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Contents and Introduction
Journal of the British Academy, Volume 14 Issue 1, Contents and Editors’ Introduction
Elizabeth Edwards*†
,
ejmedwards10@gmail.com
Hilary Graham‡
, Andrew Hadfield§
, Pablo Mukherjee¶
, Mike Savage♠
Abstract
The Editors introduce the first issue of Volume 14 of the Journal of the British Academy. This Introduction includes an overview of the content of the issue.
Keywords
social scienceshumanitiesartsinterdisciplinaryinnovativeinquiryContents
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Jack Copeland and William Lyons
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Hilary Graham and Pete Lampard
COMMENTARY
Katy Hayward
CONVERSATION
Patricia Hayes, in conversation with Elizabeth Edwards
CONVERSATION
India Rakusen, Ronald Hutton, Laura Kounine, and A.K. Blakemore
THE EXHIBITION SPACE
Dominic Davies, Kremena Dimitrova, and Reed Puc
Introduction
We are very pleased to deliver the first issue of 2026, the relaunched Journal of the British Academy’s third year. Yet again there is a wide range of material, in an equally wide range of formats, but all demonstrating the British Academy’s commitment to innovative and sustained research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. In a time of increasing stresses in the sector, they all, in their different ways, demonstrate the importance and relevance of research in those fields to the history and current experience of people.
The first research article, `Ryle's war: analysing the coded messages of Hitler's Abwehr', by Professor Jack Copeland and Professor William Lyons, exploring Gilbert Ryle’s wartime service is a significant contribution to the work of academics in the intelligence services. Ryle, the prominent philosopher and author of The Concept of Mind (Hutcheson, 1949), was an analytical thinker whose logical approach to his academic work enabled him to become a serious asset in the work of intercepting messages and code breaking. Ryle’s ability to stay calm, think rationally and work well with others further enabled him to have ‘a good war’. Ryle joined the Welsh Guards with his student, A.J. Ayer, through connections even though, as Ayer noted, neither was Welsh. Ryle worked to decipher messages from the German military espionage section, Abwehr, using the Enigma machine, in the unit headed by his colleague, Hugh Trevor-Roper (whose military career is far better known). The Radio Analysis Bureau intercepted traffic from Germany, Italy and Russia and Ryle played a vital role in intelligence relating to the conflict in North Africa, predicting enemy strategy and seeing whether disinformation had been absorbed or detected. He also took part in the interrogation of enemy officers and continued to work in intelligence after the war as the Cold War developed. The article, based on letters and diaries, as well as classified documents, shows how British military intelligence relied on academics for its success and, especially in the case of Ryle, how working for the military helped shape the careers of several major academics, including several FBAs.
The second research article looks forward in the current climate emergency: ‘Climate change, children and future generations’, by Professor Hilary Graham FBA and Dr Pete Lampard of the University of York. It hardly needs saying that climate change is probably the most fundamental challenge facing the world today. Yet the political will to address this challenge is stalling in the leaderships of many nations at the very moment that decisive action is needed. In this important article, which has policy implications, Graham and Lampard take aim at the short-termism that underwrites the lack of attention to climate change from political and corporate elites. They seek to tilt the focus of thinking toward a long-term perspective by drawing out the way that the United Nations—with its capacity to rise above the realpolitik of nation states—has invaluably endorsed the commitment to protecting future generations.
They then use data from the UK to show how a wide range of adults do indeed endorse future-focused and long-term perspectives that recognise the need to protect children and future generations. Graham and Lambert therefore ultimately present a hopeful account of an emerging ‘ethical axis’ linking the UN, as an overarching institution of global governance, with majoritarian popular values.
Also addressing contemporary and well-founded anxieties, is Professor Katy Hayward’s Commentary essay ‘Democracy and discernment: the public purpose of the University in a world of “AI everywhere”’, which originated from a British-Academy-funded conference of which Professor Hayward was co-convenor. Events of the past two decades seem to suggest that the ‘age of AI’ is likely to be an authoritarian one. Can democracy survive as a political form in our times? Might institutions like universities be able to preserve or strengthen democratic practices when they are under attack from major global powers? In her essay, Katy Hayward, from Queen’s University Belfast, revisits the arguments made more than a century ago by John Dewey and John Henry Newman regarding the obligation of universities to nurture civility, freedom and intelligence through an exercise of thoughtfulness. Decades of neoliberal restructuring have severely compromised the ability of universities to meet this obligation. And the handful of supersized AI companies that monopolise information technology today are working assiduously to weaken the universities further. However, Hayward argues that there remains a critical mass of dedicated teachers, inquisitive students and, crucially, flexible curricula to educate citizens in the art of rejecting the empire of AI.
