader behind Alessi's transformation, Alberto Alessi, orchestrated such storytelling effort, targeting employees, customers, retailers, and visitors to Alessi exhibitions. Our findings uncover how stories can be used to win audiences' endorsement of change through narrative practices aimed at: (a) constructing a collective memory of change, (b) depicting change as a novel but coherent departure from the past, and (c) portraying change as a transcendent endeavor.