UCL Institute of Advanced Studies

Kevin Middlebrook, Professor of Latin American Politics at UCL Institute of the Americas, talks to BBC's Dan Damon about the rounds of NAFTA negotiations starting this week between Canada, Mexico and the United States.

We shall see how, in their calendrical monographs, the medieval Iberian Rabbis Abraham bar Ḥayya (untitled, 1123) and Isaac Israeli (Yesod Olam, 1310) contextualize and interpret ancient Rabbinic traditions in a scientific framework. (Image: Yesod ʻolam, Israeli, Isaac ben Joseph, 1484, MS. Huntington 299, Photo: Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford 2017)

The emergence of the early medieval calendar tradition is well-established: seventh-century Anglo-Saxon monks returned from Rome with a late antique Roman model, which was popularized, in a refined format, by the brilliance of Bede’s pen and the imperial visions of mighty Charlemagne. This lecture proposes alternative origins of early medieval calendars.

Examining the continuity of the ancient calendars of Cyprus, especially with regard to the month of Aphrodisios and its placement in springtime.

Various proposals of how the Arabian Calendar was before Islam are compared and evaluated including, the present Islamic calendar, Pre-Islamic intercalation, the algorithm of intercalation, the start of the year and when the system was abolished.

The name Hemerologia identifies a set of comparative calendar tables preserved in early medieval Greek manuscripts which comprise the Julian calendar and a number of local calendars of the provinces and cities of the eastern half of the Roman Empire. I present some preliminary results of my on-going research, which consists in a re-assessment of the information provided by the manuscripts by takin...

Rabbinic sources of all periods and times are deeply committed to a human-regulated luni-solar calendar, however small number of late tannaitic sources show a commitment to the 365-day year. I shall examine the background and the message of two statements on the matter and establish their relation with other rabbinic statements on the calendar.

It will be demonstrated that the data in the Aramaic calendrical scroll from Qumran, 4Q209, represents an ideal year in the 19-year cycle, known as the Metonic Cycle.

Sacha Stern introduces and sums up the results of a 5-year research project at UCL, funded by the European Research Council (ERC), on ‘Calendars in late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Standardization and Fixation’. The overarching question of the project: how Roman, Christian, Jewish, and Islamic calendars evolved, in late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, towards ever increasing standardization and...

In the Jewish year 5070 Isaac Israeli ben Joseph the Younger composed an extensive and highly scientific treatise on the Jewish calendar. The first of the five books of Yesod Olam is dedicated mainly to Euclidean geometry and spherical trigonometry. Presented here is a discussion of the mathematical materials and their direct or indirect relevance to the Jewish calendar and in particular, the non-...

Under the Saljuqid ruler Jalal al-Dawla Malik-Shah (died 1092 C.E.) a new calendar with the era 15 March 1079 was introduced. Up to this time, the old Persian calendar with a fixed year of 365 days was still in use, and the first regnal year of Yazdagird III (632 C.E.) served as its epoch. Explored here is the relationship of the two calendars, their use and their symbolic significance in the late...

The Chronology of al-Biruni is a classic Arabic book on calendars and chronology written in the year 1000 CE. Presented here are some results of work on a new edition and translation including an overview of its contents and an analysis of some of the sections that are either missing in the printed edition, or that have not been understood until now.

The Gregorian calendar reform of 1582 has its intellectual roots in the European Middle Ages, when the reckoning of time by means of calendrical cycles was a topic of central importance to education and learned culture. This talk will focus on several previously unknown source texts and the way they shed new light on the various factors that fostered or inhibited the calendar reform debate in the...

Brazilian prisons are characterised by extraordinarily high levels of imprisonment, overcrowding and understaffing. Explanations for Brazilian punitivism largely reflect those that have been associated with the global export of American penal policies. Brazil is far more than an exemplary case of contemporary global punitivism, however.

Using Buenos Aires as his case study, James Scorer traces the figure and practice of 'the commons' in Argentine cultural production to explore how communities are variously shaped and contested within urban imaginaries. Exploring a diverse set of works, including literature, film, and comics, and engaging with urban theory, political philosophy, and Latin American cultural studies, he paints a por...

As a result of the liberalising reforms of the 1990s and the commodity super-cycle that followed, Peru's business elites have accumulated very substantial political power which they have deployed through a number of mechanisms to maintain an effective control over the key workings of the state. At the same time, the country's once powerful left has been marginalised as a consequence of the economi...

Dr Ludmila Abilio (University of São Paulo) will examine 'uberisation' as a recent trend in Brazil and beyond it. These labour market trends have in fact been developing for decades, but are now visible and recognizable in a new pattern of precarisation, which will be referred to in this presentation as the uberisation of work.

Rooted in thousands of pages of Access to Information documents and dozens of interviews carried out throughout Latin America, Blood of Extraction examines the increasing presence of Canadian mining companies in Latin America and the environmental and human rights abuses that have resulted. By following the money, Gordon and Webber illustrate the myriad ways Canadian-based multinational corporatio...

Venezuela today is a country mired in turmoil. But thirty years ago the story was different. Back then Venezuela stood for many as an inclusive democracy in a region where dictatorship and civil war reigned. Enlightened leaders, strong parties, powerful unions – all spoke of a stable political system that for decades managed to ensure social peace. Or so it seemed.

From the 1760 conquest of New France to the early twentieth century, a loyalist seam can be found in French Canadian thought and writing. Leading clerics and laymen expressed a sincere devotion to the Crown, to British rule, and to British institutions. They believed that the British Conquest had been providential in nature; that it had been ordained by God and that it had proven to be a fortunate...

This paper discusses the many attempts of the United States to buy Cuba from Spain throughout the nineteenth century. Although all the bids ended in failure, each one came at a particular moment of change or crisis, and was set in a much wider global context. The bids in 1853 and 1898 were particularly crucial, coming before and after the abolition of slavery in both places, and this paper will fo...

Is greater political representation for women associated with better health outcomes? Previous research has linked women's legislative representation to greater public health care spending, more widespread use of basic health care services, and better health status. This event is co-organised by Kings College London Department of International Development and University College London Institute of...

This talk provides novel micro-level evidence of the relationship between two central aspects of state capacity, taxation and the provision of law and order. Drawing on an original nationally-representative survey conducted in the context of Mexico’s war on drugs, we estimate through a novel technique the size of the fiscal sacrifice citizens are willing to make to improve public safety, and inves...

This talk will explain the political dynamics and conflicts underpinning the contradictory evolution of left-wing governments and social movements in Latin America in the last two decades. Throughout the 2000s, Latin America transformed itself into the leading edge of anti-neoliberal resistance in the world. What is left of the Pink Tide today? What are the governments’ relationships to the explos...

This event unveils the results of a poll of 71 UK scholars specializing in American history and US politics. The survey rated the performance of American presidents from George Washington to Barack Obama in five categories: vision/agenda setting; domestic leadership; foreign policy leadership; moral authority; and the positive historical significance of their legacy.