In much of its history from the nineteenth century to the last decade of the twentieth, comparative literature remained largely Eurocentric, and surveys or histories of the world’s literatures were mostly written by Western scholars from a West-centred perspective. Literature: A World History (LAWH) took the first step in writing a history of literature of the world from a non-Eurocentric point of view by having the voices of the world’s different traditions heard and by distributing the proper space to macro-regions more equally than ever before. That is the most significant contribution this long and arduous project made for a better understanding of the world’s literatures.

Mpox (formerly called monkeypox) is a zoonotic viral disease caused by the monkeypox virus (MPXV) that has recently emerged as a notable global health issue by spreading beyond its typical geographical zones in Central and West Africa. In this study, we conducted a phylogenetic and evolutionary investigation of MPXV in West Africa. We focussed on 167 complete genome sequences collected from human infections in Nigeria and Cameroon between 2019 and 2024, all of which were retrieved from the GSAID database. To analyse these sequences, we employed multiple sequence alignment using fast Fourier transform (MAFFT) and maximum likelihood techniques to identify conserved genomic variants and trace evolutionary patterns within the virus. Our findings revealed that all the MPXV strains studied belong to clade II, which is further subdivided into two subclades. Notably, this study documents the presence of two distinct subclades IIa and IIb, reflecting the complex and ongoing evolution of the virus in the region. The phylogenetic analysis reveals rapid mutations and suggests that MPXV is being transmitted from multiple lineages between Nigeria and Cameroon. This demands the need to further strengthen the surveillance and containment efforts in West Africa. This study highlights the role of genomic surveillance in monitoring the evolution and spread of the MPXV, particularly in regions with limited available data.

In this article, we address the role that European bordering and migration policy play in the broader construction of the European project by defining who does and does not belong in Europe. This question, and the policy answers to it, are shaped by a variety of different political and economic interests and factors, such as racialized narratives of border protection, labor market needs, and the securitization of borders. We tackle this question by examining the role that categories and figures of migration—such as the “genuine” and “bogus” asylum seeker, the refugee, and the economic migrant—play in European border policy and how they are changing in the present conjuncture. We argue that a redefinition is taking place of who counts as a “good” and “bad” migrant, which responds to the changing political economy of contemporary European capitalism and is reflected in the growing prominence of the dichotomy of “legal” and “illegal” migration. This, we argue, reconfigures the existing categories of economic migrant and asylum seeker and speaks to the emergence of new forms of racialized disposability at Europe’s borders. We do this by developing a critical political economy perspective that builds on our previous work and draws on the literature on racial capitalism and the concept of disposability.

The experiences of Latina women and girls with state surveillance, and their responses to unfair policies and practices, remain underexplored. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Latinas—primarily of Mexican descent—living in San Diego, we examine how encounters with local police and immigration enforcement shape their political practices. Participants described repeated negative encounters with police and immigration enforcement agencies over the life course. These cumulative experiences fostered distrust of police and critical views of surveillance practices designed to restrict the mobility of immigrants and other systematically minoritized groups. In response, many of the women engaged in community organizing and adopted counter-surveillance strategies. Our findings show how patterned experiences with state surveillance generate political critique and action.

Agricultural intensification has profoundly transformed Europe’s landscapes, driving widespread declines in farmland bird populations. Among the most pressing threats is the loss of meadows, either through conversion to arable land as a result of intensification, or through agropastoral abandonment leading to shrub encroachment. Although farmland bird populations in Central and Eastern Europe have historically declined more slowly than in other regions, recent evidence shows that even once-common species are now in decline. This highlights the urgent need to quantify these trends and identify their underlying drivers. In this study, we investigate habitat preferences and factors underlying the severe, over 30-year decline of Red-backed Shrike Lanius collurio, an iconic farmland species and key bioindicator of grassland biodiversity. Our research focused on a 440-ha alluvial floodplain in Slovenia’s Sub-Pannonian region, a site considered a national stronghold for the species. Territory surveys were conducted intermittently from 1992 to 2025, with detailed habitat mapping available from 2004 to 2022. Consistent with previous studies, our results indicated that breeding Red-backed Shrikes primarily occupied ecotonal habitats marked by extensive meadow cover, moderate shrub density, and high habitat heterogeneity. Alarmingly, between 1992 and 2025, the population declined by 92.44%, decreasing from 172 territories to just 13. The steep decline observed was likely driven by agricultural intensification, persisting under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), with conversion of meadows into arable land and the loss of traditional management leading to shrub encroachment. The latter emerged as the strongest predictor of population decline in the most recent years. Our findings emphasise the urgent need to protect, manage, and restore meadows to prevent further biodiversity loss. Considering the relatively better historical status of farmland bird populations in Central and Eastern Europe compared with their Western European counterparts, this worrying trend indicates that similar declines are likely widespread, highlighting the need for immediate research and targeted conservation efforts.

