bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Novel Relations
Authors: Christoff Alicia Mireles
Published: May 2020

This book engages twentieth-century post-Freudian British psychoanalysis in an unprecedented way: as literary theory. Placing the writing of figures like D. W. Winnicott, W. R. Bion, Michael and Enid Balint, Joan Riviere, Paula Heimann, and Betty Joseph in conversation with canonical Victorian fiction, the book reveals just how much object relations can teach us about how and why we read. These thinkers illustrate the ever-shifting impact our relations with others have on the psyche, and help us see how literary figures—characters, narrators, authors, and other readers—shape and structure us too. In the book, novels are charged relational fields. Closely reading novels by George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, the book shows that traditional understandings of Victorian fiction change when we fully recognize the object relations of reading. It is not by chance that British psychoanalysis illuminates underappreciated aspects of Victorian fiction so vibrantly: Victorian novels shaped modern psychoanalytic theories of psyche and relationality—including the eclipsing of empire and race in the construction of subject. Relational reading opens up both Victorian fiction and psychoanalysis to wider political and postcolonial dimensions, while prompting a closer engagement with work in such areas as critical race theory and gender and sexuality studies. The book describes the impact of literary form on readers and on twentieth- and twenty-first-century theories of the subject.
Wishfulness
Authors: Christoff Alicia Mireles
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses The Mill on the Floss and W. R. Bion that both care about sympathy and render it as paramystical and real, as a kind of unconscious communication. It points out fantasies of breaking novelistic, provincial, and subjective frames and reveals wishful thinking as the disavowed basis of George Eliot's theory of social realism. In The Mill on the Floss, books and subjectivities overflow like rivers. The key psychoanalytic interlocutor in the chapter is Bion, whose unconventional ideas fundamentally altered modern psychoanalysis in the 1960s and 1970s, and yet remain opaque to nonspecialists. The chapter also argues that The Mill on the Floss constructs an intersubjective model of mind that helps to shape Bion's later theories of unconscious communication. In turn, Bion's work helps to uncover Eliot's deeper aim in the novel: not necessarily to strengthen social sympathies, but to animate psychic processes in generative, unpredictable ways.
Aliveness
Authors: Christoff Alicia Mireles
Published: May 2020

This chapter focuses on Middlemarch and Betty Joseph and Paula Heimann that are concerned with how people fend off feelings of weariness in order to make the world, closest relationships, and long novels feel ardent, energized, and alive. It talks about aliveness by highlighting the shift in the novel from the ardor of a Saint Teresa to the weariness of her modern counterparts. The novel uses weariness, most strikingly embodied in the aging scholar Casaubon, to describe the exhausting task of understanding others as well as the difficulty of reading the novel itself. While “weary experience” threatens to suffuse the entire novel, from syntax to structure, ardor and a second affective term, aliveness, describe the feelings created by the paired activities of metaphor-making and idealization in the novel. The narrative voice highlights both the capacity of life to feel empty, dull, deadened, and meaningless and its own power to reanimate it.
Coda
Authors: Christoff Alicia Mireles
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses how much Victorian fiction and British psychoanalysis together teaches about relationality. It explains loneliness, wishfulness, restlessness, and aliveness as profoundly solitary emotions. Relational readings reveal that people are never more intensely related to other than when these emotions are felt. Although novel reading is a solitary activity, the chapter shows how intensely, if paradoxically, people are related to others while they read: to narrators, authors, characters, and other readers, and also to themselves, in the new forms of self-relation evolved by Victorian novels and consolidated by British object relations psychoanalysis. The chapter also talks about the contemporary psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas who has invented a new term to designate the opposite of trauma: “genera.” The psychic genera, in Bollas's theory, sponsors a very different kind of unconscious work. Rather than an open wound, it is a site of psychic incubation, an inner place to gather resources so that one may turn outward, to “novel experiences” that bring the self into renewing contact with ideational and affective states, often within an enriching interpersonal environment.
The Passion Projects
Authors: Micir Melanie
Published: May 2020

It's impossible, now, to think of modernism without thinking about gender, sexuality, and the diverse movers and shakers of the early twentieth century. But this was not always so. This book examines biographical projects that modernist women writers undertook to resist the exclusion of their friends, colleagues, lovers, and companions from literary history. Many of these works were vibrant efforts of modernist countermemory and counterhistory that became casualties in a midcentury battle for literary legitimacy, but that now add a new dimension to our appreciation of such figures as Radclyffe Hall, Gertrude Stein, Hope Mirrlees, and Sylvia Beach, among many others. The book explores an extensive body of material, including Sylvia Townsend Warner's carefullly annotated letters to her partner Valentine Ackland, Djuna Barnes's fragmented drafts about the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Margaret Anderson's collection of modernist artifacts, and Virginia Woolf's joke biography of her friend and lover Vita Sackville-West, the novel Orlando. Whether published in encoded desire or squirreled away in intimate archives, these “passion projects” recorded life then in order to summon an audience now, and stand as important predecessors of queer and feminist recovery projects that have shaped the contemporary understanding of the field. Arguing for the importance of biography, the book shows how women turned to this genre in the early twentieth century to preserve their lives and communities for future generations to discover.
Modernism’s Unfinished Lives
Authors: Micir Melanie
Published: May 2020

