International Group Of Scholars Research Articles

Hungary and Ukraine: Relations between States, States between Relations

Hungary and Ukraine: Relations between States, States between Relations

Nicolai Hartmanns Dialoge 1920–1950. Die “Cirkelprotokolle.” ed. by Joachim Fischer and Gerald Hartung

Reviewed by: Nicolai Hartmanns Dialoge 1920–1950. Die “Cirkelprotokolle.” ed. by Joachim Fischer and Gerald Hartung Keith R. Peterson Joachim Fischer and Gerald Hartung, editors. Nicolai Hartmanns Dialoge 1920–1950. Die “Cirkelprotokolle.”Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2020. Pp. v + 487. Hardback, $126.99. Originally a student of Marburg Neo-Kantianism, Nicolai Hartmann (1882–1950) departed from this tradition to become one of the leading German philosophers of the first half of the twentieth century. He wrote on all the major fields of philosophy, including the philosophy of history, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics, although his central interest was ontology. He held teaching posts in Marburg, Cologne, Berlin, and Göttingen, and was president of the German Philosophical Association after the Second World War. Perhaps unique among his peers, he spearheaded the resurgence of ontology by developing a pluralistic, humanistic realism that attempted to do justice to both the sciences and the humanities. Over the last twenty years, after a long period of neglect, his work has been attracting more attention from an international group of scholars. Until now these scholars have relied on Hartmann’s many published works. However, after his literary estate was delivered to the Archive of German Literature in Marbach, Germany, in 2012, scholars discovered files full of dozens of transcripts of conversations held during evening meetings of graduate students and colleagues that Hartmann held at his own home throughout his career. This book contains six of the roughly fifty collections of “protocols” (discussion minutes), and is a product of a four-year Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft grant (2016–20). The transcribed remainder will be made available through De Gruyter’s website at some point in the future. This nearly five-hundred-page volume includes, in addition to the text of the dialogues, informative editorial introductions and an appendix that all together constitute roughly 165 pages. These are made up of several useful elements: introductory “abstracts” for each dialogue; an editors’ report on the mechanics of the edition, its goals, and the scope of the discovery (about 2,800 pages of hand- or typewritten text); a discussion of the protocol as a genre; biographical entries on the participants in the dialogues included in this volume (here 41 of 115 participants over the years); a bibliography of Hartmann’s works; and a valuable list of all of the lecture courses Hartmann delivered at his university posts from 1919 to 1950 in Marburg, Cologne, Berlin, and Göttingen. The topics of the dialogues included in this volume are (1) “The Essence of Ideal Being” (1923–24); (2) “On the Nature of Essence” (1925–26); (3) “Intuition and Concept” (1931); (4) “What Are Aesthetic Values?” (1939–40); (5) “On Spiritual and Mental Being” (1942); and (6) “On Thinking” (1948). Some of the editors’ criteria for including a dialogue in the volume were the relevance of its content generally and for understanding Hartmann’s work, whether it included a diversity of themes covering various fields, the richness of controversies in it, or the appearance of significant participants. Regarding the last point, the editors consider the dialogues a valuable resource for writing a history of early twentieth-century German philosophy, since figures like Hans-Georg Gadamer (who participated in no less than five separate discussion groups spanning four years during his time in Marburg), Helmuth Plessner (who was an enthusiastic participant in the circle during Hartmann’s time in Cologne), and Günter Patzig (respected Aristotle scholar and Frege advocate in Göttingen), among others, participated in these meetings. The introduction outlines five main reasons why these protocols constitute an important discovery for both Hartmann scholars and historians of early twentieth-century philosophy. [End Page 519] First, they display the vast range of philosophical problems and fields with which Hartmann was familiar and actively attempting to deal, from epistemology and philosophy of science to ethics, aesthetics, philosophical anthropology, and ontology. Second, they show him engaging in extended dialogue with others over these topics, where ideas are tested and thoroughly submitted to criticism. While it appears from his lengthy tomes that Hartmann was a monological thinker, his persistent cultivation of these groups throughout his entire career and testimony from others show that he had a real...

