This article examines the activities of the Japanese Buddhist priest Ueda Tenzui (1899–1974) in wartime Thailand and Burma. Ueda initially went to Southeast Asia to pursue his studies of Buddhist precepts. During the war, he joined a pacification team of the Japanese military in occupied Burma and, as part of this role, became the headteacher of a Japanese language school. He was later ordained and served for some time as a monk in the Burmese Theravada tradition. Since the 1970s, research on Japanese Buddhist involvement in Japan’s wars has focused on criticizing those who cooperated with the war effort and praising those who resisted. In this regard, Ueda is unquestionably a ‘collaborator’. Yet, his case demonstrates the importance of the concept of the ‘grey zone’ between the two extremes of collaboration and resistance. While we have to acknowledge that Ueda acted in support of the war effort at the request of the military, he was also a scholar and a practitioner who deepened his understanding of Theravada Buddhism through personal experience. Ueda criticized the war after Japan’s defeat and also came to actively appreciate Burmese Buddhism’s strict adherence to the precepts. At the same time, he never showed a critical attitude towards Japanese Buddhism. Ueda’s thinking is characterized by his ability to find commonalities between Burmese and Japanese Buddhism without ranking them according to some hierarchy of superiority and inferiority, while also recognizing the differences that exist between these two branches of Buddhism.

This article takes a novel approach to fragmentary Roman comic playwright Caecilius Statius by exploring the titles attested for his comedies. Informed by Genette's theory on the title qua paratext, it argues that titles are distinct artifacts of Caecilius’ dramatic production designed to circulate without the texts they label and, consequently, it treats them as legitimate objects of interpretation in and of themselves. Analysis of ten titles in both Greek and Latin reveals that Caecilius Statius’ titles are polysemous, bilingual and profoundly meaningful in their engagement with the genre of New Comedy and with translation as a social and cultural phenomenon of middle republican Rome. But given that the titles of Roman comedy are largely uninvestigated by scholarship, this piece begins by arguing for their author-ity, setting forth the evidence for comic titles’ origins, function and transmission. In so doing, it demonstrates the palliata's textuality and challenges the communis opinio regarding comic scripts’ passage from stage to page. A Supplementary Appendix available online (10.1017/S0075435824000285) presents the evidence for the titles of Caecilius’ plays.

Since 2015, the south-eastern region of Nigeria has experienced sporadic outbursts of aggression spearheaded by Biafran separatist agitators. However, the latter part of the 2010s has witnessed a marked increase in the fervent endeavours of Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB) activists within the same area as they passionately pursue their aspirations for self-determination. Central to their approach is enforcing a compulsory weekly ‘sit-at-home’ policy, effectively establishing a quasi-sovereign enclave within the region. The prevalence of social media has provided a prominent platform for propagating secessionist sentiments. IPOB also advocates vigilante justice against individuals who dare to flout the mandated Monday sit-at-home order. An alarming manifestation of this stance can be gleaned from a tweet containing a chilling threat: ‘[I]f you come out, we will kill you, hang your head, and upload it.’ In response to these developments, the Nigerian state has assumed a resolute stance, taking action to proscribe IPOB and declaring any social gatherings of south-eastern youths a ‘state of exception’. As this article examines IPOB’s sit-at-home directive and the escalating focus on fear and retribution against transgressors in the south-eastern region, it adopts a comprehensive methodology that integrates oral interviews, focus group discussions, analysis of newspaper editorials, books and journal articles, and the tracking of relevant online hashtags for the purpose of data generation and analysis. Adopting securitization theory, this article offers an interpretative lens to comprehend the intricate issues at stake.

Close reading of documents produced by the early courts in New South Wales show two young men, formerly barristers at the Northern Assizes, innovating in their court rooms. Such innovation derived from their merchant background rather than the traditions of mercy or paternalism of the Assizes. In such innovations colonial agents were empowered and could shape the workings of the courts themselves. Minutes of the court show the impact of new kinds of elites generated by wealth built on slavery on the courts in the colonies and the subsequent flowering of subcultures.

