How I was Denied Scholastic Opportunities by the British Government

This paper describes the difficulties the author had in obtaining twice a UK visa from the British Consulate in Paris. She was once refused an academic visitor visa despite an invitation to conduct research for two years at the Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge. Then, the following year, she was denied again a short visit to attend a conference at the Department of Museum Studies, Leicester University.     

Getting a Visa vs. Using a Visa: Some Observations and Complaining

An Argentinian living in the USA, this author argues that nothing can provide insight into the world opinion of one’s country like the process of applying for a visa. She describes her experiences going through immigration, and outlines her concerns about observing the appropriate protocols. She concludes that it is no easy matter fitting the profile of all those dangerous 5′1″, 26 year-old female students that are plotting the end of society as we speak.     

Visa Discrimination

This paper addresses the problem of increased visa discrimination for people from low-income countries since the events of September 11th. She uses the example of changes in her own experiences as an Argentinian citizen wishing to travel to the USA to highlight changes that are occurring throughout South America. The difficulties involved include unsympathetic automated telephone answering systems, non-refundable application fees, and long-distance travel to the Embassy.     

Gabrielle Lévy and the Roussy-Lévy syndrome

In 1934, Gabrielle Lévy died at the age of 48. She became well known for an article she published on a hereditary polyneuropathy in cooperation with Gustav Roussy, resulting in the eponym Roussy-Lévy syndrome. Not much is known about this extraordinary neurologist/neuropathologist. Her family declared that she died from the disease she was studying. She was a pupil of Pierre Marie, with whom she worked at the Salpêtrière in Paris and wrote on war neurology. In cooperation with Marie, she published a number of articles on postencephalitic syndromes, which also became the subject of her 1922 thesis. Three years later, she became associate physician at the Paul-Brousse Hospital in Paris, where the study of brain tumors became one of the subjects of her scientific work. Remarkably, Lévy was first author in a few of her many articles, although Roussy confirmed that she often initiated the study and even wrote the main part. In this article her career is considered in the context of the struggle of women physicians to improve their position during the early-twentieth century. She probably died from a brain tumor or a postencephalitic syndrome.     

Visa Stupidity

This paper describe the author’s experiences when he has applied for visas in a range of countries, including Germany, the UK, Japan, China and the USA. In 22 years of international travel, he has never been refused a visa, though he has been unable to obtain a visa in time on several occasions, and this has cause him to be unable to attend meetings, even when he is fully funded, and has applied for a visa well in advance.     

Hysteria behind the scenes: Jane Avril at the Salpetriere

Jane Avril (1868-1943), the famous dancer of the Moulin Rouge, immortalized by Toulouse-Lautrec, left behind published Memoires (1933). Trustworthy and written with verve, they include an account of her admission to Charcot's service at the Salpetriere in December 1882. There she was kept until June 1884, not so much because of illness but to protect her from her mother's abuse. Jane Avril provides unvarnished testimony of the daily life of the women with hysteria among whom she lived. She wrongly accuses them of simulation. But she accurately portrays the rivalry of the 'crazy girls' who vied to become the center of attention, and she sheds light on the factors that came together to make hysteria contagious (she herself escaped), the loading of symptomatology and the cultivation of the ailment. Charcot has been criticized on this score, since he showed his recognition of the underlying process when he pronounced isolation to be necessary to treatment. If Charcot accommodated hysteria, the ailment amply rewarded him with a fame that continues to this day to overshadow his achievement in neuropathology that he brilliantly forged using the "anatomo-clinical method."     

Inga Clendinnen,Historian (1934–2016)

Inga Clendinnen has been described as an anthropologist, a public intellectual, a writer, a poet in prose, a Mesoamericanist, and a student of the Holocaust and Australia. She was all this, but she insisted that she was always and mainly a historian. A cultural historian without portfolio, I would say. This essay aims to introduce her written work as a whole, its main purposes, themes, and approach.     