Whole-Body/Head Transplantation: Personal Identity, Experimental Surgery, and Bioethics

AbstractThis issue of The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy brings together an international group of scholars from Hong Kong, Mainland China, and North America, critically to explore whole-body/head transplantation. The proposed procedure raises significant philosophical, ethical, and social/political questions. For example, assuming transplant is successful, who survives the surgery? Does personal identity necessarily follow the head? The contributors to this special thematic issue explore the nature and ground of personal identity, what it would mean to preserve personal identity, given such a significant set of physical changes, as well as the morality of such a procedure. As the authors make clear, careful conceptual philosophical analysis is essential for understanding whether whole-body/head transplantation is a life-saving/life-enhancing technological innovation, or a bioethical morass that should not be attempted. How we come to terms with such conceptual and moral concerns will have a significant impact on the future of medicine and medical technological innovation.

The Emergence of Relativism: German Thought from the Enlightenment to National Socialism

The Emergence of Relativism: German Thought from the Enlightenment to National Socialism

When a Crisis Opens New Academic Perspectives: The New Webinar Series of the SIEF Ritual Year Working Group

For over 10 years, the academic journal Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore has regularly published news on the activity of The Ritual Year Working Group (RY WG), a group of international scholars with shared interests in ritual activities, customs and festive celebrations throughout the yearly calendric cycle, an affiliate of the International Society of Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF – Société Internationale d’Ethnologie et de Folklore). This includes reviews of the annual WG’s conferences, reviews of panels organised by the WG at important congresses in the field of ethnology and folklore, and releases of new books. In addition, the journal has dedicated several special issues to topics addressed by the various academic meetings of the WG, reuniting studies written by its members (Fournier & Sedakova 2015; Sedakova & Vlaskina 2016, etc.). This article sheds light on the drastic changes that the academic world was recently confronted with during the Covid-19 pandemic, and on how the RY WG met the challenges of this new reality; it shows how a crisis can also open new possibilities.

Socialist Realism in Central and Eastern European Literatures under Stalin: Institutions, Dynamics, Discourses ed. by Evgeny Dobrenko et al.

