Aristotle was the first philosopher to divide the imagination—what he called phantasia—from other parts of the psyche, placing it between perception and intellect. A mathematician and philosopher of mathematical sciences, Aristotle was puzzled by the problem of geometrical cognition—which depends on the ability to “produce” and “see” a multitude of immaterial objects—and so he introduced the category of internal appearances produced by a new part of the psyche, the imagination. As Justin Humphreys argues, Aristotle developed his theory of imagination in part to explain certain functions of reason with a psychological rather than metaphysical framework. Investigating the background of this conceptual development, The Invention of Imagination reveals how imagery was introduced into systematic psychology in fifth-century Athens and ultimately made mathematical science possible. It offers new insights about major philosophers in the Greek tradition and significant events in the emergence of ancient mathematics while offering space for a critical reflection on how we understand ourselves as thinking beings.

Change arises as something both desired and mourned in poems that reckon with a world where perspectives blur, names drift “billowing, unattached,” and language yields a broken music. A statue of Lenin topples in a Georgian square only to be raised again in a Dallas backyard. Antlers sprout from Actaeon’s head, rendering him unrecognizable to the dogs he loves. Ungainly piano notes pour from a window and wake unexpected wonder in a lost walker. A forest grows inside a box that once held a father’s new pair of shoes. Skylab slips from its watchful orbit and careens toward Earth. A familiar chair once owned by a now absent family appears in a field of wild parsnips. Meditative and richly imaginative, these poems cast and recast the self and its relation to other selves, and to memory, history, power, and the natural world.

Trailer Park Psalms traces the speaker’s journey beyond his boyhood trailer park, through an American landscape marked by violence—from a gas line explosion in his hometown to his father’s war memories to the scars of colonialism inscribed in place, language, and ecology. Along the way, he searches for sources of awe that might inspire us, even in a compromised world: the everyday miracle of eyesight, the courage of the Voyager spacecrafts, and the “clumsy kindness” of family members trying to mend the damages of the past. In the end, what he finds isn’t faith but the hope that “if there’s a heaven, we will bend / to examine our old selves / and wonder how something so delicate / was ever allowed. ”

A Poetic Autobiography—Intimate, Sorrowful, and Funny Lynn Emanuel’s sixth collection of poetry is not sequential or straightforward. It has no conventional chronology, no master narrative. Instead, it is a life story, with all the chaos and messiness entailed therein. Transcript of the Disappearance, Exact and Diminishing is a commotion of grief and wit, audacious images, poems, and paragraphs. It explores and centers on the possibilities and limitations of art in the face of disappearances of many kinds, including the disappearance that is most personal—the poet’s own.

In poems at once profound and accessible, Nadia Colburn finds splendor and astonishment in a natural world - and a human world - that is deeply troubled yet still majestically beautiful. Both elegy and celebration, I Say the Sky addresses some of the most challenging aspects of human existence, from childhood trauma to environmental devastation, and discovers, in unexpected and clear-sighted ways, wisdom, wonder, and peace. Colburn's brilliant second book charts a journey to meet the self. From girlhood to parenthood, loss to discovery, in poems that sing, the book explores how meaning is made. Claiming the female voice from silence, the poems find their grounding in the body and achieve rootedness and hope. I Say the Sky is a meditative and ultimately inspiring book that will be savored by seasoned readers as well as those new to poetry.

Find the beauty. In 2017, writer and educator Rahul Mehta began a writing practice to find solace and beauty—in the natural world, in their family and friends, and in everyday simplicities—during a time of political tensions, environmental disasters, a global pandemic, and personal disappointment. From the vibrant color of a blade of grass, to their dog sleeping quietly in the corner, to delicate petals fallen from a rose, a mindfulness of the beauty in their surroundings helped offset the feelings of fear, outrage, and helplessness. The result of this exercise is a profoundly moving poetry collection that explores Mehta's South Asian and Appalachian culture, their Queerness, their relationships with self and others, race, privilege, and a deep admiration of nature and the spiritual realm. With the ear of a poet and a novelist's understanding of narrative motion, Mehta draws in the reader through humor, tenderness, and complexity. This debut poetry collection from the Lambda Literary Award–winning writer is a magnificent celebration of our own ordinary yet miraculous daily lives—an acknowledgment of the "messy beauty… ugly beauty" in the world.

Two-up, a famous Australian soldiers’ gambling game, has given Australian English many unique words and phrases. The game is significant in Australia’s cultural history. This book is the essential guide to the language and history of the ‘national game’. Bruce Moore explains Two-up’s role in the development of the ANZAC legend and provides new evidence that aspects of the game and its terminology have their origins in Ireland. He shows us how the Australian concept of the ‘fair go’ had its origins in Two-up, and how working-class tenacity saved the game from the efforts of authorities and wowsers to wipe it out. The well-known phrase ‘come in spinne’r is just one of the more than 140 Australian words and phrases that have their origin in the game of Two-up. This is the reader’s chance to learn about ‘alley loafers’, ‘baldie’s, ‘bastards on bikes’, ‘boxer’s, ‘butterflies’, ‘cockatoos’, ‘floaters’, ‘grouter bettors’, ‘headies’, ‘kips’, ‘nit-keepers’, ‘nobs’, ‘ringmasters’, and ‘two-uppians’.

