Books by Ileana Baird
This book is focused on a highly topical theme which aims at investigating a remarkable phenomeno... more This book is focused on a highly topical theme which aims at investigating a remarkable phenomenon of identity-shaping and cross-cultural exchange. Starting from an analysis of Dracula as the epitomized image of the Balkans (and of Romania, more specifically) abroad, it provides a comprehensive historical and (con)textual investigation of the myth, enlarged to incorporate it into the fictions of exile and to draw the reader's attention to the "demonic" dimension of the Balkan area in general, and the Romanian area in particular. By redefining the notion of cultural stereotypes, undertstood as stereotypes impressed upon us through a cultural channel (books, movies, cartoons, computer networks, musicals, etc.), this book points to the fact that they depict a movement in double direction: not only do cultures generate their own stereotypes but also perpetuate the stereotypes created by the "significant Other," urging us to reconsider categories such as "central" and "marginal" from a more complex perspective. The book is addressed to students and scholars with an interest in South-Eastern Europe and transatlantic encounters, diasporic, postcolonial and cultural studies, as well as to researchers in Sociology, History, Globalization and Ethnic Studies. Given the interest of the theme and the accessibility of the material presented, it is also directed to the larger reading public.
Dictionar de dificultati ale limbii engleze. Common Errors, False Friends, Phrasal Verbs, Collocations, Tests, 2016
Daca stapiniti limba engleza la nivel mediu-avansat, acest dictionar va ajuta:
• sa eliminati co... more Daca stapiniti limba engleza la nivel mediu-avansat, acest dictionar va ajuta:
• sa eliminati confuziile create de false friends si de phrasal verbs;
• sa alegeti termenul potrivit dintr-o serie sinonimica;
• sa ortografiati corect anumiti termeni;
• sa folositi formele gramaticale adecvate in exprimarea colocviala;
• sa cititi corect abrevierile;
• sa intelegeti diferentele dintre unii termeni din engleza britanica si corespondentii lor din engleza americana;
• sa va insusiti o serie de norme gramaticale: numarul substantivelor, articolul, adverbele fara marca specifica, utilizarea predicativa sau atributiva a unor adjective, verbele fara aspect continuu, verbele modale, subjonctivul, contrastul gerunziu/infinitiv, prepozitia etc.
Dictionarul va propune de asemenea un set de exercitii cu termenii plasati cel mai frecvent in contexte incorecte, alaturi de raspunsurile corespunzatoare.
Edited Books by Ileana Baird
Palgrave Macmillan, 2021
Data Visualization in Enlightenment Literature and Culture explores the new interpretive possibil... more Data Visualization in Enlightenment Literature and Culture explores the new interpretive possibilities offered by using data visualization in eighteenth-century studies. Such visualizations include tabulations, charts, k-means clustering, topic modeling, network graphs, data mapping, and/or other illustrations of patterns of social or intellectual exchange. The contributions to this collection present groundbreaking research of texts and/or cultural trends emerging from data mined from existing databases and other aggregates of sources. Describing both small and large digital projects by scholars in visual arts, history, musicology, and literary studies, this collection addresses the benefits and challenges of employing digital tools, as well as their potential use in the classroom.
Brill, 2020
By employing the innovative lenses of thing theory and material culture studies,
this collection ... more By employing the innovative lenses of thing theory and material culture studies,
this collection brings together essays focused on the role played by Arabia’s
things—from cultural objects to commodities to historical and ethnographic artifacts
to imaginary things—in creating an Arabian identity over time. The Arabian
identity that we convey here comprises both a fabulous Arabia that has haunted
the European imagination for the past three hundred years and a real Arabia that
has had its unique history, culture, and traditions outside the Orientalized narratives
of the West. All Things Arabia aims to dispel existing stereotypes and stimulate
new thinking about an area whose patterns of trade and cosmopolitanism
have pollinated the world with lasting myths, knowledge, and things of beauty.