Reviewed by: Socialist Realism in Central and Eastern European Literatures under Stalin: Institutions, Dynamics, Discourses ed. by Evgeny Dobrenko et al. Inessa Medzhibovskaya Dobrenko, Evgeny and Jonsson-Skradol, Natalia (eds). Socialist Realism in Central and Eastern European Literatures under Stalin: Institutions, Dynamics, Discourses. Anthem Series on Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies. Anthem Press, London, 2018. 362 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliographies. Index. £100.00: £175.00. This comprehensive and well-organized volume edited by Evgeny Dobrenko and Natalia Jonsson-Skradol is a major new achievement in the study of both a single method by which literature is institutionalized and globalized, and its lasting discourses. It is an achievement that builds on the strengths of Dobrenko and Thomas Lahusen's Socialist Realism Without Shores (Durham, NC, 1997), the magisterial Sotsrealisticheskii kanon (St Petersburg, 2000) edited by Dobrenko with Hans Günther, and A History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism: The Soviet Age and Beyond (Pittsburgh, PA, 2011) edited by Dobrenko with Galin Tihanov, and also enters into an illuminating dialogue with Tihanov's award-winning The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond (Stanford, CA, 2019). This new collection features a skilfully arranged set of twenty detailed and lucid chapters by an international group of scholars from Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Great Britain, Germany, Hungary, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia and the United States by Imre József Balázs, René Bílik, Rossen Djagalov, Evgeny Dobrenko, Plamen Doinov, Helen Fehervary, Hans Günther, Anne Hartmann, Nenad Ivic´, Pavel Janáček, Natalia Jonsson-Skradol, Melinda Kalmár, David Norris, Ivana Peruško, Evgeny Ponomarev, Benjamin Robinson, Tamás Scheibner, Vít Schmarc, Tatiana V. Volokitina and Vladislav M. Zubok. This heavily archival and scrupulously theoretical volume is the impressive result of many years' work under the auspices of the research project, 'Literary Pax Sovietica: National Revival and Cultural Unification in Post-War Eastern Europe', based at the University of Sheffield. Prior to publishing these important results, they were showcased at two conferences funded by, amongst others, the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, the International Visegrad Fund and the Mikhail Prokhorov Fund. [End Page 183] On the cover of the book, Cyrillic typewriter keys capture the eye. Their gold inlaid tops are stuck frozen on their arms, idling and untouched. Nobody is using the typewriter: it is an artifact of an era long gone. Who stopped typing? When and why? What did the dominant ideological spirits of Socialist Realism have to do with the eventual abandonment of these keys? Focusing on the former Warsaw pact countries of Eastern and Central Europe — but omitting Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine — the editors thoughtfully place each contribution under one of the three sequential parts listed in the book's subtitle (institutions, dynamics, discourses). Most closely examined is the fate of Socialist Realism in East Germany, Poland, Croatia, Czecholslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Yugoslavia, with brief mention of Albania and Macedonia. With one exception — the Béla Bartók debates that were to influence the larger process of the development of Socialist Realism in Hungary — and unlike the approach used by Dobrenko and Lahusen in 1997 and Dobrenko and Günther in 2000, the volume covers only the literatures and literary criticism of this multilingual region. The volume's structure enables the reader to accurately track the arrival of Socialist Realism in the newly Soviet-occupied zones of war-torn Eastern Europe following the defeat of Hitler's Nazi Germany. After the extermination of many artists who had been anti-Nazi resisters, the devastations of the Holocaust and the purges in the Soviet Union, far from all the surviving writers were able to immediately return home from their places of displacement and exile. (Anna Seghers, for example, did not return from Mexico until 1947, and lived in West Berlin until 1950.) All the volume's essays are sensitive to the difficult circumstances surrounding the construction of the early institutions and discourses of the proto-socialist and popular-democratic cultural fronts in the region. Although comic in part, this was not a makeshift montage job for 'Kremlin gremlins', as Zubok calls them (pp. 78–82). These were...

An online community of international scholars: Enabling spaces for reciprocal academic and psychological support

ABSTRACT COVID-19 and its imposed social confinement entailed a radical shift in research, supervision and learning in doctoral education. Heightened flexibility in delivery, sensitivity and compassion and greater reliance on technology sought to address not merely scholars’ pedagogical but holistic needs, which became more prominent during the pandemic. Face-to-face doctoral supervision and academic events were conducted online to overcome hurdles presented by ‘social distancing’. We examine how the dynamics of our group supervision for international doctoral scholars changed after shifting to online mode. We employed an autoethnographic approach to highlight evolving rewards and challenges in conducting online meetings with a group of international scholars. Focusing on this group is timely since the ‘working-from-home’ mode contributed to doctoral scholars’ isolation and stress that they experienced. This paper: a) exemplifies the psychological benefits fostered by online meetings; and b) highlights creative virtual pedagogies and practices worth adopting even after the pandemic is over.

Introduction: The cultural politics of food and eating in Poland and beyond

This special issue of Ethnologia Polona comprises contributions from an international group of scholars who scrutinize the culturally embedded politics of food and foodways in Poland and beyond. The idea for the special issue “The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating in Poland and Beyond” stemmed from discussions and collaborations with academics working in the area of food studies, and with those who use food as a lens to look at different social, cultural and political phenomena. Both groups share a commitment to a critical perspective in the social sciences and humanities, and a need to strengthen this position within international academia. 
 We developed this special issue around the cultural politics of food and eating in order to highlight the importance of a critical perspective while studying food-related issues. Our aim is to demonstrate both the thematic scope and the theoretical directions present in the contemporary studies produced by scholars working on Poland, as well as Polish researchers working on other regions. The territorial scope of the volume is wide as it features analyses based on abundant ethnographic and historical material from Poland, Belgium, Georgia, Ukraine, Dagestan and Argentina. The volume features contributions from scholars representing different disciplines (anthropology, sociology, social history and cultural studies) based on original research (extended ethnographic fieldwork, archival research and autoethnography) and presenting a clear methodological reflection.