This is followed by this issue’s first Conversation, ‘Photography and history: a view from Southern Africa’ is a conversation between Professor Patricia Hayes of the University of the Western Cape in Southern Africa and Professor Elizabeth Edwards FBA, both of whom have particular interests in the work of photographs in global histories. The Conversation ranges from the historiographical—what kinds of history are photographs?—to the ways in which the specific historical experience of the Southern Africa has given rise to a realisation of the potential of photographs as drivers for historical thinking and analysis: the way photographs, as Professor Hayes put it, ‘move history forward’. The Conversation considers major questions that resonate through the discourse and politics of global photographies—about the conditions of visibility, the problematics of Western photo-theory in relation to global photographies and non-Euro-American histories, of the language of photographic and historiographical analysis as viewed from the Global South and the inadequate language more generally with which to address photographs, a position which engenders methodological nervousness. It points in the direction of the new historiographical modalities that are emerging from these debates in the Global South.
This is followed by a group Conversation, ‘A conversation on witchcraft: history, religion, and persecution’, which has its origins in a lively and well-attended British Academy panel discussion event: ‘The History of Witches’. The conversation is an edited transcript of this event held on 23 April 2025. Chaired by the radio and TV presenter, India Rakusen, the panellists were Professor Ronald Hutton FBA, University of Bristol; Dr Laura Kounine, University of Sussex; and A.K. Blakemore, poet and novelist. The wide-ranging discussion, supplemented by some incisive questions from the audience, covered a number of issues relating to the history and culture of witchcraft. It was shown that witchcraft has a complicated and varied history, from its ancient origins when witches were represented as hostile outsiders who threatened community cohesion and shared belief as agents of the devil, to modern wicker beliefs that see witches as benign pagans connected to nature and eager to preserve the environment. The panellists discussed the impact of the Reformation in Europe which fuelled the fear of the heretic and established a culture of suspicion that targeted outsiders. Even so, the conversation confirms that in parts of Europe, such as the British Isles, defendants had a fair chance of being acquitted once they were accused of practising witchcraft and more trials than not ended with a ‘not guilty’ verdict. A.K. Blakemore discusses her novel, The Manningtree Witches (Granta, 2021), based on the experiences of the women accused of witchcraft by the ‘witchfinder general’, Matthew Hopkins (c.1620–c.1647). Hopkins’ career flourished during the English Civil War, and, as Blakemore suggests, he can be seen as a figure caught up in the hysteria of turbulent times when persecution of witches flourished. Witchcraft is a subject that needs to be considered in terms of the history of the emotions and the relationship between what people believed and what was true. It is at least arguable that everyone believed in witchcraft in one way or another, the accused as much as the accusers. Most accused witches were female, as is popularly believed, and older women, especially those in remote or contested areas, were particularly vulnerable. Yet it needs to be noted that large numbers of men were also accused of witchcraft, and in some areas of Europe with specific belief systems, more men than women. Witch crazes generated work that solidified the fear of witches notably in Albrecht Dürer’s famous image, Witch Riding Backwards on a Goat, and the extensive manual of witchcraft, Malleus Maleficarum, which does indeed cast the witch as a female figure and which paves the way for later images of the witch as a solitary crone with warts, cat and broomstick.
The issue is rounded off by a new type of article, The Exhibition Space. In this, it is intended to present research projects that have important visual or sonic components, representing the Academy’s commitment to the potential of practice-based research and expanding humanities and social science research beyond the textual alone. This is not confined to the work of artists but also looks at other visual and non-textual strategies to emerge out of projects. The first ‘exhibition’ is ‘Power grids: community energy and comics co-creation’ by Dr Dominic Davies, City St George’s, University of London, Dr Kremena Dimitrova and Dr Reed Puc. This series of photographs documents and presents project work on climate change and Net Zero which uses comics and their making as a conduit for community engagement. Comics, as an expressive form, have always carried a sense of the radical and subversive, ameliorated by humour and satire. Further the grid-like framing of cartoons works especially well with the concept of the power grid. The wider project explores the ways in which such embodied practices of drawing and making can become community actions for a collective good: in this case narratives of alternative and sustainable energy. It was funded by the British Academy’s Leverhulme Small Research Grant, of ‘Power Grids: Reimagining Energy Infrastructure in Comics’ (2024–2026), which enabled these workshops and the exhibition in the Academy’s Summer Showcase in 2025, which is the basis of this contribution.
As always, we thank our Editorial Board for their support, our impressive and insightful peer reviewers whose comments improve the quality of the articles, and our authors for their good humour in revising articles and submitting to deadlines. We remain indebted to the Publishing Department of the British Academy for their combined experience, knowledge and efficiency in producing the Journal. There have been some changes as the team step into restructured roles, but with their usual professionalism there has been minimal impact, pointing to a well-oiled and efficient machine that is the Journal. We are pleased to feel that as the Journal enters its third year in this form it remains vibrant, diverse and innovative.
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/014.a01
Published on: 30 March 2026
Volume: 14
Issue: Issue 1
Article view count: 24
Article download count: 0
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© The author(s) 2026. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Edwards, E., Graham, H., Hadfield, A., Mukherjee, P. & Savage, M. (2026), ‘Journal of the British Academy, Volume 14 Issue 1, Contents and Editors’ Introduction’, Journal of the British Academy, 14(1): a01 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/014.a01Crossref
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Received
October 2022
Accepted
May 2023
Published
July 2023
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