In the summer of 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. introduced the keynote speaker for the 10th-anniversary convention banquet of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Their guest, he said, was his “soul brother.” “He has carved for himself an imperishable niche in the annals of our nation’s history,” King told the audience of 2,000 delegates. “I...
After years of pressure, Germany recently announced that an agreement had been reached to return hundreds of priceless artefacts and artworks that had been looted from Nigeria in colonial times and were on display in German museums. Commonly called the Benin Bronzes, these beautiful and technically remarkable artworks have come to symbolise the broader restitution...
Many women “risk” allowing natural grey hair to show in order to feel authentic, a new study shows. Researchers from the University of Exeter surveyed women who chose not to dye their grey hair, and found a “conflict” between looking natural and being seen as competent. Participants in the study – mostly from English-speaking countries...
“To live among the handmade,” philosopher and antiques dealer Leon Rosenstein once said, “is to live among the human.” Well, there’s nothing more human than handmade pornography. When you hear “pornography,” you might think of Playboy and Penthouse, X-rated movies and internet porn. But one type that has been largely hidden and forgotten is the...
International expert in creativity and innovation, UniSA’s Professor David Cropley, is calling for Australian schools and universities to increase their emphasis on teaching creativity, as new research shows it is a core competency across all disciplines and critical for ensuring future job success. Conducted in partnership with visiting PhD researcher Kim van Broekhoven from Maastricht...
How do we speak trauma? We know from medicine that people embody trauma, beyond words. It shows up in our hearts and our blood pressure, our dreams and our nightmares; we pass it onto our children, and we work it through in arts, spirituality, counselling. My work has focused on a burning question in South...
Scientists from the CNRS, ENS-PSL, Inserm, and Sciences Po revealed an increase in facial displays of trustworthiness in European painting between the fourteenth and twenty-first centuries. The findings, published in Nature Communications on 22 September 2020, were obtained by applying face-processing software to two groups of portraits, suggesting an increase in trustworthiness in society that closely...
Teleportation is most commonly the stuff of science fiction and, for many, would conjure up the immortal phrase “Beam me up Scotty”. However, a new study has described how its status in science fact could actually be employed as another, and perhaps unlikely, form of entertainment – live music. Dr. Alexis Kirke, Senior Research Fellow...
While millions of people across Europe and beyond have been forced into lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic, some artists have used their time in isolation to create work using religious imagery as a way to tell the story of the crisis. On the streets of Madrid, graffiti artist Ernesto Muñiz reimagined the imagery related to...
A new book tells the story of a man jailed for impersonating a priest in 1693 Spain when he was likely trying to escape racial persecution. It gives readers a fascinating look at a centuries-old legal case against a man on pilgrimage and shows how Iberians of black-African ancestry faced discrimination and mistreatment. The book,...
