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p53 gene family members in humans and other organisms encode a large number of protein isoforms whose functions are largely undefined. Using Drosophila as a model, we find that a p53B isoform is expressed predominantly in the germline where it colocalizes with p53A into subnuclear bodies. It is only p53A, however, that mediates the apoptotic response to ionizing radiation in the germline and soma. In contrast, p53A and p53B are both required for the normal repair of meiotic DNA breaks, an activity that is more crucial when meiotic recombination is defective. We find that in oocytes with persistent DNA breaks p53A is also required to activate a meiotic pachytene checkpoint. Our findings indicate that Drosophila p53 isoforms have DNA lesion and cell type-specific functions, with parallels to the functions of mammalian p53 family members in the genotoxic stress response and oocyte quality control.

Candida albicans is the most frequently encountered fungal pathogen in humans, capable of causing mucocutaneous and systemic infections in immunocompromised individuals. C. albicans virulence is influenced by multiple factors. Importantly, iron acquisition and avoidance of the immune oxidative burst are two critical barriers for survival in the host. Prior studies using whole genome microarray expression data indicated that the CCAAT-binding factor is involved in the regulation of iron uptake/utilization and the oxidative stress response. This study examines directly the role of the CCAAT-binding factor in regulating the expression of oxidative stress genes in response to iron availability. The CCAAT-binding factor is a heterooligomeric transcription factor previously shown to regulate genes involved in respiration and iron uptake/utilization in C. albicans. Since these pathways directly influence the level of free radicals, it seemed plausible the CCAAT-binding factor regulates genes necessary for the oxidative stress response. In this study, we show the CCAAT-binding factor is involved in regulating some oxidative stress genes in response to iron availability, including CAT1, SOD4, GRX5, and TRX1. We also show that CAT1 expression and catalase activity correlate with the survival of C. albicans to oxidative stress, providing a connection between iron obtainability and the oxidative stress response. We further explore the role of the various CCAAT-binding factor subunits in the formation of distinct protein complexes that modulate the transcription of CAT1 in response to iron. We find that Hap31 and Hap32 can compensate for each other in the formation of an active transcriptional complex; however, they play distinct roles in the oxidative stress response during iron limitation. Moreover, Hap43 was found to be solely responsible for the repression observed under iron deprivation.

In the wake of the establishment of the Portuguese in the region, slavery was fundamentally constitutive of early modern society on the west coast of India. While indigenous hierarchies and existing systems of slavery shaped Portuguese slavery, over time, indigenous society too was transformed by the extensive reliance on enslaved labor facilitated by European trafficking networks. Centering slavery in the study of South Asian history underscores the importance of considering the difference between elite projects of enforcing boundaries, both spatial and social, and the ways in which enslaved people negotiated these projects. Thus, instead of taking for granted the classificatory labels of race, caste, and blackness imposed upon enslaved peoples by elite institutions, a social history of slavery elucidates instead the evolution of these mechanisms for policing identity, and the centrality of the expropriation of labor in identity formation.

This article maps the life of an Ethiopian slave in the late sixteenth century Indian Ocean world, whose life is known to us through the records of two trials in the Inquisition of Goa. The case study allows an exploration of the connections between regimes of slavery within the interior of South Asia and the oceanic networks of enslavement of the European powers, specifically the Portuguese in this case. Unlike methodological approaches focused on mining subaltern subjectivity, this article traces Gabriel’s life based on Fernand Deligny’s method of mapping lignes d’erre. In doing so, it shows how Gabriel’s life unsettles given categories of space and identity by which the analysis of the history of the Indian Ocean usually proceeds.

This essay is an attempt to show the richness of the archive of religion for the history of emotions. The problem I wish to explore is this: if one were to sing of god in a foreign tongue, what emotions would such a song evoke? In addressing this question, I hope to show that the affective history of cultural encounter—which is not merely a reconstruction of what each side might have felt about the other—must be sought in the space of shared meaning created by the two interlocutors. To explore these claims, I will consider a text composed in the early seventeenth-century in Salcete, in Portuguese Goa. The Discurso sobre a vinda de Jesu Christo (Discourse on the coming of Jesus Christ), popularly known as the Krisṭapurāṇa, published by the English Jesuit Thomas Stephens, was meant to elicit a particular affective response among new converts to Catholicism in order to cement them in their new faith. Yet, by dint of language and genre, the emotional vocabulary the poet drew upon was distinctive to a foreign religious and literary tradition, that of Marāṭhī bhakti.

This essay explores the role of disgust in the creation and maintenance of two Catholic communities in early modern South Asia, the first in Salcete, a border region of Portuguese Goa, and the second in eastern Bengal. As Catholicism sought a foothold, the thorny issue of caste, which is subtended even today by an emotional regime of disgust, confronted both missionaries and converts. Both sites witnessed the development of a vernacular language Catholic literary tradition, authored collaboratively by indigenous converts and European missionaries but which exceeded the control of the latter. Placing these materials in the context of the social history of these regions, I challenge the popular canard that conversion was a means to escape the strictures of caste.

The post-Second World War era witnessed the need for new political forms to accommodate the aspirations for national identity of newly decolonized nations within the hegemonic structure of the Cold War. Although both Cold War historiography and postcolonial studies have analysed these phenomena, the place of Latin America in general and Brazil in particular remains fraught with conceptual difficulties, largely due to the very different (post)colonial experience of this region from the rest of the ‘Third World’. This article examines how three Brazilian intellectuals and diplomats observed India from its independence until the annexation of Portuguese India by the Indian Union in 1961. In exploring their peripheral gaze, it shows how Brazilian self-identification with the West, and particularly its complex relationship with the heritage of European colonialism, prevented a truly commensurable experience, despite a sense of commonality with India based on their peripheral position in the global political structure.

The call to attend to a history of affect is hardly a new one in the profession: in 1941, in a classic essay entitled “La sensibilité et l’histoire: Comment reconstituer le vie affective d’autrefois?,” Lucien Febvre laid out an agenda for just such a historiographical turn. His reasoning, however, had less to do with the need for a history of affect per se than with the belief that the history of ideas or of institutions, both of them mainstays of traditional historiography, “are subjects that the historian can neither understand nor make understood without this primordial interest that I call the psychological.” In a perceptive review essay of the historiography of emotions that marked the beginning of the current affective turn in historical inquiry, Barbara Rosenwein argued that Febvre’s turn toward such a history was less a repudiation of the political focus of history than a belief born from observing the rise of Nazism: “politics itself is not rational, not unemotional.” As Rosenwein notes, Febvre answered the skeptics in his own essay: “The history of hate, the history of fear, the history of cruelty, the history of love; stop bothering us with this idle chatter. But that idle chatter … will tomorrow have turned the universe into a fetid pile of corpses.”