Search results for ""Àmsterdam""

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism: Walking in Films offers a rich exploration of the cinematic aesthetics that filmmakers devised to reflect the corporeal and affective experience of walking in the city. Drawing from literature in urban studies, film theory, and aesthetic philosophy, it is the first monograph to approach the history of cinema from the perspective of walking. A series of case studies providing nuanced analyses of widely referenced figures, such as the flaneur/flâneuse, vagabond, and nomad, reveal how filmmakers articulated their objection to repressive structures through depictions of walking: a common, everyday act yet transgressive, bold, and indomitable. Through the lens of Henri Lefebvre’s theory of space, Michel de Certeau’s concept of pedestrian acts, and Jacques Rancière’s treatment of the politics of aesthetics, Walking in Films traces how cinema evolved in conversation with the mobile body and the new images, styles, and techniques that emerged with it.

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Made up of both material and symbolic elements, the urban space is always dynamic and transitional; it brings together or separates the past and the present, the public and the private, the center and the periphery. The present volume focuses on the interaction between the social processes and spatial forms that shape the identity of Italian cities. Using both canonical and less well-known texts along with cultural artifacts, the essays in the volume deprovincialize the Italian city, interpreting the material and symbolic practices that have made it into a unique entity whose enduring influence extends far outside Italy.

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As Cardinal Hugo and as pope, Gregory was one of the dominant figures in the history of the papacy of the High Middle Ages. Coming to prominence under Pope Innocent III, Hugo played an important political role, particularly as legate on various occasions, as well as being a major promoter of the new religious orders. As pope, his battle with Emperor Frederick II is one of medieval history’s most absorbing conflicts. But he also acted as peacemaker, promoter of the Crusades, instigator of mission for the sake of conversion, refomer of the Curia, patron of arts and liturgy, and as a passionate advocate of Church reform. His decretal collection, the Liber Extra, was the most influential of the Middle Ages. A full examination of Gregory’s pontificate is very long overdue. The current volume brings together a team of international scholars, each of them expert in dealing with a particular aspect of the pontificate, and provides what will be a collection of studies of lasting scholarly value on a central figure of the medieval papacy.

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The motif of the woman and the dragon has been prevalent in Western art since antiquity, yet has hitherto remained understudied, and artworks featuring this motif in Western Mediterranean cultures have been examined primarily in relation to the topos of the male dragon-slayer. This book analyzes artistic images of women and dragons over an extensive period, from Classical Greece and Rome (with forays to Egypt and Mesopotamia) to the early modern period in Western Europe. The unique methodology employed in the study of this motif reveals its sacred core, as well as its relationship to rituals of fertility and oracular knowledge, to the liminal realm between life and death, and to the symbolism of Great Mother goddesses. At the same time, the images explored throughout expose stereotypes and biases against women in unusual positions of power, which were embedded in the motif and persisted in Western European art.

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This edited collection of papers explores from an interdisciplinary perspective the role of images and objects in early modern knowledge-making practices with an emphasis on mapping methodological approaches against printed pictures and things. The volume brings together work across diverse printed images, objects, and materials produced c. 1500-1700, as well as well as works in the ambit of early modern print culture, to reframe a comparative history of the rise of the ‘epistemic imprint’ as a new visual genre at the onset of the scientific revolution. The book includes contributions from the perspective of international scholars and museum professionals drawing on methodologies from a range of fields.

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Northern Laos has become a prominent spot in large-scale, top-down mappings and studies of neoliberal globalisation and infrastructural development linking Thailand and China, and markets further beyond. Yet in the common narrative, in which Laos appears as a weak victim helplessly exposed to its larger neighbours, attention is seldom paid to local voices. This book fills this gap. Building on long-term multi-sited fieldwork, it accompanies northern Lao cross-border traders closely in their transnational worlds of mobilities, social relations, economic experimentation and aspiration. Cross-Border Traders in Northern Laos: Mastering Smallness demonstrates that these traders’ indispensable but often invisible role in the everyday workings of the China-Laos-Thailand borderland economy relies on their rhetoric and practices of ‘smallness’—of framing their transnational trade activities in a self-deprecating manner and stressing their economic inferiority. Decoding their discursive surface of insignificance, this ethnography of ‘smallness’ foregrounds remarkable transnational social and economic skills that are mostly invisible in Sino-Southeast Asian borderland scholarship.

