Dead ends and possibilities: potters - the work of Martin Lungley and Ashley Howard prompts Alison Britton to reconsider the role of the wheel in contemporary studio pottery

Article published in Ceramic Review 210 November/December 2004 p. 24-25 This article is an edited extract from the fully illustrated catalogue 'Full Circle' which was produced to accompany the touring exhibition of the same name during 2005

Towers of recollement and bases for diagram algebras: planar diagrams and a little beyond

The recollement approach to the representation theory of sequences of algebras is extended to pass basis information directly through the globalisation functor. The method is hence adapted to treat sequences that are not necessarily towers by inclusion, such as symplectic blob algebras (diagram algebra quotients of the type-\hati{C} Hecke algebras). By carefully reviewing the diagram algebra construction, we find a new set of functors interrelating module categories of ordinary blob algebras (diagram algebra quotients of the type-${B}$ Hecke algebras) at {\em different} values of the algebra parameters. We show that these functors generalise to determine the structure of symplectic blob algebras, and hence of certain two-boundary Temperley-Lieb algebras arising in Statistical Mechanics. We identify the diagram basis with a cellular basis for each symplectic blob algebra, and prove that these algebras are quasihereditary over a field for almost all parameter choices, and generically semisimple. (That is, we give bases for all cell and standard modules.)Comment: 61 page

Empowering Developing Countries to Lead the Aid Partnership

human development, aid, trade, security

Bloomsbury in Berlin: Vita Sackville-West’s 'Seducers in Ecuador' on the German literary marketplace

Vita Sackville-West, famed as Virginia Woolf’s muse, as a horticultural journalist and as the creator of Sissinghurst’s gardens, has hitherto been considered largely peripheral to Bloomsbury modernism. Yet during her lifetime, her works were translated energetically into German and she received widespread recognition in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, as a leading figure on the European interwar and post-war literary scene. This essay analyses how Sackville-West’s short story, Seducers in Ecuador (Hogarth Press, 1924), made its 1929 debut in Germany as ‘Verführer in Ecuador’ in the journal Die neue Rundschau [The New Review]. This offers an interesting case study not only of how a work could change its medium through translation – here from a free-standing novella to a short story in a literary journal – but also change its context through the new set of juxtapositions and cultural associations it acquired by being absorbed into German periodical culture. The function of small magazines in promoting new ideas or forms of art has been well researched in the context of British modernist writing: but little attention has been paid to the reception of translations of such work in European journals. Yet they often functioned as important promotional conduits and were influential in shaping how authors gained footholds in foreign markets. Given that Die neue Rundschau aligned Sackville-West’s prose alongside that of Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse, it explicitly positioned her within a European corpus of avant-garde literary production

Disk Growth in Bulge-Dominated Galaxies: Molecular Gas and Morphological Evolution

Substantial numbers of morphologically regular early-type (elliptical and lenticular) galaxies contain molecular gas, and the quantities of gas are probably sufficient to explain recent estimates of the current level of star formation activity. This gas can also be used as a tracer of the processes that drive the evolution of early-type galaxies. For example, in most cases the gas is forming dynamically cold stellar disks with sizes in the range of hundreds of pc to more than one kpc, although there is typically only 1% of the total stellar mass currently available to form young stars. The numbers are still small, but the molecular kinematics indicate that some of the gas probably originated from internal stellar mass loss while some was acquired from outside. Future studies will help to quantify the role of molecular gas (dissipational processes) in the formation of early-type galaxies and their evolution along the red sequence.Comment: 4 pages. To appear in the proceedings of IAU Symposium 245, "Formation and Evolution of Galaxy Bulges," M. Bureau, E. Athanassoula, and B. Barbuy, ed

Outward bound: women translators and scientific travel writing, 1780–1800

As the Enlightenment drew to a close, translation had gradually acquired an increasingly important role in the international circulation and transmission of scientific knowledge. Yet comparatively little attention has been paid to the translators responsible for making such accounts accessible in other languages, some of whom were women. In this article I explore how European women cast themselves as intellectually enquiring, knowledgeable and authoritative figures in their translations. Focusing specifically on the genre of scientific travel writing, I investigate the narrative strategies deployed by women translators to mark their involvement in the process of scientific knowledge-making. These strategies ranged from rhetorical near-invisibility, driven by women's modest marginalization of their own public engagement in science, to the active advertisement of themselves as intellectually curious consumers of scientific knowledge. A detailed study of Elizabeth Helme's translation of the French ornithologist Françoise le Vaillant's Voyage dans l'intérieur de l'Afrique [Voyage into the Interior of Africa] (1790) allows me to explore how her reworking of the original text for an Anglophone reading public enabled her to engage cautiously – or sometimes more openly – with questions regarding how scientific knowledge was constructed, for whom and with which aims in mind