This is the first book-length study of the history of gerontology. It shows how old age became a 'problem' worth investigating and how a mulitidisciplinary orientation took shape.

Crossing Frontiers is an autobiography. It starts with a short historical background of the author’s home country, Germany, as it refers to his story. Growing up during the depression and under Hitler’s National Socialists, he saw the Third Reich rise and fall. He relates interesting and humorous events from his school time, his training in the Hitler youth, labor force and military. In riveting details, he describes his war experiences, his return to his home in search of his mother. He points out the dangers he encountered living under Russian and Polish rule and later being expelled. He describes the situation in Germany after the war, illustrating it from his experience in refugee camps in East Germany, and his escape to West Germany. He compares university life in Germany, where he studied for his degree in architecture and the USA where he studied on a scholarship for a year. He narrates his adventures, hitchhiking through the United States, masterfully. His story ends with his decision to immigrate to Canada.

For over a quarter of a century, the author has ventured systematically into the emerging field of international political economy, an area traditionally dominated by political scientists. Crossing Frontiers - the title refers both to national and disciplinary boundaries - brings together for the first time a dozen of his essays. These essays exhibit a pragmatism, a preference for practical applications over abstract theory, and a willingness to face the complexity of the real world rather than adopt simplifying assumptions.

This volume brings together two very popular and active research fields: Swiss Studies and Intercultural Studies. It includes contributions on the movement of ideas, literatures, and individuals from one culture to another or one language to another, and the ways in which they have been either assimilated or questioned. All of the writers explore this general theme; some come from a literary angle, some look at linguistic inventiveness and translation, whilst others study the problems faced when crossing geographical and cultural borders or presenting ideas which do not `travel¿ well. By emphasising the connections, borrowings and mutual influences between Switzerland and other countries such as Germany, Hungary, France, the UK, and the Americas, the articles reaffirm the importance for Switzerland of intellectual openness and cultural exchange. Barbara Burns is Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Glasgow. She has published books and articles on a number of nineteenth-century German writers including Theodor Storm, Detlev von Liliencron, Louise von François and Adolf Müllner, and also has an interest in Swiss Studies, in particular the work of Eveline Hasler on which she has recently been publishing. She is Germanic Editor of the MHRA journal The Year¿s Work in Modern Language Studies. Joy Charnley has co-edited eight volumes of essays on Swiss literatures and history with Malcolm Pender and in 1996 they co-founded the Centre for Swiss Cultural Studies in Glasgow. She has written books and articles on French-speaking Swiss authors such as Yvette Z¿Graggen, Alice Rivaz, Anne-Lise Grobéty, Anne Cuneo, Janine Massard and Amélie Plume.

"Aspect is widely present in most Quechuan languages, but it has been summarily treated or even overlooked in most of the existing descriptive grammars. This book changes that situation completely. It contains detailed discussions of the semantics and the use of aspect in its relation to tense, modality, evidentiality, etc., and opens up a wealth of unexpected data. ...The historical chapters are a most welcome addition to the grammatical analysis because they are highly relevant for our understanding of the development of aspect in other Quechuan languages and in the Quechuan family as a whole." - Willem Adelaar, Leiden University "This book addresses what is perhaps the most challenging area in the study of Quechuan languages: the scores of suffixes that occur between the verb root and person-marking inflection. It not only sheds light on one of these languages, South Conchucos Quechua, but it shows us new ways to investigate such complexities. This book will stand as a landmark in the study of Quechua." - David Weber, SIL International

Der Band untersucht das Genre erstmals eingehend in seinen komplexen und vielschichtigen interkulturellen Auffächerungen, die sich in nationalspezifischen Western-Variationen finden. Er eröffnet interessante Perspektiven auf diesen film- und kulturgeschichtlich kaum erschlossenen Bereich. Ein Schwerpunkt gilt den verschiedenen nationalen Western-Varianten in Osteuropa. Beiträge von Spezialisten aus Polen, Tschechien und Russland arbeiten bislang unbekannte Übereinstimmungen und Differenzen im Gebrauch des Genres in den damals kommunistischen Ländern zu Tage. Deutlich wird dabei u.a., dass das ideologisch als anrüchig betrachtete, aber beim Publikum sehr beliebte Genre vor allem in Russland und Polen über die Intervention der Regierungen dazu diente, sowohl Kapitalismuskritik als auch Überhöhungen der eigenen Nationalkultur zu inszenieren. Darüber hinaus beinhaltet der Band auch Texte mit neuen Perspektiven auf den deutschen Western sowie auf Western-Variationen im französischen, britischen, australischen, indischen und afrikanischen Kino. Auch die vielfältigen Verbindungen zwischen Western und Eastern werden u.a. anhand internationaler Koproduktionen beleuchtet. Der Band betont die Vielschichtigkeit und Komplexität der interkulturellen Transformationen des Western, die sich von Europa über Lateinamerika und Afrika bis nach Australien und Asien nachweisen lassen. Dabei wird herausgearbeitet, wie Western-Elemente in sehr unterschiedlicher Weise zur Geltung kommen, um nationalspezifische Kulturmuster und Kommunikationszusammenhänge zu verhandeln.

It is difficult to imagine modern archaeology without radio-carbon dating, geophysics, analytical chemistry, or the input of the social and historical sources. Archaeology is inevitably an interdisciplinary enterprise, perhaps more so than any other field. But with the ever-increasing specialisation of modern research in general, it becomes more and more difficult to communicate across disciplinary doundaries; this is one of the major challenges modern archaeology faces today. This volume is the outcome of a two-day conference held at the University of Oxford that focused on the opportunities and challenges of interdisciplinary approaches to archaeology.