RSA Hybridity in the Colonial Arts PPP for lecture

The Society for Early Modern Classical Reception (SEMCR) invites proposals for papers on the theme of the challenge and alterity of Early Modernity for the 2024 Renaissance Society of America annual meeting in Chicago, IL, March 21-23. Abstracts of no more than 150 words and a short CV, should be sent to [email protected] (see the RSA's abstract guidelines). The abstracts will be judged anonymously: please do not identify yourself in any way on the abstract page.

2010

The basic situation is that one party, A, say Albert, wants to send a message to another party, J, say Julia. However, there is a danger that some ill-intentioned third party, Machiavelli, may intercept the message and learn things that he is not supposed to know about and as a result, do evil things. The original message, understandable to all parties, is known as the plain text. To protect the content of the message, Albert encrypts his message. When Julia receives the encrypted message, she must decrypt it in order to be able to read it.

2021

Diverging from the trajectory of numerous studies that underline biased and distorted conceptions of India promoted in European literary sources, I wish to examine ways in which Indian cultural traditions and beliefs found substantial expression in visual arts that were ostensibly geared to reinforce colonial ideology. Following a brief overview, my focus will be on Indo-Portuguese polychrome woodcarvings executed by local artisans for churches in the areas of Goa and Kerala on the Malabar coast. The second part will relate to Portuguese religious strategies reflected in Goan churches, focusing on the destruction of Hindu temples and images and their replacement with Catholic equivalents.

in Numismatic Chronicle, 181, 2021, p. 575-579. , 2021

Deadline for submissions for papers: 1 June, 2015 (abstract 150 words, a one-page CV, and 5 descriptors)

Parliamentary History, 2008

The J. Paul Getty Museum has now become a major holder of stained glass. Recent acquisitions included fifteenth-century works from Erfurt and Nuremberg, large-scale windows of the French Renaissance, smallscale Swiss heraldic medallions, and Dutch roundels of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The panels from Germany, France, England, Switzerland, Austria, and the Lowlands show secular as well as religious themes, many connected to major artists such as Hans Baldung Grien. The session will consist of viewing the redesigned Medieval Treasury and Renaissance Kunstkammer galleries followed by a view of panels in storage. Panels will be examined from front and back surfaces during an in-depth discussion of technique, painting style, and authenticity under optimum conditions. This opportunity can only be extended to two groups of twenty participants, given the limits of space in the museum's storage areas.

Notices of the American Mathematical Society

The British Journal for the History of Science, 2008

but not for the discussion, in his Treatise on Algebra, of manipulating algebraic symbols without regard to their meaning. The ' modesty' championed by De Morgan was anticipated in France in 1821 by Cauchy, incidentally a conservative Catholic, who said mathematics should be confined to its proper domain, not used to address problems in history and ethics. Indeed, Cohen treats the increasing abstraction and professionalization of Continental mathematics in the nineteenth century with no reference to any philosophical and theological underpinnings, not even mentioning the theological background of Cantor's ideas about the actual infinite. As for the enlistment of mathematical methods to avoid sectarianism, in the eighteenth century the universal agreement geometry commanded had already made it a weapon, in the hands of men like Voltaire, to attack partisans in religious and philosophical disputes. There are some statements that seem to me to be errors. For example, I doubt that it was mathematical notation that Plato saw bridging the gap between the Forms and the physical world. John Dee's idea that mathematics involves the perfect demonstration of necessary conclusions cannot, as the author seems to imply, be the same as Peirce's 'mathematics is the science that draws necessary conclusions ' since Peirce, unlike Dee, was well aware that there are other consistent algebraic systems than generalized numbers (such as the noncommutative quaternions), and other geometries than the Euclidean. And Euclid's fifth postulate is not, as the author asserts, the statement that parallels are unique. Readers, then, should be cautious about the book's sweeping causal claims, and should check unfamiliar details. Nonetheless, Cohen has successfully situated the work of Peirce, Boole and De Morgan in social and religious context, making this book a valuable contribution to the literature on the mathematics of the English-speaking world in the nineteenth century.