Early Popular Visual Culture: Encounters Across Borders

Prof. Dr Frank Kessler and Dr Sarah Dellmann, both from the department of Media and Performance at Utrecht University, have edited a special issue of the journal Early Popular Visual Culture (volume 14, issue 2, Routledge 2016), for which they also wrote a theoretical introduction. The various contributions to the issue are all focused around the central theme 'Encounters Across Borders'.

The issue addresses, among other things, ideas of nationalism and transnationalism in visual culture. Apart from Kessler and Dellman the issue counts two other contributors from Utrecht University. Dr Dafna Ruppin co-authored an article on the circulation of various American Biograph machines in Southeast Asia, in particular the former Dutch colonies in present-day Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia around 1900. Another article, co-authored by PhD-student Klaas de Zwaan MA, offers a comparative study of the reception in the neutral countries of Switzerland and the Netherlands of the Vitagraph production Battle Cry of Peace (J. Stuart Blackton and Wilfred North, 1915), during World War I.