All ScholarLed presses
This page shows the latest publications (in descending order of publication date) from all of the open access publishers in the ScholarLed consortium (Mattering Press, meson press, Open Book Publishers, punctum books, African Minds, and mediastudies.press).
Metadata is licensed as Creative Commons Zero (CC0) and is retrieved from Thoth’s open APIs.
Last updated: 2025-04-17 00:00:17
April 2025
Tragedy and the Witness: Shakespeare and Beyond
Author: Fred Parker
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0435
As he dies, Hamlet pleads with Horatio to ‘report me aright … tell my story’. This book deals with the task of bearing witness to anguish, atrocity, and madness, as these are staged in the tragic theatre. Focusing on the relationship between the protagonist and the onlooker or witness, it explores how the tragic figure, often and understandably viewed as alien or culpable or profoundly strange, struggles to be understood. Centred on Shakespeare, its wide-ranging approach also introduces works by (among others) the Greeks, Racine, Ibsen, Pirandello, Kafka, Beckett, and Kane.
Active Speech: Critical Perspectives on Teresa Deevy
Editor: Úna Kealy
Editor: Kate McCarthy
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0432
‘Active Speech’ is a groundbreaking collection of scholarly essays and practitioner interviews focused on the work of Irish playwright Teresa Deevy. Acts of recovery in the 1980s and 1990s challenged Deevy’s exclusion from the literary canon, reclaiming her contributions as significant to Irish drama and theatre. The recent resurgence of scholarship and productions evidences that, as a deafened woman and Irish playwright, Deevy’s creative power continues to disrupt and tilt the canon of Irish drama, theatre, and performance.
A Cyborg’s Father: Misreading Donna Haraway
Author: Dave Brennan
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2025
Humans, Dogs and Other Beings: Myths, Stories, and History in the Land of Genghis Khan
Author: Baasanjav Terbish
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0450
Step into the windswept steppes of Mongolia and explore a world where humans and animals have coexisted for centuries in a delicate, profound dance. This groundbreaking book examines the complex relationships between the Mongols and four animals—dogs, marmots, cats, and camels—shedding light on a nomadic culture that is deeply intertwined with its natural environment. Drawing from rich ethnographic accounts, historical records, and personal memoir, the author, of Mongol origin, offers a vivid narrative that intertwines cultural insights with intimate reflections.
March 2025
Αncient Greek II: A 21st-Century Approach
Author: Philip S. Peek
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0441
In this elementary textbook, Philip S. Peek draws on his twenty-five years of teaching experience to present the ancient Greek language in an imaginative and accessible way that promotes creativity, deep learning, and diversity.
One Thing Follows Another: Experiments in Dance, Art, and Life through the Lens of Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer
Author: Sarah Rosenthal
Author: Valerie Witte
Afterword by: Ralph Lemon
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2025
Color, Healthcare and Bioethics
Author: Henk ten Have
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0443
This book explores the profound, yet often overlooked, role of color in healthcare and bioethics, arguing that color is far more than a visual or aesthetic element—it actively shapes human experience, perception, and ethical reasoning.
Mourning the Ends: Collaborative Writing and Performance
Author: Malin Palani
Author: Nilüfer Ovalıoğlu Gros
Author: Maria Shantelle Alexies Ambayec
Author: Kristof van Baarle
Author: Peter Burke
Author: Renata Gaspar
Author: Sozita Goudouna
Author: Sarah Lucie
Author: Evan Moritz
Author: Adham Hafez
Author: Jan-Tage Kühling
Author: Eero Laine
Author: Juliana Martins Rodrigues de Moraes
Author: Rumen Rachev
Author: Aneta Stojnić
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2025
Music, Religion and Politics at Worcester Cathedral, 680-1950
Author: Richard Newsholme
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0437
This book provides a comprehensive history of music and liturgy at Worcester Cathedral, from its foundation in the seventh century to the mid-20th century. The author delves into how political shifts, public opinion, and national trends have influenced changes in the cathedral’s practices over time, while also highlighting the distinct local dynamics at play.