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The view that China has become increasingly assertive under President Xi Jinping is now a common trope in academic and media discourse. However, until the end of Xi Jinping’s first term in March 2018, China had been relatively restrained in its use of coercive economic measures. This is puzzling given the conventional belief among scholars and practitioners that sanctions are a middle ground between diplomatic and military/paramilitary action. Using a wide range of methods and data — including in-depth interviews with 76 current and former politicians, policy-makers, diplomats, and commercial actors across 12 countries and 16 cities — Sanctions with Chinese Characteristics: Rhetoric and Restraint in China’s Diplomacy examines the ways in which China had employed economic sanctions to further its political objectives, and the factors explaining China’s behaviour. This book provides a systematic investigation into the ways in which Chinese decisionmakers approached sanctions both at the United Nations Security Council and unilaterally, and shows how China’s longstanding sanctions rhetoric has had a constraining effect on its behaviour, resulting in its inability to employ sanctions in complete alignment with its immediate interests.

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Film Phenomenology and Adaptation: Sensuous Elaboration argues that in order to make sense of film adaptation, we must first apprehend their sensual form. Across its chapters, this book brings the philosophy and research methodology of phenomenology into contact with adaptation studies, examining how vision, hearing, touch, and the structures of the embodied imagination and memory thicken and make tangible an adaptation’s source. In doing so, this book not only conceives adaptation as an intertextual layering of source material and adaptation, but also an intersubjective and textural experience that includes the materiality of the body.

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In several European countries, the United States, and the Soviet Union, remarkable industrial novels based on empirical observations were written between 1900 and 1970. With two successive world wars and the rise of communism and fascism, this was an exceptionally turbulent time in the history of industrial capitalism as Taylorism and Fordism sought to increase production and consumption. This social landscape shaped modernist industrial novels. Key themes in these novels were class conflict, bad working conditions, worker alienation, changing workmen and employee cultures, urbanization, and worker migration. The primary goal was to document and publicize the real developments of working conditions in factories and offices, often aiming to influence both company welfare work and state social policies. This book focuses on the modernist industrial novel as written in five large industrial nations: the United States before WWII, the Stalinist Soviet Union, Weimar Germany, post-WWII Italy, and France.

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Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema: Poetics of Space, Sound, and Stability rethinks theory and style through films that bring the limits of traditional postcolonial frameworks into stark relief. Discover Singapore’s preoccupations with space, Yasmin Ahmad’s Malaysian soundscapes, and Indonesia’s investment in genre. These undertheorized films from geopolitically situated cultures narrate colonial identity within a distinctively Southeast Asian story. Gerald Sim’s immersive journey nurtures connections between narrative film, commercial video, art cinema, and experimental work with an abiding commitment to self-reflexive theorizing. The book culminates in a reflection on the ethics and politics of conducting knowledge work on world cinema. Sim navigates Singapore’s love of maps with the work of Tom Conley and Gilles Deleuze, surveys the city-state’s cartographic uncanny, before using the spatial inquisitions in filmmaker Tan Pin Pin’s “cinema of hiraeth” to appreciate Singapore’s territorial predispositions. The book then revisits a beloved Malaysian director's voice of modernity alongside Jean-Luc Nancy’s phenomenologies of listening and globalization. Original readings of Ahmad’s oeuvre dwell on the interplay between her ethnic cacophonies and imperfect subtitling. Finally, Sim focuses on the postcoloniality of Indonesia’s Cold War alliance with the United States to contemplate the overhang of authoritarian stability within its contemporary cinema’s generic recourse.

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River Cities in Asia uncovers the intimate relationship between rivers and cities in Asia from a multi-disciplinary perspective in the humanities and the social sciences. As rivers have shaped human settlement patterns, economies, culture and rituals, so too have humans impacted the flow and health of rivers. In Asia, the sheer scale of urbanization increases the urgency of addressing challenges facing urban rivers, leading to the importance of historically, socially, and culturally relevant solutions. However, cities are also uneven landscapes of power, affecting chances to achieve holistic ecological approaches. The central premise of River Cities in Asia is that a “river city” is one where proximity between a river and a city exists across time and space, natural and social dimensions. Recognition of these deep connections can help to better contextualize policy solutions aimed at rivers and their ecologies, including human life.