This chapter reassesses the importance of biography, broadly conceived, for modernist, midcentury, and contemporary women writers and scholars. It draws together a diverse archive of biographical acts, such as published and unpublished books, drafts, outlines, fragments, letters, annotations, collections, objects, and ephemera. In the experimental life writing of canonical mainstays like Virginia Woolf, the intimate archives of Radclyffe Hall and Sylvia Townsend Warner, the abandoned projects of Djuna Barnes and Hope Mirrlees, the midcentury memoirs and literary collections of Margaret Anderson, Sylvia Beach, and Alice B. Toklas, and the more contemporary recovery projects of Lisa Cohen, Jenny Diski, Monique Truong, and Kate Zambreno, the biographical impulse signals a shared ethical drive to develop a counternarrative of literary history grounded in women's lives. The chapter then tracks the interest in preservation across biographical novels, histories, and archives. It uncovers the modernist prehistory of the contemporary queer feminist recovery project.
Intimate Archives
Authors: Micir Melanie
Published: May 2020

This chapter demonstrates that some intimate biographical acts are designed as archival projects to be mined later. It suggests that compilers of intimate archives, such as Radclyffe Hall, his long-time partner Una Troubridge, alongside her lover Evguenia Souline prioritize future researchers over midcentury readers. This chapter focuses on Ann Cvetkovich's notion of the “archive of feelings” and further proposes that some queer feminist life stories were intentionally left incomplete—even unwritten. The chapter concludes with a substantial engagement with Sylvia Townsend Warner's late-career life writing. Claiming that the archive of her partnership with Valentine Ackland could not be published without a safe margin for everyone to be dead in. Warner spent years after Ackland's death assembling an intimate archive of their literary life together. Like Troubridge and Souline's letters, Warner's archive was intentionally assembled, collated, annotated, and saved for a more generous future audience.
Abandoned Lives
Authors: Micir Melanie
Published: May 2020

This chapter theorizes biographical failure, such as what happens when it feels impossible to finish telling a life story. It reads two incomplete biographical projects in the context of what Jack Halberstam has called the “queer art of failure”: the recognition and reframing of failure as one possible form of the deliberate subversion of heteronormative metrics of success. Djuna Barnes worked for decades to turn the attempted autobiography of her Dadaist friend, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, into a publishable biography. Hope Mirrlees compiled a series of half-done drafts, notes, and outlines toward the biography of her late mentor, friend, and intimate companion, the celebrated Cambridge classicist Jane Ellen Harrison. Though their projects were very different, neither Barnes nor Mirrlees would finish their biographies or consent to let anyone else take over their projects. The chapter reframes the discourse of failure surrounding both projects and suggests that these so-called failures represent acts of resistance to the normalizing pull of typical biographical narratives.
Biographical Criticism and the Passion Project Now
Authors: Micir Melanie
Published: May 2020

This chapter focuses on the future audience imagined for many of the biographical passion projects. It talks about more recent experiments in biographical writing by Lisa Cohen, Jenny Diski, Nathalie Léger, Monique Truong, and Kate Zambreno that share intellectual and affective motivations with the modernist practices. If the biographical and archival projects hope to assure a future readership for queer feminist life stories, then these contemporary writers volunteer as that readership through the generosity of their attention and the experimental forms of their continued custodianship. The chapter suggests that they write with the affective engagement and sense of generic activism that so many mid-century women harnessed to preserve the lives of their friends, partners, lovers, wives, and companions. In this sense, the chapter ends with a generation of women writers who, like their ancestors at midcentury, see the work of writing as inseparable from the work of recovery.
Reference
Authors: Freedgood Elaine
Published: May 2020

This chapter suggests the virtues of forestalling allegory and rationalization that literal representations of the invisible or incredible tend to invite. It focuses on ghostly reference as a malleable aspect of representation, a formal nexus that allows for the free play of belief and the production of worlds—two necessary conditions for the formation and sustenance of the liberal subject. Refusing to give up the ghost slows ghostly reference to a halt, allowing readers to think about the materiality as well as the meaning of the ghost. The chapter also explains the larger function of ghostly reference, that it occurs wherever disavowal admits guilt into a discourse only to render it immaterial: unbelievable, inexplicable, and finally impossible to pursue logically, rationally, or scientifically. In this, ghostly reference promises relief from meaning, from guilt, and from the burden of history that it avows and then displaces onto the apparitional, a category that is never resolved. Ghostly reference offers a form of endlessly shifting semiotic play: the play of reference, the play of meaning, and the play of belief each shield one another from any final resolution.
Faltings Heights and L-functions: Minicourse Given by Shou-Wu Zhang
Authors: Gao Ziyang , Känel Rafael von , Mocz Lucia
Published: May 2020