We explored the relationships between L2 utterance fluency and cognitive fluency in monologic and dialogic tasks. The study involved 136 Chinese university-level English learners. Utterance fluency was measured through speed, breakdown, and repair fluency aspects. Cognitive fluency was indicated by L2 lexical and syntactic processing efficiency measures. Stepwise regression models, including metrics of L2-specific cognitive fluency, L2 knowledge, and L1 utterance fluency as predictors, targeted L2 utterance fluency as the dependent variable. We found that L2 cognitive fluency predicted limited variance in utterance fluency, with its influence more evident in monologues. L2 lexical processing efficiency paralleled syntactic processing efficiency’s importance in the monologic task but surpassed it in dialogues. Moreover, L2 processing speed had a more significant impact on utterance fluency than processing stability across both contexts. We suggest that cognitive fluency is not the sole determinant of utterance fluency; L2 knowledge and L1 utterance fluency play non-negligible roles.

Numerous applications in psychological research require that a data set is partitioned via the inverse of a clustering criterion. This anticlustering seeks for high similarity between groups (maximum diversity) or high pairwise dissimilarity within groups (maximum dispersion). Brusco et al. (2020) proposed a bicriterion heuristic (BILS) that simultaneously seeks for maximum diversity and dispersion, introducing the bicriterion approach for anticlustering. We investigate if the bicriterion approach can be improved using exact algorithms that guarantee globally optimal criterion values. Despite the theoretical computational intractability of anticlustering, we present a new exact algorithm for maximum dispersion that scales to quite large data sets ($N = 1,000$). However, a fully exact bicriterion approach was only feasible for small data sets (about $N = 30$). We therefore developed hybrid approaches that maintain optimal dispersion but use heuristics to maximize diversity on top of it. In a simulation study and an example application, we compared several hybrid approaches. An adaptation of BILS that initiates each iteration with a partition having optimal dispersion (BILS-Hybrid-All) performed best across a variety of data inputs. All of the methods developed here as well as the original BILS algorithm are available via the free and open-source R package anticlust.

From the early use of TF-IDF to the high-dimensional outputs of deep learning, vector space embeddings of text, at a scale ranging from token to document, are at the heart of all machine analysis and generation of text. In this article, we present the first large-scale comparison of a sampling of such techniques on a range of classification tasks on a large corpus of current literature drawn from the well-known Books3 data set. Specifically, we compare TF-IDF, Doc2vec and several Transformer-based embeddings on a variety of text-specific tasks. Using industry-standard BISAC codes as a proxy for genre, we compare embeddings in their ability to preserve information about genre. We further compare these embeddings in their ability to encode inter- and intra-book similarity. All of these comparisons take place at the book “chunk” (1,024 tokens) level. We find Transformer-based (“neural”) embeddings to be best, in the sense of their ability to respect genre and authorship, although almost all embedding techniques produce sensible constructions of a “literary landscape” as embodied by the Books3 corpus. These experiments suggest the possibility of using deep learning embeddings not only for advances in generative AI, but also a potential tool for book discovery and as an aid to various forms of more traditional comparative textual analysis.

Recent advancements in random distributed feedback Raman fiber lasers have promoted random Raman fiber lasers (RRFLs) as a novel laser source with significant progress. However, fully open cavity RRFLs suffer from suboptimal Stokes conversion efficiency and output power due to mode mismatch limitations. In this paper, we demonstrate the impact of end feedback and mode control on output Stokes wave characteristics. The random laser model incorporating multimode Raman interactions was established to theoretically simulate end feedback and output modal properties. Experimental studies were demonstrated through the construction of a fully open cavity RRFL. Higher end feedback reduces forward-propagating Stokes waves while amplifying backward-propagating light intensity. Transmission modes were effectively controlled through the design and optimization of tapered fiber. Consequently, 2081 W random Raman lasing was achieved in the fully open cavity RRFL. At maximum power, spectral purity exceeded 90%, representing the maximum output power reported for fully open cavity random lasers. This work provides important guidance for high-power laser generation and investigations of multimode nonlinear effects.

