bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Right to Objects of Cultural Heritage
Authors: Gerstenblith Patty
Published: October 2023

This chapter turns to the international legal principles that developed over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to protect the rights of States and communities to their tangible movable cultural heritage. Chapter 5 accomplishes this by analysing three phases of this development, starting with aspects of the 1954 Hague Convention regime and International Humanitarian Law that affect movable cultural heritage. Next, cultural heritage and the right to cultural objects are examined as a human right and the international agreements and principles that articulate this right, with a particular focus on the rights of Indigenous communities. Finally, the chapter turns to the international conventions that attempt to regulate the movement of cultural heritage, recognizing the weaknesses in the regime that have made regulation of the market particularly challenging.
Beyond the Law: Ethical Considerations
Authors: Gerstenblith Patty
Published: October 2023

This chapter discusses various Codes of Ethics and guidelines for professional associations, and how they could be utilized to fill gaps in the current legal framework regarding movable cultural objects. To illustrate this idea, prominent examples of codes of ethics are analysed, such as the ICOM Code, AAM Code, and others that have a primary emphasis on good title and legal export of objects that museums are considering acquiring or scholars are considering publishing. This chapter also looks at the special considerations ethical guidelines give to art looted during the Holocaust and the special treatment given for human remains and sacred cultural objects. Finally, the chapter analyzes the 1970 UNESCO Convention and how the ‘1970 standard’ has been both helpful and harmful in its adoption by academic organizations, museums, and other market professionals as an ethical standard.
Data Analysis
Authors: Upton Graham , Brawn Dan
Published: October 2023

This book introduces the central concepts of modern data science, beginning with an introduction to simple statistical concepts such as mean and variance together with related methods for presenting and summarising data. The next chapters present the laws of probability, the probability distributions most commonly used to summarise data, the methods for estimating the parameters of these distributions, and the extent to which we can be confident concerning those estimated values. The next chapters are concerned with the relationships between two variables and the selection of models that involve several variables. The final chapter investigates the various methods that are used in dividing a population into distinct classes. The many worked examples include a study of the fate of those on the Titanic, and the factors affecting babies being born underweight. The book demands no particular software familiarity, since the methods presented can be implemented in Python, R (used by the authors), or any other statistical software.
How to Talk about Comics and Not Fear Them
Authors: Borkent Mike
Published: October 2023

This chapter describes some important cultural contexts and problematic theoretical underpinnings of engagements with comics in North America in particular. It describes the challenge of engaging comics from a traditional perspective on literacy and highlights the false assumptions about visual and verbal communication. It then turns to describe the emerging multimodal approach to multiple literacies, define media and modalities, and situate the role of interdisciplinary cognitive studies as a tool for elaborating on how multimodal meaning is constructed in comics.
Introduction
Authors: Lee Gavin S. K.
Published: October 2023

Queers have always listened widely, repurposing straight sounds for the music theorist’s “queer ear,” a concept that stands in contrast with queer soundings, by queer composers, who are also investigated in this volume. Privileging provisional, idiosyncratic, and non-normative listening practices, a queer ear enables us to counter music theory’s tendencies toward rationality, unity, unilinearity, teleology, and logical certainty. What unites the investigation of queer ear and queer soundings is the repurposing of “hard” music-theoretical apparatuses, as well as “soft” apparatuses like narratology and cultural theory, for queer ends. These repurposings contribute to the search for general principles—or “theory”—of queering that counters mainstream music theory’s proclivities, encouraging everyone to experiment with queer ways of listening.
Queer and Critical Race Theory
Authors: Lee Gavin S. K. , Ewell Philip , Hatten Robert
Published: October 2023

Queer music theory emerges in conjunction with rising awareness of LGBTQ+ issues and racism in music theory. In this conversation, editor Gavin S. K. Lee engages Philip Ewell, the foremost critic of racism in music theory, and Robert Hatten, who as former SMT president was instrumental in the formation of the SMT LGBTQ+ Standing Committee, discussing ways in which scholars coming from different perspectives can support the LGBTQ+ cause, while always being aware of one’s positionality and limitations. The conversation ranged over recent racist discourse in music theory, the conjunction of LGBTQ+ and other minority discourse, the dialectic of generality and specificity found both in music theory and in queer theory, and ways of cooperating in alliances.
Music Analysis; Queer Academy
Authors: Currie James R.
Published: October 2023