An Introduction to “Overlapping Resources and Mismatched Property Rights”

Property scholars have long explored how rights to land and resources influences their use and conservation. Over time, inquiry has turned towards the governance of competing claims. Simplistic models of rights are yielding to the social, political, and ecological realities of managing ecosystems amidst increased resource demands fueled by human population growth. Prior dichotomies between “human” and “natural” uses are dissolving. Bold new conceptions of socio-environmental models are emerging. Political scientists, ecologists, scientists, and legal scholars are working on the front lines of increasingly urgent resource conditions to update the theoretical and normative terrain of landscape governance. In 2019, the New York University School of Law Classical Liberal Institute and the Indiana University at Bloomington Ostrom Workshop Program on Natural Resource Governance invited us to co-host a conference about emerging understandings of property rights as overlapping and nested. The organizing institutions asked us to use as a starting point Contracting for Control of Landscape-Level Resources, a 2015 article co-authored by Karen Bradshaw and Dean Lueck (Bradshaw & Lueck, 2015). We hosted the conference, “Mismatched Property Rights to Landscape-Level Resources: Legal and Customary Solutions,”1 in New York over two days in March 2019. We were honored to host notable scholars, from a variety of academic disciplines and phases of their careers presenting papers, moderating panels, and acting as discussants. Billy Christmas coordinated the peer review process for this volume. This symposium volume of the International Journal of the Commons reflects the proceedings of the March 2019 conference. Like the conference, this volume brings together an interdisciplinary group of international scholars to explore new areas of the role of property in addressing socio-environmental questions, and the diverse solutions to them. As guest editors, we are grateful to the authors, peer reviewers, symposium participants, discussants, and audience who jointly created this project. The contributions of this group have transformed the initial, modest set of observations about resource governance from Contracting for Control of Landscapes into a budding new conception of property—a vision more aligned with a modern understanding of ecological and economic realities.

Better Late Than Never: Business Schools and Climate Change Action

In this interactive panel, we bring together a group of international scholars from the atmospheric science, engineering, political science, and business disciplines to engage the audience and panel in a discussion on: (a) climate change, its impact on well-being, economic opportunity, and equality; and (b) the role of business schools/scholars in leading response to the climate change impacts. The discussion will explore the gravity of threats posed by climate change to the world in general and to businesses in particular. It will include examples of innovative solutions that aim to minimize adverse climate change impacts and will unpack how business schools can lead through research and effective curriculum development. An interactive dialogue with the audience will address the challenges related to climate change education initiatives and how some schools have effectively designed and implemented programs. The potential role of the Academy of Management and its Organizations and Natural Environment (ONE) Division in building resilience against climate change and mitigating its impacts will also be discussed.

Legal Discontinuities — Opening Remarks

The law inevitably draws lines, but why do the lines have such dramatic effects? Being a bit too incautious can turn what would have been lawful conduct into a million dollar claim for negligence. Being a bit unreasonable in assessing danger can turn what would have been justified self-defense into murder with a life sentence. Many have the intuition that as we gradually cross some boundary from permissible conduct into tortious or criminal conduct, the legal consequences should also change gradually. Yet laws often have all-or-nothing effects even when they could be gradual. To better understand these and related phenomena, we convened an international group of scholars with diverse interests in the law, spanning property, tax, torts, crimes, contracts, and more, for the Legal Discontinuities Conference. The event was held at Tel Aviv University Law School’s Cegla Center for Interdisciplinary Research of the Law from December 29-30, 2019. Contributing papers will be published in a special open access issue of Theoretical Inquiries in Law. This short paper is adapted from my opening conference remarks.