This article presents and analyses new evidence for how Simplicius made use of Alexander of Aphrodisias for his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics. Alexander’s commentary on the Physics is lost to us (except for scholia on Physics IV–VIII), but, as argued in section II of this article, we have a slightly abridged version of Alexander’s commentary on Physics II 3 in the form of his commentary on Metaphysics V 2 (Aristotle’s Physics II 3 and Metaph. V 2 are more or less identical). This allows a comparison of Alexander’s and Simplicius’ commentaries on the same Aristotelian text. In section III, it is shown that Simplicius relies much more extensively on Alexander than his explicit references indicate. In section IV, it is shown that (a) when Simplicius refers to Alexander disapprovingly, he reports reliably what Alexander said, but that (b) when Simplicius refers to Alexander approvingly and as an authority in support of his own view, he provides a tendentious interpretation of Alexander’s argument. My results help to evaluate Simplicius’ reliability as a witness to the many works of ancient philosophy for which he is our only source.

We introduce a number field analogue of the Mertens conjecture and demonstrate its falsity for all but finitely many number fields of any given degree. We establish the existence of a logarithmic limiting distribution for the analogous Mertens function, expanding upon work of Ng. Finally, we explore properties of the generalised Mertens function of certain dicyclic number fields as consequences of Artin factorisation.

This paper provides some personal reflections on my experiences as a project leader in four cooperative projects with colleagues from the Global South involving higher education institutions (HEIs) in seven countries—namely, Benin, Uganda, Ethiopia, Colombia, Palestine, Bulgaria, and Kosovo. The aim is to try to assess advantages and shortcomings of some of these funding programs in terms of their framing, structuring, and (limited) funding, and to provide some suggestions for ensuring better coordination of what constitutes an institutionally fragmented field. The focus of my reflections is on three related broad themes—that is, how to enhance international academic cooperation, improve academic mobility, and ensure better access to teaching and research materials for Global South HEIs. The paper first analyzes the issue of funding for North-South cooperation, then moves on to the enhancement of international academic cooperation, international mobility, and finally, the provision of better access to teaching and research materials.

This article argues that commemoration practices performed in the aftermath of the First World War, on occasion of the British Armistice Day, and during the two minutes’ silence in particular, served as incubators for a change in feeling rules for the British population. It will show how British society engaged with, challenged, and finally shifted what the “emotional regime” of the period – commonly referred to as the “stiff upper lip” – commanded them to feel. A very short lapse of time – two minutes – turned into a moment where a fundamental change in an important subset of feeling rules specifying this emotional regime became manifest: those applied to male weeping. The two minutes encapsulated a challenge to the harsh contempt for expressive mourning through the shedding of tears, a verdict that was inherited from the nineteenth century but increasingly seemed inappropriate, not the least in the wake of the emotional turmoil that Britons had faced during the “Great” War.

This article explores the Irish-American press’s engagement with the Franco-Prussian War, the unification of Germany and the Paris Commune. The leading papers — the Irish-American, the Irish Citizen, The Pilot and the Irish World — commented extensively on the Franco-Prussian War and its aftermath, and made use of widespread Irish-American sympathy for France in an attempt to influence the evolution of Irish-American ethnic immigrant identity after the American Civil War. The article assesses Irish-American editors’ opinions on the French and Prussian causes, and explores the parallels drawn with the Irish national cause. It then considers the Irish-American press's coverage of the American Republican party's pro-German stance after September 1870, which the editors assessed against the context of Reconstruction after 1865 and the attempts by Radical Republicans to achieve multi-racial citizenship in the United States. Finally, it explores Irish-American commentaries on the Paris Commune and the divisions between the editors that this international phenomenon fostered. It contributes to the study of the Irish-American experience of Reconstruction and the history of American engagement with international conflict after 1865.