Duke University Press Log

Call for Papers: Transgender Studies Quarterly, The Translation Issue

The Translation Issue

Guest Editors: David Gramling and Aniruddha Dutta

Special Issue on Translating Transgender

Submissions of 4000-9000 words (in any language). Due March 1, 2015 for publication in Spring 2016

Few primary and secondary texts about transgender lives and ideas have been translated from language to language in any formal way over the centuries. Meanwhile, transgender, gender variant, and gender non-confirming people have often been exiles, translators, language mediators, and multilinguals in greater numbers and intensities historically than their cisgender counterparts have. This kind of positionality among languages has become a generative, yet often precarious aspect of trans* embodiment. Nonetheless, the discourses of transgender studies (as in the neighboring fields of LGBT / queer studies) continue to be more Anglophone, more monolingual, and less translated than they historically ought to be, given how the subjects that produced those discourses have often been prototypes of transnational and translingual border-crossing. This paradox continues to constrain disciplinary and conceptual agendas around sexuality and gender a great deal more than in other fields that have enjoyed consistent state and institutional support as well as access to international distribution pathways. This is an important problem for transgender studies in the coming decades because an Anglophone disciplinary and discursive disposition will continue to lead policy-makers, public intellectuals, and academics to fall back on ethnocentric and monolingual frameworks and resources. It perpetuates a hierarchical conceptual economy, with Anglophone and West European linguacultures at the top and trans and queer vernaculars in other languages either at the bottom of the epistemic order, or sequestered into localist, ethnicized, or neo-Orientalist fetish. If not profoundly transformed, how will this discursive hierarchization impact the multi-directional traffic in trans knowledge and ideas in years ahead? This issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly calls for multilingual and translational critique. This may take the form of:

• Essays offering a metacriticism of the field, its terms, and its methodologies from a multilingual point of view
• Essays offering a theoretical problematization of national languages and transnational lingua francae as such from a trans perspective
• Essays exploring the idea of a trans* lingua franca beyond Anglocentricity
• Trans-oriented research that often gets elided precisely because of rhetorical Anglocentricity or methodological monolingualism
• Essays critiquing the relationship between travel and multilingualism in trans* contexts
• Ethnographic studies of multilingual transgender spaces and communities
• Ethnographic studies of medical, legal, penal, educational contexts in which transgender positionality or existence are negotiated translingually
• Reflections on the craft and practice of translation
• Studies on how Anglocentricity in transgender epistemology perpetuates itself—institutionally, methodologically, politically
• Essays exploring how language normativity intersects with racial, ethnic, civic, sexual, erotic, socio-economic normativity in transgender contexts
• Studies that model a “multilingual transgender studies” or a multilingual trans-futurity more broadly
• Case studies on how language frontiers shape the planetary landscape of transgender discourse
• Reflections on the process of translating texts dealing with transgender and gender variance
• Essays on what transgender methodology in translation theory or practice might look like
• Essays exploring what working interpreters and translators (literary, poetic, technical, diplomatic) may reveal about transgender epistemology
• Historical studies linking multilingual, code-switching, and translingual practice with transgender embodiment
• Historical studies linking the genealogy of monolingualism with various kinds of gender normativity

Initial submissions may be in any language and will be peer-reviewed accordingly. Duke University Press requires publication in English, and we will commission translations of accepted submissions in the latter process of review. Accepted submissions will be published in the original language on TSQ’s Web site. Please send a complete manuscript by March 1, 2015 to tsqjournal[at]gmail[dot]com along with a short abstract and brief bio including name and any institutional affiliation. The expected length for scholarly articles is 4000 to 9000 words, and 1000 to 2000 words for shorter works. All manuscripts should be prepared for anonymous peer review. For articles engaging in scholarly citation, please use the Chicago author-date citation style. Any questions should be addressed to dgl[at]email[dot]arizona[dot]edu.