Editors' Foreword

Editors' Foreword Mark G. Brett and Susan E. Hylen This issue of JBL was produced under extraordinary circumstances. The world was in lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and each day we woke to news of rising infection rates and death tolls around the globe. There have been significant variations among the international reports, although a relentless unveiling of inequalities has been typical in many different contexts. In the United States and the United Kingdom, the infection statistics are disproportionately high; in Vietnam and Kerala, remarkably low. Remote Aboriginal communities in Australia have so far been spared, in part because their leaders saw the potential dangers very early and exhorted people to retreat to their traditional lands away from the centers of industry. Because Aboriginal people have suffered from imported diseases many times in the past, the communal memory was sensitized to the signs of danger.1 Amid these very pressing global concerns, academic journals have reported a dramatic fall in the number of submissions written by women. But as Gale Yee made clear in her Presidential Address to the Society of Biblical Literature last year, there are many other intersectional factors that need to be considered: race, color, and class would need to be added to our statistics before the dynamics of inequality could be understood in all their layered complexity. And even if some institutions in the United States can celebrate the participation of nonwhite faculty, there are researchers from universities in many other parts of the world who have never contributed to JBL. Most of us will be all too aware that patterns of inequality have steadily increased since the 1980s, and even the dismal science of economics has managed to produce bestsellers on the theme. Most recently, in Capital and Ideology, Thomas Piketty has delivered a one-thousand-page challenge to all of us who worry about [End Page 231] the problems generated by inequality in education.2 That book was written before the coronavirus pandemic, so there is already a new genre of revelation upon us. In the September issue of JBL this year, we are aiming to provide a forum on the topic "Biblical Studies in a Pandemic," and an international group of scholars has been asked to offer their brief reflections. We hope that this will just be one example of a lively debate in years to come. [End Page 232] Footnotes 1. Amy McQuire, "Aboriginal Community Health's Success with Covid-19," The Saturday Paper 298 (2020), https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/health/2020/04/25/aboriginal-community-healths-success-with-covid-19/15877368009740. 2. Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2020). Copyright © 2020 Society of Biblical Literature

Paul and the Greco-Roman Philosophical Tradition

Paul and the Greco-Roman Philosophical Tradition

Boyhood and Belonging

This special issue of Boyhood Studies considers how a group of international scholars have engaged with the concepts of boyhood and belonging as a complex personal and powerful process. In different ways, the authors highlight how belonging is an ongoing negotiation within one’s surroundings. The international research presented here compels us to conceptualize belonging and boyhood as something that is not only infused with individuals and collective histories, but also interwoven within different conceptions of place and space. These places and spaces are experienced in multiple ways within different social contexts. We contend that this special issue is positioned at an important time in studies of boys and young men. As boys and young men experience their transition into adulthood with increased precarity, it is time we take theories of boyhood and belonging seriously. These theories can open up new spaces and provide critical insights into young lives.

Preface

The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book for 2019, as every year, draws together work from an international group of scholars. Our contributors address a variety of subjects from a range of perspectives and with diverse methodologies, and the sum of these parts produces a high-quality snapshot of a dynamic and heterogeneous field of study. The first section, ‘Exile Photography’, is a collection of articles based on papers first presented at the 2016 conference on exile photography held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In their focus on the visual dimension of the Jewish past, in particular within Germany and pre-state Palestine, the articles complement those on German and Israeli film that appeared in our 2018 volume. Our second section likewise builds on work from a previous volume, with two pieces that constitute the completion of the 2017 section ‘German-Speaking Jews in Europe in the Immediate Post-War Period’. The essays in the third section explore issues of politics, culture, and intellectual life in Germany and Austria. The volume is rounded out by another in our series of memoirs; in this instance, a mathematician’s eulogy for his wife, a writer, offers a thumbnail portrait of their lives before and after National Socialism.

