Returning again. Resurrection narratives and afterlife aesthetics in contemporary television drama

This article examines the return of the dead to life in two television drama series of the last decade, Les Revenants (The Returned; 2012–15, Canal) and Glitch (2015–19, ABC Studios). The returning dead do not figure as classic undead figures, as ghosts or zombies, instead returning to life exactly as they were at the point of death and in search of a renewed purpose and an ultimate destiny. This, the article suggests, can constitute a form of latter-day resurrection. The article shows how both series present established religion as incapable of recognizing the return of the dead, while science and the secular state are also never wholly able to explain and manage these apparent miracles. The return of this seemingly religious trope to an ostensibly secular world and the mutual jostling and overlapping of theological, scientific, and aesthetic discourses, as they seek to represent and explain the mystery, not only constitutes a postsecular theme but also occasions the search, at times inherent to artistic form, at times explicit and self-reflexive, for an appropriately postsecular televisual aesthetics

Relation algebras with n-dimensional relational bases

Accepted versio

Strongly representable atom structures of relation algebras

Accepted versio

Relation algebras from cylindric algebras, I

Accepted versio

Transnational encounters in Algeria : para-colonial writing in the travelogues of German soldiers in colonial Algiers, 1830–1890

This essay analyses travel writing by German-speaking soldiers serving in the French military in nineteenth-century colonial Algiers. It suggests that their position – that of Europeans associated with and employed by the French colonial powers without necessarily being culturally or politically aligned with the colonial project – can be described as “para-colonial”. That perspective allowed soldiers writing in German both to participate in and endorse, though also to critique, the process of colonisation, albeit in ambivalent terms. The texts do not describe binary, German–Algerian relationships, but rather “triangular” intercultural encounters, whereby the soldiers’ shifting attitudes to the French influence their feelings and writing about local people and culture, and vice versa. Examining the representations of the “first encounter” each soldier has with the new continent, the triangular intercultural relationship, and the written treatment of urban and rural spaces, the discussion contrasts two travelogues produced in 1840 and 1881, respectively, considering how the absence and, later, the advent of a German colonial Empire left its mark on German writing about the colonisation of Algiers

Strongly representable atom structures of cylindric algebras

Published versio

Representability is not decidable for finite relation algebras

Published versio

Tangled closure algebras

The tangled closure of a collection of subsets of a topological space is the largest subset in which each member of the collection is dense. This operation models a logical ‘tangle modality’ connective, of significance in finite model theory. Here we study an abstract equational algebraic formulation of the operation which generalises the McKinsey-Tarski theory of closure algebras. We show that any dissectable tangled closure algebra, such as the algebra of subsets of any metric space without isolated points, contains copies of every finite tangled closure algebra. We then exhibit an example of a tangled closure algebra that cannot be embedded into any complete tangled closure algebra, so it has no MacNeille completion and no spatial representation

High levels of gene flow and genetic diversity in Irish populations of Salix caprea L. inferred from chloroplast and nuclear SSR markers

peer-reviewedBackground Salix caprea is a cold-tolerant pioneer species that is ecologically important in Europe and western and central Asia. However, little data is available on its population genetic structure and molecular ecology. We describe the levels of geographic population genetic structure in natural Irish populations of S. caprea and determine the extent of gene flow and sexual reproduction using both chloroplast and nuclear simple sequence repeats (SSRs). Results A total of 183 individuals from 21 semi-natural woodlands were collected and genotyped. Gene diversity across populations was high for the chloroplast SSRs (H T  = 0.21-0.58) and 79 different haplotypes were discovered, among them 48% were unique to a single individual. Genetic differentiation of populations was found to be between moderate and high (mean G ST  = 0.38). For the nuclear SSRs, G ST was low at 0.07 and observed heterozygosity across populations was high (H O  = 0.32-0.51); only 9.8% of the genotypes discovered were present in two or more individuals. For both types of markers, AMOVA showed that most of the variation was within populations. Minor geographic pattern was confirmed by a Bayesian clustering analysis. Gene flow via pollen was found to be approximately 7 times more important than via seeds. Conclusions The data are consistent with outbreeding and indicate that there are no significant barriers for gene flow within Ireland over large geographic distances. Both pollen-mediated and seed-mediated gene flow were found to be high, with some of the populations being more than 200 km apart from each other. These findings could simply be due to human intervention through seed trade or accidental transportation of both seeds and pollen. These results are of value to breeders wishing to exploit natural genetic variation and foresters having to choose planting material.Teagasc Walsh Fellowship Programm

Spatial logic of tangled closure operators and modal mu-calculus

There has been renewed interest in recent years in McKinsey and Tarski’s interpretation of modal logic in topological spaces and their proof that S4 is the logic of any separable dense-in-itself metric space. Here we extend this work to the modal mu-calculus and to a logic of tangled closure operators that was developed by Fernández-Duque after these two languages had been shown by Dawar and Otto to have the same expressive power over finite transitive Kripke models. We prove that this equivalence remains true over topological spaces. We extend the McKinsey–Tarski topological ‘dissection lemma’. We also take advantage of the fact (proved by us elsewhere) that various tangled closure logics with and without the universal modality ∀ have the finite model property in Kripke semantics. These results are used to construct a representation map (also called a d-p-morphism) from any dense-in-itself metric space X onto any finite connected locally connected serial transitive Kripke frame. This yields completeness theorems over X for a number of languages: (i) the modal mucalculus with the closure operator ; (ii) and the tangled closure operators (in fact can express ); (iii) , ∀; (iv) , ∀, ; (v) the derivative operator ; (vi) and the associated tangled closure operators ; (vii) , ∀; (viii) , ∀,. Soundness also holds, if: (a) for languages with ∀, X is connected; (b) for languages with , X validates the well-known axiom G1. For countable languages without ∀, we prove strong completeness. We also show that in the presence of ∀, strong completeness fails if X is compact and locally connecte