The brain stem center that controls the pupillary light reflex is activated by light. This center is called the Edinger-Westphal (EW) nucleus, and it has excitatory synaptic input from the pretectal nucleus. The EW nucleus also receives inhibitory input that depresses activity in those neurons and dilates the pupil. The inhibitory influences projecting to the EW nucleus are discussed in this chapter

This chapter considers politically oriented works by Jacques Stephen Alexis, Edris Saint-Amand, Anthony Lespès, and Jacques Roumain, all communist writer-activists who came of age during the US occupation and were committed to the twinned ideologies of anti-racism and anti-imperialism. Kaussen shows how their Indigenist writings make explicit the connection between literature, Marxism, and the so-called folk, advocating for the embrace of Haiti’s African cultural origins, as expressed through the traditions of the peasantry. Not only do these writers put forward meaningful and incisive critiques of the existing social order, Kaussen observes, but they also present a wide array of imagined alternatives. Her chapter emphasizes the idiosyncrasies of Haitian socialism, noting the points of both intersection and diversion from Franco-European political models.

This chapter investigates the crucial significance of Lucian for early modern Italian literature and culture. From the late fourteenth century, Lucian’s writings were employed by Italian humanists to learn Greek and contributed considerably towards sparking a remarkable interest in the ancient Greek-speaking world. From Italy, Lucian’s fame travelled to the rest of Europe. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Lucian’s fictional dialogues and paradoxical encomia deeply informed the oeuvre of many prominent writers, among them Leon Battista Alberti, Erasmus of Rotterdam, and Lodovico Ariosto. Moreover, this study aims to shed light on the variety of different roles played by Lucian within the Renaissance. By taking into account unexplored matters, such as the impact of vernacular translations, it is possible to distinguish between a ‘didactic-moral’, a ‘useful and delightful’, and a ‘heterodox-heretical’ understanding of Lucian in early modern Italy. On the one hand, such differentiation allows to finesse the connections between the reception of his oeuvre and the political, cultural, as well as religious transformations of that time (e.g. the printing revolution and the Counter-Reformation). On the other hand, it shows that some features of Lucian’s poetics – especially humour, satire, and parrhesia – acted throughout the Renaissance as frameworks that influenced the early modern comprehension of fundamental issues, such as literary imitation and fictionality.

The Introduction gives a brief account of Bartolus’s life, explains the world of medieval law in which he worked, and then explains the political context of the northern and central Italian city republics for which he worked, and whose problems he sought to analyse. It explains that tyranny was Bartolus’s main preoccupation, even in the two treatises ostensibly concerned with other questions. It then presents the main arguments of his three political treatises and Bartolus’s main political theory in his academic legal commentaries, and describes the later influence of these treatises in European political theory. The Introduction also argues that Bartolus conceived of these three treatises as one composite treatment of tyranny.

In The Prelude (1805/1850), Wordsworth reimagines time through the ritual calendar and festivals of revolutionary France. The Revolution’s rituals, moreover, complicate the common notion that Wordsworth retreats from politics into poetry. By way of ritual, Wordsworth enters what Walter Benjamin calls now-time or higher time, moments in which the past – via memory – becomes simultaneous with the present. Such now-times allow Wordsworth to juxtapose, on the one hand, his own past calling to a poetic vocation with, on the other hand, the Revolution’s founding vocation to bring liberty. In that juxtaposition, Wordsworth’s own faithfulness to his poetic calling tacitly critiques the Revolution’s infidelity to its origins. The higher time of ritual, then, mediates between Wordsworthian memory and revolutionary history. Wordsworth provides foundations for many Victorian liturgies. His sacralization of material reality, his resistance to the market’s dehumanizing rituals, his imbrication of memory and higher time – each of these undergoes further elaboration as the century unfolds.