Interview with Mary Beth Norton

Born in Michigan in 1943, reared and educated in Indiana, Norton earned her bachelor's degree at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and her master's and doctoral degrees from Harvard University. She has written and edited many works that deal mainly with women and gender in the intellectual, political, and social life of North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Besides being the editor of the massive new American Historical Association Guide to Historical Literature and a co-author of the best-selling U.S. history text, A People & a Nation, Norton has held leading positions in the American Historical Association, Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, International Federation for Research in Women's History, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She taught for two years at the University of Connecticut before she joined the faculty at Cornell University in 1971. The recipient of many fellowships, honorary degrees, and prizes, she has been Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History since 1987. This interview was conducted in Norton's office on the Ithaca, New York campus in April 1997 by Roger Adelson.     

‘Halt! Be Men!’: Sikelgaita of Salerno,Gender and the Norman Conquest of Southern Italy

This article examines the career of Sikelgaita (1040–1090), wife of the Norman conqueror of southern Italy, Robert Guiscard, as a means of understanding the impact of the ‘other’ Norman conquest of the eleventh century. Sikelgaita is unusual in that she has left images in narrative sources both within and well beyond the confines of southern Italy. She is also well documented at a local level. Both types of material combine to reveal her crossing gender boundaries in titles she used, the way in which she managed property, her legendary presence alongside Robert on his campaigns and, more speculatively, in organising a campaign of written propaganda to ensure the succession of her son to his father's patrimony in preference to his half‐brother by Sikelgaita's predecessor as Robert's wife. Her history raises the problems of women's access to written texts, their conscious shaping of their own identities, their conflicting loyalties between natal and marital families, and the need for competing male heirs to prove themselves against a prevailing notion of masculinity in a period when one aggressively masculine group, the Lombards, was being supplanted in power by another, the Normans. As such, it demonstrates that the lives of so‐called ‘exceptional’ women continue to have a value to historians of gender in the middle ages, and can often demonstrate the patriarchal boundaries which even they could not cross.     

Marriage under occupation: Israel’s spousal visa restrictions in the West Bank

In the West Bank, hundreds of non-Palestinian women who are married to Palestinian men have recently been issued shortened visas with tightened restrictions. This means they are often prevented from working, their mobilities are severely reduced and they are placed in extremely precarious bureaucratic and procedural positions. The research in this article draws from fieldwork interviews with women affected by such restrictions to show how politically induced precarities produce gendered effects towards specific ends of the occupation of Palestine. We thus frame a discussion of the women’s experiences of visa regulations through precarity before giving an account of the profound effects on women’s roles in family and political life. We then broaden the focus to consider Israel’s occupation of Palestine and the demographic implications of the gendered effects of visa precarity. In doing so we make the argument that Israel’s spousal visa regulations contribute to the (re)production of uneven gender relations and the demographic objective of emptying out the West Bank.     

The global visa cost divide: How and why the price for travel permits varies worldwide

Visas are an important means for countries to regulate the potential access of non-nationals to their territory. Past datasets and quantitative research on visas have focused on visa waivers, ignoring the fact that visas, where demanded, can vary greatly by cost. This paper presents a novel dataset based on a manual collection of visa costs for travel between a global set of country pairs in seven different categories (tourist, work, student, family reunification, business, transit, and other). Our analyses reveal a strong global visa cost divide that exposes the injustice in the right to travel for people located in different areas of the world. Whereas Europeans usually hardly have to work at all for travel permits, visa costs often amount to several weeks of mean income in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The result is a fundamentally paradoxical situation: The richer a country, the less its citizens pay for visas to go abroad (both in absolute terms and relative to their income). Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood regression analyses reveal that a variety of factors influence the costs of visas between countries: reciprocal treatment, processing costs, historical-cultural ties, geographic proximity and regional, religious, economic, and political discrimination. This confirms the important role of visa costs as a tool for states to control population movements and simultaneously position themselves in international relations.     

