William James was an American psychologist and philosopher who worked across those fields to investigate the nature of consciousness, experience and free will. A founding…
Born Else Hildegard Plötz in the German Baltic seaport town of Swinmünde in 1874, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven was an avant-garde poet, performer, visual…
Communism is first and foremost the reality of long-dismantled or nearly defunct regimes in China, the (former) Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Cuba and North Korea:…
Myrtle Eugenia Watts, known variously as Jim, Jean, or Gina, was a Canadian foreign correspondent for the Spanish Civil War, theatre artist in the Theatre…
Gregory Bateson was an English anthropologist, social scientist, communications theorist, and cyberneticist. His most famous work, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), is a…
Hermann Broch is best known as a philosophically attuned novelist. Above all he is the author of two extraordinarily accomplished works of European modernist fiction:…
British writer, publisher and scholar Charles Kay Ogden was active in the field of linguistics and language. He is best known for The Meaning of…
Luis Chan was a doyen of the Hong Kong art world whose artistic career not only witnessed but also paved the way for the development…
Hermann Hesse was born in Calw (Germany) in a pietistic missionary family. To his devout parents, ‘the I’, as a subject next to God, had…
One of the hallmarks of modernist style, interior monologue affords a prime opportunity for studying how writers ranging from James Joyce and Dorothy Richardson to…
A historical figure as well as a literary phenomenon, the New Woman was named in 1894 in an exchange between ‘Ouida’ (Marie Louise de la…
Born in Dublin, Louis le Brocquy became one of the most significant figures in Irish twentieth-century art. After a major role in the organization of…
Canadian poet Miriam Waddington was born in Winnipeg’s Jewish North End neighbourhood in Manitoba, Canada on 23 December 1917. Waddington was honoured with several awards…
Jean Toomer (26 December 1894—30 March 1967) was an American writer associated with literary modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. He was born as Nathan Pinchback…
Alejo Carpentier, Cuban novelist and musicologist, formed important connections between the European and Latin American modern literature of the 20th century. He was a founder…
Born Nikolai Vasil’evich Korneichukov, Chukovsky was a renowned writer, critic, and translator. He was born in St. Petersburg but moved to Odessa at the age…
In Mexico City, at the height of World War II, the Viennese expatriate artist Wolfgang Paalen founded and edited DYN, an international art journal that…
Hugo von Hofmannsthal was a leading Austrian writer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His prolific works span a wide range of genres,…
May Sinclair was a novelist, journalist and literary critic. She began writing relatively late in life to help support her family, and while most of…
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (known as ‘HPB’ to her inner circle) claimed that from childhood she possessed the gift of clairvoyance. She used this well-publicized fact…
René Magritte was a Belgian artist who gained notoriety during the interwar period as a painter and for his involvement with Surrealism. His epigrammatic approach…
The Makerere Art School started informally in Mulago, Kampala, Uganda, in 1937, with a handful of students who turned up one evening at the porch…
One of the founders of Russian Futurism, Khlebnikov can be counted as one of the movement’s most prominent and seminal representatives. Widely acclaimed for his…
Edward Weston was one of the leading photographers of the Western and California landscape in the early 20th century and one of the pioneers of…
The Treaty of Versailles was one of the peace treaties signed on June 28, 1919, in the Palace of Versailles, by Germany and the Allied…