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly is co-edited by Paisley Currah and Susan Stryker, and published by Duke University Press, with editorial offices at the University of Arizona’s Institute for LGBT Studies. TSQ aims to be the journal of record for the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies and to promote the widest possible range of perspectives on transgender phenomena broadly defined. Every issue of TSQ is a specially themed issue that also contains regularly recurring features such as reviews, interviews, and opinion pieces. To learn more about the journal and see calls for papers for other issues, visit http://lgbt.arizona.edu/tsq-main. For information about subscriptions, visit http://www.dukeupress.edu/TSQ.

Call for Papers: Reconsidering Gender, Violence and the State

Reconsidering Gender, Violence and the State
Radical History Review issue number 126 (Fall 2016)
Abstract Deadline: February 1, 2015

As emerging scholarship in feminist and queer history makes clear, archives contain surprising histories about gender, sexuality and violence, stories that challenge axiomatic, gendered oppositions of power and vulnerability. This issue of Radical History Review hopes to explore these histories, and reassess conflicting narratives of victimization, subjection, retaliation and self-defense in the context of forms of state authority.

Events and developments over the last two centuries—from the expansion of the provocation defense in the nineteenth century, to the collection of rape testimonies in the early twentieth-century, from the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib, to the recent mass kidnapping of girls in Chibok, Nigeria—convey contradictory messages about race, gender, violence and the role of the state as enforcer, perpetrator or protector. Recent calls for critical re-examination of timeworn notions of male violence and female victimhood suggest the need to interrogate longstanding assumptions about the relationships among gender, violence and the powers of the State.

This special issue of Radical History Review invites critical reflection on gendered violence as a historical, intersectional topic of lasting significance. How have conceptions of masculinity and femininity over time informed the persistence of and punishments for gendered violence? What do the archives reveal about the larger structural factors that perpetuate gendered violence? How have feminist and queer organizing efforts to protect and/or avenge victims, further complicated the legal, penal, and legislative efforts to address gendered violence?

Building on contemporary debates and conversations about feminism, its evolving critique of violence, and some of its blind spots, this issue of Radical History Review seeks to reanimate conversations about gender, violence, resistance, victimization, and the role of the state as arbiter among these categories. We hope to engage histories that reveal how gender and violence are mutually constituted categories of personal, political, cultural and legal subjectivity. And we hope to reconsider the ways in which violence – and narratives of violence – can be used to uphold, resist or reshape the ordering structures of the State.

Potential topics might include:

• Gendered violence as an effect of state dominance
• Women as agents of state violence (e.g., in police, prison, and military contexts)
• Gendered violence and vulnerability within the criminal justice enterprise
• “Lost” histories of gendered political violence and/as effects of archive formation
• Unintended consequences of feminist engagements with violence and anti-violence in the law, such as the imbrication of affirmative self-defense claims (e.g. “stand your ground” laws)
• Legal responses to gendered violence, and its race and class implications for incarceration and control
• Gender implications of popular cultural constructions of state violence
• Sexual assault in the military as instantiating institutionalized, hierarchical state power
• Government efforts to decrease violence against women (and forms of gendered violence)
• Compulsory sterilization and chemical castration programs as strategies of state authority and punishment

The RHR seeks scholarly, monographic research articles, but we also encourage such non-traditional contributions as photo essays, film and book review essays, interviews, brief interventions, “conversations” between scholars and/or activists, and teaching notes and annotated course syllabi for our Teaching Radical History section. Preliminary inquiries can be sent to Lisa Arellano ([email protected]), Amanda Frisken ([email protected]), and Erica Ball ([email protected]).

Procedures for submission of articles: At this time we are requesting abstracts that are no longer than 400 words; these are due by February 1, 2015 and should be submitted electronically as an attachment to [email protected] with “Issue 126 submission” in the subject line. By March 31, 2015, authors will be notified whether they should submit a full version of their article to undergo the peer review process. The due date for completed drafts of articles is July 1, 2015. An invitation to submit a full article does not guarantee publication; publication depends on the peer review process and the overall shape the journal issue will take. Please send any images as low-resolution digital files embedded in a Word document along with the text. If chosen for publication, you will need to send high-resolution image files (.jpg or .tif files at a minimum of 300 dpi), and secure written permission to reprint all images. Authors must also secure permissions for any other media that they may wish to include with their articles in the online version of the journal. Those articles selected for publication after the peer review process will be included in issue 126 of Radical History Review, scheduled to appear in Fall 2016.

