Thematic line:
Modern Mediations: Arts, Technology, and Communication

Coordinator: Rui Lopes

The cultural turn and the development of visual studies have opened history to new objects and archives, including audiovisual sources. This is particularly visible in a renewed attention to the role of images in modern history. This thematic line brings together researchers involved in different forms of historical representation, combining long-standing research on the press and circulation of discourses, documentary film, performance, curatorial practices, or literary atlases, and a growing interest in popular music.

This focus represents a robust move towards interdisciplinary exchange with neighbouring disciplines (art history, film and media studies, ethnomusicology) and cultural and artistic institutions. In this sense, more than a set of tools to represent reality, modern mediations are here seen as reality itself, in a period marked by the constitutive role of language, images, and sounds in social life and modernisation.