Interconnected Traditions: Semitic Languages, Literatures, Cultures—A Festschrift for Geoffrey Khan: Volume 2: The Medieval World, Judaeo-Arabic, and Neo-Aramaic
Editor: Aaron D. Hornkohl
Editor: Nadia Vidro
Editor: Janet C.E. Watson
Editor: Eleanor Coghill
Editor: Magdalen M. Connolly
Editor: Benjamin M. Outhwaite
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0464
Geoffrey Khan’s pioneering scholarship has transformed the study of Semitic languages, literatures, and cultures, leaving an indelible mark on fields ranging from Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic dialectology to medieval manuscript traditions and linguistic typology. This Festschrift, celebrating a distinguished career that culminated in his tenure (2012–2025) as Regius Professor of Hebrew in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge, brings together contributions from a vast and representative array of scholars—retired, established, and up and coming—whose work has been influenced by his vast intellectual legacy.
Interconnected Traditions: Semitic Languages, Literatures, Cultures—A Festschrift for Geoffrey Khan: Volume 1: Hebrew and the Wider Semitic World
Editor: Aaron D. Hornkohl
Editor: Janet C.E. Watson
Editor: Nadia Vidro
Editor: Eleanor Coghill
Editor: Magdalen M. Connolly
Editor: Benjamin M. Outhwaite
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0463
Geoffrey Khan’s pioneering scholarship has transformed the study of Semitic languages, literatures, and cultures, leaving an indelible mark on fields ranging from Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic dialectology to medieval manuscript traditions and linguistic typology. This Festschrift, celebrating a distinguished career that culminated in his tenure (2012–2025) as Regius Professor of Hebrew in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge, brings together contributions from a vast and representative array of scholars—retired, established, and up and coming—whose work has been influenced by his vast intellectual legacy.
Feeling Colour: Chromatic Embodiment in Film Culture, 1950s–1960s
Author: Bregt Lameris
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0380
The shift back from quasi monochrome to coloured motion picture during the 1950s and 1960s famously provided moviegoers the dazzling opportunity to more fully engage their senses, all the while opening new modes of affective possibilities for filmmakers. Set against the intersection of media studies, emotion theory, biology, and digital humanities, Feeling Colour: Chromatic Embodiment in Film Culture (1950s-1960s) delves into the role colour played in the oft-fraught relationship between cinema and its audiences. This transnational analysis of an extensive range of midcentury cinematography examines the multilayered effects which extend beyond the silver screen, offering a high-level theoretical elaboration and in-depth historical exploration of both experimental and mainstream movies.
Troubled People, Troubled World: Psychotherapy, Ethics and Society
Author: Michael Briant
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0416
Therapists endeavour to be non-judgemental and, indeed, are no more qualified to pass judgement on others than anyone else; do they nevertheless learn anything about ethics from their disciplined listening?
The same question was asked after the war about the persecution of the Jews and other minorities, and it’s a very live issue again, faced as we are by movements like ISIS, or Putinism in Russia, that cause great suffering in the name of religious or moral regeneration - a bewildering paradox that David Astor, former editor of The Observer called ‘the scourge’.
Can psychotherapy throw any light on it, or contribute any ideas as to how we might contain, if not prevent, the barbarism it sanctions? Can it offer any insights into a different, more inclusive kind of ethics, and if so, can we glean any guidance from it as to how we might further it?
These are the questions the author explores, drawing on psychoanalytic thinking on these issues for over a century and illustrated by his work with individuals over four decades.
The Art of Compilation: Manuscripts and Networks in the Early Medieval Latin West
Editor: Anna Dorofeeva
Editor: Michael J. Kelly
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2025
February 2025
Winter Light: On Late Life’s Radiance
Author: Douglas J. Penick
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2025
The Making of Les Immatériaux
Author: Andreas Broeckmann
Lüneburg: meson press, 2025
The exhibition Les Immatériaux was presented at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1985. Curated by the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard and design theoretician Thierry Chaput, it is widely regarded as a landmark in the history of postmodern philosophy, as well as for discourses around art, science and digital culture.