This essay posits that the foundations of a queer academy must rest upon the pursuit of activities that are self-justifying and non-instrumental. Drawing from an array of different queer theorists—including Sara Ahmed, Michel Foucault, and Leo Bersani—it argues for forms of academic life and being that work according to tangibly different value systems from those used to justify relevance and moral and political acceptability in the non-academic world. The fact that academics have primarily endeavored, to date, to attempt to eradicate any difference between their practices and those of extra-academic life is seen as resulting from what the author terms—drawing from queer theory—academic shame. The essay thus seeks to extol things such as uselessness, play, loitering, forgetting, and time-wasting and argues that music analysis could provide us with intimations of how such things might manifest themselves within a queer academy. Paradoxically, it also argues that such things might be useful to the academy as it attempts to erase such things as racial capitalism and its pervasive effects from institutional life. But ultimately it concludes with a call for academics to “come out” about the fact that before we think about things, we think because thinking itself is a pleasure.
Queering Schubert’s “Der Atlas”
Authors: Bretherton David
Published: October 2023

Adopting a broad, intersectional approach to queer studies, this chapter reflects on the impact that the author’s own queer and disabled positionality has had on their interpretation of Franz Schubert’s “Der Atlas” over a twenty-year period. Following a detailed music analysis of the song, the author offers various readings (“Surface,” “Straight,” “Gay,” and “Disabled”), evaluates each in turn with reference to their own experiences, and—given Schubert’s reported disabilities and the suggestion that he was homosexual—speculates on the possibility that the song could be a coded autobiographical statement. These four readings are then queered, before an attempted “Queer Reading” concludes that, regardless of Schubert’s illnesses and sexuality, the song’s message is deeply conservative: submit to the powerful and know your station. The chapter concludes by arguing for queer music theory to embrace subjectivity, ambiguity, and multiple readings, and that the queer reading of a composition should not be considered contingent on its composer having a queer sexuality.
Sun Ra’s Fletcher Henderson
Authors: Stover Chris
Published: October 2023

Black radical artist Sun Ra’s relationship with jazz’s histories was materially and sensually different from that of his contemporaries in the Afrological musical avant-garde. He adopted an exaggerated and playful—yet lovingly attentive—mode of engagement with his predecessors, notably bandleader-pianists Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington, that could be read as an ongoing series of drag interpretations. This chapter examines one of Sun Ra’s live recordings of “Queer Notions,” a composition by swing-era saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, arranged by Henderson, that in its time was already queering aspects of jazz syntax. This analytic foray is in the service of larger rumination on the relation between music analysis, the lives and actions of musicians, and both real and “fabulated” histories. In doing so it draws largely on the work of Jose Esteban Muñoz and others, considering how what has been richly theorized as “queer temporality” can be put to work in musical inquiry.
Queering Musical Chrononormativity
Authors: Solomon Bill
Published: October 2023

This chapter examines works for percussion ensemble from the 1930s and 1940s through the lens of queer temporalities and Asian exoticization and appropriation by queer West Coast composers Henry Cowell, John Cage, and Lou Harrison. The concept of queered chrononormativity leads to an analysis of the ostinato in percussion composition, which is an attempt to achieve static time inspired by a Western understanding of gamelan and other Asian musics. The West Coast composers’ fascination with Asian culture was part of an apparatus of queer desire that sought out alternative socialities free from the pressures of heterodominant society, yet simultaneously erased the presence of Asian bodies. Seeking out uses of queer time in music by queer individuals illuminates one way in which sexuality can be problematically reflected in an orientalist musical practice. An analysis of Cowell’s Ostinato Pianissimo (1934) demonstrates the construction of static musical temporality that reveals a problematic relationality between the composition and its eroticized source materials.
Queer Sexuality and Musical Narrative
Authors: Maus Fred Everett
Published: October 2023

The study of “music and narrative,” as it developed in music theory and historical musicology especially from the 1980s on, intersected with issues of sexuality in foundational queer musicology essays by Susan McClary and Philip Brett. It intersected with gay male subjectivity in another way: the field as it took shape is hard to imagine without the formative writings of Edward T. Cone and Anthony Newcomb. Cone and Newcomb, openly gay in their personal lives, did not explicitly bring their sexualities into their professional work. I suggest, though, that continuities exist between personal gay subjectivity and their theoretical and interpretive writings. Such connections make sense in light of the frequent use of music and other cultural products by LGBTQ+ subjects in search of self-understanding. A recent essay on Poulenc by Campbell Shiflett continues the work of these earlier texts in sophisticated ways, dealing with sexuality with a welcome openness.
“Legendary In-Reading”
Authors: Franseen Kristin
Published: October 2023

