Global responses of terrestrial productivity to contemporary climatic oscillations

The terrestrial biosphere is subjected to a wide range of natural climatic oscillations. Best known is the El Niño–southern oscillation (ENSO) that exerts globally extensive impacts on crops and natural vegetation. A 50-year time series of ENSO events has been analysed to determine those geographical areas that are reliably impacted by ENSO events. Most areas are impacted by changes in precipitation; however, the Pacific Northwest is warmed by El Niño events. Vegetation gross primary production (GPP) has been simulated for these areas, and tests well against independent satellite observations of the normalized difference vegetation index. Analyses of selected geographical areas indicate that changes in GPP often lead to significant changes in ecosystem structure and dynamics. The Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO) is another climatic oscillation that originates from the Pacific and exerts global impacts that are rather similar to ENSO events. However, the longer period of the PDO provided two phases in the time series with a cool phase from 1951 to 1976 and a warm phase from 1977 to 2002. It was notable that the cool phase of the PDO acted additively with cool ENSO phases to exacerbate drought in the earlier period for the southwest USA. By contrast in India, the cool phase of the PDO appears to reduce the negative impacts of warm ENSO events on crop production.

Pagan epic in contemporary British poetry: Hughes and Logue, Ovid and Homer

In 'Tales from Ovid' and 'War Music' respectively, Ted Hughes and Christopher Logue turned to classical epic as source material and a model for contemporary poetry. In this essay I consider the different ways in which they work with the original epic poems and how they rework them both textually and generically. In the process, I suggest, Hughes gives his readers an Ovid modeled on his own, vatic conception of Homer, while Logue reworks Homer in a manner that is essentially Ovidian.

Playing with history: negotiating subjectivity in contemporary lens based work

Contemporary artists exploring Jewish identity in the UK are caught between two exclusions, broadly speaking: an art community that that sees itself as ‘post –identity’ and a ‘black’ art scene that revolves around the organizations that emerged out of the Identity debates of the 1980s and 1990s, namely Iniva, Third Text, Autograph. These organizations and those debates, don’t usually include Jewish identity within their remit as Jewish artists are considered to be well represented in the British art scene and, in any case, white. Out of these assumptions, questions arise in relation to the position of Jews in Britain and what is at stake for an artist in exploring Jewish Identity in their work. There is considerable scholarship, relatively speaking on art and Jewish Identity in the US (such as Lisa Bloom; Norman Kleeblatt; Catherine Sousslouf), which inform the debates on visual culture and Jews. In this chapter, I will be drawing out some of the distinctions between the US and the UK debates within my analysis, building on my own writing over the last ten years as well as the work of Juliet Steyn, Jon Stratton and Griselda Pollock. In short, this chapter aims to explore the problematic of what Jewish Identity can offer the viewer as art; what place such art inhabits within a wider artistic context and how, if at all, it is received. There is a predominance of lens based work that explores Identity arising out of the provenance of feminist practices and the politics of documentary that will be important in the framing of the work. I do not aim to consider what constitutes a Jewish artist, that has been done elsewhere and is an inadequate and somewhat spurious conversation . I will also not be focusing on artists whose intention is to celebrate an unproblematised Jewishness (however that is constituted in any given work). Recent artworks and scholarship has in any case rendered the trumpeting of attachment to any singular identity anachronistic at best. I will focus on artists working in the UK who incorporate questions of Jewishness into a larger visual enquiry that build on Judith Butler’s notion of identity as process or performative as well as the more recent debates and artwork that consider the intersectionality of identifications that co-constitute provisional identities (Jones, Modood, Sara Ahmed, Braidotti/Nikki S Lee, Glenn Ligon). The case studies to think through these questions of identity, will be artworks by Susan Hiller, Doug Fishbone and Suzanne Triester. In thinking through works by these artists, I will also serve to contextualise them, situating them briefly within the history of the landmark exhibition in the UK, Rubies and Rebels and the work of Ruth Novaczek, Lily Markewitz, Oreet Ashery and myself.

Contemporary women playwrights

A co-edited selection of extracts from plays by contemporary Irish women playwrights, with Introduction by Anna McMullan and Caroline Williams.