Abstract Deadline: February 1, 2015
contactrhr[at]gmail[dot]com

Q&A with the editors of French Historical Studies

The incoming editors of French Historical Studies (FHS), Kay Edwards and Carol Harrison, discuss the future of the journal under their joint editorship, including information about forthcoming special issues and what topics they would like to see submitted to the journal. See the most recent issue here, and subscribe to the journal here.

How would you like to shape French Historical Studies in the future?

CAROL: In the future I think we’d like to continue some trends that we see in the field and that FHS is starting to reflect, publishing a lot about France and French history beyond the borders of metropolitan France. There will be more colonial material, which is where the field is going. We have exciting material on South East Asia and North Africa in the pipeline now that is being submitted.

KAY: We've also said that we've wanted to expand the chronological framework. FHS is open to anyone working in France or in these related fields over pretty much any chronology. But our submissions currently do tend to be much more modern. We want to get people who are doing medieval work or late antique work to think of us as well, since we definitely are a highly ranked scholarly publishing venue.

How do you see the journal developing over the next few years?

KAY: I would like to see us broadening the journal not just chronologically and in terms of international content, but also in terms of broadening it to more of an international academic audience. We currently are getting more and more submissions from German and Scandinavian lands, we've always gotten a few French, but we’d like to broaden our European, East Asian, African, Latin American base.

CAROL: I think we have a couple of ideas or projects on board now that are also about reminding the rest of the historical profession of how important French history is and how important French historians are to the rest of the profession. So I would say Michael Breen’s forum for instance. We have a group of articles by young French social historians that we’re arranging to translate into English to publish in the journal. I think this is important because social history is a much more lively tradition in France right now than it is in the Anglophone world. These are scholars who unless you work in French history and read French and keep up with things in France, you probably don’t know about. I think scholars outside of French history should read this forum to find out what’s going on in French history, and particularly in French social history. Similarly, we’ve got a special issue coming up in 2017 that we've just started planning on archives so we’re recruiting scholars who will be writing about archives not just as neutral repositories where the facts are, but as institutions that shape the way history is written, so as active participants in the writing of history. I think that’s the kind of special issue that will remind the rest of the profession that French historians are really crucial to shaping history.

Speaking of special issues, are there any other forthcoming special issues that you would like to talk about? How do you select special issues?

KAY: There is a French food special issue coming out that is primarily a project of the past editors. It is about food very broadly defined in French history. There is an article on coffee, another about WWII and food allocations and foraging, a wide variety of what defines food--not just a recipe book--particularly because France is so strongly associated with food culture.

CAROL: There will be articles on wonderful food, the introduction of coffee, there will be articles on lack of food, hunger, there’s an article on late 19th-century shop girls and their relationship to food, you know where they ate lunch and if they ate lunch. So that’s going to be a very exciting issue. And then further down the pipeline--this is more speculative--but 2018 is the 50th anniversary the events of May 1968. This is another one that I think will be important for FHS and I hope for non-French historians. Nineteen sixty-eight having obviously had a global reach, but the events in France were central. So that’s another one where we’d like to put together articles on France, on the Francophone world outside of France, and think about this anniversary. We would like FHS to lead the way a bit in talking about the German ‘68 and Mexico City ‘68 and Berkeley ‘68 and pull it together.

What would you like researchers to know about the submission process?

KAY: Don’t be afraid to send all different types of articles. Just because we’re FHS doesn't mean we only, as Carol said, do the metropol. There’s probably going to be a conception that we only do cultural stuff because that’s what France is. And the whole point is that we’re trying to get a wide variety of methodologies and subjects and approaches.

Who should be submitting to this journal that hasn't been?

KAY: A lot of early modernists and pre-modernists don’t think they should submit to FHS, in part because the name implies a very national framework that sometimes work and sometimes doesn't.