Edward Prime-Stevenson (1858–1941) is best known, insofar as he is known at all, as “Xavier Mayne,” the pseudonymous author of the early gay novel Imre: A Memorandum and the monumental work of historical sexology The Intersexes: A History of Similisexualism as a Problem in Social Life. In public life, however, Prime-Stevenson was also a prolific writer on musical subjects, beginning during his time as a newspaper critic and editor in New York City and continuing through his last two known books, Long-Haired Iopas: Old Chapters from Twenty-Five Years of Music-Criticism and A Repertory of 100 Symphonic Programmes. While Prime-Stevenson made some pretenses toward keeping his queer and musical writings separate, this chapter demonstrates how the efforts at queer canon building in his sexology informed his listening practices and analytical writing, especially when it came to his queer reading of Beethoven’s symphonic music.
Animating Indeterminate Agency
Authors: Luong Vivian
Published: October 2023

In his 1988 article “Music as Drama,” Fred Everett Maus argued that the indeterminacy of musical agency—the elusive identity of who acts in musical experience—is a fundamental quality of music-analytical language. Taking this indeterminacy as a challenge, subsequent responses to Maus often posit hierarchical taxonomies to pin down the elusive location of musical agency. In this scholarship, the higher status of human agents, such as analysts, composers, and performers, is continually assumed over that of nonhuman musical agents. However, by treating the ambiguity of musical agency as a problem to be solved with anthropocentric solutions, music theorists have yet to consider the transformative, beyond-human potential in music’s agential indeterminacy. Through situating Maus’s observations in the context of feminist and queer interventions in music theory, this chapter rearticulates musical agency to better illuminate its queer post-humanist potential for imagining our disciplinary world otherwise. To do so, it links music’s erotic agency and animism with the concept of animacy developed by queer theorist and linguist Mel Y. Chen. Resisting the human-centric hierarchy of animacy in linguistics, they point to instances when language subverts the agential status quo as opportunities to rethink who and what matters for biopolitical and ethical ends. Thinking with Chen, this chapter re-contextualizes the purpose of analytical writing beyond knowledge production. Rather, our writing always invites readers to imagine and enact particular worlds. This orientation could invite scholars to write alongside a coalition of minoritized interventions to build more liberatory worlds.
Content before Curriculum
Authors: Searcy Yan Dominic , Harden Troy
Published: October 2023

In Chapter 6, curriculum development through incorporation of evidence-based practices (EBPs) is discussed. Youth programs are encouraged to use best practices for designing activities that engage young people. Activities are often derived from standards that are driven by evidence-based research and practices. After defining EBPs, the chapter provides a critique detailing advantages as well as disadvantages of a rigid incorporation of EBPs. The chapter questions assumptions of youth outcomes in order to examine front-line youth worker practitioner traits linked to positive program outcomes. The chapter then provides details of curriculum development based on EBPs, practitioner attributes, desired program outcomes, and utilizing program moments to achieve high impact.
News from the Front
Authors: Timmons Jill
Published: October 2023

In Chapter 2, the author presents a compelling narrative regarding the current state of the music profession. Moreover, as musicians embark on the path of professional training, later entering what may become a lifelong profession, they will be required to continually adapt to a rapidly changing market place. In this chapter, the author explores the key components to embracing change, igniting transformation, and embarking on new frontiers, ever enriching a vibrant and personal artistic life. By learning how to operate as an entrepreneur in today’s market place, artists can bring to fruition their own professional dreams and goals.
Musicians and the Path of Entrepreneurship
Authors: Timmons Jill
Published: October 2023

Chapter 3 describes music entrepreneurship as the ability to create and sustain a viable career in the music industry. A music entrepreneur is one who is able to generate a personal career vision and who has the necessary training and skills to construct and put into action a plan for that vision. This chapter sets the stage for what it means to be an entrepreneur and the requisite skills that are required. The author suggests that entrepreneurs know that opportunity favors the prepared individual and that successful careers are firmly in their hands. Thriving artists creatively develop opportunities, acquire necessary professional skills, are adaptable, and engage in lifelong learning. This chapter lays the groundwork for a new paradigm shift which powerfully undergirds entrepreneurship—the vision-plan continuum.
Your Plan
Authors: Timmons Jill
Published: October 2023

Chapter 7 develops further the narrative from Chapter 6, focusing first on the critical details of an effective business plan. An artist’s strategic business model or plan is the underpinning of a successful career. It makes your planning real and serves your unique artistic vision. There it is in black and white: who you are, your mission or artistic statement, your vision, your goods and services, your marketing strategies, the reality of your finances, a precise and doable timeline, and your advisory team of professionals. In this chapter, the author explores how each of these components and more can create a dynamic and effective plan that serves one’s artistic vision. Whether one is looking to create an independent enterprise, climbing the ladder of the music industry, working in the nonprofit sector, or even thriving in the field of education, all roads lead to first creating your business model. The author provides a template that allows the reader to think about their professional goals in a systematic way.
States of Anxiety
Authors: Rosenberg William G.
Published: October 2023