Broeckmann’s book provides the first comprehensive account of the preparation of this epochal event. It shows how the exhibition resulted from multiple, collaborative and interdisciplinary trajectories in such diverse fields as contemporary art, architecture, science, and network media. Based on extensive archival research, The Making of Les Immatériaux offers detailed insights into the curatorial process. Throughout its ten chapters, the book highlights the different forms of cooperation among the people involved in the conception of the exhibition, including Lyotard, Chaput, the team at the Centre de Création Industrielle, and their consultations with artists, theorists, and scientists.
Les Immatériaux marks a pivotal point in the history of exhibitions in the 20th century because it gave important impulses for the organisation, design and structure of interdisciplinary exhibitions. Broeckmann discusses the place of Les Immatériaux in the broader context of this history, examining the epistemology of exhibits, curatorial agency, and interdisciplinarity in research networks. The book takes up current questions about the relationship between materiality and immateriality, between subjectivity and thinghood, and shows how Les Immatériaux continues to offer a significant contribution to debates that over the last decades have become ever more urgent.
Bacterial Genomes: Trees and Networks
Author: Aswin Sai Narain Seshasayee
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0446
In Bacterial Genomes, the evolutionary and regulatory processes that shape bacterial life are brought to life. This textbook offers a conceptual exploration of how bacterial genomes are organized, how they evolve, and how their genetic information is interpreted through intricate molecular networks. Drawing on both cutting-edge research and the historical milestones that shaped microbiology, it illuminates how bacteria navigate the intersection of genetic adaptation and ecological resilience.
The Field Guide to Mixing Social and Biophysical Methods in Environmental Research
Editor: Rebecca Lave
Editor: Stuart Lane
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0418
Despite ongoing debates about its origins, the Anthropocene—a new epoch characterized by significant human impact on the Earth’s geology and ecosystems—is widely acknowledged. Our environment is increasingly a product of interacting biophysical and social forces, shaped by climate change, colonial legacies, gender norms, hydrological processes, and more. Understanding these intricate interactions requires a mixed-methods approach that combines qualitative and quantitative, biophysical and social research.
Doctoral Education in Context: Perspectives from Africa
Editor: Jan Botha
Editor: Liezel Frick
Editor: Nompilo Tshuma
Cape Town: African Minds, 2025
https://doi.org/10.47622/9781067253530
Doctoral Education in Context: Perspectives from Africa shares lived experiences and insights of doctoral supervisors from 16 different countries in Africa. The book’s originality lies also in the contributors’ profiles as practicing, novice doctoral supervisors. All of them graduated from the Training Course for Supervisors offered by the Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology (CREST) at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, with the support of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD)/German Rectors’ Conference (HRK) through the DIES Programme.
Two Early Byzantine Bible Manuscripts in Christian Palestinian Aramaic: Codex Climaci Rescriptus II & XI
Author: Kim Phillips
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0455
Despite the ubiquitous use of Greek by the Christian church of the late antique Southern Levant, many Christians in the region also—or only—spoke Aramaic. Today, this dialect, known as Christian Palestinian Aramaic (CPA), is relatively sparsely attested in the form of regional inscriptions and, particularly, in the form of vernacular translations of Greek biblical, liturgical and theological texts. These translations survive predominantly as undertexts within palimpsest manuscripts. Codex Climaci Rescriptus (CCR) is one of the most important palimpsest manuscript sources for the recovery of CPA texts.
The Fight for Black Liberation: Breaking the Political Strings in the Trump Era
Author: William T. Hoston
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2025
Phenomenography in the 21st Century: A Methodology for Investigating Human Experience of the World
Author: Gerlese S. Åkerlind
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0431
Phenomenography offers a distinctive approach to studying human experience of the world, by highlighting different ways in which the same phenomena (concepts, objects, events) are experienced within any group of people. Phenomenography focuses on the relationship between meaning—people’s holistic understanding of phenomena—and structure, that is the part-whole structure of people’s awareness of phenomena. This structure of awareness then forms the basis for identifying differences in the experienced meaning of phenomena, and how awareness needs to change to allow new meanings to emerge—whether educationally, historically, culturally or socially.
