In his new book, Professor Frédéric Ramel invites us to change the way we look at international relations. He identifies benevolence as a neglected concept in International Relations and International Political Theory. He defines it as a moral principle which promotes attention to vulnerability, as well as temperance, kindness, sensibility, and friendship.

This symposium explores new approaches to Japanese culture, society, and literature by examining Tohoku (northeastern) Japan in a global context. Often seen as a remote and conservative countryside, Tohoku has, in fact, been a site of transnational exchange for centuries, with its people actively shaping and

Edo-period Japan was a golden age for commercial fiction. But how to understand the politics of this literature remains contested, in part because many of its defining characteristics—formulaicness, reuse of narratives, stock characters, linguistic play, and heavy allusion to literary canon—can seem to hold social and political realities at arm’s length. Writing Violence: The Politics of Form in Early Modern Japanese Literature offers a new approach to understanding the relationship between the challenging formal features of early modern fiction and the world beyond its pages.