CAROL: They may be working on a territory that was not in fact called France. But if it’s Francophone, we’d like to see more early modern, medieval, and more French scholars! We do publish in French.

KAY: It does not have to be a translated work. In terms of material, I just want to see diversity. I really don’t want people to assume that because it’s French that it must be cultural or that it must have theoretical work. I have nothing against theoretical work, but I think there may potentially be stereotypes. I would like to see a reconstruction of environmental drainage, as long as this is something that hasn't been done.

CAROL: One thing our predecessors started that I think we want to continue is publishing more editorial pieces. Instead of very closely researched monographs, single author traditional research articles, FHS has been publishing these editorial pieces that are often reflections on the profession. We've published a recent one by David Bell that’s thinking about global history and reflections on the profession generally, on French history, and its role in the globalizing historical profession. I think there is room for developing that kind of editorial piece. We invite people to submit not just the research articles, but editorial articles that reflect the state of the field and the kind of the research that’s being done.

Call for Papers: The Gender and Sexuality of Militarization, War and Violence

The Journal of Middle East Women's Studies invites feminist scholars working in any discipline or interdisciplinary area in the interpretive social sciences and humanities to submit area-specific manuscripts on any topic related to the theme of "The Gender and Sexuality of Militarization, War and Violence."

Manuscripts may address any historical period related to any part of the region. Manuscripts are expected to substantiate a thesis based on original scholarship grounded in primary sources (literary, visual, archival, textual, ethnographic, artistic, legal, and so on) and to engage with relevant transnational gender and sexuality scholarship. The highest quality manuscripts will be published as articles in a JMEWS themed issue within approximately a year of submission. Submission guidelines may be found at www.jmews.org 

Manuscripts are due on or before 15 June 2015 to our online submission system here.

Questions may be directed to jmews[at]dukeupress[dot]edu.

Call for Papers: French Historical Studies issue on Archives

The editors of French Historical Studies seek articles for a special issue on the theme of archives and archival practice in French history to appear in the spring 2017. Recent transnational scholarship on archives has alerted us to the ways in which archives are not neutral sites but ones where knowledge is constructed and negotiated. Discussions about whether or not cultural history has lured historians away from the archives have missed an underlying reality: historians of France and the French empire now use a wider range of public and private holdings beyond national, departmental, defense, and colonial archives. These archives often require different strategies for entry and use. To note only the most obvious differences: finding aids have not always been compiled by trained archivists and classificatory schemes vary considerably depending on organizations’ needs. Access to outsiders and the communication of documents may be limited or restricted. Technology is also transforming both the archive itself and access to the archive.

The editors invite articles that situate these issues in the context of French history and historiography. More than just tales from the archives, articles will reflect authors’ experiences in archives that illuminate both archival practice and ways of doing French history. Among the various types of non- traditional archives, we invite authors to consider church and missionary archives, corporate archives, associations’ archives, mayors’ offices and communal records, hospital archives and medical records, private papers, and colonial archives outside Aix. We also welcome articles on non-traditional ways of using traditional archives, on the impact of digitization and other technologies on archival practice, and on the encounter between historians and archivists.

Queries about submission and other matters regarding this special issue should be addressed to the guest editors, Sarah Curtis (scurtis[at]sfsu[dot]edu) and Stephen Harp (sharp[at]uakron[dot]edu).

To submit an article, please visit www.editorialmanager.com/fhs. After registering, follow the submission instructions under “Instructions for Authors” on the website. Articles may be either in English or in French but must conform to French Historical Studies style (for details, see www.dukepress.edu/fhs) and must be accompanied by titles and 150-word abstracts in both languages. Manuscripts should be between 6,000 and 8,000 words excluding notes and no longer than 10,000 words including notes. For the inclusion of illustrations, written permission must be obtained from the relevant persons or institutions for both print and online publication. The deadline for submissions is July 15, 2015.

Tikkun Wins 2014 Magazine of the Year Award

Tikkun Managing Editor Alana Price accepts the RNA 2014 "Magazine of the Year: Overall Excellence in Religion Coverage" award. Credit: Dawn Cherie Araujo.