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This volume of interdisciplinary essays examines the intersection of religion and literature in medieval China, focusing on the impact of Buddhism and Daoism on a wide range of elite and popular literary texts and religious practices in the 3rd-11th centuries CE. Drawing on the work of the interdisciplinary scholar Stephen Bokenkamp, the essays weave together the many cross-currents of religious, intellectual, and literary traditions in medieval China to provide vivid pictures of medieval Chinese religion and culture as it was lived and practiced. The contributors to the volume are all highly regarded experts in the fields of Chinese poetry, Daoism, Buddhism, popular religion, and literature. Their research papers cut across imagined disciplinary boundaries to show that the culture of medieval China can only be understood by close reading of texts from multiple genres, traditions, and approaches.

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There is growing awareness about how social media circulate extreme viewpoints and turn up the temperature of public debate. Posts that exhibit agitation garner disproportionate engagement. Within this clamour, fringe sources and viewpoints are mainstreaming, and mainstream media are marginalized. This book takes up the mainstreaming of the fringe and the marginalization of the mainstream. In a cross-platform analysis of Google Web Search, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, 4chan and TikTok, we found that hyperpartisan web operators, alternative influencers and ambivalent commentators are in ascendency. The book can be read as a form of platform criticism. It puts on display the current state of information online, noting how social media platforms have taken on the mantle of accidental authorities, privileging their own on-platform performers and at the same time adjudicating between claims of what is considered acceptable discourse.

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Drawing on a rich array of textual and visual primary sources, including medicine, satires, play scripts, dictionaries, natural philosophy, and texts on collecting wonders, this book provides a fresh perspective on monstrosity in early modern European culture. The essays explore how exceptional bodies challenged social, religious, sexual and natural structures and hierarchies in the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and contributed to its knowledge, moral and emotional repertoire. Prodigious births, maternal imagination, hermaphrodites, collections of extraordinary things, powerful women, disabilities, controversial exercise, shapeshifting phenomena and hybrids are examined in a period before all varieties and differences became normalized to a homogenous standard. The historicizing of exceptional bodies is central in the volume since it expands our understanding of early modern culture and deepens our knowledge of its specific ways of conceptualizing singularities, rare examples, paradoxes, rules and conventions in nature and society.

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The Mime Handbook covers the theory of mime corporel (Corporeal Mime) and explains the technique through dozens of clearly illustrated exercises. It provides an overview of the work and life of Etienne Decroux (1889-1991), founder of the ‘mime corporel’ and father of modern mime. Building onto Decroux’s mime corporel, additional concepts are introduced on the use of space in physical theater and the creation of mime performances. Mime corporel is a physical theater technique that has revolutionized the physical expression for actors, dancers, and mime players. The philosophy of Etienne Decroux has permanently influenced approaches to performance, the use of space and the study of movement composition in the theater. The Mime Handbook is intended for anyone who creates, studies, or teaches physical theater. Directors, actors, dancers, mime players, and performance artists will discover fundamental ideas and techniques that will enrich their work. You can download page 88 of the book here.

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Film Festivals, Ideology and Italian Art Cinema is the first systematic study of the role ideology plays in film festivals’ construction of dominant ideas about art cinema. Film festivals are considered the driving force of the film industry outside Hollywood, disseminating ideals of cinematic art and humanist politics. However, the question of what drives them remains highly contentious. In a rare consideration of the European competitive film festival circuit as a whole, this book analyses the shared economic, geopolitical and cultural histories that characterise ‘European A festivals’. It offers, too, the first extensive analysis of such festivals’ role in the canonisation of select Italian films, from Rome, Open City to The Great Beauty and Gomorrah. The book proposes a new approach to ideology critique, one that enables detailed examination of how film festivals construct ideas about not only contemporary art cinema, but assumptions about gender, race, colonialism and capitalism.

