This article re-examines Tipu Sultan beyond colonial and nationalist representations that hyper-masculinize him as either predatory or benevolent. I use the term hyper-masculinization to describe a representational stratagem in which Indian rulers are depicted in lopsided extremes: either as excessively violent and aggressive or conversely as overly compassionate and weak. Such single-dimensional representations sideline the wider cultural meanings of masculinity associated with the traditional Indian conception of androgyny. This study fills this gap by arguing that Tipu's personality is far more profound and many sided and can be better apprehended through the hitherto overlooked conception of androgyny, understood in Ashis Nandy's work as a marker of masculinity in pre-colonial India. Here androgyny is not a form of gender ambiguity but a culturally bounded ideal of balance that sacralizes political agency, controlled violence, and creativity. Drawing on Ashis Nandy's conceptualization of Indian masculinity as well as Hindu and Islamic metaphysical worldviews, I argue that Indian fictional writings such as Girish Karnad's The Dreams of Tipu Sultan and Bhawan S. Gidwani's The Sword of Tipu Sultan can be read as presenting Tipu as an androgynous sovereign. In doing so, these texts stand in sharp contrast to the colonial demonization and nationalist romanticization of Tipu as a hypermasculine individual. While neither Karnad nor Gidwani may have explicitly set out to recover the medieval Indian ideal of androgyny, my reading illustrates that their representations lend themselves to an interpretation of Tipu as an androgynous figure whose rulership sits at the intersection of south Indian Islam and Hindu ksatriyahood reflecting a balance of protection and force, benevolence and wrath. While existing corrective scholarship is valuable, it does not engage with Tipu's symbolic and gendered self-fashioning or read his struggles against the British through the lens of androgynous kingship. This study extends the discussion on the sultan by introducing a perspective that illuminates alternative modes of kingship rooted in the religious and cultural imagination of eighteenth-century India.
This article explores the concept of a successful, or convincing, forgery. What makes a forgery successful and why? Drawing from a range of high-profile and lesser-known cases of forgery from the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries, this article examines the dominant notions of success in forgery and challenges the assumptions that uphold them. It demonstrates that although the conditions that enable the creation of a successful forgery are multifaceted and vary considerably, what exactly constitutes a successful forgery is inextricably linked with its capacity to deceive. However, by decentring the importance of deception in the makings of a successful forgery, this article makes space for thinking about the bad, childish fakes that occupy the lower ends of the antiquities market in particular as successful and in what capacity. It concludes by arguing that bad fakes, much like bad art or bad movies, can simultaneously embody multiple and at times radically divergent notions of success unrelated to their ability (or inability) to deceive.
This article examines how the Romance of the Three Kingdoms (RTK) video game series transforms history into a source of gameplay enjoyment. Moving beyond debates over historical accuracy and authenticity, it asks how history functions for video games rather than how video games serve history. The article analyzes RTK through two interconnected dimensions: the rule-based reconfiguration of historical materials and resonance between the game and players, understood as a twofold mechanism for generating enjoyment. The article argues that RTK reorganizes historiographical records, literary narratives, and modern media representations into a calculable game system structured through quantified character attributes, turn-based temporality, restricted historical agency, and conquest-oriented goals. Through these rule structures, historical complexity is translated into a framework that enables prediction, planning, and strategic decision-making. The gameplay experience is further recontextualized through resonance, as players relate emergent in-game narratives to their prior knowledge of the Three Kingdoms. By foregrounding the interplay between systemic abstraction, which constructs a generalized rule-based framework, and resonance, which reconfigures gameplay through individualized meaning-making, this article argues that historical video games do not simply represent the past but generate historically grounded enjoyment through the interaction among rules, players, and culturally circulating historical narratives.
