Since the advent of the papurau bro (community newspaper) movement in Wales in the 1970s, hundreds of articles on rock music have appeared in their pages, giving publicity to local rock bands, gigs, new releases, and so forth. However, these have received no scholarly attention. The present article explores the nature and influence of this little-known collection of sources, positing that this material throws light on the workings of the music scene at a regional and local level, and also that the register of these writings reveals something of the agenda of the contributors: an emphasis on justifying not the existence but the cultural worth of Welsh-language rock music to the older generation influenced young writers and champions of the pop world.

In this article it is argued how Morgan John Rhys’ (1760–1804) belief in the Second Coming and Millennium influenced his participation in the campaign to abolish slavery, the French Revolution and America. It is shown how Millenarianism was a force that shaped Morgan John Rhys’ worldview and influenced his social action and campaigns. Also, it is shown how William Williams, Pantycelyn (1717–91), preceded Morgan John Rhys in this context. My argument, with comparative reference to Williams and Rhys, is that Evangelicalism and the Enlightenment were not intellectual enemies, and that Millenarianism was one of the most important driving forces in the lives of these two men, who were integral to the life of eighteenth century Wales.

Saunders Lewis’ Williams Pantycelyn (1927) was the most exciting and controversial work of literary criticism to appear in twentieth century Welsh letters. In ten memorable and often brilliant chapters, Lewis analysed the work of the eighteenth century hymnist not according to the usual Protestant norms but in terms of medieval Catholic mysticism on the one hand and the then novel Freudian and Jungian psychology on the other. The book caused a literary and critical storm. Among those who affirmed its counterintuitive nature was the poet T. Gwynn Jones; its thesis was rejected by the philosopher E. Keri Evans while the preacher-poet Moelwyn Hughes found the volume objectionable in the extreme. Such was the power of Lewis’ analysis, however, that for more than a generation it came to embody a new orthodoxy in the scholarly understanding of William Williams. It was not until the 1960s that this orthodoxy began to be overturned. The accompanying essay describes how this process evolved.

In answer to a call by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and with the support of the Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol, Anne Marie Carty, Nick Jones and Dafydd Sills-Jones made a poetic/experimental documentary film in 2016, on the subject of Cors Fochno, near Borth. Cors Fochno is one of Western Europe’s major peat bogs, is home to a unique ecology, and also home to important scientific study, not least into climate change. The bog was therefore a useful filmic metaphor for a number of issues and perspectives, including the feelings of the local community towards wilderness, the sustainability of local farming, and more broadly the history and future of human relationship with the environment. The article traces the approaches and concepts behind the film, and by doing so places it in the tradition of ‘practice-as-research’.

Dros y deng mlynedd diwethaf, mae ‘astudiaethau cynhyrchu cyfryngau’ wedi tyfu’n sylweddol fel is-ddisgyblaeth. Yn sgil hyn, mae’r drafodaeth arferol ar y ddynameg rhwng technoleg, economi, ffurfiau diwylliannol, creadigrwydd a gyrfaoedd proffesiynol wedi eu trawsnewid, gan herio hen begynau disgyrsiol economi gwleidyddol ac astudiaethau diwylliannol. Er hynny, mae gogwydd cyfoes i’r datblygiadau hyn, sy’n aml yn anwybyddu hanes y cyfryngau. Mae’r erthygl hon yn ceisio defnyddio agwedd ‘astudiaethau cynhyrchu cyfryngau’ (wrth ddefnyddio fframweithiau cysyniadol Simon Cottle, Pierre Bourdieu ac Eric Berne) er mwyn olrhain hanes un o brif gwmnïau teledu Cymru, Teliesyn.

This article is based upon the idea of designing a laser that can emit light at two different wavelengths, at the same time. This kind of laser has already been produced in the past; however, the difference between the two wavelengths was much larger. We intend to reduce this difference, while still being able to emit at two different wavelengths. This article will also address the effects of linewidth broadening where it is important to know how close the two wavelengths can be before we only see one broad peak in the spectrum, rather than two individual narrow peaks. Doing this will allow us to generate terahertz radiation from just one laser source.