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014
In an attempt to better account for the impressive diversity of positions and relations that char... more In an attempt to better account for the impressive diversity of positions and relations that characterizes the eighteenth-century world, this collection proposes a new methodological frame, one that is less hierarchical in approach and more focused, instead, on the nature of these interactions, on their Addisonian “usefulness,” declared goals, and (un)intended results. By shifting focus from a cultural-historicist approach to sociability to the rhizomatic nature of eighteenth-century associations, this collection approaches them through new methodological lenses that include social network analysis, assemblage and graph theory, social media and digital humanities scholarship. Imagining the eighteenth-century world as a networked community rather than a competing one reflects a recent interest in novel forms of social interaction facilitated by new social media—from Internet forums to various types of social networking sites—and also signals the increasing involvement of academic communities in digital humanities projects that use new technologies to map out patterns of intellectual exchange. As such, the articles included in this collection demonstrate the benefits of applying interdisciplinary approaches to eighteenth-century sociability, and their role in shedding new light on the way public opinion was formed and ideas disseminated during pre-modern times. The issues addressed by our contributors are of paramount importance for understanding the eighteenth-century culture of sociability. They address, among other things, clubbing practices and social networking strategies (political, cultural, gender-based) in the eighteenth-century world, the role of clubs and other associations in “improving” knowledge and behaviors, conflicting views on publicity, literary and political alliances and their importance for an emerging celebrity culture, the role of cross-national networks in launching pan-European and transatlantic trends, Romantic modes of sociability, as well as the contribution of voluntary associations (clubs, literary salons, communities of readers, etc.) to the formation of the public sphere. This collection demonstrates how relevant social networking strategies were to the context of the eighteenth-century world, and how similar they are to the congeries of new practices shaping the digital public sphere of today.
Routledge, 2018
Exploring Enlightenment attitudes toward things and their relation to human subjects, this collec... more Exploring Enlightenment attitudes toward things and their relation to human subjects, this collection offers a geographically wide-ranging perspective on what the eighteenth century looked like beyond British or British-colonial borders. To highlight trends, fashions, and cultural imports of truly global significance, the contributors draw their case studies from Western Europe, Russia, Africa, Latin America, and Oceania. This survey underscores the multifarious ways in which new theoretical approaches, such as thing theory or material and visual culture studies, revise our understanding of the people and objects that inhabit the phenomenological spaces of the eighteenth century. Rather than focusing on a particular geographical area, or on the global as a juxtaposition of regions with a distinctive cultural footprint, this collection draws attention to the unforeseen relational maps drawn by things in their global peregrinations, celebrating the logic of serendipity that transforms the object into some-thing else when it is placed in a new locale.
Book Chapters by Ileana Baird
1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, Volume 29, 2024
Urban spaces of complex functions within the Levant, Turkish baths, or hammams, combine practical... more Urban spaces of complex functions within the Levant, Turkish baths, or hammams, combine practical purpose (public hygiene) with social roles (congregation places, matchmaking) and spiritual significance (religious purification). With origins that can be traced back to the Roman thermae, the hammams have distinct architectural and decorative features, collecting within a variety of objects of practical and aesthetic use. During the eighteenth century, due to translations of Orientalist literature and accounts by famous Western travelers, such as Aaron Hill and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, such places gain additional connotations, creating fictions about the Near East that emphasize its exoticism, femininity, eroticism, idleness, seclusion, and prohibition. Through a close reading of some of these accounts, as well as explorations of visual representations of the hammam in the work of artists such as William Hogarth, Jean-Jacques-François Le Barbier, Jean-Étienne Liotard, and famous 19th-century Orientalist painters, this article unpacks some of the meanings associated with this space, its role in what Srinivas Aravamudan called the “Levantinization” of the Orient, and the rich visual and fictional lexicon surrounding the hammams and the bath culture in the Western imaginary.
Data Visualization in Enlightenment Literature and Culture, 2021
This chapter uses social network analysis to visualize the fields of relations involving John Den... more This chapter uses social network analysis to visualize the fields of relations involving John Dennis, the most important critic of the first half of the eighteenth century, with the protagonists in Alexander Pope’s satire, The Dunciad in Four Books (1743). By using visualizations generated by GraphViz, a program that creates topological graphs from sets of dyadic relations, and ShivaGraph, a tool that helps visualize large networks and navigate through them as through a map, this chapter brings to light data that is structurally embedded in the poem but not immediately legible given the large amount and complexity of information. In Dennis’s case, they reveal the competing stories told by the poem and the apparatus and the critic’s main role as the uncrowned king of The Dunciad’s textual periphery. These visualizations also highlight Dennis’s essential position as a network connector, his camp affiliations, the role played by peripheral characters in the plot network of the poem, and the main dunces targeted by Pope, or the poem’s “hall of infamy.”