New Words to Old Tunes: Genres and Metrics of Lebanese Zajal Poetry
Author: Adnan Haydar
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0424
New Words to Old Tunes: Genres and Metrics of Lebanese Zajal Poetry introduces the rich tradition of Lebanese oral poetry, offering an in-depth study and analysis of its metrics and genres. It presents a novel framework for the proper scansion of meters and emphasises the previously overlooked roles of musical and poetic stress. It details nearly twenty zajal genres, including popular songs that use zajal metrics, and integrates musical notations and web-streamed audio links to enrich the reader’s experience.
Harvesting the Sea in Southeastern Arabia: Volume 1: Regional Studies
Editor: Erik Anonby
Editor: Miranda J. Morris
Editor: Janet C.E. Watson
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0409
Traditional livelihoods and the ecosystems that sustain them are dying out around the world. This book is a collection of research on the relationships between people, their environment, their expertise and their languages along the ecologically fragile coasts of the Arabian Peninsula.
These studies are the outcome of many years of collaborative fieldwork with local communities in three main regions of southern and eastern Arabia: the Musandam Peninsula, Dhofar and al-Mahrah, and the island of Soqotra. Bringing together oral literature, traditional scientific knowledge, and marine subsistence at the peripheries of the Arabian seaboard, the volume makes a major contribution to the documentation of the indigenous Modern South Arabian languages (MSAL), regional Arabic, and the Kumzari language, as well as to a greater understanding of their speakers’ mastery in harvesting the seas.
January 2025
The Samaritan Pentateuch: An English Translation with a Parallel Annotated Hebrew Text
Author: Abraham Tal
Author: Moshe Florentin
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0415
This new translation into English seeks to introduce the reader to the character of the Samaritan version of the Pentateuch, while emphasising the fundamental differences between it and the Masoretic version.
The translation is based on a grammatical analysis of each and every word in the text according to its oral pronunciation, informed by examination of the Samaritan translations into Aramaic and Arabic as well as other Samaritan and non-Samaritan sources.
Oral Literary Worlds: Location, Transmission and Circulation
Editor: Sara Marzagora
Editor: Francesca Orsini
Cambridge,UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0405
The discipline of world literature has traditionally focused on written literatures, particularly the novel, with little emphasis placed on the unwritten verbal arts, despite the significance of oral literary expressions around the world, in the past as in the present. This volume redresses this gap by putting the discipline of world literature into dialogue with scholarship on orature and folklore. It asks, what does world literature look like if we start from orature, from oral texts and utterances, and from the performances and audiences that support it?
Arabic in Context: Essays on Language, Dialects, and Culture in Honour of Martin R. Zammit
Editor: Anthony J. Frendo
Editor: Kurstin Gatt
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0445
This Festschrift, Arabic in Context, is a tribute to the remarkable scholarly legacy of the Reverend Professor Martin R. Zammit. It celebrates his extensive contributions to the fields of Semitic Studies, Arabic linguistics, and comparative Semitic philology.
Navigating Our Way to Solutions in Marine Conservation
Editor: Larry B. Crowder
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0395
Navigating Our Way reflects the broader insights and diverse voices revolutionizing marine conservation. This volume brings together an array of scholars, practitioners, and experts from multiple fields, creating a network of trans-disciplinary and multi-cultural perspectives to address the complex problems in marine conservation.
The Before and the After: Critical Asynchrony Now
Editor: Sean Gurd
Editor: Mario Telò
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2025
The Art of Becoming Infinite: Mou Zongsan’s Vertical Rethinking of Self and Subjectivity
Author: Gabriella Stanchina
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0442
In addressing fundamental questions of self-consciousness and self-identity, the book contextualizes Mou’s philosophy within contemporary discussions in neuroscience and cognitive science. By placing Mou’s ideas in dialogue with Western thought—examining thinkers like Husserl, Kant, Hegel, and Lévinas—as well as with Daoist and Confucian vision of mind, this work opens a pathway to understanding selfhood beyond purely epistemological boundaries.
