Books in the Proceedings of the British Academy series

Buddhism and Its Religious Others examines how Buddhist literature and art from pre-modern Asia understand and represent the character and value of other religions. It looks at the strategies employed by Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and Southeast Asian Buddhists to challenge and claim authority over traditions that opposed Buddhism and its influence.

The book identifies a new human rights phenomenon. While disappearances have tended to be associated with authoritarian state and armed conflict periods, this study looks at these acts carried out in procedural democracies where democratic institutions prevail.

This book develops an interdisciplinary analysis of the institutional, cultural and political-economic factors shaping crime and punishment so as better to understand whether, and if so how and why, social and economic inequality influences levels and types of crime and punishment, and conversely whether crime and punishment shape inequalities.

Under the Skin examines contemporary women's art from the Middle East and North Africa, introducing the latest scholarship on art production, histories and methods in approaching modern and contemporary visual culture.

This book reveals a high degree of organisational capacity in early medieval societies. It outlines a new agenda for assessing and interpreting early medieval power, how it was formed, how it functioned and how it developed across time providing the basis for the kingdoms of the European Middle Ages.

Since Darwin, scholars have noted that cultural entities such as languages, laws, firms, and theories seem to 'evolve' through sequences of variation, selection, and replication, in many ways just like living organisms. These essays consider whether modern evolutionary theory can help us to understand the dynamics of different cultural domains.

This new study of the history and archaeology of Central Asia is crucial for our understanding of the ancient and early medieval world. The period from the conquests of Alexander the Great to the arrival of Islam was one of change and conflict between settled peoples and new arrivals, city-dwellers and nomads.

Ground-breaking in its study of translation of subtitling and dubbing of silent films, The Translation of Films, 1900-1950 shows how silent films went through a complicated editing process for international distribution. It is also a major step forward in research on translation during the transition to sound in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Governing England explores how England is governed and how the English wish to be governed. England's relationships to Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland is discussed in terms of devolution and Brexit alongside the regional divide of the Brexit vote. Issues of nationalism and support for separate English institutions are also examined.

Sensory substitution and augmentation devices are used to replace or enhance one sense by using another. Fiona Macpherson brings together neuroscientists, psychologists and philosophers to focus on the nature of the perceptual experiences, the sensory interactions, and the changes that occur in the mind and brain while using these technologies.

These essays bring into clearer focus the transformation in the study of Russian music that has occurred since glasnost. Concentrating on Russian music since 1917, the volume shows how censorship in the USSR hindered developments in scholarship, and explains some difficulties experienced by musicians and scholars in the post-soviet era.

This book provides many fresh perspectives on why and how the Middle Ages continue to matter so much in the 21st century. It is therefore as much about recent cultural and political history as it is about medieval history and medieval literature. The introduction provides a long overview of medievalism from the 14th to the 21st centuries.

The book explores how human societies have used, constructed, and interpreted their pasts. It ranges chronologically from the Middle Ages to the 21st century, and in worldwide geographical scope. The book probes the concept of the 'invention of tradition' and moves beyond historical writing to embrace a much wider range of media and genres.

The relationship between non-state terrorism and state counter-terrorism continues to shape world politics. Leading scholars analyse this relationship, examining post-9/11 counter-terrorism, the evolution of al-Qaida, challenges to western counter-terrorism, and why terrorist campaigns sometimes endure and sometimes end.

Archaeology and science enable new and creative understandings of Europe's early farmers, answering questions that remain after more than a century of research. The challenge is to integrate multiple lines of evidence, scientific and more traditionally archaeological, while keeping in focus the principal questions that we want to ask of our data.

How do rulers make their rule palatable to their people? This book examines the question from the perspective of medieval Muslims in the areas that are now Spain, Portugal, and Morocco. It looks at strategies of legitimation ranging from the use of titles to issues such as economic prosperity.

The concept of 'human dignity' has become central to politics, law and theology but is little understood. This book presents a wide-ranging collection of edited essays from specialists in law, theology, politics and history and seeks to define the main areas of current debates about the concept in these disciplines.

This book examines nine historical cases of fiscal squeeze in democracies. It combines quantitative and qualitative analysis to examine cases ranging from the United States in the 1830s/40s (when half of the states then in the Union defaulted) to the squeeze following the 2001 Argentinian default. It warns against a simplistic view of 'what works'.

Ancient Anatolia was a region where indigenous peoples mixed with conquerors and incomers: Persians, Greeks, Gauls, Romans, Jews. Names from all these sources intermingled, and it is by studying them that the cultural interactions and changes and resistances that occurred can be illuminated.

Liberal World Orders is a timely contribution to debates about the current world order in the face of declining US hegemony and rising new powers. It examines the history and durability of liberal thought. Neo-liberalism is criticised as a theoretical perspective ill-equipped to understand the current crisis or possibilities for its amelioration.

Volume 117 of the Proceedings of the British Academy contains 16 lectures delivered at the British Academy in 2001.

The literature of ancient Egypt is less well known than its art and architecture but merits study as one of the earliest literary traditions. This book reviews the current range of interpretative approaches and highlights the vitality of the field, covering the period c. 2000 BC to the Roman period.

This title surveys the transition in prosopographical research from more traditional methods to the new technology, and discusses the role of the British Academy and French, German and Austrian academic institutions, in developing prosopographical research on the Later Roman Empire, Byzantium and now Anglo-Saxon and other periods.

These essays explore philosopher Henry Sidgwick's solutions to issues that are still relevant a century later. For example, how does moral philosophy fit in with the use of practical reason? And how can the moral thought of the academic be related to thought and practice in the everyday world?

Drawing on the "Lexicon of Greek Personal Names", which identifies over 200,000 individuals, the contributors here demonstrate the uses to which name evidence can be put. They narrate stories of political and social change and explore the natural and supernatural phenomena which inspired them.

The largest source of new information about Graeco-Roman antiquity is from newly discovered inscriptions. Epigraphic information gained through use of new techniques and technologies is helping to reshape and extend our knowledge of the religious life, languages, populations, governmental systems, and economies of the Greek and Roman world.

Urban life as we know it in the Mediterranean began in the early Iron Age: settlements of great size and internal diversity appear in the archaeological record. This collection of essays offers a discussion of the beginnings of urbanization across the Mediterranean, from Cyprus through Greece and Italy to France and Spain.

This volume presents studies of military commemorative practices in Western culture, from 5th-century BC Greece, through two World Wars, to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. This new comparative approach reveals that the distant past has had a lasting influence on commemorative practice in modern times.

In popular presentation, some treat the Bible as a reliable source for the history of Israel, while others suggest that archaeology has shown that it cannot be trusted at all. This volume debates the issue of how such widely divergent views have arisen and will become an essential source of reference for the future.

Nineteen obituaries of recently deceased Fellows of the British Academy: W S Allen; George Anderson; A C de la Mare; John Flemming; James Harris; John Hurst; Casimir Lewy; Donald MacDougall; Colin Matthew; Edward Miller; Michio Morishima; Brian Reddaway; Marjorie Reeves; C Martin Robertson; Conrad Russell, and Arnold Taylor.