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This book reconstructs the factional-ideological conflicts surrounding socialist transformation and political reform in China that were played out through ‘factional model-making’, a norm-bound mechanism for elites of the Chinese Communist Party to contest the party line publicly. Dazhai, Anhui, Nanjie, Shekou, Shenzhen, Guangdong and Chongqing were cultivated into factional models by party elites before Xi Jinping came to power in 2012. Although factional model-making undermined party discipline, it often did not threaten regime security and even contributed to regime resilience through strengthening collective leadership and other means. This follows that the suppression of factional model-making under Xi might undermine longer-term regime resilience. However, Xi believes that regime security rests on his strongman rule, not any benefits that factional model-making may contribute. It is in this spirit that he grooms Zhejiang into a party model for his policy programme of common prosperity, which is designed to legitimize his vision of socialism.

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The Barrandov Studios are one of the largest and oldest film studios in Europe. For more than 80 years so far, the studios have been the location of choice for over 2,500 Czech and International films. Barrandov’s founding fathers, the Havel brothers Vàclav and Milo. (the grandfather and uncle of later president Vàclav Havel), built the ‘Hollywood of Eastern Europe’ in the 1930s. A legendary studio like this – and its story – has so far not been told to an English-speaking readership. This collection aims to correct this, presenting the studio’s rich history, its esteemed directors, and their most important films.

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A plethora of new actors has in recent years entered China’s environmental arena. In Western countries, the linkages and diffusion processes between such actors often drive environmental movements. Through a study of Chinese anti-incineration contention, Chinese Environmental Contention: Linking Up against Waste Incineration investigates how the different contentious actors in China’s green sphere link up, and what this means for environmental contention. It addresses questions such as: What lies behind the notable increase of environmental protests in China? And what are the potentials for the emergence of an environmental movement? The book shows that a complex network of ties has emerged in China’s environmental realm under Hu Jintao. Affected communities across the country have connected with each other and with national-level environmentalists, experts and lawyers. Such networked contention fosters both local campaigns and national-level policy advocacy. Beyond China, the detailed case studies shed light on the dynamics behind the diffusion of contention under restrictive political conditions.

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The Imperial City of Cologne: From Roman Colony to Medieval Metropolis (19 B.C.-1125 A.D.) is an urban history of Cologne from its imperial Roman origins as a northeastern frontier military outpost to a medieval metropolis on the German Empire’s northwestern border. This first history of Cologne, available in English, challenges received notions of late Roman ethnic identities, a Dark Age collapse of urban life, devastating Viking and Magyar incursions, and the origins of medieval urban government.

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Cross-border Marriages and Mobility: Female Chinese Migrants and Hong Kong Men focuses on cross-border marriages between mainland Chinese women and Hong Kong men, a phenomenon which is of critical importance to the transformation of Hong Kong. By examining the women’s motivations for migration and lived experiences in relation to the discursive, political, economic, and social circumstances of mainland China and Hong Kong, Avital Binah-Pollak demonstrates how these marital practices are causing the expanding and blurring of borders, so that there is a much wider strip of border in which the dichotomies of the rural/urban, periphery/center, and hybrid/national identities become more complex and negotiable. While this is particularly interesting and valid in the case of the border between mainland China and Hong Kong because of the particular nature of the relationship between these two societies, it may also apply to borders between many other societies worldwide.

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How did men cope with sexual health issues in early modern England? This vivid history investigates how sexual, reproductive, and genitourinary conditions were understood between 1580 and 1740. Drawing on medical sources and personal testimonies, it reveals how men responded to bouts of ill health and their relationships with the medical practitioners tasked with curing them. In doing so, this study restores men’s health to medical histories of reproduction, demonstrating how men’s sexual self-identity was tied to their health. Charting genitourinary conditions across the life cycle, the book illustrates how fertility and potency were key to medical understandings of men’s health. Men utilized networks of care to help them with ostensibly embarrassing and shameful conditions like hernias, venereal disease, bladder stones, and testicular injuries. The book thus offers a historical voice to modern calls for men to be alert to, and open about, their own bodily health.

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Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe examines the lives of women whose gender impeded the exercise of their personal, political, and religious agency, with an emphasis on the conflict that occurred when they crossed the edges society placed on their gender. Many of the women featured in this collection have only been afforded cursory scholarly focus, or the focus has been isolated to a specific, (in)famous event. This collection redresses this imbalance by providing comprehensive discussions of the women’s lives, placing the matter that makes them known to history within the context of their entire life. Focusing on women from different backgrounds -- such as Marie Meurdrac, the French chemist; Anna Trapnel, the Fifth Monarchist and prophetess; and Cecilia of Sweden, princess, margravine, countess, and regent -- this collection brings together a wide range of scholars from a variety of disciplines to bring attention to these previously overlooked women.

