This article analyses Dario Argento’s 1998 film The Phantom of the Opera as a distinctive reworking of Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel. Rather than viewing it as an incoherent departure, the study reads the film as a cinematic exploration of Leroux’s unstable binaries—human/animal, child/adult, grand opera/carnival, and female otherness—central to the Gothic tradition. Employing close textual and visual analysis, combined with Gothic theory and art-historical interpretation, the article examines how Argento reimagines the Phantom as an attractive yet internally hybrid figure raised by rats, his subterranean lair evoking Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead and the fin-de-siècle homme de génie. Christine is reframed as a psychologically ambivalent heroine whose descent mirrors a confrontation with repressed desires, conveyed through tableaux referencing artists such as Jean-François Millet and Georges de La Tour. The Paris Opera House becomes a site where sublime artistic ideals are undermined by grotesque caricatures, echoing Victor Hugo’s grotesque–sublime aesthetic. Blending Gothic symbolism, carnivalesque satire, and art-historical homage, the film emerges as a visual meditation on identity, hybridity, and the instability of moral and social boundaries.
Published between 1886 and 1888, Italo Pizzi’s Il Libro dei Re was the first complete verse translation of the national epic poem of Iran, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh (c. 1010 CE). This article draws on early theorisations of the role of translation and comparison in world literature (William Jones and Goethe) to analyse the wider cultural ramifications of Pizzi’s endeavour to introduce Ferdowsi to an Italian readership. After a broader contextualisation of the development of Oriental Studies in post-unification Italy, Pizzi’s translation, its paratext, and his other publications on Ferdowsi are analysed together in order to reconstruct his approach to literary translation and the dissemination of knowledge, in which literary comparison (in particular that between Ferdowsi and Dante) played a central role. Whereas the nineteenth-century reception of Persian classics such as the Shahnameh has received scholarly attention in the English, French, and German language contexts, little has been said of their Italian reception. This article brings to light the equally pioneering work of translation and dissemination that was undertaken in Italy, despite the young nation being late to professionalise Oriental Studies – Pizzi became Italy’s first Professor of Persian in 1887. In doing so, the article expands our understanding of the development of Oriental Studies in nineteenth-century Europe and reveals Italy’s distinctive place in the global circulation of Persian literature in translation.
Manssour Bin Mussallam is a Saudi national who, since 2020, has served as the Secretary-General of the Organisation of Southern Cooperation (OSC), headquartered in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. From 2016 to 2020 he founded and served as the President of the Education Relief Foundation in Geneva, Switzerland, with the purpose of developing, promoting and incorporating a Balanced and Inclusive approach to Education, based on the four pillars of intraculturalism, transdisciplinarity, dialecticism and contextuality. In 2025 he authored Una Carta Meridional: Apuntes desde el Claroscuro Mundial (translated into English as A Letter from the Greater South: Notes Amidst Global Disorder), laying out his vision for the “Greater South”, a phrase he originated to encompass vastly diverse countries, peoples and cultures who simultaneously share systemic characteristics, challenges and aspirations. Through his leadership of the OSC, the first intergovernmental organization of and by the Greater South, HE Sheik Manssour Bin Mussallam works towards the collective espousal and construction of a Third Way of Development founded upon the spirit of solidarity, multilateralism and self-determination and emerging through education. In this conversation with communication scholar Dr Isabelle Alice Zaugg, who currently serves as Chief of Section – Knowledge Development and Democratization at the OSC, he shares how the revitalization of Greater South languages fits into this broader vision, illuminating language as a critical transversal across the domains of education, the geopolitics of knowledge, transdisciplinary research, technological innovation, digital sovereignty and multilateralism.
Machine translation (MT), which involves the use of algorithms to translate between languages, has advanced to a high level of quality for dozens of language pairs and is employed in an array of everyday contexts, including on social media. However, there are hundreds of languages for which there are insufficient digital resources to sustain quality machine translation, and errors abound even in translations for so-called “high-resource” language pairs. Meanwhile, although decades of research have led to improvements in MT system performance, recent scholarship has drawn attention to the social impact of MT systems. The present article builds on this burgeoning tradition and advocates for a language justice orientation in MT system development and design, focusing on online social media as a case study. This view advocates for transparency and consent in the application of machine translation. We also consider how language justice can inform the management of linguistic resources used to train MT systems.
While linguistic access in the digital sphere is a growing concern, many overlook the key role of written scripts in mediating who can fully utilize digital tools. This interview presents the experiences and perspectives of Kamal Mansour, a pre-eminent typographer working to support the world’s scripts with enabled fonts, in conversation with Dr Isabelle Alice Zaugg, a scholar of communication and semiotics who investigates the technical foundations for digital language justice. An enabled font is a key piece of digital infrastructure required to exchange text in a script and the language(s) it represents, thus widening linguistic inclusion in the digital sphere. However, moving written scripts from the page on to the screen also requires multiple levels of technical policy, which represent layered challenges considering that digital architecture is designed around Latin script defaults and a capitalist consumption model that does not take into account the economics of the Majority World. This interview also explores the essential place of typography within the visual culture of language communities as well as the skills and intuition required of typographers as they design culturally appropriate fonts for scripts from unfamiliar contexts. This interview highlights the inspiration and the reflections of one of the most experienced typographers in the world, taking us in-depth into what it would really take for digital tools to enrich the communication ecosystems of all language communities.