This article examines historians' multifaceted engagement with the concept of presentism. Traditionally associated with distortive historical practice, presentism has, in recent decades, been increasingly subjected to a more ambivalent discourse - one attentive not only to its shortcomings and fallacies but also to its merits and productive potential. The article argues that fully accommodating this polyvalent discourse requires framing presentism through the lens of present-centeredness, enabling a reading across both 'vicious' and 'virtuous' conceptualizations of the term. By elaborating on four iterations - motivational, narrative, strategic and pluralist presentism - the article brings to light the stakes of reassessing the long-standing hostility toward presentism. In addition to justifying historians' use of conceptual and analytical resources not rooted in the past, exploring legitimate forms of presentism helps articulate history's value and contribution amid present-day concerns and predicaments. However, within a broader historical culture, these efforts remain contested and constrained by alternative historical engagements not bound by the strict present-past dichotomy characteristic of professional history. Therefore, a proper assessment of historians' preoccupation with presentism requires a dialogue with contemporary theories of historical time and temporality, as developed in this article through the discussion of two illustrative examples.
This article explores the rise and fall of Hebrew gymnastics in Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine as a lens through which to reconsider the experiential dimensions of Zionism during the early twentieth century. At the turn of the century, gymnastics enjoyed global popularity and occupied a prominent place in Zionist discourse, most notably through Max Nordau's ideal of 'Muscular Judaism'. In Ottoman Palestine, this language of bodily renewal was taken up by the newly founded Maccabi movement, which sought to position gymnastics at the center of Jewish life and revolutionary aspiration. Yet despite these ambitions, Hebrew gymnastics gradually lost its appeal and faded from both collective memory and scholarly attention. Addressing this historical and historiographical gap, I reconstruct Hebrew gymnastics not simply as an institution or cultural practice, but as radical attempt to generate a new Jewish mode of being. Drawing on the history of experience and a postcritical, receptive reading of sources, it traces the spatial, linguistic and embodied difficulties involved in producing a sustained ontological horizon of the 'new Jew'. By foregrounding embodiment, affect and memory, the article offers an alternative framework for thinking about Zionism: one that moves beyond structural or discursive explanations to ask how revolutionary projects endure, or disappear, at the level of lived experience.
Against the background of how interdisciplinary Memory Studies emancipated itself from academic History over the last century, we examine current research trends through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the two main journals of the field, namely Memory Studies and History and Memory. On this basis, we discuss how the relationship between Memory Studies and History operates in the interdisciplinary practice of today's humanities and social sciences, and what intellectual and practical challenges these encounters pose for historians.
This article examines the layered meanings and evolving functions of public history in both academic scholarship and wider societal practice. It explores how the various components of public history intersect and how these entanglements reshape the conditions under which historical knowledge is produced, circulated, and authorized. As a subfield of historical studies, public history investigates representations and uses of the past, including ephemeral, embodied or performative practices that restage historical events. To research such representations public historians employ inter- and transdisciplinary methods, thereby expanding the conceptual and methodological repertoire of historical inquiry. At the same time, public history operates as a transdisciplinary mode of knowledge co-production that extends beyond academic peer communities. Through collaborations with society actors, it generates historical meaning in socially engaged contexts and thus reconfigures the boundaries between scholarly expertise and public participation.
This article highlights how digital games and digital game scholarship can contribute to ongoing theoretical debates about more-than-human agency in history. Inspired by ecological theory, the more-than-human is a level of analysis in which objects - and historical actors - are neither fully natural nor human-made, but rather assemblages of mutually influential human and non-human elements. Decentering human agency in this fashion is not easily accomplished by mainstream history. In this article, I will argue that digital games may help historians make sense of this expanded framework of perception. Game scholars have long highlighted the scholarly potential of such systems, be it by fostering agential flexibility in players, or acting as mesocosms with which to study real-world systems by proxy. In the first part of this paper, I will provide a literature overview showing some points of convergence between scholars of the Anthropocene and game experts. In the second part, I will discuss some examples of more-than-human historical agencies in games. Finally, I will introduce my upcoming game Galar, a historiography simulator which intends to discuss how written sources and scholarly history writing struggle with - and, ultimately, hinder - our appreciation of the more-than-human.