Data Visualization in Enlightenment Literature and Culture , 2021
This introduction provides a brief survey of the evolution of data visualization from its eightee... more This introduction provides a brief survey of the evolution of data visualization from its eighteenth-century beginnings, when the Scottish engineer and political scientist William Playfair created the first statistical graphs, to its present-day developments and use in period-related digital humanities projects. The author highlights the growing use of data visualization in major institutional projects, provides a literature review of representative works that employ data visualizations as a methodological tool, and highlights the contribution that this collection makes to digital humanities and the Enlightenment studies. Addressing essential period-related themes---from issues of canonicity, intellectual history, and book trade practices to canonical authors and texts, gender roles, and public sphere dynamics---this collection also makes a broader argument about the necessity of expanding the very notion of “Enlightenment” not only spatially but also conceptually, by revisiting its tenets in light of new data. When translating the new findings afforded by the digital in suggestive visualizations, we can unveil unforeseen patterns, trends, connections, or networks of influence that could potentially revise existing master narratives about the period and the ideological structures at the core of the Enlightenment.
All Things Arabia: Arabian Identity and Material Culture, 2020
All Things Arabia: Arabian Identity and Material Culture, 2020
Eighteenth-Century Thing Theory in a Global Context: From Consumerism to Celebrity Culture, 2014
Social Networks in the Long Eighteenth Century. Clubs, Literary Salons, Textual Coteries, 2014
Book Illustration in the Long Eighteenth Century: Reconfiguring the Visual Periphery of the Text, 2011
Journal Articles by Ileana Baird
Eighteenth-Century Life, 2024
Drawing on Michel Foucault's seminal essay, “Of Other Spaces,” I explore Colley Cibber's library ... more Drawing on Michel Foucault's seminal essay, “Of Other Spaces,” I explore Colley Cibber's library as a “heterotopia of indefinitely accumulating time,” a space that symbolically represents, in Pope's imaginative world, the dangers posed by a modernity gone wild to the values epitomized by classic antiquity. Like Virgil, who guides Dante through Inferno, Pope leads his readers through the library's circles of folly, demonstrating that Cibber's confusion of space, time, and value is a consequence of his misguided relationship with his books. In this library, Cibber's books—classic, gilded, or voluminous—are assigned specific spaces: the exemplary ones are stashed under the beautiful, the lavishly adorned are crammed under the pedantical, or, in Cibber's case, the books of a plagiary. This hierarchy reflects the value system promoted, in Pope's view, by the moderns, whose political and cultural corruption inevitably results in subpar productions and debasement of taste. Within the larger argument of the poem, Pope's radical rewriting of Theobald's monologue and immolation scene from the Variorum to fit the new hero better delivers the poem's message about the intertwining of writing and political compromise, which becomes a major theme of the Dunciad in Four Books.
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830, 2019
This article uses visualizations of Eliza Haywood’s social networks, as described in The Dunciad ... more This article uses visualizations of Eliza Haywood’s social networks, as described in The Dunciad in Four Books (1743), to make visible her relations with the other characters in the poem, and the nature of these affiliations. The tools used to generate these visualizations are GraphViz, an open source visualization software that creates topological graphs from sets of dyadic relations, and SHIVA Graph, an application used to visualize large sets of networks and navigate through them as through a map. In Eliza Haywood’s case, this model of social network analysis sheds new light on the nature of Pope’s attack on women writers and on the role Pope assigned to the novelist in the cultural space of early eighteenth-century London. These social graphs also make visible the poem’s main “connectors,” and its “hall of infamy” (i.e., the seventeen characters that seep into all the networks of the poem). By focusing attention on less dense clusters of relations, this model of social network analysis also highlights what Mark Granovetter calls “the strength of weak ties,” or the role played by peripheral characters within the poem's plot network.
