Magic
Special Issue: Volume 32, Number 1 (Spring–Summer 2025)

Magic is a vexing category that is all too often taken to comprise practices whose only shared feature is their opposition to religion, science, and our presumed rationality. Despite its inherent flaws, the concept retains a pivotal role in diverse areas of art history, archaeology, anthropology, material culture studies, and history of science. For this special issue we invited twenty specialists from different disciplines to interrogate magic’s manifold materials and implications in a multivocal format, addressing such questions as: What forces are at play in the making and destruction of magic? How can the sensory and material affordances of magic be brought to bear on histories of making, perception, ideology, or quotidian life? How can our evolving approaches to magic contribute to our understanding of alternative world models or challenge our ontological presumptions? In the authors’ respective fields, what are the greatest challenges and prospects posed by engagements with magic? Where might future directions take us?

Earthbound: Gravity/Figure/Ground
Special Issue: Volume 33, Number 1 (Spring–Summer 2026)

The significance of the body’s contact with and relationship to the ground, evocations of the heft of bodies and their relationship to gravity, and the cultural meanings of uprightness or falling have been central to a wide range of objects from different cultures, geographical regions, and time periods. Yet, these topics remain substantially understudied in the existing scholarly literature, particularly from a cross-cultural perspective. It is these works, produced in widely divergent times, places, and cultures, that are the focus of the twenty-one essays written by distinguished scholars featured in this special issue. Bringing these contributors’ research together will allow for a richer understanding of these objects’ commonalities and differences of meaning for their makers, users, and viewers. It will also enhance our knowledge of how reflections on the body’s weight, earthbound status, and relationship to gravity have profoundly shaped the fine art, design, decorative arts, and material culture of different times, places, and people.