This review is divided into three sections that, taken together, map the state and shape of the year’s work in posthumanism. The first section, ‘Surveys, Elaborations, and Trajectories’, considers works that explore multiple dimensions of posthumanism, with some choosing to focus on specific thematics, antecedents, or connections. This sections maps the sustained interest in genealogies of the posthuman, particularly its intersections with older intellectual debates and current concepts of personhood. Section 2, ‘Pedagogy and Research’, turns to work at the intersections of posthumanism and the field of education and pedagogy comprising, aside from the surveys, the most voluminous body of work in posthumanism over the course of 2024. Curriculum, pedagogy, and posthumanist thought have together produced a challenging and interesting shift in the field of education, and works in this field surveyed here offer a glimpse into a rapidly expanding domain. The final section, ‘Posthumanism in Literature and Culture’, demonstrates that literary and cultural texts remain at the forefront of enunciations of the posthuman.
This year’s review of digital humanities (DH) continues to position DH at the epicentre of debates around AI, while tracing how these conversations have evolved within disciplinary scholarship from 2024 and early 2025. The surveyed interventions critically examine trajectories in contemporary DH where uncritical endorsements of massive datasets and computational complexity often result in algorithmic reductionism, which can obscure and oversimplify complexities in the domain of the humanities and social sciences. Building on the authors’ emphasis on decolonial approaches in DH—scholarship that frequently develops beyond traditional Anglo-American frameworks—this survey of scholarship reveals that significant DH contributions are not necessarily dependent on vast amounts of data. Rather, meaningful work in the discipline can emerge from relatively constrained information infrastructures that leverage the strength of community connections and focus on granular and localized user experiences. The essay is organized into five key areas: small-scale databases in DH; the limitations of scale in Global South and Global Majority contexts; resistance to bias in AI, metadata, and archival practices; user relationships with archives; and the emerging role of video games as digital archives. Together, these scholarly interventions reveal how DH researchers, educators, and practitioners can and should tactically repurpose strategic digital sites, tools, and methods for nuanced approaches that prioritize humanistic enquiry over the supposed objectivity of large-scale computational paradigms.
This review is divided into three sections that, taken together, map the state and shape of the year’s work in posthumanism. The first section, ‘Surveys, Elaborations, and Trajectories’, considers works that explore multiple dimensions of posthumanism, with some choosing to focus on specific thematics, antecedents, or connections. This sections maps the sustained interest in genealogies of the posthuman, particularly its intersections with older intellectual debates and current concepts of personhood. Section 2, ‘Pedagogy and Research’, turns to work at the intersections of posthumanism and the field of education and pedagogy comprising, aside from the surveys, the most voluminous body of work in posthumanism over the course of 2024. Curriculum, pedagogy, and posthumanist thought have together produced a challenging and interesting shift in the field of education, and works in this field surveyed here offer a glimpse into a rapidly expanding domain. The final section, ‘Posthumanism in Literature and Culture’, demonstrates that literary and cultural texts remain at the forefront of enunciations of the posthuman.
The first two sections of this review consider two anthologies on source study, specifically Shakespeare’s and Beckett’s Italian sources. These works bring together ideas of filiation and affiliation, a useful distinction made by Edward Said in The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983). By filiation is meant a biological or natural connection, while affiliation describes the conscious, chosen connections that are formed through shared ideas. These anthologies offer new kinds of affiliation, which are complex, overdetermined, and break with the ideas both of source study and of traditional dramaturgy. Ideas of origins and inheritance, both in the study of source materials and in the idea of performance, are at stake in these texts. The next two sections are concerned with two books on performance studies that offer new ways of thinking about theatre, in relation to environment and gender. In a break from traditional dramaturgy, these texts argue for the transformative power of theatre. Following an introductory overview, the essay is divided into five sections: 1. Shakespeare and His Italian Sources; 2. Samuel Beckett and His Italian Sources; 3. Performing the Nonhuman; 4. Performance, Resistance, Tragedy; Conclusion.
This article reviews the year’s work in film theory publications from the perspective of ‘film theory without theory’, especially considering the so-called ‘material’ or ‘cinephiliac’ turns in film studies. It specifically reviews five recent publications and is thus divided into five sections. The first section covers Jiří Anger’s monograph Film Theory from Below, which analyses the digital archive of Czech early cinema pioneer Jan Kříženecký and argues for a film theory based on the materiality of the image. The second section considers Timothy Corrigan’s Describing Cinema, which argues for a commitment to ‘close reading’ of films based on detailed written description. In the third section, mood and suspense are considered in Rick Warner’s The Rebirth of Suspense, which argues that the ‘atmospheric turn’ of slow cinema offers its own form of suspense contra what is often termed traditional ‘Hitchcockian’ suspense. Section 4 reviews Marina Hassapopoulou’s Interactive Cinema, which considers the formal and ethical implications of films that involve more than just the senses of sight and sound. Finally, Section 5 covers Textiles on Film, Becky Peterson’s look at the material turn through its exploration of literal fabric.
