Current Articles

In this ‘Conversation’ piece, Professors Patricia Hayes and Elizabeth Edwards discuss the relationship between photography and history as it manifests itself through the photographic legacies of Southern Africa. 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 ‘move history forward’. The Conversation addresses major questions that resonate through the discourse and politics of global photographies—about the conditions of visibility, the problematics of Western photo-theory and of the language of photographic and historiographical analysis as viewed from the Global South.

This online exhibition of photographs and artworks provides documentation of ‘Power Grids: Reimagining Energy Infrastructure in Comics’ (2024–2026). The project is funded by the BA/Leverhulme Small Research grant scheme and the images included here were exhibited at the British Academy’s Summer Showcase in June 2025. The project brings together two discrete yet growing social movements: community energy and comics-based research. It uses comics co-creation workshops to conduct research into the way communities across England are organising to produce sustainable energy and in that way to lower fuel costs, catalyse the green transition and combat the climate crisis, and build place-making cultures of empowerment and belonging.

We are entering an era of ‘AI everywhere’, in which Artificial Intelligence is not merely being utilised but integrated into countless aspects of human interaction and occupation. Such is the nature of this integration that AI is not only changing our behaviour but our capabilities. It is also exposing new societal vulnerabilities—particularly in our use of language and the way we access, accumulate, and process information. Communication and information are all-important for the exercise of power, including political power. To hold such power to account, it is imperative that human intelligence remains distinctive and discerning. The inculcation of neoliberalism and endemic thoughtlessness has compromised the capacity of the contemporary University to meet this challenge. This article argues that the need for the University to foster the freedom of human intelligence is not only a moral obligation but an urgent democratic necessity.

Climate change is driven by the fossil fuel consumption of past and current generations. Its effects will disproportionately fall on today’s children and those yet to be born (‘future generations’). We chart the historical contribution of high-income countries, including the UK, to their climate futures before exploring the intergenerational orientations of two key actors in climate politics: the United Nations (UN), the collective voice of sovereign states, and adults with the right to vote in these states. Taking UK adults as our example, we suggest that adults share the UN’s commitment to protecting children and future generations from accelerating climate change. We conclude by noting the importance of this ethical alignment at a time of polarised debates about climate change and the increasing fragility of global institutions like the UN.

This conversation considers the definition of witchcraft, its origins, history, and various manifestations of witches in history and literature. The speakers discuss the issue of the gender of witches, and how thinking about witches and witchcraft has changed over time. Witches are a global phenomenon, but the conversation concentrates on their European history. Emphasis is placed on the impact of the Reformation and the religious nature of many of the waves of witch persecution, including those of the English ‘witch-finder general’. Matthew Hopkins, the subject of a recent novel by A.K. Blakemore. The discussion shows how witchcraft was often thought of as a Satanic conspiracy, and that the widespread nature of persecution was possible because so many people, including those labelled as witches, shared this assumption. The history of witch persecution is discussed in terms of judicial processes and the history of the emotions.

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.

Biographical articles on Gilbert Ryle—one of the 20th century’s greatest philosophers, remembered especially for his iconoclastic contributions to the philosophy of mind—tend to pass over his wartime years in silence, content with the meagre phrase ‘seconded to intelligence’. Yet those dark years were an important time in Ryle’s life and philosophical development. The investigation presented in this article extends from the time of his last philosophical publication before joining the army, in 1940, through to 1946, when his intelligence work continued alongside his Waynflete Professorship of Metaphysics. Ryle spent much of the Second World War spying on the enemy through a lens of broken German radio messages, including messages enciphered by the famous Enigma machine. He moved in the same shadowy ultra-secret milieu as some other notable academics, including Alan Turing, Gordon Welchman, J.L. Austin, Stuart Hampshire, and—on the other side of the Atlantic—W.V.O. Quine. Together with Hampshire, Ryle belonged to a small group of analysts described from on high in the British Secret Intelligence Service as ‘a team of a brilliance unparalleled anywhere in the Intelligence machine’. Ryle’s unit, the Radio Analysis Bureau (renamed later in the war as the Radio Intelligence Service) was part of the Radio Security Service (RSS), an organisation closely linked to Britain’s military codebreaking headquarters at the now famous Bletchley Park. Ryle’s principal work was analysis of the rich streams of intelligence traffic known as ISOS and ISK. Our account of Ryle’s war is based on letters, diaries, unpublished memoirs and, above all, top-secret documents by Ryle himself that remained classified until long after his death.