Joseph Ernest Renan was a French rationalist philosopher, orientalist, and historian of religion. He was a professor of Semitics at the Collège de France. Renan…
Laila Shawa was born in Gaza in 1940. Between 1957 and 1958, she travelled to Cairo to study art at the Leonardo da Vinci Art…
Born Annie Wood, Annie Besant was an English political activist and spiritualist with Irish heritage. She married British clergyman Frank Besant in 1867; they separated…
Phyllis Webb, OC is a Canadian poet, teacher, and broadcaster. She was born in Victoria, British Columbia and attended the University of British Columbia and…
A short-story writer, novelist, poet and journalist, Bosman was born in Kuils River near Cape Town, but spent most of his life in the Transvaal,…
Franz Marc was born in Munich, Germany in 1880 and died in the battle of Verdun in 1916, one of many of the Great War’s…
John Dewey was an American philosopher, educational theorist, and one of the three major pragmatists, along with William James and Charles Saunders Peirce. After obtaining…
Stefan George was one of the most original and influential poets to have written in German in the last 150 years. During his lifetime he…
Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886-1965) was a leading novelist, playwright and theorist of the Taishō and Shōwa eras. Although best known as a novelist, Tanizaki’s plays also…
Born in Kirkuk, Iraq, Atta Sabri was among the pioneer generation of Iraqi modern artists with careers peaking in the mid-20th century. He was an…
The Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 ushered in what became known as the ‘New Imperialism’. While the first waves of European expansion had focused on the…
Wallace Stevens is recognized as one of America’s greatest modernist poets, yet he was not widely celebrated for his poetry until the last years of…
Ernst Alfred Cassirer was a philosopher and intellectual historian. The central concept of Cassirer’s system is that of symbolic form. Owing to Cassirer’s affiliations with…
Christopher Isherwood was a British American novelist, memoirist, and playwright best known for The Berlin Diaries, a fictionalized portrayal of his experiences with the urban…
Kim Ki-chang (1914–2001), also known as Unbo, was a modern ink painter who was born in Seoul, Korea. Having lost his hearing from typhoid fever,…
Sadegh Hedayat was an Iranian writer and intellectual who was responsible for introducing Modernism to Iranian literature. His short stories and novellas are the best…
Aleksei Mikhailovich Remizov was a Silver Age prose writer, associated with the Symbolists but not aligned completely with the tenets of this movement. Born in…
Karen Blixen was a singular figure in 20th century Danish literary life. In the 1930s, when Blixen started writing, Danish literature was dominated by social…
One of the emblematic figures of the French avant-garde, Claude Cahun was born Lucy Renée Mathilde Schwob on October 25, 1894 in Nantes, the niece…
Jane Ellen Harrison was a classicist credited with being the first woman to obtain a post in England as a ‘career academic’. Her scholarship combined…
Alan Crawley (born in Cobourg, Ontario on 23 August 1887; died on Vancouver Island in 1975) was an editor and critic who played a significant…
Ferdinand Tönnies was central to the professionalization of European sociology, co-founding the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie (German Society for Sociology) in 1909 along with Max…
Lewis Nkosi is increasingly recognized as one of South Africa’s foremost literary critics, and also as an iconoclastic writer of novels and plays. His years…
Laurens van der Post was born on December 13, 1906 in the village of Phillipolis, in what was then the Orange River Colony. He was…
Benedetto Croce was an Italian philosopher of aesthetics and history, who cast a long shadow into the aesthetic and literary criticism of Modernism. Croce’s biography…