This summary presents the proceedings of the two-day conference held in December 2025 as part of the preparatory work for The Bloomsbury Handbook of Modern Italian History. Conceived as a collective intellectual workshop, the conference brought together scholars working across chronological, thematic, and methodological boundaries to reflect on how modern Italy’s history can be narrated and rethought in handbook form. Over two days, participants discussed the construction of Italian identity, from the eighteenth century to the present, foregrounding the interaction between political cultures, social structures, and cultural representations. The eight panels explored national identity before and after unification; the role of media, Catholicism, and war; gender, sexuality, and race; crime and deviance; colonialism; urban development and environmental inequality; labour, industrialisation, and economic crises; Fascism and antifascism; and the architectural, cultural, and mnemonic legacies of the twentieth century. The conference functioned not merely as a presentation of individual chapters, but as a forum in which contributors tested interpretative frameworks, identified historiographical gaps, and refined their arguments. In doing so, it played a crucial role in shaping the intellectual coherence of The Bloomsbury Handbook, ensuring that it reflects current debates while offering a critical and inclusive account of modern Italian history.

In his ‘The Countefactual Argument Against Abortion’ (2023) Ryan Kulesa argues that it is prima facie wrong to kill a ‘counterfactual person’. Some early foetuses, though still lacking consciousness, are counterfactual persons. Hence, it is prima facie wrong to kill (abort) these foetuses. Kulesa’s aim is to reconcile apparently conflicting intuitions about abortion and related acts, e.g., the failure to rescue frozen foetuses in abortion rescue cases, which philosophers writing about abortion find it hard to reconcile. I argue that he does not succeed because his argument does not establish that the mere fact that an entity is a counterfactual person is a sufficient condition of the prima face wrongness of killing it. More generally, Kulesa does not establish that the concept of counterfactual personhood is of utility in the debates he is concerned with at all.

The British invasion of the Zulu kingdom in January 1879, the imposition of British colonial rule from 1880 onwards, and the subsequent undermining of the Zulu royal family and the destruction of the kingdom from the 1880s to the early twentieth century have received attention in numerous historical publications and dissertations. While the primary focus of these studies is on how the British colonists placed the primary members of the Zulu royal family such as King Cetshwayo kaMpande and King Dinuzulu kaCetshwayo under siege, none has explored the impact of the British hostility toward other senior members of the Zulu royal family, such as Prince Ndabuko kaMpande and Prince Shingana kaMpande. Only Robert R. R. Dlomo and Jeff Guy have made brief references to these issues in their biographies of Kings Cetshwayo and Dinuzulu and Harriette Colenso. It will be shown below that the incarceration of Shingana and Ndabuko alongside their nephew, Dinuzulu, from 1889 to 1898, and the re-arrest, trial, and banishment of Shingana to kwaThoyana near Amanzimtoti from 1910 to 1911, and the re-arrest, retrial, conviction, and banishment of Dinuzulu to Middelburg from 1911 to 1913 were part of the British efforts to completely destroy the senior section of the Zulu royal family popularly known as the Usuthu.

By reconstructing the boundaries of a ‘community’ that shared the same emotional horizon when it came to love, this article explores the role that concepts of romantic love played in the development of modern ideas of sexuality, with a specific focus on the relationship between women, sexual desire and pleasure. After a brief description of the Italian historical and cultural context in which Paolo Mantegazza developed his sexual science and the role that romantic love played within it, I analyse his Fisiologia dell’amore to show how, even without explicit references to sexual acts, the book clearly alludes to sexual desire and pleasure. I then examine a selection of letters from Mantegazza’s female readers to demonstrate their enthusiasm for the book. Finally, I show how ideas of romantic love and the introspective enquiry prompted by reading Mantegazza also affected women’s awareness of themselves as sexed beings capable of and entitled to experiences of pleasure.

This study investigates the variation in null subject usage across Slavic languages, focusing on Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. By examining the syntactic and interpretive conditions for null subjects in embedded subjunctive clauses, the paper highlights differences in subject–verb agreement, clause structure, and the role of complementizers. Polish, as a consistent null subject language, shows high acceptance of null subjects, while Russian and Ukrainian exhibit partial null subject behavior, with significant inter-speaker variability. A cartographic analysis reveals that clause size and syntactic movement play a crucial role in licensing null subjects, with Polish consistently realizing its complementizer in ForceP, and Russian and Ukrainian showing more variation. The findings highlight the importance of structural factors in explaining null subject distribution and contribute to a deeper understanding of this phenomenon in Slavic languages.

This study of Neolithic Comb Ware and Pitted Ware clay figurines from south-western Finland and Åland focuses on their provenance, technological traits, and cultural significance. Using ICP-MA/ES chemical analysis and thin-section petrography, forty-two figurines were analysed to identify clay sources and preferences in fabrication techniques. The data indicate that the figurines, and thus the humans, moved between contemporaneous locations along the south-western Finnish coast and on Åland, suggesting regional connections between sites. Most figurines were crafted locally, but a significant number was non-local, signifying mobility within a cross-Baltic network. Distinct clay recipes included calcareous or plant-based tempers and the use of grog. The symbolic value of adding grog is seen as reinforcing connections to a place, indicating that portability and provenance, i.e. movement between places, was an important characteristic of the hunter-gatherer figurine tradition of the Neolithic in the northern Baltic.

