This article explores the complex professional and personal relationship between Edward Hume, an American missionary physician, and Fu-ch’ing Yen, a Chinese physician trained in the United States, during their work at the Yale University medical mission in Changsha, Hunan, from 1906 to 1926. The partnership between Hume and Yen exemplifies the collaboration and compromise required to sustain and develop a major medical institution in provincial China, highlighting broader tensions in early twentieth-century Sino-American medical education and professional identity. Their differing priorities led to a temporary rift over the purpose of their work at the Yale mission, reflecting deeper debates about professional identity, Sino-foreign cooperation, and the evolving dynamics of Western medicine in China. Drawing on correspondence, institutional records, and contemporary reports, this study situates their partnership within broader trends of professionalisation and the localisation of scientific medicine in Republican China. It argues that the negotiation of professional status was pivotal in shaping the trajectory of their collaboration and offers insights into the local, structural, and personal dimensions of Sino-foreign cooperation in medical work.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has reached memory studies in earnest. This partly reflects the hype around recent developments in generative AI (genAI), machine learning, and large language models (LLMs). But how can memory studies scholars handle this hype? Focusing on genAI applications, in particular so-called ‘chatbots’ (transformer-based instruction-tuned text generators), this commentary highlights five areas of critique that can help memory scholars to critically interrogate AI’s implications for their field. These are: (1) historical critiques that complicate AI’s common historical narrative and historicize genAI; (2) technical critiques that highlight how genAI applications are designed and function; (3) praxis critiques that centre on how people use genAI; (4) geopolitical critiques that recognize how international power dynamics shape the uneven global distribution of genAI and its consequences; and (5) environmental critiques that foreground genAI’s ecological impact. For each area, we highlight debates and themes that we argue should be central to the ongoing study of genAI and memory. We do this from an interdisciplinary perspective that combines our knowledge of digital sociology, media studies, literary and cultural studies, cognitive psychology, and communication and computer science. We conclude with a methodological provocation and by reflecting on our own role in the hype we are seeking to dispel.

Scores of young men and women were killed by regime forces during the Arab Spring in Egypt (2011–2013). Their photographs assumed iconic proportions, meandering online and off through countless acts of creative remediation. This essay examines the different kinds of social and political work that these photographs came to play during this period, including as indexes of the revolutionary cause and as mediators of revolutionary subjectivities at a distance. This essay departs from extant studies of visual cultures of secular martyrdom or funerary portraiture framed by notions of commemoration, and instead stresses contingent presence grounded in the specific liminal temporality of the revolutionary process. In this temporal limbo, photographs of martyrs often blurred conventional boundaries between representations and their referents. Established visual conventions of funerary portraiture were turned upside down, and portraits of martyrs were understood not as representations of the dead, but as alive and present, sometimes more alive than the dwindling group of dedicated revolutionaries.

This article surveys the life and work of Benjamin Clough (1791–1853), Wesleyan Methodist missionary to Ceylon, focusing on his contributions to the study of Pali and Buddhism. It attempts to show that he inaugurated the Western study of Pali and that he should be recognised as one of the most important early scholars of Buddhism.

In 1770, the Rohilla chief Ḥāfiz̤ Raḥmat Ḵẖān wrote a text called Ḵẖulāṣat ul-Ansāb, focusing on the genealogical and ancestral history of the Rohilla Afghans. This article analyses the text as a glimpse into the emotions he went through—such as anxiety, uncertainty, confidence, determination, and strength—as the ruler of a small principality founded by a new political group in the competitive political milieu of eighteenth-century South Asia. It studies the textual expression of these emotions he experienced during a period that brought both challenges and opportunities for the Rohilla Afghans. It firstly shows how the text served as a means of creating unity among the Rohilla Afghans by elaborating an origin story, adapting them to new circumstances, and legitimising the emerging Rohilla state. Secondly, it discusses how Ḥāfiz̤ Raḥmat aimed to rectify the negative portrayals of the Afghans by Mughal chroniclers and enhance Afghan prestige in northern India by creating a haloed genealogy. Finally, it explains how the text claimed religious legitimacy for the Rohilla Afghans by linking them to the prophets, Muslim invaders of the past, and local religious figures. Overall, this textual analysis contributes to the historiography of eighteenth-century South Asia by studying the political anxieties associated with Rohilla Afghan state formation.