This article deals with the reception of the Yugoslav model of self-management in Italy between the 1950s and 1970s. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources from Yugoslav and Italian archives, this research provides new evidence about transnational exchanges of models of industrial democracy that transcended ideological barriers and the Cold War divide and linked Italian party elites, trade unions and Christian-oriented movements to the ‘Yugoslav model’ in a common search for a ‘third way’ in industrial relations.

The recovery of subaltern experiences in colonial contexts requires more than reading against the grain and interrogating silences. This paper describes “archival patchwork,” a way of working across diverse sources from multiple repositories, collecting small scraps of evidence about subordinated individuals, reconstructing social relationships, and stitching together patterns of daily life that aren’t visible otherwise. Archival patchwork accommodates present-day ways of working in neoliberal universities, acknowledges north-south disparities, and opens collaborative possibilities. The paper, pinned to South African history, enumerates digitization, transcription, and duplication projects that make archival sources for the colonial Cape more widely available. Although this paper’s evidence is focused in time and place, the methodology is broadly applicable.

This paper re-examines the medical texts used by Bede in De temporum ratione and Retractatio in Actus apostolorum. It has long been accepted that he had access to works by Pseudo-Hippocrates, Vindicianus and Cassius Felix. Yet idiosyncrasies evident from his quotations complicate matters. Each highlights connections with distinctive textual traditions evident in early continental manuscripts and, especially in the case of the alleged influence of Vindicianus, other works. It shows the close affinities that Bede’s compendia had with Frankish medical miscellanies. In the process, we can also see something of how Bede dealt with a non-Christian body of knowledge, using it critically within his own intellectual projects.

This article examines debates about the future of health coordination between French African colonies in the era of decolonisation. These debates illuminate tensions over the future of French doctors in Africa, the role of international organisations, and the meaning of colonial borders for public health. In the late 1950s, French officials sought to reformulate inter-territorial colonial medical structures in a way that could be sustained with African independence, resulting by the 1960s in the creation of new West and Central African regional health organisations. Newly appointed African health ministers supported these organisations for various reasons, including sharing costs of medical infrastructure and the idea of a French debt that could be addressed through technical assistance. Both French and African health officials in turn naturalised the idea of post-colonial health coordination between former French colonies, regardless of shared borders with other African states. Both French and African health officials used the rhetoric of “disease knows no borders” to engage in a process of health “region-making,” although the outcome was health coordination rooted less in epidemiological realities than colonial histories. Late colonialism catalysed change in public health and medicine that mirrored broader political developments but also produced distinct discourses, agendas, and institutions.

When do citizens want a dominant political leader? A prominent Conflict-Sensitivity Hypothesis suggests such preferences arise during intergroup conflict, yet it remains untested in a real war. We report results from an experiment embedded in a two-wave panel survey with 1,081 Ukrainians (811 re-interviewed) at the start of Russia’s 2022 invasion. We find that respondents generally value competence and warmth over dominance in leaders. Yet, war increases preferences for dominance and reduces preferences for warmth and competence. Emotional reactions to war also relate to leader trait preferences: Ukrainians who react with aggressive emotions display enhanced preferences for all leader traits, whereas fearful reactions leave trait preferences mostly unaffected. These findings advance our understanding of how war shapes leader preferences.

In this paper, we demonstrate wideband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) at sub-mmW frequencies with full electronic data and carrier generation. We present the first stringent examination of OFDM-waveform design in a fully electronic experimental setup. Operating at 309 GHz center frequency and modulated channel bandwidths of 2 and 10 GHz, the performance of single-carrier waveforms is compared to OFDM signals with varying modulation formats and subcarrier settings. In addition to the investigation of the gross data rate, which is resulting in 20 Gbit/s for OFDM and 40 Gbit/s for single-carrier, we give one of the first demonstrations of joint communication and sensing with OFDM-signals at sub-mmW frequencies, as the distance between transmitter and receiver isdetermined by examination of the received signal.