As Arctic stakeholders navigate a new era of great power competition, this article reflects on the influence that Indigenous Peoples have had on Arctic and international politics through their roles as co-founders of the Arctic Council (AC) system and as Permanent Participants (PPs) within it. Through a constructivist lens, this article highlights the influence the PPs have had on the evolution of the Council’s interests and practices. Based on findings from multiple interviews and an extensive document analysis of the AC’s official Declarations between 1996 and 2021, the article identifies how PP advocacy for the inclusion of Indigenous worldviews, Knowledges, and rights has shaped the AC over time. The article argues that the PPs are a crucial part of the AC’s structure and co-constitute its identity, challenging state-centric understandings of the Council’s existence. It asserts that the PPs’ co-constitution of the AC is what has endowed it with its legitimacy in Arctic and international affairs. However, despite being a core element of what makes the Council what it is, the research findings highlight a variety of challenges and limitations that remain for the PPs. Additionally, the article discusses how the pause of AC work following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exposed gaps in the recognition and full implementation of the rights and self-determination of Indigenous Peoples.

This article examines how popular musical practices in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Prague articulated and shaped Czech nationalist sentiment through intertwined forms of pastoral and urban nostalgia. In a rapidly modernizing city marked by migration, industrialization, and intensifying Czech–German antagonism, pubs, dancehalls and garden restaurants became crucial sites where everyday leisure intersected with the cultural politics of nationalism. These venues, many of which consciously evoked a rural atmosphere through architecture and repertoire, offered urban newcomers a symbolic refuge from the social dislocation of modern life. Here, brass bands and the emergent folk-like genre lidovka, alongside satirical café chantant couplets, became key media through which audiences negotiated the loss of traditional rural worlds and articulated desires for collective belonging.

This article is an attempt to understand how diverse and seemingly incommensurable aerial perspectives on Arctic exploration could co-exist during the search for the John Franklin expedition in the 1840s and 1850s. I begin by examining the cultural context of ballooning before turning to proposals to send balloons and other aerial missions to the Arctic. Why did balloons and ‘balloonacy’, as the popular periodical Punch described this craze, come to feature so prominently in responses to the Arctic mystery, and how did women feature in these responses? I then discuss the clairvoyantes who were put into mesmeric trances and then described visiting Franklin and his men in the Arctic. Beginning at the time of greatest anxiety regarding the fate of the expedition, clairvoyante visionaries and their operators formed part of an emotional field of speculation and experimentation centred on the Arctic. I conclude by arguing that actual balloon expeditions in search of Franklin echoed many of the mesmeric and imaginary projects emanating from popular culture. This connects women’s perspectives about the Arctic with aerial exploration schemes and suggests that we look at both together for a deeper understanding of polar culture in the 1840s and 1850s.

This paper explores Japan’s maritime and Arctic policies. Japan’s interest in the polar regions emerged early due to its geographical characteristics and the impacts of climate change, expanding its scientific research activities in the Arctic and Antarctic regions. Over time, Japan has broadened its involvement in the economic, scientific, environmental, and security domains. As a non-Arctic state, Japan has expressed its intent to contribute to resolving Arctic issues and has sought to take a leading role in Arctic governance within the international community. In 2007, Japan enacted the Basic Act on Ocean Policy to promote comprehensive and strategic maritime policies. Japan announced its 4th Basic Ocean Plan in 2023, which plays a crucial role in the sustainable use and protection of marine resources, marine environmental protection, and maritime safety. This paper comprehensively analyses Japan’s Basic Ocean Plans and Arctic policy, exploring the relationship and evolution between maritime and Arctic policies and examining how these policy changes reflect Japan’s international maritime strategy. While previous studies have treated maritime and Arctic policies separately, this paper analyses the interrelationship between the two, investigating the evolution of Japan’s maritime policy up to the present and the development and characteristics of its Arctic policy.

There is increased public attention directed to the topic of weapons trade and this is a positive development because enhanced scrutiny holds a promise of bringing more accountability to the field that has long been obscure. This article reviews the possibility of criminal prosecutions of corporate officials for supplying weapons to Gaza, Yemen and Ukraine at the International Criminal Court (ICC) or a similar forum. The Nuremberg Trials planted seeds for such an endeavour by holding several industrialists criminally liable. Yet, modern international criminal law has so far largely stayed away from defining the scope of individual criminal responsibility for corporate officials. The case studies in this paper reveal that the moment is not ripe for commencing actual investigations at the ICC. Nonetheless, a future consensus is slowly building through (often failed) attempts to use legal or policy avenues to define the standards of conduct in the weapons trade.