This chapter explores Shou-Wu Zhang's minicourse on Faltings heights and L-functions. It essentially consists of three parts. The first part discusses conjectures and results in the literature which give bounds, or formulae in terms of L-functions, for “Faltings heights.” The authors also mention various applications of such conjectures and results. The second part is devoted to the work of Yuan–Zhang in which they proved the averaged Colmez conjecture. Here, the authors detail the main ideas and concepts used in their proof. The third part focuses on the work of Yuan–Zhang in the function field world. Therein they compute special values of higher derivatives of certain automorphic L-functions in terms of self-intersection numbers of Drinfeld–Heegner cycles on the moduli stack of shtukas. The result of Yuan–Zhang might be viewed as a higher Gross–Zagier/Chowla–Selberg formula in the function field setting. The authors then motivate and explain the philosophy that Chowla–Selberg type formulae are special cases of Gross–Zagier type formulae coming from identities between geometric and analytic kernels.
Renaissance Epics: Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser
Authors: Mack Peter
Published: May 2020

This chapter takes a look at Orlando Furioso (1516, 1532), Gerusalemme Liberata (1581), and The Faerie Queene (1596), which are the recognized epic masterpieces of their eras. They draw in succession on each other and on a wide range of classical and romance texts, many of them known to the first audiences of these three poems. The chapter investigates the ways in which Ludovico Ariosto, Torquato Tasso, and Edmund Spenser used their predecessors and the different effects they achieved from a shared heritage. It examines the ways in which a series of authors used both their immediate predecessors and their sense of a long tradition of epic writing to create something new. The chapter argues that Ariosto aimed to shock and surprise his audience. Tasso reacted to Ariosto by combining a more serious and unified epic on the lines of the Iliad. Spenser's idea of devoting each book to a hero and a virtue presents a structure which is easier to comprehend than Ariosto's, yet looser and more open to surprises than Tasso's.
Dual Citizenship as a Strategy of Global Upward Mobility
Authors: Harpaz Yossi
Published: May 2020

This chapter presents an approach that posits that global inequality in citizenship value is the main factor that shapes the acquisition and use of dual citizenship. The world's citizenships are not equal. Some citizenships provide access to a secure and prosperous territory; guarantee extensive social and political rights; and come with a prestigious, high-mobility passport. On the other end of the spectrum, some citizenships are practically worthless in terms of economic access, social welfare, and political rights—and, moreover, mark their bearer as an automatic suspect when trying to cross international borders. The chapter then describes a model of the global citizenship hierarchy. Within this hierarchy, citizenship from Western or EU countries provides the highest level of rights, opportunities, and travel freedom. Once dual citizenship became available, millions of individuals from middle-tier nations in Latin America and Eastern Europe drew on their ancestry or ethnicity to obtain EU citizenship. For those individuals, compensatory citizenship is a deliberate strategy of upward mobility in the global hierarchy.
Conclusion
Authors: Harpaz Yossi
Published: May 2020

This concluding chapter discusses the theoretical implications of the book's findings. The proliferation of compensatory citizenship contributes to the commodification of nationality through multiple pathways: the emergence of citizenship industries, the exchange of citizenship for cash, and the instrumentalization of national belonging. Respondents exhibit an attitude which can be called “the sovereign individual”; they understand citizenship status as a domain for individual free choice and maximization of utility, free from traditional collective dictates. In other words, citizenship is changing from an ascribed to an achieved status. Ultimately, the legal acceptance of multiple nationality has made Western citizenship into a valuable practical resource for elites in other parts of the world, allowing them to convert local advantages into a new kind of capital that elevates their position within the global system of stratification.
Clinical Guidelines and Clinical Judgment
Authors: Manski Charles F.
Published: May 2020

This chapter reviews the continuing discourse in medicine regarding the circumstances in which clinicians should adhere to evidence-based practice guidelines or exercise their own judgment, sometimes called “expert opinion.” There are at least two broad reasons why patient care adhering to guidelines may differ from the care that clinicians provide. First, guideline developers and clinicians may differ in their ability to predict how decisions affect patient outcomes. Second, guideline developers and clinicians may differ in how they evaluate patient outcomes. Welfare comparison of adherence to guidelines and decentralized decision making requires consideration of both factors, and perhaps others as well. This chapter looks at how limited ability to assess patient risk of illness and to predict treatment response may affect the welfare achieved by adherence to guidelines and by decentralized clinical practice.
Wishful Extrapolation from Research to Patient Care
Authors: Manski Charles F.
Published: May 2020