This paper explores the discipline of Museum Studies considering its relationship to History. It addresses key differences between understandings of academic Museum Studies internationally, its distinction from museum practice, and interdisciplinary strengths. The paper is based on an extensive literature review, analysis, and reflections from 20 years of experience, both within the academic discipline of Museum Studies in the UK and of interdisciplinary, international, collaborative working across Europe. The paper argues that Critical Museum Studies as an 'undisciplined' or 'disobedient' academic field offers much of value for historians and those from other disciplines interested in understanding the role, influence and politics of museums, their impact on individuals and society. It also argues for the significance of Critical Museum Studies in offering diverse and rigorous means to analyse complex and contested uses of the past in, for and by contemporary society. The paper therefore contributes to the debates on the productive potential of interdisciplinarity for History, while emphasising the specific contributions of a critical Museum Studies, which are different from those of traditional Museum Studies, from studies of museums from other disciplines and from museum practice.
This article comparatively examines the documentaries In Search of My Roots (2021) and Resilient Souls: Stories of Spanish Muslims (2023). These documentaries problematize dominant narratives about Islam's presence in Spain through documenting journeys of rediscovery and spiritual transformation. In Search for My Roots uses the first-person investigative mode to unearth the protracted legacy of the Moriscos, whereas Resilient Souls sheds light on contemporary Spanish converts to Islam and their communities. Both documentaries reimagine Muslim identity not as being imported and external, but rather as intimately woven in the Spanish cultural fabric. Through bringing these documentaries into discussion, this article examines how they both negotiate and problematize questions of historical erasure, Islamic heritage, and embodied faith through different documentary strategies such as on-location interviews, archival retrieval, participatory observation, and autobiographical voiceover. Drawing on documentary and memory studies, this article argues that these films reconstruct overlooked genealogies of Muslim belonging and challenge persistent notions of cultural purity. They provide a vision of Spain as historically and presently plural. The article positions these documentaries as interventions into Spain's ongoing struggle with its Islamic past and the visibility of its Muslim present, and as contributions to a broader reimagining of European identity in the 21st century.
In this article, I establish a connection between affective pasts and historical sources. The concept arises from the notion that despite history's receptiveness to various disciplines and sources, it may tend to omit the amorphous but profound social experiences. Consequently, I introduce three modes of historical ontology focusing finally on mode 3. While mode 1 is historical research built on analysis of written sources, and mode 2 is research centered on memory studies, mode 3 explicitly relates to affective pasts and historical facts usually based on ethnographic accounts. I argue that this last kind of material can convey not only the knowledge we may call experiential but also the knowledge that is factual. I present my analysis in the following sections. First, my case study is related to the rapid deindustrialization in post-socialist Poland and to the experiences of loss among impoverished workers. Second, I describe the affective labor performed for the state imagined as a community, such as building of schools and community centers in Polish villages during the late socialist decades. In conclusion, I argue that these case studies may offer a fresh perspective on historical understanding, allowing us to reconstruct significant socioaffective processes in history.
This article investigates the nature of the 'public' in public history by returning to a crucible moment in 1970s Britain when public art and public history were not clearly differentiated. It takes as its case-study two public art projects undertaken by the pioneering English multi-media and performance artist Stuart Brisley: the Hille Fellowship (1970-71) and the Peterlee Project (1976-77). Both are emblematic of a new kind of art activism that emerged in the 1970s and sought to liberate people from their difficult pasts. This article traces the ambitions and failures of both projects as a means of analysing how a public movement becomes co-opted by the institutional structures that first mimic and then come to oppose it. The distance traversed from this strong sense of art activism as a force for political change in the 1970s and today's institutionalised versions is revelatory of deeper social and economic changes.
