We model discrete-time dynamical systems using a specific class of lenses between polynomials whose domains are equipped with a bijection between their positions and their directions. We introduce Moore machines and deterministic state automata as key examples, showing how these morphisms describe state transitions and interactions. We also explain how to build new dynamical systems from existing ones using operations like products, parallel composition, and compositions of these maps. This chapter demonstrates how polynomial functors can be used to represent and analyze discrete-time dynamical behavior in a clear, structured way.

Chapter 3 on Alvin Tollestrup, my experimental physics thesis advisor, describes the singular contributions he made to physics, and what was required to practice experimental particle physics at the highest level. What I learned from him affected me profoundly, giving me the understanding of experiments necessary for the discovery of quarks.

Tollestrup: Developed photomultipliers as particle detectors to obtain the most acute values of the masses of the light elements. Designed the RF system and a million-volt pulse transformer to inject electrons into Caltech’s Synchrotron that observed the first pion-nucleon resonance beyond its peak. Found the pion’s beta decay into an electron and neutrino at CERN, removing the last obstacle to the acceptance of the V-A theory of parity violation. Performed the first users group experiment at the Bevatron. Designed the first superconducting magnets for Fermilab’s Tevatron. Helped convert the Tevatron to a proton-antiproton collider, the most powerful collider for 25 years until the LHC at CERN was constructed. For this work he received the National Medal of Technology  and Innovation.

In his Sketches Illustrative of Oriental Manners and Customs, published in 1797, British soldier and artist Robert Mabon made a last-minute change to the frontispiece (Figure I.1). While we do not know exactly why he changed his mind, this illustration encapsulates the interface between visual arts and British imperialism. Mabon brings together the emblematic figures of History and Painting. While History draws the attention of Painting to Indian subjects as depicted on a tablet, a rainbow unfolds with the power of the latter's pencil. A picture is worth a thousand words, but, more importantly, visual representations convey deeper and more subtle significances than words are capable of producing. These are constituted by the images’ literary and historical backgrounds, the decisions made by artists and patrons alike, audience response, and, above all perhaps, the ideas that are revealed about power. Mabon's frontispiece allows us to think about imagery as an important arena to address how the British Empire in India can be known, understood, and, most importantly, remembered.

An Empire of Images is not a history of the British Indian Empire as told in images; rather, it foregrounds the visual arts’ centrality in the making of political legitimacy during the early years of British rule in India. I am concerned with the visual languages of imperialism between 1688 and 1815, a chronology internalized as the long eighteenth century in British historiography. A reassessment of this period, however, requires us to turn to its wider colonial context.

‘Community’ is a popular term often invoked by Shakespearians in ways that assume a clear meaning. To problematize community, this article briefly examines the literature on community in social science and history before turning to its use by Shakespearians. It concludes with a reading of community in James Ijames’s Fat Ham.

The campaign to address severe forms of labour market exploitation in markets around the world has led activists, unionists, policymakers, and legislators to explore the role of corporations in driving human trafficking and modern slavery (LeBaron, 2020). Based on the understanding that lead firms are not merely complicit actors but active contributors – through their purchasing and sourcing practices – to violations of workers’ human rights and labour standards, the focus on corporations seeks to expand corporate responsibility to working conditions throughout global value chains (GVCs) (Anner, 2015). In this chapter, we compare two labour governance models that have developed in the quest to combat modern slavery.

To better comprehend the structural aspects of efforts to eradicate modern slavery within GVCs and the dynamics created around them, as well as the measures pursued and their implications, we further develop and employ our analytical concept of ‘anti-trafficking chains’. This term refers to the provision of anti-trafficking services by both non-profit and for-profit entities to multinational corporations (MNCs), mirroring the logic and structure of supply chains (Barkay et al., 2024). The comparative analysis presented here focuses on two types of anti-trafficking chains: one that has proliferated following the enactment of State Anti-Trafficking laws in various countries and another that emerged from the deployment of the Worker Social Responsibility (WSR) model. This analysis seeks to discern the extent to which State Anti-Trafficking laws provide the expected hardening of soft-law anti-trafficking tools and to identify the conditions under which anti-trafficking chains may transform corporate behaviour and serve as drivers of change in human trafficking in GVCs. To this end, this chapter offers a structural analysis of the governance models behind State Anti-Trafficking laws and WSR and of the power dynamics created by each.

