The George Peabody Library in Baltimore, Maryland is not accessible from the street; one must traverse two anterooms before entering into that magnificent, public library. It is in one of these anterooms—a very large open room with wooden floors and tall windows open to the street—that the Gertrude Stein in Circles: Spheres of Life and Writing exhibition was held from September 22, 2024 through March 2, 2025 at Johns Hopkins University. With material drawn from archives across Johns Hopkins’s...

By the time I moved to Cairo to research Forster’s years in Egypt, late in the summer of 2018, I was already familiar with his cabinet of lost artifacts and vanished statues.

“Respectfully submitted for your perusal—a Kanamit. Height: a little over nine feet. Weight: in the neighborhood of three hundred and fifty pounds. Origin: unknown.” So begins Rod Serling’s characteristically clipped voice-over narration near the beginning of “To Serve Man,” a 1962 episode of the cannily uncanny half-hour television series The Twilight Zone, in which one such Kanamit arrives in his spaceship in New York City and soon afterward appears before the Security Council of the United...

© 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press “The task of a museum,” wrote Italian critic and curator Pietro Maria Bardi in 1951, “should be to make resound, to interpret with perspicacity and appropriate technique, those monuments that sing: thus will be avoided the risk of useless sentimentalities, dangerous neutralities, hybrid educations, and eclecticism.” [1] Bardi’s proclamation was rooted in a line from Paul Valéry’s “Eupalinos, or the Architect” (1921), a Socratic dialogue in which the ancient...

Introduction In 2011, the Japanese government designated Yasuda Yukihiko’s Camp at Kisegawa ( Kisegawa no jin, 1940-41) as an Important Cultural Property ( Jūyō bunkazai) (fig. 1). The left half of the painting, which portrays Minamoto Yoshitsune (1159-1189), a famous warrior from the Kamakura period (1185-1333), was initially produced and exhibited in 1940 as The Arrival of Yoshitsune (Yoshitsune sanchaku). The right half, which depicts Yoshitsune’s older brother Yoritomo (1147-1199), was added...