Congratulations to Tikkun, winner of the prestigious 2014 "Magazine of the Year: Overall Excellence in Religion Coverage" award from the Religion Newswriters Association! The Religion Newswriters Association's awards recognize journalism excellence by measuring a magazine's grasp on a diversity of religion issues.

Tikkun, published quarterly, offers analysis and commentary that strive to bridge the cultural divide between religious and secular progressives. By bringing together voices from many disparate religious and secular humanist communities to talk about social transformation, political change, and the evolution of our religious traditions, Tikkun creates space for the emergence of a religious Left to respond to the influence of the religious Right and the distortions of global capitalism, while simultaneously critiquing reductionist views that sometimes prevail in liberal and progressive circles.

The most recent issue of Tikkun is available online here. To subscribe to Tikkun, visit www.tikkun.org.

To learn more about the award, please visit www.tikkun.org/rna.

 

Call for Papers: Archives and Archiving, a special issue of TSQ

This issue of TSQ will investigate practical and theoretical dimensions of archiving transgender phenomena and will ask what constitutes “trans* archives” or “trans* archival practices.”

While transgender-related experiences have long been captured by archives to some extent, the last few decades have witnessed an increased commitment to collecting trans* materials. Consequently, sizable trans* collections can now be found in a range of institutional contexts including grassroots archives, nonprofit organizations, and university-based collections.

Given this trend, myriad practical considerations that trans* materials present for archiving warrant further attention. What should or should not be included in trans* archives? What are the best practices for acquiring, processing, preserving, and making transgender materials accessible? Given practical limitations of space and money, how do we decide what to prioritize? And who decides? What are the implications for history when archivists make such decisions? How should archives negotiate ethical concerns specific to trans* archives? What relationship—if any—do trans* materials have to broader LGBTQ collections? What cataloguing tools are available and how do they obscure, distort, or make meaning of the lived experiences of trans* people? What are the benefits and limitations of using “transgender” or “trans*” as umbrella terms in an archival context? How are archivists and archival practices changed by the challenges of dealing with trans* materials? What role can digital technologies play in collecting and accessing trans* materials, particularly born-digital materials?

These practical considerations would be incomplete without a closely related theoretical exploration of trans* archiving. How, for example, are bodies representable (or unrepresentable) through archival documents? How can embodiment itself be considered an archive of memory and feeling, a sedimentation of social practices, a living medium for the transmission of cultural forms? What power do archives have in shaping popular understandings of transgender phenomena? How are researchers affected by their encounters with archival materials? How do archives steer researchers in particular ways with metadata, organizational systems, and finding aids? Can archives help construct community and personal identity? Does digitization inherently change trans* historical artifacts?

We welcome submissions of full-length academic articles on a wide range of topics related to trans* archives and archiving. Such topics might include:

• practical and philosophical considerations for developing transgender collections independently or within broader archives
• how transgender archival materials intersect with and depart from LGBQ archival materials
• critical reflections on working in trans* archives and/or with trans* archival materials
• sex, desire, and pornographic collections
• considerations of the body within and as represented by archives
• understandings of embodiment itself as an archive of affects, memory, practices, and social forms
• capturing lived experiences with archival artifacts and ephemera
• recontextualizing historical materials within the context of the archive
• affective encounters
• ethics of historical representation
• archival temporality and considerations of time and timeliness
• the role of archivists
• institutionality of government, state, academic, non-profit, and grassroots collections
• processing and interpreting trans*-related materials
• hidden collections
• archival language practices, cataloguing, and classification
• digital technologies within archives, digital archiving, and archiving born-digital materials
• intersectional identities
• access and accessibility
• archival activism

We will also consider for publication shorter essays, opinion pieces, first-person accounts, practical advice, how-to guides, or interesting archival documents. We encourage contributions from a wide range of authors including academics, independent researchers, archivists, and activists.