This chapter critiques how evidence from randomized trials has been used to inform medical decision making. Trials have long enjoyed a favored status within medical research on treatment response and are often called the “gold standard” for such research. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ordinarily considers only trial data when making decisions on drug approval. The well-known appeal of trials is that, given sufficient sample size and complete observation of outcomes, they deliver credible findings about treatment response within the study population. However, it is also well-known that extrapolation of findings from trials to clinical practice can be difficult. Researchers and guideline developers often use untenable assumptions to extrapolate. The chapter refers to this practice as wishful extrapolation. It discusses multiple reasons why extrapolation of research findings to clinical practice may be suspect.
A Population Health Perspective on Reasonable Care
Authors: Manski Charles F.
Published: May 2020

This chapter views patient care from a population health perspective. The argument for treatment variation strengthens when one considers patient care as a population health problem rather than from the perspective of a clinician treating an individual patient. This chapter shows that randomly varying the treatment of patients with the same observed attributes can provide valuable error protection and information under uncertainty. That is, it may be useful to diversify treatment choice. The chapter explains that implementation of adaptive diversification may be possible in centralized health-care systems where there exists a planning entity who chooses treatments for a broad patient population.
Religious Parenting
Authors: Smith Christian , Ritz Bridget , Rotolo Michael
Published: May 2020

How do American parents pass their religion on to their children? At a time of overall decline of traditional religion and an increased interest in personal “spirituality,” this book investigates the ways that parents transmit religious beliefs, values, and practices to their kids. We know that parents are the most important influence on their children's religious lives, yet parents have been virtually ignored in previous work on religious socialization. The book explores American parents' strategies, experiences, beliefs, and anxieties regarding religious transmission through hundreds of in-depth interviews that span religious traditions, social classes, and family types all around the country. Throughout we hear the voices of evangelical, Catholic, Mormon, mainline and black Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist parents and discover that, despite massive diversity, American parents share a nearly identical approach to socializing their children religiously. For almost all, religion is important for the foundation it provides for becoming one's best self on life's difficult journey. Religion is primarily a resource for navigating the challenges of this life, not preparing for an afterlife. Parents view it as their job, not religious professionals', to ground their children in life-enhancing religious values that provide resilience, morality, and a sense of purpose. Challenging longstanding sociological and anthropological assumptions about culture, the book demonstrates that parents of highly dissimilar backgrounds share the same “cultural models” when passing on religion to their children.
The Purpose and Nature of Life
Authors: Smith Christian , Ritz Bridget , Rotolo Michael
Published: May 2020

This chapter considers how religious parents in the United States approach the job of passing on their family's faith and practices to their children. Furthermore, the chapter takes a look at what assumptions, categories, and beliefs inform their views on the question, as well as which desires, feelings, and concerns influence the ways they undertake the transmission of their religion to their kids. This chapter addresses these issues by systematically analyzing the cultural models that most U.S. parents hold about the issue. It identifies the relevant cultural models that parents hold, which significantly influence their behaviors. In short, the chapter focuses on cognitive frameworks that shape practices rather than the practices themselves.
Children, Parenting, and Family
Authors: Smith Christian , Ritz Bridget , Rotolo Michael
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines three other important cultural models that condition their approach to religious transmission to children—those concerning the nature of children, the task of parenting, and the importance of family solidarity. The dominant view of religious American parents about intergenerational religious transmission is also informed by a particular understanding of children's nature and potentials. In addition, American religious parents have a cultural model not only of the nature of children but also the job of parenting. Finally, conversations with religious parents about passing on religion to children brought to the surface a distinct cultural model with its own beliefs and associated feelings about the importance of family solidarity. This outlook is related to the cultural models of the nature of children and the task of parenting described above, but not reducible to them.
Horace's Ars Poetica
Authors: Ferriss-Hill Jennifer
Published: May 2020