What were the effects of scarcity and loss in Russia between 1914 and 1922: scarcities of necessary goods as well as their accompanying insecurities and anxieties, unimaginable loss in the carnage of war as well as its physical, socioeconomic, and psychological displacements? And why has the vast literature on revolutionary Russia largely ignored the importance of these effects? Based on archival and other contemporary sources, this study attempts to answer these questions by “putting the Russian revolution in its place,” examining the period by contextualizing the grave issues of scarcity and loss that each successive regime was forced to address. In the process, it focuses not on the well-known efforts of the individuals and parties that sought to shape Russia’s historical future, although these are duly referenced, but on the locations and nature of power in terms of their ability to manage the determining effects of scarcity and loss that increasingly defined the material and emotional deprivations of revolutionary Russia as a whole. The emphasis throughout is on the continuity of these underlying processes through radically different regimes during Russia’s “long world war” from 1914 to 1922. A brief concluding epilogue suggests their continuation in various ways throughout the Stalinist and post-Stalinist periods, as well as perestroika and its aftermath. States of Anxiety is thus written to further inform general readers about this seminal historical moment as well as to stimulate scholars to reconsider the ways the Great Stories of Russia’s revolution, as well as others, have largely been told.
Introduction
Authors: Rosenberg William G.
Published: October 2023

By way of introduction “ ‘Beyond the Great Stories’ ” of Russia’s wars and revolutions takes up the question of why the histories of this seminal period—the “Great Stories,” as the American historian Robert Berkhofer has called them—largely focus on politics and power. It discusses the ways all major actors in this seminal drama saw their political tasks through ideologized historical teleologies that prescribed how Russia should and could progress toward their respective visions of modernity. Three principal “Great Stories” are identified: liberal, democratic socialist, and Bolshevik. The failures of all three to address the effects of scarcity and loss in all their material and emotional dimensions after 1914 are set out as the key issues of the book, along with the ways their historically ideologized mindsets may have scripted political solutions.
“Fighting with God” and the Languages of Loss
Authors: Rosenberg William G.
Published: October 2023

While acknowledging Russia’s longer-term revolutionary currents, this chapter focuses on ways the outbreak of war itself began to alter Russia’s political and emotional landscapes. It explores first the nature of patriotic enthusiasm in 1914 by contrasting objective images with cloaked emotions. It then shifts focus to the unprecedented and unexpected early military disasters, the deprivations accompanying even marginal successes, and the problematic nature and languages of loss both experiences engendered. Letters from the front are explored here as points of entry into emotional states, along with the methodological problems of accessing them. Their effects are posited as an important way of exploring the problem of loss itself in its various dimensions. The related question of peasant soldiers’ “fatalism” is also discussed, along with other effects of the shocks and losses that occurred all along the expanding military front during the first ten months of modern war.
Social Conflict, Mediation, and the Revolutionary State
Authors: Rosenberg William G.
Published: October 2023

How did Russia’s new ruling institutions formulate “solutions” to the multiple crises of scarcity and loss? After discussing the “weighty actor” thesis, which emphasizes the power of the state, this chapter details the multivalent quest by workers for socioeconomic security and dignity and by peasants for control over arable land and the supply of grain. Although social conflict riddled the three months of the first coalition regime, democratic liberals and democratic socialists worked strenuously to mediate conflict in the ministries, factories, and villages and along Russia’s vast railroad system. A spring strike wave is reviewed in these terms, along with growing peasant activism stimulated in part by radical socialists and Bolsheviks. Despite the efforts of those widely regarded as the revolution’s “best and brightest,” the chapter argues that in these terms alone, Russia was soon again, as one prominent spokesperson described, “on the brink of catastrophe.”
“Slaughter” at the Front, the July Insurrection, and a “Government to Save the Revolution”
Authors: Rosenberg William G.
Published: October 2023

Chapter 10 repositions the well-known Kerensky offensive in late June as a failed repetition of the Brusilov breakthrough a year earlier, mounted again with little respect for casualties in an effort to finally bring the war to a victorious end. It analyzes why the large-scale offensive became an even greater rout than the earlier endeavor, centering the war and the effects of loss again as primary agents of further revolutionary change. The increasing demand of Ukrainians and other nationalities for political autonomy, the resignation of liberal ministers, and the ensuing July insurrection are reevaluated in these terms, as are the program and politics of the new socialist “Government to Save the Revolution” to meet the “real demands of Russian life.” In the process, the now amplified voices of loss and “extreme need” again underlay political process as revolutionary Russia edged closer to the brink of catastrophic scarcities, economic collapse, and violent chaos.
The Collapse of War Capitalism
Authors: Rosenberg William G.
Published: October 2023