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Since the 1990s, the Chinese-North Korean border region has undergone a gradual transformation into a site of intensified cooperation, competition, and intrigue. These changes have prompted a significant volume of critical scholarship and media commentary across multiple languages and disciplines. Drawing on existing studies and new data, Decoding the Sino-North Korean Borderlands brings much of this literature into concert by pulling together a wide range of insight on the region's economics, security, social cohesion, and information flows. Drawing from multilingual sources and transnational scholarship, this volume is enhanced by the extensive fieldwork undertaken by the editors and contributors in their quests to decode the borderland. In doing so, the volume emphasizes the link between theory, methodology, and practice in the field of Area Studies and social science more broadly.

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Film Authorship in Contemporary Transmedia Culture: The Paratextual Lives of Asian Auteurs examines film authorship in the transmedia era whereby film directors have become public figures through a wide range of textual, material, and performative practices. The book draws on the notion of paratext and its related term – palimpsest – to bring forth the idea of self-reflexive authorship as a method of examining the mediated past, present, and afterlife of East Asian filmmakers. The first part of the book pays attention to materials surrounding film festivals, multi-platform distribution, and cinephile/fan creative practices, which have been created, rewritten, and shared to foster and problematize the reputations of selected filmmakers. The second part examines alternative modes of self-projections and creative productions that address the filmmakers’ sense of selves and relations with the industry and the public. Across different chapters, discourses surrrounding film authorship and East Asian cinema are revisited and expanded to highlight its multiple histories and possible futures.

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This collection of essays from both established and emerging scholars analyses the dynamic connections between conflict and violence in medieval Italy. The contributors present a new critique of power that sustained both kingship and locally based elite networks throughout the Italian peninsula. A broad temporal range, covering the sixth to the twelfth centuries, allows this book to cross a number of 'traditional' fault-lines in Italian historiography – 774, 888, 962 and 1025. The essays provide wide-ranging analyses of the role of conflict in the period, the operation of power and the development of communal consciousness and collective action by individuals and groups. It is thus essential reading for scholars, students and general readers who wish to understand the situation in medieval Italy.

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What do we do when we listen? The act of engagement with music in everyday life may seem simple on the surface but participation, interpretation, circulation and cultural production in the digital age are more complex and entangled than ever before. It is especially so in Japan, with its vast multimedia idol and vocaloid industries. This unique ethnographic work at the intersection of cultural, media and music studies covers a wide spectrum of music-related activities embedded in the daily lives of two Japanese cohorts. The varied case studies, including teen idol groups and virtual idols, aid the detailed examination of the relation between music, generation, and society.

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The Iberian chivalric romance has long been thought of as an archaic, masculine genre and its popularity as an aberration in European literary history. Chivalry, Reading, and Women’s Culture in Early Modern Spain contests this view, arguing that the surprisingly egalitarian gender politics of Spain’s most famous romance of chivalry has guaranteed it a long afterlife. Amadís de Gaula had a notorious appeal for female audiences, and the early modern authors who borrowed from it varied in their reactions to its large cast of literate female characters. Don Quixote and other works that situate women as readers carry the influence of Amadís forward into the modern novel. When early modern authors read chivalric romance, they also read gender, harnessing the female characters of the source text to a variety of political and aesthetic purposes.

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Technology today is often presented as our best hope of solving the world's social and sustainability problems. And that's nothing new: engineers have always sought to meet the big challenges of their times-even as those challenges have shaped their technology. This book offers a historical look at those interactions between engineering and social challenges, showing how engineers developed solutions to past problems, and looking at the ways that those solutions often bring with them unintended consequences that themselves require solving.