For two millennia, the Ars Poetica (Art of Poetry), the 476-line literary treatise in verse with which Horace closed his career, has served as a paradigmatic manual for writers. Rarely has it been considered as a poem in its own right, or else it has been disparaged as a great poet's baffling outlier. Here, this book fully reintegrates the Ars Poetica into Horace's oeuvre, reading the poem as a coherent, complete, and exceptional literary artifact intimately linked with the larger themes pervading his work. Arguing that the poem can be interpreted as a manual on how to live masquerading as a handbook on poetry, the book traces its key themes to show that they extend beyond poetry to encompass friendship, laughter, intergenerational relationships, and human endeavor. If the poem is read for how it expresses itself, moreover, it emerges as an exemplum of art in which judicious repetitions of words and ideas join disparate parts into a seamless whole that nevertheless lends itself to being remade upon every reading. This book is a logical evolution of Horace's work, which promises to inspire a long overdue reconsideration of a hugely influential yet misunderstood poem.
Humano
Authors: Ferriss-Hill Jennifer
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses the first word of the Ars Poetica, humano (human), which heralds the poem's concern with all that living entails. This casts the scope of the work far beyond poetry from the start. As the poem progresses, this is borne out by Horace's striking focus on human emotions, on life cycles (whether of people or words), on nature and human nature, and on spoken language, all of which are given far greater prominence than seems justified in the ostensible context of creating believable characters for the stage. Horace's concern is with all human endeavor—the ars vivendi (art of living). If the Ars Poetica is read for how it expresses itself, moreover, rather than merely for what it says, it emerges as an ideal exemplum of art, the whole proving seamless and lending itself to being remade in new ways by every reader and upon every reading.
Amici, risum
Authors: Ferriss-Hill Jennifer
Published: May 2020

This chapter focuses on two key words: amici (friends) and risum (laughter). Both terms run the length of the Ars Poetica, appearing sometimes singly and at other times in unison, such that the senses of each crystallize further, both individually and together, with every appearance. Horace explores the paradox that the obligation of a true friend is to criticize, especially through laughter, even at the risk of causing pain, and that criticisms issued by a friend are necessarily true. Within the framework of Roman and, especially, Epicurean amicitia (friendship), Horace boldly negotiates for himself the position of “friend” vis-à-vis the Pisones, although these figures are mentioned nowhere else in his corpus. This ruse of friendship is nevertheless what allows Horace to criticize his addressees' literary talents and discourage them (along with perhaps every reader) from attempting to write poetry.
Receiving the Ars Poetica
Authors: Ferriss-Hill Jennifer
Published: May 2020

This epilogue traces the themes and concerns of the previous chapters throughout the Ars Poetica's considerable reception history. If the Ars Poetica's poetic qualities have not always been clear to scholars of literature, they seem to have been more evident to the practicing writers who, inspired by Horace's poem, wrote artes poeticae of their own. Indeed, practicing poets have long discerned what many literary scholars have not: that the poem's value lies not so much in its stated contents as in its fine-spun internal unity; in its interest in human nature and the onward march of time; in the importance of criticism—both giving and receiving it—to the artistic process; and in the essential sameness of writing, of making art, and of living, loving, being, and even dying. The argument made in this study for reading the Ars Poetica as a literary achievement in its own right may therefore be viewed as a return to the complex, nuanced ways in which it was already read in the Middle Ages, through the sixteenth century, and into the twenty-first. The authors of the later works examined in this chapter read the Ars Poetica as exemplifying and instantiating the sort of artistry that it opaquely commands, and they reflected this in turn through their own verses.
Driving Ambivalence
Authors: Macdonald John , Branas Charles , Stokes Robert
Published: May 2020

This chapter assesses the role of transportation and street environments in people's lives and how reliance on the automobile has shaped the United States and other parts of the world. The century-long evolution into a car-dependent culture has had its benefits in terms of commerce and regional mobility, but has also had devastating effects on people's health and safety. Rather than discuss the negative impacts of cars on air pollution, the chapter focuses on the place-based health impacts of reducing people's reliance on the automobile by increasing the walkability of areas and expanding access to public transit. Younger adults are increasingly ambivalent about whether they should even own a car and are moving to cities in search of more efficient and human-scale mobility options. These options include having access to a street network with safe and efficient pedestrian and bike infrastructures as well as public-transit options. Meanwhile, public officials in numerous cities are talking about the benefits of expanded transit systems and walkable street grids to encourage more active lifestyles and attract tourists, families, and entrepreneurs who are tired of traffic congestion and car commuting and interested in a lively street experience that is not simply seen from behind a windshield. The chapter then highlights case studies showing how new place-based transportation and streetscape changes can be a tool for improving health and safety.
Embracing Change
Authors: Macdonald John , Branas Charles , Stokes Robert
Published: May 2020

This chapter explores how place-based changes can bring about unintended consequences, which are a key element in any scientific endeavor. Unplanned consequences should be thought through and embraced by implementers of place-based changes. Successful changes to places will inevitably lead to increasing desirability for their use. However, any sustained change to the built environment of a place creates the potential for multiple outcomes. There will always be potential negative tradeoffs to changing places. Unintended negative consequences should be planned for and discussed ahead of time, so that efforts can be made to mitigate against their occurrence. Fear of change or negative impacts can create an inescapable status quo for many poor and neglected communities who could benefit from place-based change. This status quo can lead to dangerous and unhealthy conditions persisting for too long, producing negative legacy effects for these communities. As a solution, negative externalities of placemaking interventions are more readily anticipated through research. In this way, early scientific involvement can greatly inform proactive planning and thoughtful placemaking, easing any apprehension among local policy makers and residents.
Conclusion
Authors: Carugati Federica
Published: May 2020

