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The overarching objective of this thesis outlines the preliminary rationale for the development of a comprehensive review of the sources that seek to understand disciplinarity, Africana Studies, and Africana intellectual histories. It is the conceptual overlay for an extended work that will eventually offer a (re)conceptualization of Africana Studies intellectual genealogies. / African American Studies

In this thesis I explore the attitudes, arguments, and actions of British political elites in connection with the development of human rights law in Europe and the UK. I do this by examining British input into five key episodes for the development of European supranational rights and their incorporation into domestic legal orders (namely the drafting of the European Convention on Human Rights 1950, the drafting of the European Social Charter 1961, the acceptance of individual petition in 1966, the failed 1970s Bill of Rights debate, the passing of the Human Rights Act 1998, and recent developments such as the UK ‘opt-out’ to the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, and the emergence of a new ‘British Bill of Rights’ debate). Casting light on British involvement in less examined periods in European rights development, I challenge existing, isolated, explanations for the more focal episodes (such as Simpson’s rational-choice post-colonial thesis for individual petition acceptance, and ideological accounts for New Labour’s post-1997 constitutional reform). Responding to the most recent literature in the area, central to my analysis is the question of how rights progress relates to inter-party conflict. By considering continuities and discontinuities in elite political discussion of rights I argue that while conflict is a significant underlying feature of every major episode of rights progress during the last sixty years, and is less evident in less progressive periods, other factors have had a greater influence over the form, timing, and extent of rights progress. Most significant amongst these is the constitutional ideological development of the Labour party and the critical connection between Labour’s elevation of the Convention within the UK constitutional space and revisionist shifts in party thinking.

In this thesis, I hope to demonstrate that what I call the magic contest tradition, that is the episodes of competitive wonder-working that appear in a wide variety of apocryphal and non-canonical Christian texts, made an important contribution to the development of Christian thought during the second to the fifth centuries CE. This contribution was to articulate ‘the way’ to be a Christian in a world which was not isolated from the secular, and not insulated from the reality of the Roman empire. First, I demonstrate that a tradition of texts which feature magic contests exists within the broader scope of non-canonical Christian literature (looking at this literature across communities, regions and time periods). Second, I identify what the major features of the traditions are, e.g. what form the narratives take, what the form for a magic contest is, and what the principles used to build the magic contests are, and how these principles feature in the texts. The principles I identify are power, authority, ritual, and conversion, as well as their use as historical exempla. Third, I discuss what the texts did in the context of the time period, and for the communities that produced and read them: in other words, how did the this tradition work? I show that they served multiple purposes: as tests of faith, religious truth and ways to proclaim such; as constructors and markers of group identity (and the perilous task of identifying the insiders and those who should be outsiders); as calls to unity within the overarching diversity of the times and places, and a unified front for the ‘battle’ against evil. I suggest that the texts present a model for how one could decide what the ‘true faith’ was and how one could practice it in the turbulent environment that early Christians faced both before and after Constantine.

This thesis looks at a number of Jakob Wassermann’s novels and the ways in which society is depicted in them. Seen as a whole, Wassermann’s oeuvre can therefore be understood as an attempt to portray (mostly) German society at different historical stages. The periods in question are Biedermeier Germany, the Wilhelmine era, the years of the Great War and finally the Weimar Republic, the depiction of all of which reveal Wassermann as a fierce critic of his time. In addition to this interest in society, this thesis will examine Wassermann’s concern with various outsider figures which complement his portrayals of society. The outsider figures Wassermann seems to be mostly interested in are the Jew, the woman, the child and the homosexual man. However, Wassermann is not just interested in these outsiders on their own but also draws extensive parallels between the various forms of exclusion they experience in a society dominated by the Gentile man or, as in the case of the child, by the adult. These parallels have proven to be revelatory and have led to new insights into Wassermann’s works. The dynamic of the outsider vs. society is, however, in many ways no longer applicable to those novels written during and after the Great War. Instead Wassermann now combines his interest in the figure of the outsider with an interest in the depiction of character. At the same time character becomes a mirror not only for the society Wassermann portrays in his writing but also for the society he lived in. This makes for an altogether more complex but also more intriguing structure of his later writing. This thesis will examine how all these different elements when combined offer new ways of looking at Wassermann’s writing.

Traditionally, Arthur Johnston has been judged proxime accessit to George Buchanan in the world of Scottish neo-Latin poetry, and particularly in the versification of the Book of Psalms. The thesis offers a counterpoint to that theme. More of his poetry came under scrutiny at the close of the nineteenth century, when an edition of his Parerga and Epigrammata of 1632, turned scholarly attention to his secular poems. This study examines the poems written between 1599 and 1622 during Johnston’s peregrenatio academica in Europe – poems which depict him at the moment of his emergence onto the public stage, and which offer insights into his life, and the worlds he occupied, during those years. Part one of the thesis will examine his early years and his move into the academic world in Aberdeen and at Heidelberg University. Part two will consider the years he passed as a teacher of philosophy at the Huguenot Academy in Sedan, the independent principality on the northern border of France. It will look, too, at the evidence of his year spent in Padua, where he studied to become a physician. Part three will focus on the years 1619-22 when his longest secular poems were composed. He wrote and published with an eye to achieving a post in the medical circle around James VI and I. The thesis concludes by considering the retreat he made from Europe and London to his home in Aberdeen, and looks briefly at one of the small poems he wrote in 1623-24. Throughout, themes emerge of Johnston’s irenic preferences, and his response to the disturbance to intellectual life brought about by Calvinist division, and by the crisis heralded by the Bohemian Revolt.

This thesis explores how burglars and burglary in London were understood in cultural, criminological, legal, political, and economic discourse during the period 1860-1939, demonstrating how the ideas about crime and the criminal circulating in these domains were mutually constitutive. Specifically, it identifies how characterisations of burglary in visual and written forms of media — encompassing legal and criminological documents, as well as those produced by the press and commercial advertising, and in fiction, theatre, and film — cultivated a range of attitudes towards the crime to a greater or lesser extent. Encompassing not only fear-mongering and sympathetic representations, but also those designed to be exciting, to challenge preconceptions, and to entertain, I argue that these conflicting attitudes towards burglary and burglars emerged in response to specific changes in the cultural landscape: the advent of mass literacy and corresponding interest in narratives of crime that reflected the social, cultural, and political concerns of an audience diverse of class, age, and gender; the commercial imperatives of the insurance and entertainment industries as the middle classes expanded, including the development of household insurance and the popularity of the ‘true crime’ genre; debates surrounding women’s increasing social and sexual agency and their alignment with particular crimes; and the evolution of new modes of policing and regulation. The thesis thereby uses the topic of burglary to illuminate a broader range of contemporary preoccupations and experiences with gender relations, class structures and stereotypes, and the moral authority of state and society. By approaching burglary as a focus of interactions not only between police, criminal, and victim, but also between the market, consumers, and the state, this thesis uncovers new terrain upon which crime intersected with everyday lives historically.

This paper compares two art museums, both created during the French Revolution, that fostered national unity by promoting a cultural identity. By analyzing the use of preexisting architecture from the ancien régime, innovative displays of art and redefinitions of the museum visitor as an Enlightened citizen, this thesis explores the application of eighteenth-century philosophy to the formation of two museums. The first is the Musée Central des Arts in the Louvre and the second is the Musée des Monuments Français, both housed in buildings taken over by the Revolutionary government and present the seized property of the royal family and Catholic Church. Created in a violent and unstable political climate, these museums were an effective means of presenting the First Republic as a guardian of national property and protector of French identity.