Contemporary media history is a rapidly growing field that extends far beyond traditional studies of technology or institutions such as radio, film, and television. This volume expands the scope further still to analyse ephemeral, mundane phenomena long overlooked by media historiography. In eight original essays, the volume demonstrates the strengths of a broad concept of the media. The first part centres on media systems and media events, with studies of spiritist séances, Gallup polls, the mediated persona of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and the burial of a Swedish elder statesman in 1915. The second part focuses on media materialities and infrastructure such as art replicas, ring binders, tourist guidebooks, and media technology in the IKEA home. Aimed at students and academics alike, Expanding Media Histories offers new empirical research, which engages critically with key concepts in media history today.

Writing does not begin and end with the encoding of an idea into a group of symbols. It is practised by people who have learnt its principles and acquired the tools and skills for doing it, in a particular context that affects what they do and how they do it. Nor are these practices static, as those involved exploit opportunities to adapt old features and develop new ones. The act of writing then has tangible and visible consequences not only for the writers but also for those encountering what has been produced, whether they can read its content or not – with potential for a wider social visibility that can in turn affect the success and longevity of the writing system itself.With a focus on the syllabic systems of the Bronze Age Aegean, this book attempts to bring together different perspectives to create an innovative interdisciplinary outlook on what is involved in writing: from structuralist views of writing as systems of signs with their linguistic values, to archaeological and anthropological approaches to writing as a socially grounded practice. The main chapters focus on the concepts of script adoption and adaptation; different methods of logographic writing; and the vitality of writing traditions, with repercussions for the modern world.Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS) is a project funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 677758), and based in the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge.

In Afterlives, the literary scholar Camilla Storskog investigates how classics with Scandinavian orgin have been reinterpreted as comics. She sets out how literary works, plays, and films have crossed and recrossed the boundaries of language and media, speaking to new times and new contexts. Comic art adaptations have long been neglected by academics, so in this book the author considers them as unique visual media with their own aesthetic, technical, and narrative qualities.

Historical actors are as central to the history of knowledge as to all historical scholarship. Every country, every era has its biographies of eminent scientists, intellectuals, and educational reformers. Yet the theoretical currents that have left their mark on the historical and sociological studies of knowledge since the 1960s have emphasized structures over actors, collectives over individuals. By contrast, Knowledge Actors stresses the importance of historical actors and re-engages with their actions from fresh perspectives. The objective of this volume is thus to foster a larger discussion among historians of knowledge about the role of knowledge actors. Do we want individuals and networks to take centre stage in our research narratives? And if so, which ones do we want to highlight and how are we to conduct our research? What are the potential pitfalls of pursuing that actor-centric trajectory? This the third volume in a trilogy about the history of knowledge from the Lund Centre for the History of Knowledge (LUCK).

Buddhist Hybrid Sanskri is not a deteriorated Sanskrit (as many believed at the discovery of Buddhist texts in Sanskrit), but, following the theoretical foundations underlying the pioneering work of Franklin Edgerton, a language with its grammar and vocabulary sui generis implemented rather consequently, which for a long period of time was used to spread the teaching of Buddha. The Reader is meant as a textbook for advanced students with an interest in non-standard Sanskrit and Middle Indo-Aryan. A substantial novelty of the Reader is that it includes extracts from representative texts either recently critically re-edited on the basis of new manuscripts or from the texts unknown at the time of Edgerton’s publications. All extracts are accompanied by commentaries explaining their grammatical peculiarities as well as by selections of specific lexical items.

Public education plays a crucial role in crafting a nation's future. In the United States, education reform policy, particularly the reliance on large-scale, standardized testing, is a growing topic of national conversation and concern. An Illusion of Equity: The Legacy of Eugenics in Today's Education demonstrates how centuries of propaganda have led us to accept the idea that test scores indicate something so valuable about human beings that they should be used to organize society. Drawing on decades of experience as an educator, author Wendy Zagray Warren unpacks the origins of this practice, inviting us to probe the ideologies underlying testing procedures and score interpretation and to evaluate the rationale for using test scores as the sole markers for academic achievement. From the beginning, large-scale tests have produced scores divided by race and class. Initially, these results aligned with the eugenic ideology of its creators. Warren shows that while the rhetoric used to justify test-based policy has changed, the model used to produce test scores remains much the same. Therefore, so do the outcomes of test-based policies, which continue to reproduce and reinforce the existing social hierarchy of the United States. The hope of equity lies in educators charting new paths and scholars around the world who are dreaming new educational paradigms into being. Ultimately, Warren invites policymakers, educators, and parents to explore the richness of possibility when education is designed around the belief that every child is worthy of the opportunity to thrive.

What can the classification of languages tell us about human origins and human prehistory? This book presents a popular account of the origin of language. It is intended for an audience with no prior knowledge of comparative linguistics, genetics or archaeology. The present volume is a reprint of the 2009 second edition of the book, and includes the text of the first edition (1994) with minor modifications, as well as the scientific evidence for monogenesis, and a Postscript recounting developments in the field since the original publication of the book.

An English translation of a Latin work on the Syriac grammatical tradition ('Historia artis grammaticae apud Syros') by the 19th-century German theologian and linguist, Adalbert Merx.

This work argues that there are traces of Sufism to be found in British Romanticism. Most scholars of Romanticism have overlooked the impact of Sufism on Romanticism in favour of Christian and neo-Platonic Mysticism, but this work fills in this gap by showing the magnitude of the influence of Sufism on the Romantics without negating the influence of other -isms. What elements of Sufism attracted the attention of the Romantics? And why were the Romantics attracted more to Sufism and Sufi poets than to Christian Mysticism and Mystic poets?