Books in the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship Monographs series

Ol'ga Berggol'ts (1910-1975) was a prominent Russian Soviet poet, whose accounts of heroism in wartime Leningrad brought her fame. This volume addresses her position as a writer whose Party loyalties were frequently in conflict with the demands of artistic and personal integrity.

One of the most important surviving works from the golden age of Ancient Egyptian literature, a searching exploration of human motivation and divine justice, is discussed and translated in this major literary study.

This is the first detailed ethnography of rural Mongolian life since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Based on fieldwork with migrant herding families who traverse the Northern Mongolian-Russian border, the volume explores how intimate social relationships and identities are drawn upon to engage with new political and economic uncertainties.

This major regional study analyses the politics of the state and the history of land tenure and rural labour in Chiapas, Mexico, in 1876 to 1914. It provides a case study of tropical plantation development and labour relations and contributes to the growing history of indigenous peoples in Latin America.

A study of the classical-style, Latin didactic poetry produced by the Society of Jesus in the early modern period. This book considers the Society's educational and ideological values and practices. It features poems that command attention for what they reveal about social, cultural, and intellectual life in this period.

The vanished civilization of the Nasca is famous for its enigmatic giant ritual pathways through the desert pampa of Peru. But how and why did the civilization collapse? This new and detailed archaeological study argues that deforestation of river valleys, in particular the loss of the huarango tree, may have been to blame.

This book tells, for the first time, the story of bronze in Renaissance Venice. Previously unpublished documents provide an invaluable resource for the study of bronze objects and the people who commissioned and made them. The numerous illustrations include recently-restored works of art, and unpublished historical photographs.

This is an ethnographic study of kinship and the nature and behaviour of ownership amongst the much-studied Sepik River Iatmul people. Written from the viewpoint of a Melanesian scholar, this book seeks to re-think anthropology's central assumptions about social relations.

Two of the most important questions in modern African history are the causes of its population explosion, and the origins of the HIV pandemic. Before HIV shows that the more permissive sexual culture which permitted HIV to spread so quickly can be traced back to the mid-20th century, when new patterns of socialization and sexual networking emerged.

Martin Delrio, author of Disquisitiones magicae (Investigations into Magic, 1599-1600) probably never persecuted or met a witchcraft suspect, yet his name is a byword for credulity and cruelty. Jan Machielsen recovers the lost world of Delrio's scholarship set in the context of the Catholic Reformation, rather than the straitjacket of demonology.

This study of one of the most enigmatic cultures in the world looks at the nature of knowledge in the Min area of Papua New Guinea (where sharing knowledge is believed to be like exchanging skin), and uses these understandings to consider our own anthropological notions of knowledge.

By studying one of the oldest courts of the city this volume discusses the impact of Venice's unique brand of justice on its ordinary citizens. The criminal cases shed light on the black market economy; the civil cases demonstrate that justice was cheap, fast and accessible to all.

This volume explores how Victorian philosophers, scientists, clergymen, and novelists debated the meaning of the new term 'altruism'. Including a reappraisal of Charles Darwin's ideas and insights into the rise of popular socialism, this study is highly relevant to contemporary debates about altruism, evolution, religion, and ethics.

A household name in nineteenth-century France, Xavier Marmier's work had a significant influence on literary and intellectual developments both in France and the countries he visited. Marmier's achievements are assessed in their intellectual and historical context, within the framework of his colourful and somewhat controversial private life.

Dr Erskine's 'embedded cosmopolitanism' embraces the perspective of local loyalties, communities and cultures in the theory of why we have duties to 'strangers' and 'enemies' in world politics. Taking examples from the 'war on terror', she examines duties to 'enemies' through norms of non-combatant immunity and the prohibition against torture.

Credit transactions were a common and important feature of peasant society in the middle ages. This study of rural credit in medieval England uses the evidence of inter-peasant debt litigation to investigate the lenders and borrowers, the uses to which credit was put, and the effects of credit on social relationships.

An account of Huju, a Shanghai operatic tradition which blends music and acting with portrayal of the lives of ordinary people, this study follows the genre as it develops in China's largest city from rural entertainment to urban ballad, revolutionary drama, and contemporary opera.

This is a study of very short songs: pieces long perceived as 'fragments' or remnants of longer narrative texts, and dismissed as the by-products of a degenerative oral tradition. Coverage includes English, Welsh, Breton, American, and Finnish songs.

This book and CD concern the musical and ritual life of the Sibe people, who have lived in Chinese Central Asia since the 18th century. Descendants of the military garrisons of Imperial China, they remember their heritage through song. The book describes contemporary musical life in their villages, and discusses the impact of 50 years of Communism.

The Lombard League, an alliance which included many cities in northern Italy, played a crucial role in the evolution of Italy's political landscape. This volume examines the League's structure, activity, place in political thought, and its links with regional identities, to offer new interpretations of the history and politics of medieval Italy.

Classical Arabic literature has a rich tradition of women's poetry-and of lamentation for the dead in particular. This volume contextualises this corpus by examining its favourable reception in the literary canon, its uncanny resemblance to an analogous male-authored 'heroic' poetic corpus, and its relationship to other genres of women's verse.

Badius Ascensius (1462-1535), scholar and printer, played a central role in the flourishing of humanism and print culture in the French Renaissance. This account of his contributions to pedagogy, scholarship, printing, and humanist culture re-examines these roles and explores the wider context of the communities in which Badius worked.