Requiem
Author: Teresa Carmody
Introduction by: David L. Ulin
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2025
Learning Statistics with jamovi: A Tutorial for Beginners in Statistical Analysis
Author: Danielle Navarro
Author: David Foxcroft
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0333
Based on Danielle Navarro’s widely acclaimed and prize-winning book Learning Statistics with R, this elegantly designed textbook offers undergraduate students a thorough and accessible introduction to jamovi, as well as how to get to grips with statistics and data manipulation.
Being in Shadow and Light: Academics in Post/Conflict Higher Education
Editor: Dina Zoe Belluigi
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0427
Academia and its citizens, during periods of political violence and social conflict, are often overlooked. When attention is given, the focus tends to be on student activism, access to higher education, or curriculum development. The experiences of academics affected by conflict remain under-researched, despite the crucial role they play as educators and in generating, documenting, preserving and challenging knowledges. This is particularly concerning given that academics have−and continue to be−at risk as targets of sanction, persecution and oppression.
December 2024
Kritik des Neo-Extraktivismus in der Gegenwartskunst
Author: Susanne Witzgall
Author: Lukas Schepers
Author: Irene Schütze
Author: Ina Neddermeyer
Author: Florian Telsnig
Author: Liliana Gómez
Author: Viktor Brim
Author: Linn Burchert
Author: Lena Geuer
Author: Veronica Peselmann
Author: Jorge Sanguino
Author: Martin Siegler
Author: Franca Spengler
Editor: Hauke Ohls
Editor: Birgit Mersmann
Lüneburg: meson press, 2024
Wie reflektieren Künstler*innen und Kollektive die globalen Herausforderungen der akzelerierenden Rohstoffausbeutung? Und welches Widerstandspotenzial entfalten diese künstlerischen Praktiken gegen die Paradigmen des (Neo-)Extraktivismus? Die Beiträge in Kritik des Neo-Extraktivismus in der Gegenwartskunst analysieren die künstlerische Auseinandersetzung mit unterschiedlichen extraktivistischen Phänomenen aus kunstwissenschaftlichen, kuratorischen und künstlerischen Perspektiven. Eröffnet wird ein globaler Blickwinkel, der kritisch die Materialitäten und Infrastrukturen des (Neo-)Extraktivismus beleuchtet und um dekoloniale Perspektiven ergänzt.
Fragile Evidenz: Videodokumente illegaler Zurückweisungen an Europas Grenzen
Author: Anna Polze
Lüneburg: meson press, 2024
Pushbacks finden systematisch an den EU-Außengrenzen statt. Von offizieller Seite wird ihr Einsatz geheim gehalten oder geleugnet. Fragile Evidenz stellt die Frage, wie aus einem gescheiterten Fluchtversuch eine aussagekräftige Falldarstellung europäischer Grenzregime entstehen kann. Es begreift die Dokumentation illegaler Zurückweisungen als mediale Aushandlungen von Sichtbarkeit und Hörbarkeit, Aufmerksamkeit, öffentlicher Anerkennung und vor allem Evidenz.
Eine zehnminütige Videoinvestigation der Rechercheagentur Forensic Architecture erweist sich als Symptom für die Krisen politischen Auftretens in digitalen Medien. Sie wird detailliert als Montage von Smartphone-Dokumenten fliehender Personen und den Medien forensischer Verifikation aufgeschlüsselt. Im Zentrum steht die Spannung zwischen Fluchtauftritt und Evidenzprozess, das Wechselspiel von ästhetischen Strategien und rhetorischen Wirksamkeiten, von Situiertheit und Infrastrukturen. Fragile Evidenz ist eine analytische Reaktion auf die anwachsende Präsenz forensischer Medienpraktiken in digitalen Bildkulturen.
Was ist Medienästhetik?: Internationales Jahrbuch für Medienphilosophie und Medienästhetik
Author: Jörg Sternagel
Author: Bettina Papenburg
Author: Ulrike Ramming
Author: Emmanuel Alloa
Author: Martin Beck
Author: Dieter Mersch
Author: Beate Ochsner
Editor: Judith Siegmund
Editor: Natascha Adamowsky
Lüneburg: meson press, 2024
Als Nachfolger des früheren Internationalen Jahrbuchs für Medienphilosophie beschäftigt sich das Internationale Jahrbuch für Medienphilosophie und Medienästhetik in der ersten Ausgabe nach dem Relaunch mit der wesentlichen Frage: Was ist Medienästhetik?