Book Reviews by Ileana Baird
The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats, 2024
Enlightenment Past and Present is an impressive collection of essays, most of them previously pub... more Enlightenment Past and Present is an impressive collection of essays, most of them previously published during the author's prolific career as a (self-described) "contextual intellectual historian." Although its chapters range from academic essays to extensive book reviews to pieces blending confessional prose with bibliographical details, they come together as a surprisingly unified argument about the Enlightenment's extraordinary ideological force in its time and impact on our culture today. Its coherence is given by an eloquent introduction that delivers on the promise of the title: that is, to delve into how the Enlightenment thought shaped the very tenets of modernity while, at the same time, reflecting on the author's intellectual and professional choices, his disciplinary methods, and his formative influences as a historian of the Enlightenment. The Preface and Introduction to this volume are purposely reflective on the author's approaches to his field of study, which makes for delightfully engaging prose. As the author candidly states, "I wanted to come at eighteenth-century constructs not through the lenses of later political ideologies, but by recovering their positional meaning in relation to what preceded them." This candor is counterpoised by a remarkable erudition and an uncanny ability to bring various sources into conversation with each other and delve deeply into their arguments.
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Books by Ileana Baird
• sa eliminati confuziile create de false friends si de phrasal verbs;
• sa alegeti termenul potrivit dintr-o serie sinonimica;
• sa ortografiati corect anumiti termeni;
• sa folositi formele gramaticale adecvate in exprimarea colocviala;
• sa cititi corect abrevierile;
• sa intelegeti diferentele dintre unii termeni din engleza britanica si corespondentii lor din engleza americana;
• sa va insusiti o serie de norme gramaticale: numarul substantivelor, articolul, adverbele fara marca specifica, utilizarea predicativa sau atributiva a unor adjective, verbele fara aspect continuu, verbele modale, subjonctivul, contrastul gerunziu/infinitiv, prepozitia etc.
Dictionarul va propune de asemenea un set de exercitii cu termenii plasati cel mai frecvent in contexte incorecte, alaturi de raspunsurile corespunzatoare.
Edited Books by Ileana Baird
this collection brings together essays focused on the role played by Arabia’s
things—from cultural objects to commodities to historical and ethnographic artifacts
to imaginary things—in creating an Arabian identity over time. The Arabian
identity that we convey here comprises both a fabulous Arabia that has haunted
the European imagination for the past three hundred years and a real Arabia that
has had its unique history, culture, and traditions outside the Orientalized narratives
of the West. All Things Arabia aims to dispel existing stereotypes and stimulate
new thinking about an area whose patterns of trade and cosmopolitanism
have pollinated the world with lasting myths, knowledge, and things of beauty.
Book Chapters by Ileana Baird
Journal Articles by Ileana Baird
Book Reviews by Ileana Baird
• sa eliminati confuziile create de false friends si de phrasal verbs;
• sa alegeti termenul potrivit dintr-o serie sinonimica;
• sa ortografiati corect anumiti termeni;
• sa folositi formele gramaticale adecvate in exprimarea colocviala;
• sa cititi corect abrevierile;
• sa intelegeti diferentele dintre unii termeni din engleza britanica si corespondentii lor din engleza americana;
• sa va insusiti o serie de norme gramaticale: numarul substantivelor, articolul, adverbele fara marca specifica, utilizarea predicativa sau atributiva a unor adjective, verbele fara aspect continuu, verbele modale, subjonctivul, contrastul gerunziu/infinitiv, prepozitia etc.
Dictionarul va propune de asemenea un set de exercitii cu termenii plasati cel mai frecvent in contexte incorecte, alaturi de raspunsurile corespunzatoare.
this collection brings together essays focused on the role played by Arabia’s
things—from cultural objects to commodities to historical and ethnographic artifacts
to imaginary things—in creating an Arabian identity over time. The Arabian
identity that we convey here comprises both a fabulous Arabia that has haunted
the European imagination for the past three hundred years and a real Arabia that
has had its unique history, culture, and traditions outside the Orientalized narratives
of the West. All Things Arabia aims to dispel existing stereotypes and stimulate
new thinking about an area whose patterns of trade and cosmopolitanism
have pollinated the world with lasting myths, knowledge, and things of beauty.