The relaxation spectrum of a viscoelastic material holds the key to describing its relaxation mechanisms at a molecular level. It also plays a fundamental role in accessing the molecular weight distribution, and in modelling the dynamics of complex uids. The relaxation spectrum cannot be measured directly, but it may be locally determined from experimental measurements of viscoelastic response at a macroscopic level. In particular, the relaxation spectrum is a continuous distribution of relaxation times which may be recovered, at least locally, from measurements of the complex modulus of the material. Although mathematical expressions for the continuous spectrum have been known for over a century, these were inaccessible to numerical implementation for decades, since they involve inverse operators which are not continuous, resulting in severe instability. Progress was made when regularization methods for approximating discrete line spectra were introduced some two decades ago. It was not until 2012, however, that Davies and Goulding proposed a method of wavelet regularization for recovering continuous spectra in a mathematically rigorous framework. This work was further rened in 2016 by introducing a mathematical form of high-order derivative spectroscopy involving sequences of derivatives of dynamic moduli, termed Maclaurin sequences. In this article, a rigorous justication for the use of Maclaurin sequences is presented. Furthermore, a new sequence is presented, which is termed a wavelet correction sequence, achieving the same accuracy as Maclaurin sequences, but with a reduced order of differentiation.

The article considers the history of Gwerddon, a multi-disciplinary research e-journal launched in April 2007, which has to date (January 2019) published more than one hundred original articles. Its origins lie in the growth of Welsh-language teaching in Welsh universities in the 1970s and 1980s, the campaign to establish a Welsh-language federal college at a time when the federal University of Wales was in crisis, and the urgent need for Welsh-language scholarship to be equally represented in the research assessment exercises of the RAE/REF. The study considers the journal’s impact factors and its role in the development of a Welsh presence on the burgeoning web of the early twenty-first century, and argues that its continuation rests both on Welsh Government educational policy in general, and the financial resilience of the Higher Education sector at a time of severe challenges. 

Drawing on a rich seam of archival material on Welsh missionary activity in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Bengal, the article addresses ways in which care of the sick became a central, if problematic, part of Christian Mission. While the building of dispensaries, clinics and hospitals provided both a platform and a social visibility to the evangelisation process, they also exposed deeper tensions around the politics of gender and the implantation of Western medical practices in a colonised society.

In many places, devolution has created new regional arenas within which minority nationalist parties have been highly successful in mobilising support for their national projects. However, scholars have paid scant attention to how minority nationalist parties have adapted as they have become major players in regional politics. This article examines such process of adaptation in the cases of two minority nationalist parties: Plaid Cymru in Wales and the Bloque Nacionalista Galego in Galicia. It is argued that the experiences of these parties in adapting to passing the thresholds of representation, relevance and government in their respective regions are far from unique. Rather, they reflect the challenges that any political party faces when it makes the transition from protest to power.

This article is a study of the relationship between nationality and national theatre in Wales from the nineteenth century up to the present day. Welsh nationality is considered in the context of contemporary discussion by the pioneering critics Umut Özkirimli and Hans Kohn on concepts of the nation. The article aims to look into the crucial questions which arise from the historical and current relationships between national theatre, as an arts exercise, and a political expression of national identity in Wales. The significance of national theatre as a tool for expressing national identity is assessed and it is questioned whether the new national theatres of the twenty first century refer back to traditional concepts of the nation and nationality or do they instead exercise a new kind of modern nationality which is defined as ‘an interaction of cultural coalescence and specific political intervention’?

This article seeks to interrogate the ways in which the citizens of Wales use the theatrical resources at their disposal to investigate and articulate their national identities and experiences. The discussion will take a recent co-production, entitled Sisters, between National Theatre Wales and Junoon Theatre Mumbai as its starting point. Sisters stimulates discussion of new ways of creating and participating in theatre that respond creatively to the challenges of a twenty-first century global, digital and post-consumerist society. In discussion, this article will use Johannes Birringer’s uncompromising vision of theatre as a transformative activity that focuses on patterns of collaboration between unfamiliar and unrooted individuals, as a measuring yard for the success and significance of Sisters. I will also argue that the social conditions that inspired Birringer’s vision also give fresh importance to Amelia Jones’s argument about the value of responding to a production or performance by means of secondary evidence, or ‘detritus’, as described by Mathew Reason.