Please send a complete manuscript by October 15, 2014 to tsqjournal[at]gmail[dot]com along with a brief bio including name and any institutional affiliation. The expected length for scholarly articles is 5,000 to 7,000 words, and 1,000 to 2,000 words for shorter works. All manuscripts should be prepared for anonymous peer review. For articles engaging in scholarly citation, please use the Chicago author-date citation style. Any questions should be addressed by e-mail to both guest editors for the issue: Aaron Devor (ahdevor[at]uvic[dot]ca) and K.J. Rawson (kjrawson[at]holycross[dot]edu). We plan to respond to submissions by early January 2015. Final revisions will be due by March 1, 2015.

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly is co-edited by Paisley Currah and Susan Stryker, and published by Duke University Press, with editorial offices at the University of Arizona’s Institute for LGBT Studies. TSQ aims to be the journal of record for the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies and to promote the widest possible range of perspectives on transgender phenomena broadly defined. Every issue of TSQ is a specially themed issue that also contains regularly recurring features such as reviews, interviews, and opinion pieces.

To learn more about the journal and see calls for papers for other issues, click here. For information about subscriptions, click here.

Duke University Press at the 2014 IFLA World Library and Information Congress

L to R: IFLA Attendees Elizabeth Chapman (University of Sheffield) and Lauren Smith (University of Strathclyde) with Library Relations & Sales Manager Kim Steinle at the Duke Univesrity Press booth at IFLA.

Last week we attended the IFLA World Library and Information Congress in Lyon, France. This year's IFLA Congress was the best attended in the last several years, with 3,900 delegates from all over the world, including France, Korea, Kazakhstan, China, Japan, Uzbekistan, Uganda, Nigeria, Russia, Trinidad & Tobago, Scandinavia, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

We attend this conference in order to meet librarians from around the world, learn about issues that affect or are important to the global library community, and to promote our Press internationally. Next year's Congress will be held in Cape Town, South Africa and the 2016 Congress will be held in Columbus, Ohio.

Frances Pinter, Executive Director of Knowledge Unlatched, accepting the 2014 IFLA/Brill Open Access Award at IFLA

IFLA/Brill Open Access Award
Congratulations to Knowledge Unlatched for winning the IFLA/Brill Open Access Award! Knowledge Unlatched "depends on many libraries from around the world sharing the payment of a single Title Fee to a publisher, in return for a book being made available on a Creative Commons licence via OAPEN and HathiTrust... The Title Fee represents the basic cost of publishing a book. Because the Title Fee is a fixed amount, as more libraries participate in Knowledge Unlatched, the per-library cost of ‘unlatching’ each title declines." Knowledge Unlatched was chosen as the most outstanding and game-changing initiative in the field. Read the full press release here.

Duke University Press is very excited to be a part of this program! We've included four books in the Knowledge Unlatched pilot program: Bilogical Relatives by Sarah Franklin, In Search of the Amazon by Seth Garfield, My Voice is My Weapon by David McDonald, and Ever Faithful by David Sartorius. 

Volcanic Eruptions and Environmental Disasters in Literature and History

Cataclysmic events, such as the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which happened on this day, have fascinated people for thousands of years. Individuals have attempted to express this captivation in various ways from Pliny the Younger, who survived the Vesuvius eruption and subsequently wrote in detail about his experience, to the leaders of the French Revolution, who invoked the powerful symbolism of a natural, unstoppable force that volcanoes represent. Writing about natural disasters helps people move on, but not forget, these catastrophes. As these experiences are immortalized over time, they come to symbolize hope, survival, power and destruction. Poetics Today and French Historical Studies delve further into these instances of expression and demonstrate the link between why people write about natural disasters such as Mount Vesuvius’ eruption and how that calamity empowers and embodies events long after.

