This chapter provides definitions of academic freedom and its legal precedents, stemming from the First Amendment. The authors note the tension placed on the concept as it occupies a space between the purposes of democratic legitimation and the promotion of democratic competence. The strain on conceptualizations of academic freedom is exacerbated by a lack of legal clarity and the ambiguity of some of its key elements. Contemporary challenges, including the neoliberalization of the university and political attacks in the form of “divisive concepts” bills, will continue to test the discursive power of “academic freedom.”

Written during a crisis, this volume betrays an awareness that the field of ‘literature and medicine’ is at a crossroads. It anticipates the many directions that researchers can take, but also records the anxieties involved in not knowing what lies ahead. We take three steps in this Afterword, which may pave the way for future forays into this area. First, we sketch how the particular ‘medical’ event of the pandemic has transformed literature as medium, art form, and practice. By identifying the thematic and formal trends, we also signal the necessary methodological adjustments that we will have to take to assess these critically. Second, with a view to these changes and the necessary opening up of the field of medicine and literature that the pandemic has made visible, we draw attention to the thematic and formal trends that may be helpful in this endeavour. With a view to the volume chapters, we identify the possible directions that can be intensified in the future. Finally, under the heading ‘Medicine and Literature, quo vadis’, we indicate some of the ways in which, we strongly believe, scholars across Medical and Health Humanities, literature and medicine, and humanities in general, might be going.

Often misread by policy analysts who oppose stem cell research, H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau actually presents a balanced view of science, warning against unethical scientists but suggesting ways in which the creation of chimeras would be ethically acceptable. Wells’s novel articulates principles that foreshadow the conditions bioethicists today have proposed for research on human-non-human chimeras, research that could lead to advances in treating Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, organ transplants, and more. Wells’s relation to his mentor, Thomas Huxley, dramatizes the importance of reading literary works in historical perspective and sheds light on disciplinary specialization and the two-culture split.

Ethical self-formation and epistemic virtues have been a focus of attention in the history of science for over three decades, and yet, despite some important early contributions, anthropologists of science have only recently started to pay more sustained and explicit attention to the ethical. This chapter argues that anthropologists of science could benefit from taking a closer and more systematic look at recent developments in the anthropology of ethics. Conversely it suggests that anthropologists of ethics might gain from a closer consideration of some of the specificities of Euro-American science as an (internally and externally contested, multiple, and perhaps in part fictitious) ethical tradition. The first half of the chapter explores the rather fitful genealogy of an interest in the ethical in the history, sociology, and anthropology of science, and points to some of the elements from which the anthropology of science as an anthropology of ethics might be (re)built. The second half of the chapter gives one extended, ethnographically grounded example of what such a (re)building might produce, and suggests some of the ways in which anthropology’s exploration of both science and ethics might benefit.

This concluding chapter has three objectives: (1) to review the central threads of contemporary material culture research; (2) to assess material culture theoretical approaches and perspectives that offer greatest potential for future development of the field; and (3) to define material culture and the future of material culture studies in relation to the traditions of disciplinary practice.

This chapter introduces the handbook and outlines the volume’s organization, topics, themes, and intended audience. It clarifies the handbook’s goals of including both past and contemporary theory and practice as well as looking toward future trends in material culture studies. The authors discuss disciplinary contributions to material culture and provide the foundation for redefining the field’s relationship to disciplinarity. The guiding questions posed to contributing authors, what is material culture, and what are the implications of material culture scholarship, are presented. The chapter also introduces the geographic scope of the project, addressing and acknowledging differences and similarities that exist between the understanding of, framing of, and study of material culture in an international context.

In 1956, Philip C. Jessup, in Transnational Law, defined transnational law (TL) as “all law which regulates actions or events that transcend national frontiers. Both public and private international law are included, as are other rules which do not wholly fit into such standard categories.” The book, defining the object of study, crystalized over the next generation as a field of study, if not quite yet a methodology and not yet a discipline. Philip Jessup’s definition of TL was formulated within the horizon of a particular phase of disciplinary engagement, which has been broadly characterized as postwar “pragmatism,” though this category hides as much as it reveals.3 The current book arrives at a different moment, and if future intellectual historians take us at our word, they will characterize us with a similarly imprecise term: interdisciplinary. This epilogue will diverge in its task from what the essays above have done so ably: investigating TL as an account of regulatory actors, norms, and processes discoverable in the world. It will open a window instead upon TL as a project for producing knowledge.4 This means viewing the book through the lens of its purposes, motives, and habits in producing TL as a kind of knowledge. It also means recognizing that the particular image of TL captured in the present book is highly specific, implicitly opposed to other conceptions, and that is true even if representatives of every faction are present and accounted for.

The period since 1980, one of intense social change in Ireland, has witnessed manifold scholarly and intellectual breakthroughs, a weighty library of historiography, and a fluorescence of cultural criticism that has greatly enriched our understanding of Ireland and the Irish story. Yet despite its scholarly and intellectual achievements, there are besetting contradictions and conflicts in the field that we call ‘Irish studies’. Irish studies has a national focus, but an inextricably international institutional ecology. This essay charts the story of Irish studies alert to these contradictions. It examines how and where it developed as a scholarly field, how it responded to internal and external pressures, including the Troubles. It considers how Irish studies negotiated academic frames such as postcolonialism, feminism, and cultural theory and, relatedly, the lasting impact of revisionist-nationalist debates. It analyses how consensus and debate formed what Irish studies covered and, as importantly, what it did not. It concludes by considering the impact of the transnational turn on Irish studies in the twenty-first century.