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With its emergence as a global power, China aspires to transform from made in China to created in China. Mobilised as a crucial source for solid growth and soft power, creativity has become part of the new China Dream. Boredom, Shanzhai, and Digitisation in the Time of Creative China engages with the imperative of creativity by aligning it to three interrelated phenomena: boredom, shanzhai, and digitisation. How does creativity help mitigate boredom? Does boredom incubate creativity? How do shanzhai practices and the omnipresence of fake goods challenge notions of the original and the authentic? Which spaces for expressions and contestations has China’s fast-developing digital world of Weixin, Taobao, Youku, and Internet Plus Policy opened up? Are new technologies serving old interests? Essays, dialogues, audio-visual documents, and field notes, from thinkers, researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers, examine what is going on in China now, ultimately to tease out its implication to our understanding of creativity.

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Since prehistoric times, the Baltic Sea has functioned as a northern mare nostrum — a crucial nexus that has shaped the languages, folklore, religions, literature, technology, and identities of the Germanic, Finnic, Sámi, Baltic, and Slavic peoples. This anthology explores the networks among those peoples. The contributions to Contacts and Networks in the Baltic Sea Region: Austmarr as a Northern mare nostrum, ca. 500-1500 ad address different aspects of cultural contacts around and across the Baltic from the perspectives of history, archaeology, linguistics, literary studies, religious studies, and folklore. The introduction offers a general overview of crosscultural contacts in the Baltic Sea region as a framework for contextualizing the volume’s twelve chapters, organized in four sections. The first section concerns geographical conceptions as revealed in Old Norse and in classical texts through place names, terms of direction, and geographical descriptions. The second section discusses the movement of cultural goods and persons in connection with elite mobility, the slave trade, and rune-carving practice. The third section turns to the history of language contacts and influences, using examples of Finnic names in runic inscriptions and Low German loanwords in Finnish. The final section analyzes intercultural connections related to mythology and religion spanning Baltic, Finnic, Germanic, and Sámi cultures. Together these diverse articles present a dynamic picture of this distinctive part of the world.

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Though oil prices have been on a downward trajectory in recent months, that doesn't obscure the fact that fossil fuels are finite, and we will eventually have to grapple with the end of their dominance. At the same time, however, skepticism about the alternatives remains: we've never quite achieved the promised 'too cheap to meter' power of the future, be it nuclear, solar, or wind. And hydrogen and bio-based fuels are thus far a disappointment. So what does the future of energy look like? The Tesla Revolution has the answers. In clear, unsensational style, Willem Middelkoop and Rembrandt Koppelaar offer a layman's tour of the energy landscape, now and to come. They show how rapid technological advances in batteries and solar technologies are already driving large-scale transformations in power supply, while economic and geopolitical changes, combined with a growing political awareness that there are alternatives to fossil fuels will combine in the coming years to bring an energy revolution ever closer. Within in our lifetimes, the authors argue, we will see changes that will reshape economics, the balance of political power, and even the most mundane aspects of our daily lives. Determinedly forward-looking and optimistic, though never straying from hard facts, The Tesla Revolution paints a striking picture of our global energy future.

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Policies intended to bring stability to fragile states tend to focus almost exclusively on building institutions and systems to get governance right. Simply building the state is often seen as sufficient for making it stable and legitimate. But policies like these, René Grotenhuis shows in this book, ignore the question of what makes people belong to a nation-state, arguing that issues of identity, culture, and religion are crucial to creating the sense of belonging and social cohesion that a stable nation-state requires.

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Analysis of political advertising tends to give music short shrift - which flies in the face of what we know about the power of music to set a mood, affect feelings, and influence our perceptions. This book is the first to offer a detailed exploration of the role of music in US presidential campaign advertising, from Eisenhower to the present, showing that in many cases music isn't simply one element in the presentation of an ad's message - it's the dominant factor, more important than images, words, or narration.

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Albanian cinema truly represents a terra incognita for most of the world. Decidedly Europe’s most isolated country during the Cold War era, communist Albania had already been cut off from the West for centuries as a one of the western-most outposts of the Ottoman empire. Nonetheless, and unknown to most of the world, communist Albania had a vibrant cinema tradition. Although bound by official orthodoxy, the films of the state-run Kinostudio enterprise were surprisingly innovative and, at times, daringly subversive. This book opens with examinations of moving images in Albania from the Ottoman period, through those captured under independence and the Fascist occupation. It subsequently foregrounds transformations in Kinostudio, from the early optimism of socialist realism through the brooding social angst of the 1980s, which constitute a bridge to the socioeconomic concerns of Albanian films of the postcommunist period.