In Francoise Lavocat’s “Narratives of Catastrophe in the Early Modern Period: Awareness of Historicity and the Emergence of Interpretative Viewpoints,” he discusses the reasons and ways people write about natural disasters:

Braccini’s narrative of the Naples volcanic eruption illustrates the narrator-witness’s need to explain his personal, intellectual, and even emotional perception of a given event. The 1631 eruption of Mount Vesuvius gave rise to many narratives that emphasized the contrast between “the curiosity” of the witness-narrator and the credulity of Neapolitans nurtured by legends. This contrast was inspired by Pliny the Younger’s attitude toward the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. It is also by reference to Pliny that the taste for observation, even close to the eruption site, is asserted and staged, as can be seen in Braccini’s writing. Another priest, Angelo Eugenii da Perugia, compares his “experience” of the “natural effects” of the eruption to the “extravagant exaggerations” of his contemporaries, who interpret the phenomenon as the beginning of the Apocalypse. No one denies the existence of divine causes, but nor does this prevent the consideration of secondary causes. Braccini goes to a library in Naples and does a public reading of Pliny’s letter about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, declaring to his fellow citizens: “Here is a description,58 1550 years old, that corresponds exactly to what you have before your eyes today”. In the case of the eruption of Vesuvius, the repetition of this catastrophe and the comparison it invites between AD 79 and 1629 beg for demystification: at least, the repetition suggests that this eruption, similar to a previous one in antiquity, is not the last and so very unlikely to be the Apocalypse. Braccini’s rational point of view thus partly secularizes the interpretation. The historical dimension is fundamental to this new approach to catastrophe, expressed several times around 1630, regarding the eruption of Vesuvius and the plague in northern Italy. Most narratives include an appendix that lists previous catastrophes in chronological order,60 focusing on disasters that occurred in the recent past (especially the sixteenth century) while ignoring biblical and mythical accounts. Catastrophes are no longer prophetic of other catastrophes.

Read more from “Narratives of Catastrophe” here.

In “Mountain, Become a Volcano: The Image of the Volcano in the Rhetoric of the French Revolution,” Mary Ashburn Miller establishes a relationship between the language of natural history and the political rhetoric of the French Revolution by tracing the iconography of the volcano throughout the revolutionary period:

Le jugement dernier des rois, a play written by Sylvain Maréchal, opened to enthusiastic reviews at the Theater of the Republic in Vendémiaire of Year II. Maréchal subtitled his play ‘a prophecy in one act.’ The journalist Prudhomme also embraced the future foreseen by the playwright and hoped for by the supportive Committee of Public Safety. ‘The theatrical fiction will soon become historical fact,’ he wrote. The overthrow of Europe’s kings, their return to an ‘uncivilized’ state, and their ultimate destruction by natural forces was fiction presented to, and patronized by, a broad French public, playing in Beauvais, Compiègne, Grenoble, Le Mans, Lille, Metz, and Rouen. And the volcano, symbol of revolutionary fervor and destruction, became the ultimate demonstration of nature’s justice, annihilating the monarchs in a single, terrifying, and glorious moment described in the play’s liner notes: ‘The explosion takes place: the fire attacks the kings from all sides; they fall, consumed in the innards of the opened earth.’ The quite literal fall of the monarchs, although enabled by the French Revolution itself, was portrayed as the work of natural forces.

Read more from “Mountain, Become a Volcano” here.

Editor of Duke Mathematical Journal wins Chern Medal Award

Congratulations to Duke Mathematical Journal editor Phillip Griffiths! He was awarded the 2014 Chern Medal for his work in complex geometry, particularly his work in Hodge theory and periods of algebraic varieties. The prize is given at the International Congress of Mathematicians, which is being held currently in Seoul, South Korea.

To read the official press release, click here.

Several contributors to DMJ have also been awarded the Fields Medal, including Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman to win the medal. Other winners include Artur Avila and Manjul Bhargava. See a list of their contributions to DMJ below. Congratulations to all!

For more information on Duke Mathematical Journal, visit dukeupress.edu/dmj.

Contributions to DMJ from Fields Medalists include:

Maryam Mirzakhani, co-author of "Lattice point asymptotics and volume growth on Teichmüller space," here; Artur Avila, co-author of "Cohomological equations and invariant distributions for minimal circle diffeomorphisms," here and "Generic Singular Spectrum For Ergodic Schrödinger Operators," here; and Manjul Bhargava, co-author of "Error estimates for the Davenport-Heilbronn theorems," here.