To what extent did village sovereignty to control grain deliveries and workers’ demands to control factory management to preserve jobs further defeat the possibilities of democratic liberal and socialist governance in the summer of 1917? Chapter 11 addresses these issues through the lenses radicalized peasants, workers, and soldiers as well as beleaguered ministries and soviet executive committees, detailing the additional effects of military defeat, the July Days, renewed strikes, increasing land seizures, rising prices, and the ever-greater crises of state and public finance. It focuses on changing conceptions of who should “own” the workplace as scarcities made production unprofitable or impossible, as well as the implications of private ownership of productive lands. It asks how in these conditions the policies, practices, and values of war capitalism could be sustained, and what the implications of its collapse were already in midsummer for the future of Russia’s revolutionary state.
Democratic Predicaments and the Bolshevik Coup
Authors: Rosenberg William G.
Published: October 2023

This last chapter on the period between February and October 1917 is organized around its democratic predicaments: the weaknesses of politically democratic institutions and mindsets to solve Russia’s urgent problems and rationalize ever growing material and emotional deprivation and loss. This was fully apparent at the Moscow State Conference, as well as during and after General Kornilov’s attempted coup shortly afterward. Claims for political autonomy by Ukraine and other parts of the dissolving empire paralleled at the highest political levels others determined to form their own local “republics” and the dissolution of all restraints against the peasants’ land seizures. Without diminishing the role of Lenin in overthrowing completely the democratic liberal and socialist order, this chapter suggests that anxieties at all levels were likely greater at this time than at any previous moment in the revolution’s long development and underlay before October the socioeconomic and sociocultural foundations of dictatorship.
Introduction
Authors: Reynoso Jose Luis
Published: October 2023

The introduction opens by contextualizing the book’s approach to analyzing dance and other forms of embodiment within the specificity of Mexican cultural and political histories. Then it discusses two main concepts the book proposes and develops: embodied mestizo modernisms and transnational nationalisms. To illustrate how these concepts facilitate analyses of ideas about modernity, nation, and identity in the postcolonial and postrevolutionary periods, the introduction surveys assumptions regarding race and social stratification developed during colonial Mexico. The case of Anna Pavlova exemplifies analyses in subsequent chapters tracing how colonial notions of mestizaje, indigeneity, and whiteness are embodied, choreographed, and performed as part of broader historical, political, and cultural trends. The introduction then problematizes ideas about racial neutrality, decolonization, agency, and histories of mestizaje as an enabling anticolonial discourse and dominant racial and cultural ideology that marginalizes Black, Asian, and indigenous Mesoamerican influences. It also offers further notes on the book’s methodologies.
The Exorcist Effect
Authors: Laycock Joseph P. , Harrelson Eric
Published: October 2023

The Exorcist Effect is a historical study of the ongoing relationship between religious culture in the West and horror movies, looking particularly at the period from 1968 to the present. Taking its name from the 1973 film The Exorcist, which was widely understood to be based on a true story, this book outlines a cycle in which religious beliefs and practices become the basis of films that in turn inspire religious beliefs, practices, and experiences. This book draws on archival research to shed new light on such figures as Ed and Lorraine Warren and Malachi Martin, who inserted themselves into this cycle. It also incorporates interviews with horror authors, film writers, and paranormal investigators. This book draws on such fields as psychology, sociology, and folklore studies to theorize how film informs religious experience and shapes religious cultures. Next, it examines the production and reception of Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), and The Omen (1976) as seminal films in the genre. Two chapters examine the Warrens and Malachi Martin, respectively, including the horror films that influenced and were inspired by their careers. The next three chapters examine areas of culture where the influence of this cycle was most apparent: exorcism, Satanic Panic, and moral panic over heavy metal. The final chapter considers the QAnon conspiracy theory and its numerous allusions to film as a contemporary manifestation of The Exorcist effect.
How Horror Movies Become Real
Authors: Laycock Joseph P. , Harrelson Eric
Published: October 2023

This chapter examines how it is possible for horror movies to influence religious belief and experiences. This question is examined through four angles. First, there is analysis of the genre of horror, which is uniquely preoccupied with questions about what is real and the problem of epistemology. Second, this chapter considers research on narrative and “veracity mechanisms” that predispose certain narratives to being incorporated into religious worldviews. Third, the chapter examines psychological research on film as a medium and its capacity to influence memories and worldviews. Finally, the chapter reviews research from folklore studies on “ostension,” or how stories function as scripts that inspire events and shape how events are interpreted.
Exorcism
Authors: Laycock Joseph P. , Harrelson Eric
Published: October 2023