Towards a heart and soul for co-creative research practice: a systemic approach

The language of co-creation has become popular with policy makers, researchers and consultants wanting to support evidence-based change. However, there is little agreement about what features a research or consultancy project must have for peers to recognise the project as co-creative, and therefore for it to contribute to the growing body of practice and theory under that heading. This means that scholars and practitioners do not have a shared basis for critical reflection, improving practice and debating ethics, legitimacy and quality. While seeking to avoid any premature defining of orthodoxy, this article offers a framework to support researchers and practitioners in discussing the boundaries and the features that are beginning to characterise a particular discourse, such as the one that is unfolding around the concept of co-creation. The paper is the outcome of an online and face-to-face dialogue among an international group of scholars. The dialogue draws on Critical Systems Heuristics’ (Ulrich, 1994) questions concerning motivation (revealing assumptions about its purpose and value), power (interrogating assumptions about who has control and is therefore able to define success), knowledge (surfacing assumptions about experience and expertise) and legitimacy (disclosing moral assumptions). The paper ends by suggesting important areas for further exploration to contribute to the emerging discourse of co-creation in ways that support critical reflection, improved practice, and provide a basis for debating ethics and quality.

Introduction to “Religious Experience in the Hindu Tradition”

This special issue of Religions brings together a talented group of international scholars who have studied and written on the Hindu tradition. The topic of religious experience is much debated in the field of Religious Studies, and here we present studies of Hindu religious experience explored from a variety of regions and perspectives. They are intended to show that religious experience has long been an important part of Hinduism, and we consider them to be important and relevant. As a body of scholarship, these articles refine our understanding of the range and variety of religious experience in Hinduism. In addition to their substantive contributions, the authors also show important new directions in the study of the third-largest religion in the world, with over one billion followers. This introduction will discuss some relevant issues in the field of Indology, some problems of language, and the difficulties faced in the study of religious experience. It will also give a brief sketch of the religious experiences described by our authors in some major types of Hinduism.