Performing performers: embodiment and intertextuality in the contemporary biopic

The actor’s body is of critical importance to the biopic’s representation of ‘real’ lives, to issues of physical and gestural resemblance, and in its role as the dramatic vehicle; acting out significant moments, embodying transformations. Through detailed examination of Beyond the Sea (2004), De-Lovely (2004), Molière (2007), films which foreground the construction, and constructedness, of life through performance and spectacle, this chapter explores the self-reflexive and intertexual embodiment of life stories. It focuses on the material details of performance in relation to distinctly contemporary strategies of film style and tone, and how these connect to questions of expectation and agency.

Hollywood in the world market – evidence from Australia in the mid-1930s

By the mid-1930s the major Hollywood studios had developed extensive networks of distribution subsidiaries across five continents. This article focuses on the operation of American film distributors in Australia – one of Hollywood's largest foreign markets. Drawing on two unique primary datasets, the article compares and investigates film distribution in Sydney's first-run and suburban-run markets. It finds that the subsidiaries of US film companies faced a greater liability of foreignness in the city centre market than in the suburban one. Our data support the argument that film audiences in local or suburban cinema markets were more receptive to Hollywood entertainment than those in metropolitan centres.

Contemporary ordinary language philosophy

There is a widespread assumption that ordinary language philosophy was killed off sometime in the 1960s or 70s by a combination of Gricean pragmatics and the rapid development of systematic semantic theory. Contrary to that widespread assumption, however, contemporary versions of ordinary language philosophy are alive and flourishing, but going by various aliases—in particular (some versions of) "contextualism" and (some versions of) "experimental philosophy". And a growing group of contemporary philosophers are explicitly embracing the methods as well as the title of ordinary language philosophy and arguing that it has been unfairly maligned and was never decisively refuted. In this overview, I will outline the main projects and arguments employed by contemporary ordinary language philosophers, and make the case that updated versions of the arguments made by ordinary language philosophers in the middle of the twentieth century are attracting renewed attention.

The lake-dwellings in Holderness, East Yorkshire, revisited: a journey into antiquarian and contemporary wetland archaeology

The story presented in this paper began in the 1880s with the discovery of five unusual wet sites in the low-lying region of Holderness, East Yorkshire, during drainage works: West Furze, Round Hill, Barmston Drain, Gransmoor and Kelk (fig 1). The changing interpretation of the significance of these wet sites, from contemporary local accounts to their 'expert' publication early in the twentieth century (Smith 791I), contributed to the tale of the Holderness lake-dwellings, echoing the then already famous lake-dwellings of the Alpine region and elsewhere in Europe (Keller 1878). The tale of the Holderness lake-dwellings survived more recent work intact, as excavators approached the sites without challenging the preconception of these being genuine lake settlements (eg Varley 1968).

Samuel Beckett, the Gate Theatre Dublin, and the contemporary Irish independent theater sector: fragments of performance history

From 1991, when the Dublin Gate Theatre launched their Samuel Beckett Festival featuring nineteen of Beckett’s stage plays, to more recent years, the Gate dominated Irish productions of Beckett’s theater. The Gate Beckett Festival was remounted in 1996 at the Lincoln Center, New York, and at the Barbican Centre, London, in 1999, and individual or grouped productions have toured regularly since then in Ireland and internationally. However, since the Irish premiere of Waiting of Godot at the Pike Theatre in 1955, in addition to several Beckett plays mounted by the National Theatre, many independent Irish theater companies, such as Focus Theatre, Druid Theatre, and more recently Pan Pan Theatre, Blue Raincoat Theatre, The Corn Exchange, and Company SJ (under director Sarah Jane Scaife), have produced Beckett’s drama. While acknowledging earlier Irish productions, this essay will consider the role of the Dublin Gate Beckett Festival and the Beckett Centenary celebrations in Dublin in 2006 in greatly enhancing the marketability of Beckett’s work, and will discuss the proliferation of productions of Beckett’s stage plays (as opposed to stage adaptations of the prose work, which is a topic for another essay) in the independent theater sector in the Republic of Ireland since 2006. In addition to giving an overview of these recent productions, the essay will consider some issues at stake in creating or constructing performance histories