This chapter considers the relationship between actual exorcisms and their depictions in horror films. Following the historiography of Brian Levack, this chapter views possession as a performance in which cultural “scripts” dictate how a demoniac will act and how others will respond to them. As such, exorcism films function as scripts that influence how some people “perform” possession. This chapter also examines how film adaptations of actual exorcisms are often favorable to exorcists, particularly when covering historical cases where young women died during exorcism. Finally, this chapter considers how exorcism films generate a media platform for practicing exorcists through interviews, consulting roles, and other secondary media. In some cases, this platform has allowed exorcists to gain more influence within their church, demonstrating a mutually beneficial relationship between horror film producers and exorcists.
Strangers on a Train
Authors: Zoloth Laurie
Published: October 2023

This chapter considers the problem of moral luck, individual responsibility, and the death of the unknown stranger. It first describes a narrative that is a metaphor for our situation, that of passengers on a train that runs over innocent and unknown strangers. Moving from that example to a parallel narrative in the Talmud in which an unknown stranger is killed in the unincorporated area between two cities, the met mitzvah, the chapter considers how rabbinic tradition, itself an exegesis on a verse in the Hebrew Scripture, elaborates the duties of the witnesses to this death. The chapter considers the problem of “tipping points” in the larger discourse of climate change as an example of how one’s individual choices will affect the unknown stranger. It reflects on Arendt’s issue of bystanders. We are entangled in the world in complex ways, and while the death of others seems not to be directly our fault, it is an act in which we participate, a theo-political reality. Turning to the rabbinic text offers a theological response to this issue.
Bad Guys
Authors: Zoloth Laurie
Published: October 2023

This chapter will raise a somewhat different question, in a somewhat different tone. This chapter will make the argument that people who seek to stop the use of carbon will find they have powerful enemies, and while the talk of sin and sinners is quite out of fashion, it is a powerful and important part of the language of religion. This chapter talks about enemies and will explore the creation of Amalek as the archetypical enemy by first closely analyzing the biblical verses that surround the enemy narrative and then reflecting on how this story of enemies shapes modern concepts of enemies. The chapter then considers this text in light of a larger project, which is to find a moral language to understand our present crisis, one that is rooted in shared Scriptural traditions, one that will awaken us, and allow us to act. The chapter considers several questions. Amalek is a fundamental part of the existence of Israel, tied up in the liberation narrative at the heart of all Scriptural possibility. Amalek is the very face of evil but also the very face of a contrary, stochastic universe. Amalek attacks the uncertain—the doubtful in the Exodus narrative, and the weak in the Deuteronic text—and that is his signal characteristic. The chapter then considers how oil and gas extraction companies are to blame not only for the profit taking at the cost of human lives and human futures, but how they colluded to defeat movements to stop them by creating false narratives—doubt—about the problem. It reflects on the problem of sinfulness and radical evil in the thinking about climate change and the role of these companies and turns again to Arendt to consider issues of guilt and responsibility. It also discusses the duty to remember and the work of Paul Ricoeur.
Mathematical tools
Authors: Manenti Riccardo , Motta Mario
Published: October 2023

In this chapter, we introduce some mathematical tools used throughout the rest of the textbook, to provide readers from different backgrounds with a good understanding of our notation and terminology. These mathematical tools include the binary system, Boolean functions, and sets of logic gates universal for classical computation. We then introduce the notion of a decision problem, a mathematical problem whose solution is either yes or no and discuss how a computation solves it by exploiting two physical resources: time and space. We conclude by presenting several examples of decision problems, including satisfiability, MAXCUT, traveling salesman, and the hidden subgroup problem
Linear algebra
Authors: Manenti Riccardo , Motta Mario
Published: October 2023

In this chapter, we present an overview of linear algebra with the purpose of outlining concepts relevant to quantum computing using the notation common to the field. The chapter consists of two parts. In the first part, we introduce vector spaces. We present the notions of linear dependence, dimensionality, inner product, and distance. We use these concepts to introduce finite-dimensional Hilbert spaces, a key ingredient for quantum information theory. In the second part of the chapter, we introduce linear operators. We describe the main classes of linear operators and show their mutual relations.
Density operators
Authors: Manenti Riccardo , Motta Mario
Published: October 2023

The first part of the chapter is devoted to the discussion of density operators. We first introduce the definition of a density operator and the unitary evolution of a quantum state. We then examine the measurement of a quantum system using the density operator approach. We present the density operator associated with a qubit and a harmonic oscillator at thermal equilibrium. The second part of the chapter focuses on bipartite systems. We show that the quantum state of a subsystem is given by the partial trace of the density operator of the global system. Finally, we explain the concept of purification of a density operator
Quantum maps
Authors: Manenti Riccardo , Motta Mario
Published: October 2023

This chapter is devoted to the discussion of quantum maps. We present three equivalent definitions of a quantum map and important examples, including the depolarizing channel, amplitude damping, and dephasing. We briefly describe the inversion recovery and the Ramsey experiment, two experimental techniques designed to measure the relaxation and coherence time of a qubit. We present the Kraus representation of a quantum map, and we show that quantum maps arise when the dynamics of an additional system are averaged out, a result known as Stinespring’s dilation theorem. Lastly, we present the Choi-Jamiolkowki isomorphism
Decoherence
Authors: Manenti Riccardo , Motta Mario
Published: October 2023