We describe a range of additional category-theoretic structures on the category of polynomial functors. These include concepts like adjunctions, epi-mono factorizations, and cartesian closure. We also cover limits and colimits of polynomials and explore vertical-cartesian factorizations of morphisms. The chapter highlights how these structures provide new tools for working with polynomial functors and extend their usefulness in modeling various types of interactions and constructions.

The church music in Prague at the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was predominantly monophonic, but nevertheless remarkably diverse. In St. Vitus’s Cathedral, the main institution of the Prague diocese, traditional Gregorian chant, partly distinctly archaic, was cultivated in the second half of the fourteenth century as a manifestation of the political aspirations of the Luxembourg rulers to establish Prague as the new megalopolis of Christianity and heir to Rome. In diocesan churches on the other hand, new liturgical repertory flourished, characterized by extravagant melodies and partly rhythmic performance. At the same time, the repertory of vernacular sacred songs was gaining increasing popularity in Bohemia. All these aspects found expression in the constitution of the vernacular liturgy for a parish church – the first in the history of the Western Church– – after the outbreak of the Hussite Wars in 1419.

This book began after a series of conversations with Ayesha Jalal on the nature of reform and religious life on the campus of Tufts University over a decade ago. An extension, of sorts, of the many discussions with her on the topic since my days as her PhD student twenty years ago, I was struck by the need to study religion in the era of nineteenth-century reform not with an eye toward communalism that developed later in time, but to the many meanings of religion, especially comparative religion, in the nineteenth century.

Another important moment emerged at a 2014 conference on the occasion of the anniversary of the Centre for South Asian and Indian Ocean Studies at Tufts University, convened by Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal. In a panel on religion in nineteenth-century India in which I discussed religious reform, I fell into a long conversation with the great scholar Professor Susannah Heschel on various aspects of religion, history, and approaches to empire. This chance encounter led me to think seriously about religion's many historical guises. For that generative discussion and for ongoing friendship and fellowship, I am grateful.

Ideas developed in this book grew after the ‘Religion and Its Others: Power, Sovereignty, and Politics in Indian Religions Past and Present’ workshop, funded by the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute at the University of Victoria in March 14–15, 2019. This workshop featured the generative work of Rinku Lamba, A. Azfar Moin, J. Barton Scott, Shruti Patel, Brian Hatcher, Uday Chandra, and Ramesh Bairy.

5.1 [338] The blessed David reveals that the inability to control one’s tongue is the most shameful of diseases. For example, he even used to offer prayers about it, saying: “Place a guard on my mouth, O Lord, and a gate of constraint about my lips. Do not turn my heart away to words of wickedness.”1 In fact, I would say that it is priceless to make the wise choice of keeping one’s mind focused upon the thoughts that are appropriate for truly sensible people and, indeed, to use irreproachable speech in this endeavor. For it has been written that, “If a person does not stumble in his speech, he is a perfect man, capable of reining in the rest of his body too.”2 On the other hand, how could anyone not find fault, and quite understandably so, with someone using a carefree and relaxed tongue that has free rein to proceed to each and every [339] reprehensible thing?

Serving tea, women’s social labor, and the intergenerational problem of negotiating “our culture.” Despite the enjoyment of New Year (Nowruz) ritual social visits, a treasured national holiday respite is a dreaded domestic endurance test, and a quiet war between generations of women. While men quote poetry rhapsodizing over the joys of spring celebrations, women dash between guests, stove, and front door in order properly to serve tea. Woe to the daughter who would prefer to retreat to the more intimate pleasures of the nuclear family achieved through partnership marriage. Unlike religious traditions that some women can challenge through informed argument over proper interpretation, secular social obligations can be experienced as oppressive but nearly inviolable. Hannah Arendt’s theorization of “the social” as a nonnegotiable sphere lacking in possibilities for free action helps explain why it might be easier to rebel against religious norms and laws than dare to defy the accumulated familial and national weight of social tradition, and informs the situation of younger Iranian women at odds with, while trying to remain loyal to, the cultural norms their mothers still uphold.