Diese Frage steht für eine doppelte Öffnung: Medienästhetik markiert eine Suchbewegung, die die philosophischen wie medienwissenschaftlichen Grundlagen erkundet, die in medienästhetischen Kontexten in Erscheinung treten können. Zugleich lädt sie ein zu einer historischen Kartographierung und begrifflichen Konturierung von Medienästhetik, einer Diskussion ihrer unterschiedlichen Modellierungen und der sich daraus ergebenden Optionen für Kritik.
Ziel ist es, den Begriff Medienästhetik offen zu halten und aus seiner Problematisierung immer wieder neue disziplinübergreifende Debatten anzustoßen. Das Jahrbuch bietet unterschiedlichen Projekten, Positionen und Fragestellungen Raum, die zueinander im Modus des Dissenses, der Überschneidung, der Assoziation, aber auch der inhaltlichen Weiterführung stehen können.
Early Media Effects Theory & the Suggestion Doctrine: Selected Readings, 1895–1935
Editor: Patrick Parsons
Bethlehem, PA: mediastudies.press, 2024
https://doi.org/10.32376/3f8575cb.f1e0489e
Early Media Effects Theory & the Suggestion Doctrine: Selected Readings, 1895–1935 consists of over 30 public domain works originally publishing from the late 19th century to the mid-1930s on the concept of “suggestion”
The Birds That Wouldn’t Sing: Remembering the D-Day Wrens
Author: Justin Smith
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0430
This compelling book offers a unique perspective on D-Day and its aftermath through the personal testimonies of the Wrens who worked for Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay during Operation Overlord. Drawing on public and private archives, it reveals the untold stories of the women serving in the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS), balancing their wartime contributions with the strictures of secrecy and censorship. The narrative is framed by letters from these Wrens, which provide intimate glimpses into both the personal and professional challenges they faced during World War II.
Genetic Narratology: Analysing Narrative across Versions
Editor: Dirk Van Hulle
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0426
Genetic Narratology is the first full-length volume to merge genetic criticism with narratology, offering an innovative approach to understanding literature. By examining the creative process behind literary works through drafts, manuscripts and revisions, this book reveals how narratives are shaped in real time.
Cycle of Dreams
Author: Eric Weiskott
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2024
Breaking Images: Iconoclastic Analyses of Mathematics and its Education
Editor: Brian Greer
Editor: David Kollosche
Editor: Ole Skovsmose
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0407
These twenty essays explore questions of mathematics as a topic of philosophy, but also the nature and purpose of mathematics education and the role of mathematics in moulding citizens. It challenges the biases and prejudices inherent within uninformed histories of mathematics, including problems of white supremacy, the denial of cultural difference and the global homogenization of teaching methods. In particular, the book contrasts the effectiveness of mathematics and science in modelling physical phenomena and solving technical problems with its ineffectiveness in modelling social phenomena and solving human problems, and urges us to consider how mathematics might better meet the urgent crises of our age.
Investing in the Structural Transformation: 2024 European Public Investment Outlook
Editor: Floriana Cerniglia
Editor: Francesco Saraceno
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0434
The fifth volume in the European Public Investment Outlook series explores how Europe can drive structural transformation through strategic public investment. Reflecting on the lessons from the 2008–2020 polycrisis and recent economic challenges, this timely book examines fiscal policy’s role in both stabilization and long-term economic development.
Education Research in African Contexts: Traditions and New Beginnings for Knowledge and Impact
Editor: Paul Webb
Editor: Mathabo Khau
Editor: Proscovia Namubiru Ssentamu
Cape Town: African Minds, 2024
November 2024
Heavy Processing
Author: T.L. Cowan
Author: Jas Rault
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2024
Knowledge: A Human Interest Story
Author: Brian Weatherson
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0425
In this book the author argues for a groundbreaking perspective that knowledge is inherently interest-relative. This means that what one knows is influenced not just by belief, evidence, and truth, but crucially by the purposes those beliefs serve. Drawing from classical Nyāya epistemologies, the book asserts that knowledge rationalizes action: if you know something, it is sensible to act on it—and the best way to square this with an anti-sceptical epistemology is to say that knowledge is interest-relative.