On the night of September 28, 2014, Selina, an expectant young woman and a mother of two, was brutally murdered in front of her six-year-old son by four men, one of whom was later found to be her husband. While her neighbors discovered the deceased woman the next morning and informed the authorities of it immediately, her lifeless body remained on the crime scene for the next two days (Daily Ittefaq, 2014). Selina was a resident of India's Islampur enclave inside Bangladesh. Since she was an Indian enclave dweller, neither the crime scene nor Selina's body was under the official jurisdiction of the state of Bangladesh. Furthermore, the unique territorial oddities of the enclave prevented the Indian police from intervening, because the enclave was inside Bangladesh, another sovereign state, where the Indian police lacked authority. For the Indian police to have entered Bangladesh in an official capacity, they would have required complicated bureaucratic arrangements. Local residents and political figures pressed the Bangladesh police to consider it from a “humanitarian perspective.” Only then was Selina's body taken and preserved in a morgue in the Bangladeshi district of Lalmonirhat. After several meetings, concerned authorities across borders – that is, the Bangladeshi police, the Indian police, and the respective border security forces, the Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) and Border Security Force (BSF) of India – arranged for a team of Indian police to investigate the crime scene inside Bangladesh. Selina's body was taken to India for an autopsy. It took eighteen days for Selina's body to be handed back to her family and friends for her funeral.

Only a few years later, the situation for the residents of the enclaves was significantly transformed. In another former Indian enclave of Dasiar Chhara, located inside Kurigram district of Bangladesh, I met Nuruddin1 during my ethnographic fieldwork in 2017. Dasiar Chhara was then merged with regular Bangladeshi territories and was undergoing numerous state-making processes as part of a successful territorial swap between India and Bangladesh. I was taking a walk and having a casual chat with Nuruddin, a twenty-seven-year-old man, who was enthusiastically showing me how things had changed in Dasiar Chhara after it officially became part of Bangladesh.

As a result of French colonization, Haiti is a nation-state with a predominantly French-speaking written tradition. However, there is also a smaller body of Haitian texts written in Creole, dating back to the eighteenth century. Based on their linguistic and aesthetic characteristics, we can divide the corpus of Haitian Creole letters into two main chronological stages: the great period of emergence that stretches from colonial times to the middle of the twentieth century, and the period of emulation. The first period was dominated by texts of a mainly religious, administrative, and political nature. Written for the most part by high-ranking white settlers, these texts, using the local language, were intended for Creole-speaking slaves with a poor command of French. The second period, that of the autonomy of Creole letters or the beginnings of an authentic Creole literary tradition, began in the mid-twentieth century, in parallel with linguistic work to standardize the written code of the national language. This advance in the standardization of Creole led to a significant development of the language’s written code, particularly in the field of literature.

Chapter 2 surveys extant theories of the nation and outlines the main positions in the historiographical debate. It begins with the primordial theories first posited by German Romantics, before turning to the “dominant orthodoxy,” modernism. It remains widely accepted that the nation is a distinctly modern type of community, the product of the profound intellectual and structural changes Western Europe underwent from the eighteenth through twentieth centuries. The chapter draws attention to the role of the state in modernist theories to explain why nations are generally defined as sovereign political communities. Medieval historians for their part have contested the modern dating of the emergence of nations and provided plentiful evidence for the existence of national communities prior to the sixteenth century. Even so, many scholars adhere to a political conception of the nation. The chapter highlights a tendency among medievalists to gauge the presence and cohesion of medieval nations principally by their degree of political institutionalization and discusses the anachronism of previous approaches to nationhood, thus illustrating the historiographical relevance of the study.

This chapter explores issues for Islam in relation to religious themes arising from developments in artificial intelligence (AI), conceived both as a philosophical and scientific quest to understand human intelligence and as a technological enterprise to instrumentalise it for commercial or political purposes. The monotheistic teachings of Islam are outlined to identify themes in AI that relate to central questions in the Islamic context and to addresses nuances of Islamic belief that differentiate it from the other Abrahamic traditions in consideration of AI. This chapter draws together the existing sparse literature on the subject, including notable applications of AI in Islamic contexts, and draws attention to the role of the Muslim world as a channel and expositor of knowledge between the ancient and modern world in the pre-history of AI. The chapter provides foundations for future scholarship on Islam and AI and a resource for wider scholarship on the religious, societal and cultural significance of AI.