This chapter is dedicated to open quantum systems. We explain the origin of non-unitary time evolution by studying different interactions between a qubit and the environment. The first part of the chapter introduces the time evolution equation of an open quantum system, also called the Born-Markov master equation and the Redfield equation. We then study the interaction between a qubit and a thermal bath of harmonic oscillators and introduce the qubit relaxation and the dephasing times. After discussing the relationship between relaxation and dephasing times of a qubit and the power spectral density of the noise source, we present the Hahn echo and the Carr-Purcell-Meiboom-Gill experiments, two protocols that provide information about the noise spectrum. The chapter ends with a discussion of the driven evolution of a qubit subject to spontaneous emission and dephasing
Early quantum algorithms
Authors: Manenti Riccardo , Motta Mario
Published: October 2023

This chapter presents early quantum algorithms. We first describe Deutsch’s and Bernstein-Vazirani, some of the first quantum algorithms that showed a query advantage over their classical counterparts. We then present Grover’s algorithm, a quantum algorithm that finds an item in an unstructured database with a quadratic speed-up over classical algorithms. We explain the quantum Fourier transform, an important subroutine in various quantum algorithms. The chapter concludes with a detailed presentation of two of the most prominent applications of the quantum Fourier transform: the period finding algorithm and Shor’s algorithm for prime factorization.
Quantum simulation of Hamiltonian eigenstates
Authors: Manenti Riccardo , Motta Mario
Published: October 2023

In this chapter, we present quantum algorithms to approximate Hamiltonian eigenstates. We start discussing the quantum phase estimation algorithms, an important subroutine that allows us to approximate eigenpairs of a Hamiltonian operator given an initial guess and a quantum circuit implementing the time evolution operator. We then present the adiabatic state preparation, a technique to transform the ground state of a Hamiltonian into the ground state of another Hamiltonian. We describe two important heuristic methods, the quantum approximate optimization algorithm, and the variational quantum eigensolver. The second part of the chapter discusses concrete applications in the field of quantum chemistry. After introducing the Born-Oppenheimer Hamiltonian in second quantization and the Hartree-Fock method, we illustrate how a chemical problem can be mapped onto a quantum computer. We conclude the chapter with the simulation of the hydrogen molecule in a minimal basis with the iterative phase estimation algorithm.
The Penitent State
Authors: Muldoon Paul
Published: October 2023

This book asks a deceptively simple question: what are states actually doing when they do penance for past injustices? Why are these penitential gestures—especially the gesture of apology—becoming so ubiquitous and what implications do they carry for the way power is exercised? Drawing on the work of Schmitt, Foucault, and Agamben, the book argues that there is more at stake in sovereign acts of repentance and redress than either the recognition of the victims or the legitimacy of the state. Driven, it suggests, by an interest in ‘healing’, such acts testify to a new biopolitical raison d’état in which the management of trauma emerges as a critical expression of attempts to regulate the life of the population. The book seeks to show that the key issue created by the ‘age of apology’ is not whether sovereign acts of repentance and redress are sincere or insincere but whether the political measures licensed in the name of healing deserve to be regarded as either restorative or just.
Introduction
Authors: Bonsaver Guido
Published: October 2023

The Introduction addresses some of the key aspects related to the overall context and rationale of this book. It is divided into two parts. The first one—‘The Academic Context’—provides an overview of the range of studies dedicated to American culture in Italy and situates the current book as filling a distinct gap in the study of the arrival and perception of American culture in Italy during the post-unification decades. The second part—‘Questions of Methodology’—dwells on the multidisciplinary make-up of the book. It defines the cultural fields that are at the centre of this study—the press, literature, cinema, music, radio, and comics magazines—after which it moves to a discussion of both the methodological choices relating to the organization of the book and the significant presence of more than a hundred illustrations as a complementary part of the book’s written narrative.
Cross-National Influence in Post-Unification Italy
Authors: Bonsaver Guido
Published: October 2023

Chapter 1 begins by looking at Italy’s cultural relations with foreign countries at the time of its unification. It dwells on the mediatory role exercised by Parisian culture on Italy’s educated elite. Attention is paid to the hegemony of French as a foreign language in Italian schools and on the dependence of both the Italian press and publishing industry on their French counterpart. Most American literature was first translated in France before it reached Italy, and most translations into Italian were based on pre-existing French versions. The chapter also examines the move from the so-called Anglomania that spread in eighteenth-century Italy to the influence of German culture during the Romantic period and also as a model of positivist thought in the wake of the political alliance of the 1880s. In general, however, French culture emerges as dominant in shaping the perception of German, British, and American culture by Italy’s educated elite.
The Idea of America in Italy’s Two Nations
Authors: Bonsaver Guido
Published: October 2023