满清文化融合的使者、闺秀文化发展的领袖——恽珠

恽珠充分发挥自己“名父之女”、“满贵之妻”和“令子之母”的特殊社会文化身份,编选出版《国朝闺秀正始集》及其续集,并辑录《兰闺宝录》,成为得统治者认同的正统闺秀文化典范,对满汉文化的融合与闺秀文化的发展作出了杰出贡献。     

Irrefutable arguments: Teresa de Cartagena defends her right to authorship

Teresa de Cartagena wrote a masterful text of consolation for all who suffer illness or impairment entitled Arboleda de los enfermos [Grove of the Infirm] in which she recounts her spiritual response to the onset of deafness. The work was maligned, not for its content, but rather because detractors refused to believe that Arboleda could have been penned by a woman, especially one who suffered from a physical impairment. Teresa responded to those who doubted her authorship by writing a second text, Admiraçión operum Dey [Wonder at the Works of God]. She felt compelled to respond to her critics in order to assert a single, and irrefutable, truth: God gave her the ability to write Arboleda, and, since anything is possible for God, to deny her authorship is tantamount to denying the omnipotence of God. She declares that any reader who doubts her authorship does not believe that God is capable of miraculous deeds. She argues that it is rare for a woman to write but certainly not impossible if God so wills it. This article explores how Teresa constructs and builds what, on the surface, appears to be a simple, in not outright indisputable, tenet of Christian doctrine, i.e., God’s unlimited and inscrutable power.     

The Role of the Speaker in the 20th Century

Baroness Boothroyd was Speaker of the house of commons from April 1992 until October 2000. She describes her approach to the job of Speaker: how she routinely briefed herself for the business of the House, and how she approached some of the more difficult decisions required of the Speaker, including the selection of amendments, the use of the casting vote and allowing members to make personal statements. She comments on some issues concerning the management of the House's business during her time in the chair: the practice of government ministers to anticipate official statements in the media before they are made in the House; the length of ministerial answers at question time and the decision on the access of Sinn Fein members to the facilities and services of the House. She refers to the functions of the Speaker outside the chamber: chairing the house of commons commission; receiving Speakers and other public figures from other countries and representing the house of commons abroad.     

Fishing for Gold: The Story of Alabama's Catfish Industry

Auburn, Alabama, independent researcher Karni R. Perez's veryreadable book takes readers on a behind the scenes tour of therise of the state's catfish industry. She crafts her narrativefrom interviews she conducted, making the book especially relevantfor oral historians. She interviewed over forty people involvedin Alabama's catfish industry, from those involved in its ratherinauspicious beginnings to     

Meurtre à Byzance: Byzantine murders in modern literature

Abstract

Thus runs the suggestively recurrent theme in a recent novel by Julia Kristeva, the famous psychoanalyst, linguist and semiotician (Meurtre à Byzance. Paris: Fayard, 2004). Kristeva, who immigrated to France from Bulgaria in the 1960s, here seizes the opportunity to set forth problems concerning her own East European and Orthodox background. She does so in a form that to a remarkably high degree mirrors her own work as a scholar: Meurtre à Byzance, with its manifold references to medieval and modern literature, is imbued with intertextuality and polyphony, literary devices which she herself as a theorist has largely helped define. And the complex story is not, as one might expect from the title, a historical detective novel set in a Byzantine milieu, but a romantic yet critical story about contemporary society, our search for origin and meaning, our longing for — as Kristeva puts it — a Byzantium of our own.     