This chapter summarizes the main findings and discusses how the theory developed on creating a constitution can be productively applied to reflect on the constitution-making processes today. It extracts some preliminary lessons from the Athenian constitution-making with the case of Myanmar. The victory of Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy in the 2015 election marked an important step toward peace and democratization in Myanmar. Yet, both the transition and the pacification of the country hang in the balance. The Rohingya crisis is one of many obstacles on Myanmar's road to peace and stability. The chapter also argues that another one Myanmar's obstacles is the 2008 constitution, because of the power that it bestows on Myanmar's armed forces, and because of the absence of a meaningful engagement with ethnic demands. Constitutional reforms are high on Aung San Suu Kyi's agenda—but direct action has proved ineffective. Negotiations have since then taken the form of a political dialogue.
A Different Kind of Animal
Authors: Boyd Robert
Published: May 2020

Human beings have evolved to become the most dominant species on Earth. This astonishing transformation is usually explained in terms of cognitive ability—people are just smarter than all the rest. But this book argues that culture—our ability to learn from each other—has been the essential ingredient of our remarkable success. The book shows how a unique combination of cultural adaptation and large-scale cooperation has transformed our species and assured our survival—making us the different kind of animal we are today. The book is based on the Tanner Lectures delivered at Princeton University, featuring challenging responses across the chapters.
Reconstructing the Roman Climate
Authors: Harper Kyle , McCormick Michael
Published: May 2020

This chapter frames our current state of knowledge about the physical climate in the period of the Roman Empire's expansion, flourishing, and final fragmentation, at roughly 200 BCE to 600 CE. The emphasis here is on the new evidence of paleoclimate proxy data. The chapter explores what it is starting to tell historians about the timing and nature of large-scale climate change in the centuries of interest. To conclude, the chapter draws together the disparate sources of evidence into a tentative narrative. It highlights the questions that can be asked about the relationship between climate change and historical change and underscores the need for more and better data to fill in such a narrative in the future.
The Language of Global Success
Authors: Neeley Tsedal
Published: May 2020

For nearly three decades, English has been the lingua franca of cross-border business, yet studies on global language strategies have been scarce. Providing a rare behind-the-scenes look at the high-tech giant Rakuten in the five years following its English mandate, this book explores how language shapes the ways in which employees in global organizations communicate and negotiate linguistic and cultural differences. Drawing on 650 interviews conducted across Rakuten's locations around the world, the book argues that an organization's lingua franca is the catalyst by which all employees become some kind of “expat”—detached from their native tongue or culture. Demonstrating that language can serve as the conduit for an unfamiliar culture, often in unexpected ways, the book uncovers how all organizations might integrate language effectively to tap into the promise of globalization.
Happiness over the Life Course: What Matters Most?
Authors: Clark Andrew E. , Flèche Sarah , Layard Richard , Powdthavee Nattavudh , Ward George
Published: May 2020

This chapter estimates the five sets of relationships discussed in the previous chapter, using two surveys. It first estimates relationships the first four sets, using the British Cohort Study data (BCS) on children born in 1970. Then the chapter estimates the fifth relationship, using data on the British cohort born mainly in the county of Avon in 1991–1992. These are of course results for Britain, but they are typical of what is found across the advanced world. And though the analysis in the chapter is purely cross-sectional, the chapter also discusses panel estimation at length. At this point, the key lesson is the power of these studies to shed a completely new perspective on human life.
Health of Mind and Body
Authors: Clark Andrew E. , Flèche Sarah , Layard Richard , Powdthavee Nattavudh , Ward George
Published: May 2020

This chapter argues that both physical and mental health are hugely important for an enjoyable life. Illnesses of either type can be devastating. But the chapter asserts that mental illness explains more of the misery in society than physical illness does, and more than either poverty or unemployment. It also explains more of the variation in life-satisfaction. Moreover, mental illness in one generation is frequently transmitted to the next. But many existing studies of life-satisfaction ignore mental illness. Implicitly they assume that misery and mental illness are the same thing. However, the chapter argues that this is quite wrong. Many things can cause low life-satisfaction, some of them directly and others indirectly by causing mental illness. But there are also sources of mental illness that are uncorrelated with any of the obvious external causes like poverty, unemployment, separation, or bereavement.
Family Conflict
Authors: Clark Andrew E. , Flèche Sarah , Layard Richard , Powdthavee Nattavudh , Ward George
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses the effects of family conflict on children. Break-ups and separations on an increased scale is a relatively modern phenomenon—one of the more important changes over the last forty years. The chapter considers what such circumstances mean for the children caught in the middle of conflict. The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) provides good evidence, and the broad answer is this: What matters is family conflict, rather than family break-up, and, if the conflict is bad enough, the break-up may help the children. But the conflict is unambiguously bad, especially for the behavior of the children—parents who fight tend to generate children who fight.
Measuring Cost-Effectiveness in Terms of Happiness
Authors: Clark Andrew E. , Flèche Sarah , Layard Richard , Powdthavee Nattavudh , Ward George
Published: May 2020

