The Persian Presence in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry: A Taxonomy

This study employs keyword searches of literary databases such as Literature Online (LION) in an attempt to map the image of “Persia” in nineteenth-century English poetry as it was molded by a proliferation of thoughts and ideas in a variety of contexts. Completeness is not possible, of course, but the article aims to identify and explore some of the major categories within which the image of Persia was formed and disseminated in the nineteenth-century. The scope of the study is not confined to a corpus of poetic works that were written specifically on or about “Persia,” but takes account of a broader range of poems, and attends to the structure, texture and variations of the presence of “Persia” in nineteenth-century English poetry.     

Hedwig revisited

The mainstream success of the 2014 Broadway revival of John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch is in stark contrast to the precarity of the central protagonist’s life and the communities out of which the original Hedwig production emerged. While these tensions reveal some of the complicities between homonormativity, gentrification, and neoliberalism, by tracing Hedwig’s other genealogies, a more complicated vision of queer possibility emerges.     

Ancient Microbial DNA in Dental Calculus: A New method for Studying Rapid Human Migration Events

Ancient human migrations provide the critical genetic background to historical and contemporary human demographic patterns. However, our ability to infer past human migration events, especially those that occurred over rapid timescales, is often limited. A key example is the peopling of Polynesia, where the timing is relatively well defined, but the exact routes taken during the final stages and the source populations are not. Here, we discuss the technical limitations of current methods for inferring rapid human migration events, using the final stages of Polynesian migration as an example. We also introduce a promising new proxy method to infer human migrations—patterns of bacterial evolution within ancient dental calculus (calcified plaque). While we focus on Polynesia, this method should be applicable to other past migrations, enhancing our understanding of human prehistory and revealing the crucial events that shaped it.     

Australian geography: The next 10 years (and beyond)?

Geography: Shaping Australia's Future (2018) provides a ‘strategic plan’ for geography aligned with the national research priorities, as well other key areas where Australian geographers are addressing environmental and societal challenges. To provide context, we first describe the state of geography in Australian universities. We then articulate ways forward for strengthening Australian geography—both within the discipline and how we interact externally. We describe how geography may better contribute to policy agendas, capitalising on our unique perspectives of space, place and the environment, but also highlight how we might improve these contributions through a more unified approach across human and physical geography. Third, we discuss opportunities for geographers to build the reputation of the discipline and ways to advocate for its importance in the wider academy, school curricula and community. We conclude with some preliminary suggestions on how Australian geographers may better engage and contribute to the United Nations Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.     

胡适与太平洋国际学会——兼论现代中国自由主义的两难处境

中国太平洋国际学会从1925年成立到1950年解散前后存在了25年.它是太平洋国际学会在中国的分会,同时又有一定的独立性.胡适曾于1931-1938,1946-1950年间两度出任中国太平洋国际学会执行委员会委员长,是中国太平洋国际学会的灵魂人物.在他的影响下,一批自由主义知识分子加入了学会,使中国太平洋国际学会从一个松散的、具有基督教色彩的组织转变为一个具有强烈自由主义色彩的知识分子团体.胡适在太平洋国际学会中的言论、思想和行动典型地反映了现代中国自由主义知识分子在面对民族危机时所遭遇的两难选择.     

From limestone caves to concrete graves: 3000 years of mortuary practice in the Palauan archipelago,Micronesia

Human skeletal remains have been discovered from a variety of contexts in the Palauan archipelago of western Micronesia. These include caves, rockshelters, earthen mounds, stone platforms, midden burials, crypts, sarcophagi, and historic period gravesites. Recent excavation of a prehistoric cemetery in a rockshelter on Orrak Island dating from ca 1000 BC–AD 200, combined with nearly contemporaneous surface finds in caves on both Orrak and other nearby islands, shed light on the earliest known burial practices in Palau. Interment in limestone caves and rockshelters was then replaced in succession by burial in earthwork terraces, beneath stone platforms, in middens, within limestone slab crypts and at least one known stone sarcophagus, and finally in Western or Asian‐style gravesites with headstones. Here we present the first major synthesis of mortuary patterns in Palau from the earliest periods of known settlement (ca. 1000 BC) to modern times. Understanding how these burial practices change over time provides valuable insight into changing sociocultural practices within Palauan society, including how contact with outsiders during the historical period drastically altered traditional mortuary behaviours. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

翁方纲及其经学思想

在清代乾嘉学者群体中,翁方纲是一个很有成就的人物。他生平精心汲古,宏览多闻,既能诗文,又擅书法,更精鉴赏。他对诗歌、书画、谱录、金石学等都有很深的研究,而且著作等身,仅流传下来的著作就有《两汉金石记》、 《汉石经残字考》、《焦山鼎铭考》、《苏米斋兰亭考》、《复初斋文集》、《复初斋诗集》、《石洲诗话》、《经义考补正》、《礼经目次》、《苏诗补注》、《苏斋笔记》等数十种。而长期以来,学术界对翁方纲的研究却付诸阙如。本文仅就其生平及经学思想略加论述,以期引起学界同仁的重视。     

3. FROM ENVIRONMENTAL CASE STUDY TO ENVIRONMENTAL KIN STUDY

This article explores the relationships among place, knowing, and being in environmental histories. Grounding ourselves in the work of Indigenous scholars from North America and the Pacific, we propose a method of listening and attuning that can attend to the dislocation and abstraction often found in work addressing ecocide and environmental violence. Against the ubiquity of the case-study approach, we propose a method we call “kin study,” which invites more embedded, expansive, material, and respectful relations to people and lands. This article frames the issues and then proposes, though a dialogue, how kin studies may be constituted and applied in studying environmental histories of the Pacific and Western Canada.     

‘Caught’ between foreign cultural and development policies: perspectives of German Studies and German as a foreign language in Africa

The promotion of the German language abroad and of German Studies plays a central role in German Foreign Cultural Policy. With regard to Sub-Saharan Africa, otherwise a peripheral region for foreign policy, German as foreign language is firmly established as second language after English. Learners especially in Francophone West and Central Africa have increased over the past decade. Numerous funding programmes and actions are supported by German nongovernmental organizations at college/university levels. But bilateral cooperation between German and African academic institutions are challenged both by negative perceptions of the ‘Global South’ among Western colleagues and by an infrastructure adverse to research and to career development in most African countries. Additionally, North/South relations are traditionally seen in terms of (under-)development by German institutions, effecting cooperation. The paper develops a differentiated picture of African Studies in Africa, and outlines benefits that can be attained through collaboration ‘at eye-level’.     

A regionalisation or long-distance trade? Transformations and shifts in the role of Tana in the Black Sea trade in the first half of the fifteenth century

Abstract

The Italian trading stations in Tana were important in the long-distance trade system of the Italian maritime republics Venice and Genoa. The deeds of two Venetian notaries who worked there during the 1430s, Nicolo de Varsis and Benedetto de Smeritis, are an important source for tracing the transformation of the issues and directions of Italian trade in the Black Sea region, a trade which was recovering from the crisis of the fourteenth century. Notwithstanding the Venetian-Genoese struggle and previous crisis events, this recovery made the economic conditions favourable. Although some scholars see a regionalisation of trade in fifteenth century, the source evidence challenges this interpretation. Westerners began to import Italian, Flemish and English textiles to the Eastern markets, and the local goods (fish, caviar) were widely exported to Europe – even to the markets of Flanders. Finally, the slave trade was intensive. My main argument here is that though there were considerable transformations in the Italian trade, there was no real regionalisation of trade, which retained its long-distance character.