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From the Author: Visualizing Race Virtually with Dr. David Sterling Brown  

Dr. David Sterling Brown is an award-winning author and a tenured Associate Professor of English at Trinity College, Connecticut. His book, Shakespeare’s White Others, published by Cambridge University Press, examines the racially white ‘others’ whom Shakespeare portrays in characters like Richard III, Hamlet and Tamora – figures who are never quite ‘white enough’.…

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William Petty’s survey of Ireland and the role of natural history in the development of statistics

William Petty (1623-1687) is well known as a pioneer of political economy and statistics. He has been often celebrated as an ingenious thinker who was among the first to grasp that certain information, like data on different categories of landowners or the number of births and deaths, could be used to describe trends and tendencies occurring on the level of what he called the ‘political body’ – or what we would nowadays call ‘population phenomena’.…

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World War in the Library: How the burning of the Leuven library in the First World War continues to resonate today

A burned library in a ruined city, civilian victims of shelling by a ruthless invader, a policy of occupation including linguistic censorship, the deportation and internment of professors teaching in the vernacular, condemnations by the international community: today all this might sound like the description of Russia’s war against Ukraine, or perhaps Nazi Germany’s policies in the General government of occupied Poland during the Second World War.

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A Spanish Civil War Scrapbook

All I hoped as I embarked on my doctorate devoted to cross-cultural encounters between the International Brigades and the Spaniards who hosted them in the course of the Spanish Civil War was that those cross-cultural encounters had actually taken place.

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Cambridge to publish a new flagship journal in the fast-growing field of Pakistan studies

Critical Pakistan Studies will be the first international journal devoted to the study of Pakistan and its peopleJournal will be interdisciplinary and open accessAims to give the widest possible understanding of Pakistan, past, and present Cambridge University Press is to publish the world’s first international journal devoted to the study of Pakistan and its people.…

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Embedding science scrutiny mechanisms in the UK Parliament

At times during the past few years, evidence sessions of the UK’s House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee have made headline news, for example Dominic Cummings’ account of his time advising the Prime Minister during the COVID-19 pandemic, or controversial witness statements about diversity and inclusion in STEM careers.…

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Beyond When and Why: North Korea’s Reluctant Embracing of “Peaceful” Nuclear Power

Nobody knows when and why did the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) begin its nuclear weapon program. Our current state of knowledge regarding these simple questions is at best partial; scholars point to different periods as its origin such as 1950 (when the Korean War broke out), 1958 (when the United Stated brought nuclear weapons to South Korea), 1964 (when the People’s Republic of China tested its first bomb), or 1979 (when South Korea started its undeclared enrichment activities that were revealed only in 2014).…

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Mr Hobbes goes to Paris

My aim in this piece, however, is to suggest that there is much to be gained from turning to Hobbes’s immediate Parisian surroundings—for, France had its own share of intellectual and political turmoil during the decade of 1640s.

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Unravelling the Myth of Gandhian Non-violence: Why Did Gandhi Connect His Principle of Satyagraha with the “Hindu” Notion of Ahimsa?

Since the demise of Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948), known as the “Mahatma” or the Great Soul, numerous studies have unsurprisingly been published about him, particularly concerning his concept of “non-violence,” a central virtue of his anti-colonial satyagraha campaign. It is tempting to think that nothing new can be offered on the subject. However, by reading his writings in Gujarati, his native tongue, it is possible to reveal important and original insights.

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Crushing anti-Fascism in the empire: judicial repression in Mussolini’s Libya

Fighting the enemies of Fascist Italy was a major concern for Benito Mussolini’s regime not only within the peninsular borders but also within the colonial administration. This was especially true in the colonial territories that constitute present-day Libya at the time of Fascist rule, where the Duce government established a branch of the Special Tribunal for the Defence of the State based in Rome, having an analogous composition and goal.

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Freedom and equality: prospects for a unified university resistance in Turkish universities

For more than a year now, on every weekday at noon, academics at Boğaziçi University gather in the main courtyard for a silent vigil turning their backs against the Rector’s Building carrying posters demanding the removal of the appointed rector and his appointees, the reinstitution of rectorate elections and the annulment of arbitrary decisions such as the opening of new programs.…

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Who was Iosif Lavrent’evich Mordovets?

This article explores the career of Iosif Lavrent’evich Mordovets who was the chief of the Soviet political police in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR) for more than a decade (1944-1955). His long career as a chekist started in Ukraine in the early 1930s continuing through the Great Terror in 1937-38 into 1940-41 Romanian Bessarabia occupied by the Soviet Union.

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Queer Belfast during the First World War

I wrote this article to take this past more seriously on its own terms, and to understand how the political, religious, and economic context of Ireland and its diaspora shaped a culture that, for historians of sexuality, will be familiar yet distinctive.

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