This chapter demonstrates that policy analysis should be based on happiness as the measure of benefit (except where traditional methods actually work). It argues that this should be generally applied throughout the public services and by nongovernment organizations (NGOs). The chapter offers four key proposals. The first is that the goal of governments should be to increase the happiness of the people and, especially, to reduce misery. Where willingness to pay is not a feasible measure of benefit, governments should develop new methods of policy analysis based on point-years of happiness as the measure of benefit. All policy change should be evaluated through controlled experiments in which the impact on happiness is routinely measured. A major objective of social science (and of its funders) should be to throw light on the causes of happiness, and how it can be enhanced—and at what cost.
The Killing Season
Authors: Robinson Geoffrey B.
Published: May 2020

This book explores one of the largest and swiftest, yet least examined, instances of mass killing and incarceration in the twentieth century—the shocking antileftist purge that gripped Indonesia in 1965–66, leaving some five hundred thousand people dead and more than a million others in detention. The author of this book sets out to account for this violence and to end the troubling silence surrounding it. In doing so, the book sheds new light on broad, enduring historical questions. How do we account for instances of systematic mass killing and detention? Why are some of these crimes remembered and punished, while others are forgotten? The book is a detailed account of a pivotal period in Indonesian history.
How to Do Things with International Law
Authors: Hurd Ian
Published: May 2020

Conventionally understood as a set of limits on state behavior, the “rule of law” in world politics is widely assumed to serve as a progressive contribution to a just, stable, and predictable world. This book challenges this received wisdom. Bringing the study of law and legality together with power, politics, and legitimation, it illustrates the complex politics of the international rule of law. The book draws on a series of timely case studies involving recent legal arguments over war, torture, and drones to demonstrate that international law not only domesticates state power but also serves as a permissive and even empowering source of legitimation for state action—including violence and torture. Rather than a civilizing force that holds the promise of universal peace, international law is a deeply politicized set of practices driven by the pursuit of particular interests and desires. The disputes so common in world politics over what law permits and what it forbids are, therefore, fights over the legitimating effect of legality. A reconsideration of the rule of law in world politics and its relationship to state power, the book examines how and why governments use and manipulate international law in foreign policy.
African Dominion
Authors: Gomez Michael A.
Published: May 2020

Pick up almost any book on early and medieval world history and empire, and where do you find West Africa? On the periphery. This pioneering book tells a different story. Interweaving political and social history and drawing on a rich array of sources, the book unveils a new vision of how categories of ethnicity, race, gender, and caste emerged in Africa and in global history. Focusing on the Savannah and Sahel region, the book traces how Islam's growth in West Africa, along with intensifying commerce that included slaves, resulted in a series of political experiments unique to the region, culminating in the rise of empire. A radically new account of the importance of early Africa in global history, the book puts early and medieval West Africa on the map of global history.
Christianity in the Twentieth Century
Authors: Stanley Brian
Published: May 2020

This book charts the transformation of one of the world's great religions during an age marked by world wars, genocide, nationalism, decolonization, and powerful ideological currents, many of them hostile to Christianity. The book traces how Christianity evolved from a religion defined by the culture and politics of Europe to the expanding polycentric and multicultural faith it is today—one whose growing popular support is strongest in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, China, and other parts of Asia. The book sheds critical light on themes of central importance for understanding the global contours of modern Christianity, illustrating each one with contrasting case studies, usually taken from different parts of the world. Unlike other books on world Christianity, this one is not a regional survey or chronological narrative, nor does it focus on theology or ecclesiastical institutions. The book provides a history of Christianity as a popular faith experienced and lived by its adherents, telling a compelling and multifaceted story of Christendom's fortunes in Europe, North America, and across the rest of the globe. It demonstrates how Christianity has had less to fear from the onslaughts of secularism than from the readiness of Christians themselves to accommodate their faith to ideologies that privilege racial identity or radical individualism.
Racial Mixing and Textual Remixing: Charles Chesnutt
Authors: Hack Daniel
Published: May 2020

This chapter studies how Charles Chesnutt's engagement with Victorian literature forms a plot of its own. This plot develops over time and ultimately brings to the surface aspects of this engagement that remain submerged in his earlier work. Chesnutt not only leverages Victorian literature to tell the stories he wants to tell but also takes a more critical stance toward his intertexts, probing and exposing shortcomings in their treatment of race. Borrowing the title of his last novel, then, the chapter suggests that Victorian literature is Chesnutt's quarry: both source and prey. Here, the double-edged nature of this engagement manifests itself most fully and strikingly when Chesnutt seizes on Victorian references to an identity as marginal and marginalized in that literature as it is central to his own writings: that of the racially mixed individual, the mulatto.
Caliphate Redefined
Authors: Yilmaz Hüseyin
Published: May 2020

