Short notices on: Evolving Societies 2008; Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalisation of Democratic Nationalism.
February 2009 marks the 400th anniversary of the death of the French composer Jean Servin. In the 1570s, Servin was a refugee from the Wars of Religion in France: Professor James Porter describes his visit to the court of King James VI of Scotland in search of patronage.
In May 2008, Professor Harry Norris visited Georgia to study the current situation of non-European communities in the country. Here he provides some historical and cultural background to this politically and ethnically complex part of the world.
In December 2004, Francis Breedon was awarded a British Academy Small Research Grant for a project to study a unique set of bond prices and yields for the Icelandic government bond market, in collaboration with the Central Bank of Iceland.
Dr Jorge L. Giovannetti held a British Academy Visiting Fellowship at the Caribbean Studies Centre, London Metropolitan University in 2006, and has subsequently completed a history of British Caribbean migrants in Cuba. Here he discusses an archive of correspondence that reveals British Imperial attitudes to race.
Professor Linda Newson FBA, Chairman of the British Academy’s Area Panel for Latin America and the Caribbean, describes how the Academy supports research on – and with – this dynamic part of the world.
Enormous political, economic, social and cultural changes are currently having an impact on the entire region of Latin America. Dr Jeremy Lester has been studying the new configurations of social and political protagonists, and here describes some emerging challenges to the traditional order.
On 5 November 2008, the Institute of Irish Studies at Liverpool University hosted a panel discussion, in partnership with the British Academy. The panel brought together key players who had brokered the 1998 Agreement, with others who are currently involved in the long-term process of cementing peace by facilitating reconciliation. …
In September 2008 the British Academy published the latest in its series of reports which seek to inform public debate on topics of current interest. The report, ‘Punching our Weight: the humanities and social sciences in public policy making’, addresses the question of how policy makers can maximise the untapped …
In 2007, Professor Caroline Knowles received a British Academy Small Research Grant to explore an innovative means of compiling raw information about the world’s complex interactions. Here she gives a taste of the project that took her from China to Ethiopia. The photographs are by her collaborator, Michael Tan.
In September 2008, the British Academy sponsored a unique gathering of world specialists in the prehistory of the Andes. Dr Paul Heggarty and Dr David Beresford-Jones, the convenors and specialists respectively in the linguistics and archaeology of the region, discuss this test-case in how to converge the divergent perspectives of …
On 10 November 2008, the British Academy hosted a panel discussion, chaired by Professor Peter Hennessy FBA, to consider whether public trust in our major public institutions has fallen as much as is widely suggested. The panellists were Baroness Onora O’Neill (President of the British Academy), Richard Wilson (former Cabinet …
Dr Martina Tyrrell reveals the tensions that exist when conservation policies conflict with traditional ways of life on Hudson Bay. Dr Tyrrell was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow 2005–2008. She gave a presentation on her research at the 2008 British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship Symposium.
Mexico City is a city of contrasts, of change and tradition, which has long captured the imagination of chroniclers and poets alike. The British Academy and the Mexican Embassy to the UK organised an event to celebrate this diversity, tracing the history of the city from its pre-Columbian origins to …
From 1998 to 2005, Dr Felicitas Becker conducted hundreds of interviews in Tanzania, both to discover why and how many people had converted to Islam and to investigate why these Muslim congregations have produced Islamic radicals. This edited extract from her book, ‘Becoming Muslim in Mainland Tanzania, 1890–2000’, gives an …
Though established by Royal Charter in 1902, the fledgling British Academy had no financial resources beyond the subscriptions of its first Fellows: a bid to the Treasury for ‘assistance from public funds’ was rebuffed in 1904. To remedy the situation, the Secretary of the Academy, Israel Gollancz, turned to a …