Chapter 2 explores the perception and influence of American culture in Italy’s public debate during the period following unification. The title refers to Disraeli’s famous conception of ‘two nations’ in order to highlight the need to distinguish between Italy’s educated elite and the vast majority of semi-illiterate Italians, many of whom crossed the ocean in search of a better life. The chapter is divided into three main sections. The first concentrates on differing visions of America in the daily press and illustrated magazines. A key point of discussion in this section is the term ‘Americanata’, a popular neologism introduced in the 1870s (and still in use today) that encapsulated a condescending view of American culture. The second section concentrates on the impact of William Cody’s 1890 and 1906 tours of Italy with his ‘Buffalo Bill’ Wild West show. The third and final section explores the ways and forms in which the vast mass of near-illiterate citizens built a vision—more imagined than real—of the United States of America.
Conclusion
Authors: Bonsaver Guido
Published: October 2023

The Conclusion provides a final assessment of the book’s in-depth examination of the perception and influence of American culture in Italy. It is divided into four parts. The first one dwells on the most surprising discoveries brought about by research for this book in relation to both the pre-First World War period and the Fascist dictatorship. The second part addresses the controversial term ‘Americanization’ and discusses whether the influence of American culture in Italy was inevitable. The third part looks at the connections between this study and the development of the presence of American culture in the post-Second World War years. The fourth and final section underlines the revealing perspective that was made possible by the chronological span of this book, moving back to the nineteenth century and thus allowing a clear perception of the centrality of French culture for Italy’s educated elite. It also dwells on the book’s connection between the development of mass culture and the arrival of American artefacts and manufacturing techniques at the start of the twentieth century. The Conclusion ends with a comment on a 1930 letter by literary author Cesare Pavese reflecting on the leading role taken by American culture during the interwar years.
Principles of Corporate Finance Law
Authors: Ferran Eilís , Howell Elizabeth , Steffek Felix
Published: October 2023

Corporate finance theory seeks to understand how incorporated firms address the financial constraints that affect their investment decisions. This is achieved by using varied financial instruments that seek to give holders different claims on the firm's assets. Recent scholarship in this area has highlighted the critical importance of the legal environment in explaining the choices that companies make about their capital structure. This book combines company law, capital markets law, and aspects of commercial and insolvency law to give readers a detailed understanding of the legal and regulatory issues relating to corporate finance. Informed by insights from theoretical and empirical work, the book examines from a legal perspective the key elements of corporate financing structures and capital markets in the UK. The authors’ practical experience of transactions and regulatory issues ensures that thorough scholarly inquiry and critical reflection are complemented by an assured understanding of the interface between legal principles and rules as they are documented and in their actual operation. Key developments covered in this edition include the post-Brexit adaptation of UK company law and capital market regulation, important new cases on parent company liability in tort, creditor-facing duties of directors, issuer and director liability for misleading statements to the market, and alternatives to public market financing.
Use of the Corporate Form as a Vehicle for Raising Finance and Managing Risk
Authors: Ferran Eilís , Howell Elizabeth , Steffek Felix
Published: October 2023

This chapter considers in detail the features of the company that explain why, either in single entity form or as multiple entities linked within a corporate group, it is the organizational form chosen by most businesses that want to raise large amounts of capital. As a dominant force in the world economy, corporate groups are examined closely. The advantages of the corporate form/group as a mechanism for shielding those who run or own a business from personal financial exposure are outlined. The disadvantages of allowing the operators of a business to benefit fully from its success but not to absorb the full costs of its failure are also identified. Specific topics addressed include: corporate group design and regulation; related party transactions; piercing the veil; transaction reversal; wrongful trading, misfeasance, and other insolvency law claims; directors’ duties and paramountcy of creditors’ interests; ratification; and tort law claims against parent companies.
Capital Structure, Sources of Finance, and Financial Reporting
Authors: Ferran Eilís , Howell Elizabeth , Steffek Felix
Published: October 2023

This chapter outlines the core components of the capital structure of a company and relevant factors that corporate managers may need to consider when making financing choices. The chapter discusses aspects of corporate finance theory including the income, capital and voting/control rights of equity and debt, valuation of securities, cost of capital and capital structure, and the efficient capital markets hypothesis. It also considers sources of corporate finance in the UK, including bank lending, venture capital, and the public and private capital markets. The role of mandatory financial requirements in providing important investment information to the markets and the expansion of regulatory and investor/stakeholder expectations with respect to non-financial/sustainability disclosures are outlined.