Science and fate: Lina Stern (1878-1968), a neurophysiologist and biochemist

Lina Stern (1878-1968), a neurophysiologist and biochemist, was born in Russia. She studied at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, where, after graduating, she conducted original research in physiology and biochemistry. In 1918, Stern was the first woman to be awarded a professional title at the University of Geneva and headed the department of Physiological Chemistry. She is deservedly considered to be one of the first scientists to entertain the concept of a blood-brain barrier. In 1929, Stern founded the Institute of Physiology in Moscow, of which she was director until 1948, when it was discontinued. Under her leadership, multidisciplinary groups of colleagues worked on the problems of the blood-brain and tissue-brain barriers and homeostasis of the brain. In 1939, Stern was elected full member of the Academy of Sciences and became its first female member ever. Most scientists manage to conduct their research by adjusting to the political and social situations surrounding them. Lina Stern did not follow this path. This small woman of complete devotion to science took the drastic decisions that altered her life. Though destiny was not kind to her, Lina Stern did not compromise. Despite a threat of execution, prolonged imprisonment, and exile she was never broken as a scientist and always maintained her dignity.     

COVID-19: THE ‘INVISIBLE ENEMY’ AND CONTINGENT RACISM: Reflections of an Italian anthropologist conducting fieldwork in Greece

In this article, the author provides a narrative of her experience as an Italian undertaking fieldwork in Greece while the epidemic was in full swing. She reflects on representations of ‘the invisible enemy’: an empty category, she claims, which has been contingently filled and morally loaded, resting on pre-existing categories, such as stereotypical representations of nations. The invisibility of ‘the enemy’ has in fact been rendered visible through what she refers to as contingent racism; this includes the ubiquitous and hence powerful use of irony and satire at the expense of China and Italy, but also expands to the use of banal and convenient tropes of accusation and derision among European Union member states, bringing back to the fore the North-South divide and its power imbalances. The author suggests that the Covid-19 crisis has ultimately provoked a veritable epidemic of contingent racism on multiple levels by stirring stereotypes and cultural prejudices which are rooted in time and rapidly renewed; its effect is all but contingent, and likely to accompany us far beyond the Covid-19 crisis itself.     

Sources of Damasios Error A Reply to Damasio

Lina Stern (1878–1968), a neurophysiologist and biochemist, was born in Russia. She studied at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, where, after graduating, she conducted original research in physiology and biochemistry. In 1918, Stern was the first woman to be awarded a professional title at the University of Geneva and headed the department of Physiological Chemistry. She is deservedly considered to be one of the first scientists to entertain the concept of a blood-brain barrier. In 1929, Stern founded the Institute of Physiology in Moscow, of which she was director until 1948, when it was discontinued. Under her leadership, multidisciplinary groups of colleagues worked on the problems of the blood-brain and tissue-brain barriers and homeostasis of the brain. In 1939, Stern was elected full member of the Academy of Sciences and became its first female member ever.

Most scientists manage to conduct their research by adjusting to the political and social situations surrounding them. Lina Stern did not follow this path. This small woman of complete devotion to science took the drastic decisions that altered her life. Though destiny was not kind to her, Lina Stern did not compromise. Despite a threat of execution, prolonged imprisonment, and exile she was never broken as a scientist and always maintained her dignity.     

The sun in Sámi mythology

The topic of this paper is the position of the sun, Biejvve, in the Sámi religion. The main source of our knowledge about Sámi religion is the accounts of the missionaries and priests from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who measured the Sámi's beliefs by the standards of classical Greek/Roman religion. Consequently, Biejwe was seen as one of the major celestial gods. Many have continued to follow this line of thinking. There is, however, another context in which Biejwe should be viewed. In almost all circumpolar societies, there exists/existed the concept of female goddesses or ‘mothers’ who regulate fertility and protect the family, especially women during pregnancy and children. Sáráhkká, the Sámi goddess of the hearth, is one of these goddesses. Her realm is the fire in the middle of the tent, at the center of people's lives. Consequently, she intercedes in everyday life; she cares for the family and the upholding of social values. Biejvve is also part of this complex. She is the burning fire in the sky, the annually recurring force which in springtime makes the hillsides turn green again and ensures there is food for the reindeer. She protects the reindeer calves during spring and sees to it that women get milk from the animals during summer. Unlike Såråhkkå, she does not intervene directly in people's lives and doesn not have the same elaborate cult, but she does carry the same life‐giving force.