This chapter traces William Burroughs’ lifelong obsession with disease – particularly cancer and viruses – as a central metaphor in his critique of power, control, and modernity. Polina Mackay and James Mackay argue that Burroughs’ engagement with medicine, from his early syphilis diagnosis to his interest in Wilhelm Reich’s unorthodox theories, shaped his representation of illness as both literal and ideological contagion. From Junky to Naked Lunch, the cut-up texts, and Blade Runner: A Movie, Burroughs portrays medical institutions and bureaucracies not as healing forces but as agents of repression, manipulation, and decay. The chapter shows how Burroughs’ writing fuses Reichian thought, alternative medicine, and paranoid systems theory into a distinctive epidemiology of language, addiction, and social control. While his metaphoric conflation of disease and power reveals the limits of postwar biopolitics, it also risks collapsing critical inquiry into conspiracy. Ultimately, Burroughs’ viral imagination oscillates between incisive cultural diagnosis and reactionary anxiety, offering a vision of medicine as both metaphor and battleground.

This article contextualizes the work of William Burroughs in terms of twentieth-century avant-garde movements, particularly Dada, Surrealism, Lettrism, and Situationism, arguing that he was deeply influenced by them and also made significant and hugely influential contributions to their aesthetic and political projects. It situates his early work with the beats as markedly Surrealist, and it argues that Naked Lunch is a Surrealist masterpiece. It traces Burroughs’ movement into 1960s multimedia cut-ups, image-text, film, and audio experiments in relation to Guy Debord and Situationism. The article concludes by noting that we should be cautious in how optimistically we read some of this work, particularly in light of the many ways the twentieth-century avant-gardes failed to realize their revolutionary hopes and how our current experience with a fully-networked world that uses many avant-garde techniques and ideas often leads not to a utopian revolution but instead a morass of reactionary post-truth politics.

Language use in online contexts has become an area of increasing academicinterest, especially for corpus linguistics (Crosthwaite et al., 2023). This chapter details the trends across previous corpus studies of online language, outlining some of the most important studies driving these trends and critically discussing the methodologies they use. Finally, we present a case study demonstrating some of these state-of-the-art techniques and trends. In this case study, we explore the discourses of stem-cell research across texts from websites known to promote pseudoscience and conspiracy.

The idea that Japan and Greece might be closely related is of European origin. Coinciding with the modern and demiurgical impulse that seized the Western imagination in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, it was part of a vast reconceptualization of the world in which analogy occupied a fundamental place. One of its first formulations is found in the History of Japan composed by the German physician Engelbert Kaempfer (1651–1716) and published eleven years after his death. Kaempfer stayed for two years in Nagasaki, working for the Dutch East India Company, and was one of the first Europeans to publish a detailed description of the archipelago following the expulsion of the Jesuits and most other Westerners in the first decades of the seventeenth century. His account is notable above all for unambiguously placing science before religion and personal analysis before collective evangelization.

This chapter traces William Burroughs’ self-imposed exile across the Americas, North Africa, and Europe, arguing that the geographic settings where he lived were integral to the conceptual structure of his work. Rather than treating setting as backdrop or exotic inspiration, Burroughs reimagines place as a set – simultaneously stage, fiction, and experiential filter – through which he explores identity, language, and systems of control. From his ironic travel ethnographies in Junky and The Yage Letters, to the colonial parody of Queer, and the fractured landscapes of Naked Lunch and the cut-up novels, Burroughs engages in a layered literary expatriation that aligns him with, but ultimately distinguishes him from, figures like Bowles, Baldwin, Stein, and Beckett. Focusing on Tangier and Paris as creative epicenters, the chapter argues that Burroughs’ spatial displacements catalyze formal and thematic experimentation. His work reveals a persistent tension between immersive estrangement and mediated construction, exposing alterity not only in foreign cultures, but within language and self.

This chapter outlines the opportunities offered by coinage as a source of evidence to the ancient historian. Different aspects of numismatic terminology and methodology are set out, and different approaches to the use of the characteristics of coinage are outlined. Coinage may be evidence for ‘official practice’ on the part of the wide variety of its issuers in the archaic period. It may be indicative of specific regional and cultural similarities or differences. It is in essence an economic object, and its mobility offers the possibility of mapping ancient economies. But at the same time its designs open up avenues of iconographic interpretation.

This chapter explores the central role of nostalgia, youth, and memory across the works of William Burroughs, challenging his reputation as an anti-sentimental icon of literary transgression. Thom Robinson traces Burroughs’ shifting relationship with nostalgia – from early satirical treatments in The Yage Letters and Naked Lunch, through the melancholic repetitions of the cut-up era, to the queer adolescent utopias of his later novels. These texts, including The Wild Boys, Cities of the Red Night, and The Place of Dead Roads, draw heavily on Burroughs’ own youth, subvert the moral codes of institutions like the Boy Scouts of America, and reimagine coming-of-age as a site of resistance and sexual awakening. Through his admiration for Denton Welch and incorporation of children’s literature tropes, Burroughs ultimately transforms nostalgia from a regressive impulse into a creative, disruptive force – an affective mechanism through which the past might be rescripted in defiance of normative adulthood.

This chapter examines decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) as emergent forms of software or knowledge commons, applying the governing knowledge commons (GKC) framework. It argues that DAOs, characterised by their reliance on blockchain-enabled smart contracts and elimination of hierarchical management, represent a novel form of collective decision-making and governance. The analysis distinguishes between on-chain and off-chain governance models, evaluating their effectiveness in ensuring decentralisation and addressing internal conflicts, with particular emphasis on the unique conflict resolution mechanisms available to DAOs (such as "forking" and "rage-quitting"). An important insight is that the rules-in-use in on-chain governance and off-chain governance are likely to be very different. The chapter also considers the robustness decentralised systems in managing common-pool resources.

Greek Japan. Placed side by side, these two words give the impression of something very strange, a sort of chimera – half-Apollo, half-samurai; half-Venus, half-geisha – set on a ground that is at once white and blue like the Cyclades, dark green and vermillion like Shintō shrines. How could two countries so distant from each other be joined together to form a coherent image, to give birth to a meaningful concept?

This chapter explores William Burroughs’ lifelong engagement with anthropology, from his early academic studies at Harvard and Columbia to his immersive depictions of indigenous and subcultural worlds. David Stephen Calonne charts Burroughs’ fascination with shamanism, Mayan hieroglyphics, animal totems, and visionary experience, arguing that his literary project is rooted in an outsider anthropological impulse that spans both ancient cultures and modern subcultures. Burroughs’ friendship with figures like Hal Chase and his involvement with institutions such as the Sahagún Anthropology Club informed works like The Soft Machine, Ah Pook Is Here, and Junky, which often merge ethnographic observation with mystical speculation. The chapter situates Burroughs alongside figures like Marcel Mauss, Georges Bataille, and Carlos Castaneda, and highlights the influence of his writings on contemporary anthropologists such as Michael Taussig. Ultimately, Burroughs emerges as an amateur but radical anthropologist, reimagining the potentials of cultural knowledge and visionary consciousness outside the confines of academic orthodoxy.