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In recent decades, traditional methods of philology and intellectual history, applied to the study of Islam and Muslim societies, have been met with considerable criticism from rising generations of scholars who have turned to the social sciences, most notably anthropology and social history, for guidance. This change has been accompanied by the rise of new fields, studying, for example, Islam in Europe and Africa, and new topics, such as the role of gender. This collection surveys these transformations and others, taking stock of the field and showing new paths forward.

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Spain, China and Japan in Manila, 1571—1644 offers a new perspective on the connected histories of Spain, China, and Japan as they emerged and developed following Manila’s foundation as the capital of the Spanish Philippines in 1571. Examining a wealth of multilingual primary sources, Birgit Tremml-Werner shows that crosscultural encounters not only shaped Manila’s development as a "Eurasian" port city, but also had profound political, economic, and social ramifications for the three premodern states. Combining a systematic comparison with a focus on specific actors during this period, this book addresses many long-held misconceptions and offers a more balanced and multifaceted view of these nations’ histories.

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Written as the Lombard kingdom was on the cusp of downfall at the hands of the Carolingian empire, the works of Paul the Deacon (c. 720-799) are vital to understanding the history of Italy and Western Europe in the Middle Ages. But until now, scholars have tended to neglect the narrative structure of his texts, which reflect in important ways his personal responses to the events of his time. This study presents fresh interpretations of Paul's Historia Romana, Vita Sancti Gregorii Magni, Gesta Episcopum Mettensium, and Historia Langobardorum by focusing on him as an individual and on his strategies of argumentation, ultimately advancing a new conception of Paul as a dynamic author whose development of multiple lines of thought deserves closer examination.

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While Muslims in Indonesia have begun to turn towards a strict adherence to Islam, the reality of the socio-religious environment is much more complicated than a simple shift towards fundamentalism. In this volume, contributors explore the multifaceted role of Islam in Indonesia from a variety of different perspectives, drawing on carefully compiled case studies. Topics covered include religious education, the increasing number of Muslim feminists in Indonesia, the role of Indonesia in the greater Muslim world, social activism and the middle class, and the interaction between Muslim radio and religious identity.

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In the late 1800s and early 1900s, colonial powers clashed over much of Central and East Asia: Great Britain and Germany fought over New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, Fiji, and Samoa; France and Great Britain competed over control of continental Southwest Asia; and the United States annexed the Philippines and Hawaii. Meanwhile, the possible disintegration of China and Japan’s growing nationalism added new dimensions to the rivalries. Surveying these and other international developments in the Pacific basin during the three decades preceding World War I, Kees van Dijk traces the emergence of superpowers during the colonial race and analyzes their conduct as they struggled for territory. Extensive in scope, Pacific Strife is a fascinating look at a volatile moment in history.

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This groundbreaking textbook redefines auditing education by seamlessly incorporating International Standards on Auditing (ISAs) and other IAASB assurance standards at its core, establishing a new paradigm in how auditing principles are taught. Recognized worldwide as the hallmark of auditing excellence, ISAs set the highest benchmarks for audit quality. This latest edition meticulously unfolds the evolution, application, and global integration of ISAs, alongside other assurance standards and key national frameworks, ensuring that the content remains at the forefront of international practices. It provides students with an extraordinary depth of insight into auditing and assurance, mirroring the very latest in contemporary practices and thought leadership. Key highlights: Comprehensive exploration of the audit profession, essential concepts, the audit process across four stages, and specialized topics. Insight into the latest advancements in audit techno

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This volume reflects on the significance of nostalgia in the construction of traumatic pasts, both on an individual and a collective level. By employing an interdisciplinary approach, the volume enhances our understanding of how the entanglements of trauma and nostalgia influence the construction and development of identity. Scholars from a range of academic disciplines and contexts explore the integration of nostalgic memories in discussions of trauma, attending to their interactions in public spaces, patriotic symbolism and rituals, popular culture, cinema, religion, museums, and memorials. The contributors emphasize the role of media and other mass-cultural technologies in disseminating images and narratives related to traumatic and nostalgic experiences. These essays ultimately bring to light the frequently overlooked role of nostalgic longing in shaping the discursive, visual, and material aspects of collective trauma.

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