This week, the World History Association (WHA) gathers for its 34th Annual Meeting in Louisville, KY. This year’s theme is: Protest, Prohibition, & Pugilism: Louisville & the World.
The Journal of World History offers this accompanying special collection, “Aesthetic Explorations of the Global Past” free on the Project MUSE platform. Select World History titles will also be 30% off from July 1 through Sept 30, 2025.
The 11 articles selected by Emily De La Torre, June Bofetiado Tanner, and Laura J. Mitchell in “Aesthetic Explorations of the Global Past” provides accessible resources for scholars and teachers worldwide, with content freely available through September 2025.
The trio introduces this free special issue in their introduction, “Aesthetic Explorations of the Global Past”:
“[W]as such a thing as a global measure for human perfection even conceivable?” asks Sebastian Conrad, plunging headlong into an exploration of aesthetics. Can something understood as individual, relative, and locally contingent also be a useful category of analysis for world history? If a British observer in the 1750s considered a Muslim woman wearing şalvar (baggy trousers) in Istanbul to be beautiful, but an English woman wearing the same clothes in London to be shocking, can aesthetics offer a productive theoretical entry point for considering connections and disruptions across space and time? The papers in this year’s open-access special issue drawn from the Journal of World History’s backlist answer these questions with a hearty, collective “Yes!”
Explore the special issue
Aesthetic Explorations of the Global Past
Emily De La Torre, June Bofetiado Tanner, Laura J. Mitchell
The “Material Turn” in World and Global History
Giorgio Riello
Women’s Fashions in Transition: Ottoman Borderlands and the Anglo-Ottoman Exchange of Costumes
Onur Inal
Consuming Kashmir: Shawls and Empires, 1500-2000
Michelle Maskiell
Weaving the Rainbow: Visions of Color in World History
Robert Finlay
Globalizing the Beautiful Body: Eugen Sandow, Bodybuilding, and the Ideal of Muscular Manliness at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Sebastian Conrad
World History Titles – 30% Discount
Starting July 1 through September 30, get 30% off select World History titles, including ones in the Perspectives on the Global Past series. Use coupon code WHA2025.
Learn more about the WHA conference here.