What's in a Chinese Room? 20th Century Chinoiserie, Modernity and Femininity

The first three decades of the twentieth century saw a resurgence in chinoiserie in the West. This chapter uses primary sources to provide an original exploration of the ways in which 'Chinese' styles of interior design, furniture and fashion were used in Britain to communicate modern feminine identities. Marked out as an indulgent, fanciful, and hence feminine and irrational style choice, early 20th century British chinoiserie drew heavily on its previous incarnations, such as 18th century wallpapers and Chippendale chinoiserie chairs, and yet fitted well with the colour and exoticism of modern art and design. Both old and new, elite yet commonplace, the fantastical but reassuringly familiar nature of 'Chinese' design made chinoiserie a potent vehicle for the expression of modern British femininities. The chapter forms the culmination of an edited collection produced as the catalogue for the exhibition 'Chinese Whispers: Chinoiserie in Britain 1650-1930', Brighton Museum and the Royal Pavilion, 3 May- 2 November 2008, of which Sarah Cheang curated the 20th century section. The exhibition received extensive and highly positive national press coverage and was awarded Best Temporary Exhibition at the Museum and Heritage Awards 2009. The catalogue was praised as ‘insightful’ and the ‘What’s in a Chinese Room’ essay was singled out as ‘excellent’ (Burlington Magazine October 2008) and widely quoted. The production of the catalogue was supported by a Paul Mellon grant

A Modern View on Merton's Jump-Diffusion Model

Merton has provided a formula for the price of a European call option on a single stock where the stock price process contains a continuous Poisson jump component, in addition to a continuous log-normally distributed component. In Merton's analysis, the jump-risk is not priced. Thus the distribution of the jump-arrivals and the jump-sizes do not change under the change of measure. We go onto introduce a Radon-Nikodym derivative process that induces the change of measure from the market measure to an equivalent martingale measure. The choice of parameters in the Radon-Nikodym derivative allows us to price the option under different financial-economic scenarios. We introduce a hedging argument that eliminates the jump-risk in some sort of averaged sense, and derive an integro-partial differential equation of the option price that is related to the one obtained by Merton.financial derivatives; compound Poisson processes; equivalent martingale measure; hedging portfolio

Hedge Portfolios in Markets with Price Discontinuities

We consider a market consisting of multiple assets under jump-diffusion dynamics with European style options written on these assets. It is well-known that such markets are incomplete in the Harrison and Pliska sense. We derive a pricing relation by adopting a Radon-Nikodym derivative based on the exponential martingale of a correlated Brownian motion process and a multivariate compound Poisson process. The parameters in the Radon-Nikodym derivative define a family of equivalent martingale measures in the model, and we derive the corresponding integro-partial differential equation for the option price. We also derive the pricing relation by setting up a hedge portfolio containing an appropriate number of options to "complete" the market. The market prices of jump-risks are priced in the hedge portfolio and we relate these to the choice of the parameters in the Radon-Nikodym derivative used in the alternative derivation of the integro-partial differential equation.incomplete markets; equivalent martingale measure; compound Poisson processes; Radon-Nikodym derivative; multi-asset options; integro-partial differential equation

An Analysis of American Options under Heston Stochastic Volatility and Jump-Diffusion Dynamics

This paper considers the problem of pricing American options when the dynamics of the underlying are driven by both stochastic volatility following a square root process as used by Heston (1993), and by a Poisson jump process as introduced by Merton (1976). Probability arguments are invoked to find a representation of the solution in terms of expectations over the joint distribution of the underlying process. A combination of Fourier transform in the log stock price and Laplace transform in the volatility is then applied to find the transition probability density function of the underlying process. It turns out that the price is given by an integral dependent upon the early exercise surface, for which a corresponding integral equation is obtained. The solution generalises in an intuitive way the structure of the solution to the corresponding European option pricing problem in the case of a call option and constant interest rates obtained by Scott (1997).American options; stochastic volatility; jump-diffusion processes; Volterra integral equations; free boundary problem; method of lines

Exchange Options Under Jump-Diffusion Dynamics

Margrabe provides a pricing formula for an exchange option where the distributions of both stock prices are log-normal with correlated Wiener components. Merton has provided a formula for the price of a European call option on a single stock where the stock price process contains a continuous Poisson jump component, in addition to a continuous log-normally distributed component. We use Merton’s analysis to extend Margrabe’s results to the case of exchange options where both stock price processes also contain compound Poisson jump components. A Radon-Nikod´ym derivative process that induces the change of measure from the market measure to an equivalent martingale measure is introduced. The choice of parameters in the Radon-Nikod´ym derivative allows us to price the option under different financial-economic scenarios. We also consider American style exchange options and provide a probabilistic intepretation of the early exercise premium.American options; exchange options; compound Poisson processes; equivalent martingale measure

Cornrow Culture

If hairdressing is the simultaneous cultivation of hair, self and society, then cornrows are a bumper crop. This article was commissioned by MacGuffin magazine for a special issue on 'rope' to explore some social and personal meanings of the cornrow hairstyle in contemporary fashion

Ethnicity

This chapter explores ethnicity and fashion in the nineteenth century for the new multivolume collection on the cultural history of fashion. The chapter is a significant contribution to an area that is very under-researched. By focussing on the key themes of slavery and freedom, colonialism and postcolonialism, industrialisation and indigenous craft traditions, the chapter gives an overview of the essential debates within dress history and fashion studies as they relate to issues of race. It argues for a less Eurocentric and more multidirectional understanding of the globalisation of fashion, and propose that the most crucial factors were the cultural and political mechanisms that mediated fashion exchanges across cultural boundaries

‘“Our Missionary Wembley”: China, Local Community and The British Missionary Empire, 1901-1924.’

Western overseas missionaries have been significant conduits of knowledge about non-Western cultures. British Christian missions in China in the late nineteenth and early-twentieth century created a wealth of written and photographic sources on Chinese society. They also sent a range of Chinese material culture to Britain in order to educate and engage British congregations and thus raise money and support for the missions. This article develops debates in the history working and middle class global networks and British education history, in an exploration of missionary education and fund raising. Through cross-cultural exchanges of material goods, through the exhibiting of Chinese things and even people in Britain, and through the promotion of named individuals and institutions in China, local communities in Britain and China became intertwined. Close examination of a wealth of detail held in UK missionary archives and parish records reveals how local parish boundaries were stretched to the provinces of China, and China was condensed within the missionary empire and read through a web of British cultural values and a myriad of local allegiances. The publication of this journal was delayed until November 2008, hence its inclusion in the 2008-2013 publication period

Synchronisation phenomena with time delay

I study a simple model of synchronisation proposed by Jensen (2008). The relevant degrees of freedom are expected to be strictly increasing functions of time, such as the total angle swept out by an oscillator. The model is rooted in Winfree’s mean-field model for spontaneous synchronisation; some of Winfree’s basic assumptions, such as identical or nearly identical dynamics and identical couplings, are therefore retained. I investigated the behaviour of the present model with respect to synchronisation without and in the presence of time delay. The mathematical treatment focuses on characterising the synchronised state as either at- tractive or repulsive, producing a theory (which ultimately leads to a phase diagram) that compares well with numerics. I employed a perturbative approach, linearising in small time delays and small phase differences. The interaction between individual oscillators is captured by an interaction matrix, which does not require further approximation, i.e. lattice structure enters exactly. To link with established results in the literature, a mean field theory, however, is also studied. The main result is that these typically systems synchronise due to a time delay.Open Acces