Reflections on the First IOTA Meeting Iasi, Romania, 9–12 January 2019

Reflections on the First IOTA Meeting Iasi, Romania, 9–12 January 2019 Gayle E. Woloschak1 INTRODUCTION The inaugural meeting of the International Orthodox Theological Association (IOTA) occurred in Iasi, Romania from 9–12 January 2019. Opinion pieces authored in the weeks after the meeting described it as “the largest international gathering of Orthodox scholars in modern history”;2 “a forum for worldwide, interdisciplinary scholarly interaction within the context of the Orthodox tradition”;3 and “an intellectual feast [with] a range of topics . . . [covering] ‘everything [End Page 101] that you ever wanted to know about Orthodoxy but were afraid to ask.’”4 To be sure, the conference was unprecedented in terms of its size (nearly three hundred scholars), global diversity (forty nations), and breadth of disciplines (anthropology, art history, cultural studies, gender studies, history, literature, liturgics, missiology, musicology, philosophy, political science, religious studies, science and religion, and theology). But it was unprecedented in other ways that signal significant demographic shifts in the academic study of Orthodox theology and Orthodox Christian studies more broadly. For example, the broad participation of scholars from secular institutions and the significant number of women academics constitute a dramatic change from the Orthodox academic gatherings in Europe, the Middle East, or the United States fifty or even twenty years ago. The following essay serves as a “Field Report” in the conventional sense—a summary and evaluation of what occurred—but it will also provide a brief history of the origins, rationale, and expectations for future IOTA meetings. BACKGROUND: SETTING THE STAGE The initial inspiration for IOTA stemmed from the participation and observations of several (mostly) American-based scholars volunteering in the press room at the Great and Holy Council of Crete, which occurred in 2016. Imagined as the largest gathering of bishops in the modern world, and in the works for more than fifty years, the Crete council was supposed to produce a number of documents on various themes that would help guide the highly diverse Orthodox Christian community in the modern world. One of the ground rules of the Crete council was that the assembly of bishops would issue only documents that had a broad consensus. Some interpreted the condition of consensus to mean “unanimity.” In the opinion of several participating scholars, too many of the bishops approached the council and its documents through the lens of their local or national concerns, making unanimity or even consensus virtually impossible. At best, the final documents’ teaching on the ethical, social, and scientific questions of our age were bland and did little to engage and clarify the increasingly complex issues of our day. What is more, many of the more pressing questions regarding ecclesial governance, such as the conditions for autocephaly, or the difficult ethical questions surrounding the advance of modern science, were simply avoided. Two of the founding members of IOTA, Pavel Gavrilyuk, and Gayle Woloschak, left Crete with a sense of dissatisfaction, not only for what had transpired, but also with respect to the Council’s mismatch between the localized interests of its participants and the assumption that pan-Orthodoxy required unanimity in all matters. [End Page 102] Is the wide diversity of experience and ideas within Orthodoxy, the two asked, not something that is desirable and even necessary for the vitality and survival of the Church? Drawing upon their experience of intellectual exchange and the diversity of approaches that exist within every academic sphere, the founders believed that the academic community might have something to offer the institutional Church. The idea for IOTA was to bring together a group of international scholars in a wide variety of disciplines that relate to the Orthodox Christianity from all countries where the Orthodox Church maintains a presence. One operating presumption was that assembling a broad collection of academics from different national, ethnic, and personal backgrounds would bring the rich diversity within Orthodoxy itself into the open. A second presumption was that the interaction of scholars from so many different perspectives, both in formal sessions and in informal conversations throughout the conference, would not only lead to an unprecedented exchange of ideas but also facilitate a greater understanding and mutual respect for various points of view on a...

Medieval Cantors and their Craft: Music, Liturgy and the Shaping of History, 800–1500, ed. Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis, A.B. Kraebel and Margot E. Fassler

The edited volume under review here provides the first book-length publication dedicated to monastic cantors and their various activities (i.e., their ‘craft’) during the Middle Ages. Following a brief introduction by the editors, Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis, A.B. Kraebel and Margot E. Fassler, the book contains nineteen chapters neatly arranged into four sections (‘The Carolingian Period’, pp. 7–88; ‘The Eleventh Century’, pp. 89–170; ‘England in the Twelfth Century’, pp. 171–276; ‘On the Continent: Five Case Studies’, pp. 277–356) and rounded off by an Index of Manuscripts (pp. 357–59) and General Index (pp. 361–370). From a conceptual point of view, the three editors have done an exemplary job by bringing together an international group of scholars from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds and at different stages of their respective careers, ranging from medieval historians, literary scholars and palaeographers to theologians and musicologists, and from doctoral candidates to emeritus professors. They have also taken great care in ensuring that the book’s individual chapters do not stand in isolation, but relate to one another regularly (and often explicitly), thereby feeding into important overarching discussions and debates.

Reflections on the “Topical Meeting on Classroom Acoustics” at the Acoustical Society of America's spring 2005 meeting in Vancouver

I had the pleasure of co-organizing the “Topical Meeting on Classroom Acoustics” at the Acoustical Society of America’s spring 2005 meeting in Vancouver with Murray Hodgson. The topical meeting featured 26 presentations from a diverse group of international scholars; Hodgson and his research team presented seven of those. This talk will include my personal reflections from co-organizing the session with Hodgson, but also discuss the impact of the work presented by Hodgson and his students at that topical meeting. Special attention will be given to how the talks given by Hodgson and his research team demonstrate the breadth of his varied interests in classroom acoustics and point to the significant accomplishments he made in this area throughout his career. Hodgson’s body of work continues to heavily influence my own and many others who study classroom acoustics.