The medieval theory of the caliphate, epitomized by the Abbasids (750–1258), was the construct of jurists who conceived it as a contractual leadership of the Muslim community in succession to the Prophet Muhammed's political authority. This book traces how a new conception of the caliphate emerged under the Ottomans, who redefined the caliph as at once a ruler, a spiritual guide, and a lawmaker corresponding to the prophet's three natures. Challenging conventional narratives that portray the Ottoman caliphate as a fading relic of medieval Islamic law, the book offers a novel interpretation of authority, sovereignty, and imperial ideology by examining how Ottoman political discourse led to the mystification of Muslim political ideals and redefined the caliphate. It illuminates how Ottoman Sufis reimagined the caliphate as a manifestation and extension of cosmic divine governance. The Ottoman Empire arose in Western Anatolia and the Balkans, where charismatic Sufi leaders were perceived to be God's deputies on earth. The book traces how Ottoman rulers, in alliance with an increasingly powerful Sufi establishment, continuously refashioned and legitimated their rule through mystical imageries of authority, and how the caliphate itself reemerged as a moral paradigm that shaped early modern Muslim empires.
Sex and Secularism
Authors: Scott Joan Wallach
Published: May 2020

The author's acclaimed writings have been foundational for the field of gender history. In this book, the author challenges one of the central claims of the “clash of civilizations” polemic—that secularism guarantees gender equality. The book shows that the gender equality invoked today as an enduring principle was not originally associated with the term “secularism” when it first entered the nineteenth-century lexicon. In fact, the inequality of the sexes was fundamental to the separation of church and state that inaugurated Western modernity. The book reveals how the assertion that secularism has been synonymous with equality between the sexes has distracted our attention from difficulties related to gender difference—ones shared by Western and non-Western cultures alike.
Kenya in the 1980s
Authors: Chorev Nitsan
Published: May 2020

This chapter describes the interplay between foreign aid and state policies in Kenya that together contributed to the emergence of a small yet robust locally owned pharmaceutical sector. Most important was a “ration kits” program that helped rationalize the procurement and distribution of drugs in rural areas. As part of that program, a government-funded component was used to specifically purchase locally produced drugs. This proved critical for the emergence and growth of the Kenyan pharmaceutical sector. Other policies in support of the state-owned pharmaceutical firm also indirectly pushed for and later assisted privately owned pharmaceutical firms. With the support of foreign aid, then, the Kenyan government was able to create a market for local producers. Foreign assistance did not come with technology transfer (mentoring), and access to technical know-how was predominantly available to Kenyans of Indian origin, whose social position during colonialism and after independence granted them educational, commercial, and cultural ties abroad. Moreover, there was little attention to quality standards (monitoring).
Uganda in the 2000s
Authors: Chorev Nitsan
Published: May 2020

This chapter identifies the conditions that led even the largest Ugandan pharmaceutical companies to forgo production of complex drugs or quality upgrading, with the exception of one firm with a unique trajectory. In Uganda, the Global Fund did not operate through the drug procurement state agency, which made the Global Fund market less approachable for most local producers. Additionally, Ugandan producers were not offered the mentoring made available to Kenyan and Tanzanian drug companies. Without potential markets and adequate mentoring, local producers did not have the incentives or capabilities to change their strategies, and local pharmaceutical firms in Uganda continued to produce simple drugs. The exception was a joint venture between a Ugandan firm and one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in India. With unprecedented support from the state, it was able to successfully achieve a WHO certificate and take advantage of the Global Fund and other markets.
Recollections of Zemlinsky from My Years of Study
Authors: Korngold Erich Wolfgang , Brodbeck David
Published: May 2020

This chapter contains Erich Korngold's personal reflections on his former teacher, Alexander Zemlinsky. Zemlinksy was an Austrian composer and conductor who enjoyed an outstanding reputation as a private music teacher in late Habsburg Vienna. He is perhaps best remembered in this capacity for the counterpoint instruction he gave to his future brother-in-law Arnold Schoenberg. For a brief time, beginning in 1900, Zemlinsky taught Alma Schindler, with whom he had a love affair in the period before she began the relationship that would lead, in March 1902, to her marriage to Gustav Mahler. Among the last—and certainly the most precocious—of Zemlinsky's Viennese students was Erich Wolfgang Korngold, whose lessons were initiated in 1908 and continued for upward of two years until Zemlinsky departed Vienna to become the music director of Prague's New German Theater.