Burning Diagrams in Anthropology: An Inverse Museum
Author: Tristan Partridge
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2024
No Prices No Games!: Four Economic Models
Author: Michael Richter
Author: Ariel Rubinstein
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0438
While current economic theory focuses on prices and games, this book models economic settings where harmony is established through one of the following societal conventions:
• A power relation according to which stronger agents are able to force weaker ones to do things against their will. • A norm that categorizes actions as permissible or forbidden. • A status relation over alternatives which limits each agent’s choices. • Systematic biases in agents’ preferences.
These four conventions are analysed using simple and mathematically straightforward models, without any pretensions regarding direct applied usefulness. While we do not advocate for the adoption of any of these conventions specifically – we do advocate that when modelling an economic situation, alternative equilibrium notions should be considered, rather than automatically reaching for the familiar approaches of prices or games.
Diachronic Diversity in Classical Biblical Hebrew
Author: Aaron D. Hornkohl
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0433
According to the standard periodisation of ancient Hebrew, the division of Biblical Hebrew as reflected in the Masoretic tradition is basically dichotomous: pre-exilic Classical Biblical Hebrew (CBH) versus post-Restoration Late Biblical Hebrew (LBH). Within this paradigm, the chronolectal unity of CBH is rarely questioned—this despite the reasonable expectation that the language of a corpus encompassing traditions of various ages and comprising works composed, edited, and transmitted over the course of centuries would show signs of diachronic development. From the perspective of historical evolution, CBH is remarkably homogenous. Within this apparent uniformity, however, there are indeed signs of historical development, sets of alternant features whose respective concentrations seem to divide CBH into two sub-chronolects. The most conspicuous typological division that emerges is between the CBH of the Pentateuch and that of the relevant Prophets and Writings. The present volume investigates a series of features that distinguish the two ostensible CBH sub-chronolects, weighs alternative explanations for distribution patterns that appear to have chronological significance, and considers broader implications for Hebrew diachrony and periodisation and for the composition of the Torah.
Digital Humanities in the India Rim: Contemporary Scholarship in Australia and India
Editor: Myra Gurney
Editor: Hart Cohen
Editor: Ujjwal Jana
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0423
This varied collection delves into illuminating examples of Digital Humanities research and practice currently being undertaken by academics in India and Australia, and seeks to understand the shared challenges as well as the points of similarity and difference between them. From the influence of Netflix on International Relations to contemporary digital adaptations of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, via detours into erobotics (empathic robots) and the cultural specificity of online dating, these essays convey the distinctive breadth and imagination of research in this field.
Digital Humanities is a relatively new discipline in the India Rim, and this novelty has created space for innovative research ideas, as well as the use of traditional methodologies and software in different ways within these unique cultural spaces that could potentially influence how Digital Humanities is conceptualised internationally.
Oblation: Essays, Parables, Paradoxes
Author: M.H. Bowker
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2024
The Struggle You Can’t See: Experiences of Neurodivergent and Invisibly Disabled Students in Higher Education
Author: Ash Lierman
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0420
This book offers a comprehensive review of current research on the higher education experiences of neurodivergent undergraduate students and those with invisible disabilities. Grounded in principles of social justice and equity, this work draws from design thinking, the neurodiversity model, and Universal Design for Learning, to explore the context of higher education in relation to neurodivergent and disabled students.
October 2024
Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State
Editor: Lisa Min
Editor: Franck Billé
Editor: Charlene Makley
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2024
Insolubles: Critical Edition with English Translation
Author: Walter Segrave
Editor: Barbara Bartocci
Editor: Stephen Read
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0359
In light of Bradwardine’s criticisms, Walter Segrave, writing around 1330, defended so-called restrictivism (restrictio) by claiming that such paradoxes exhibited a fallacy of accident. The classic example of this fallacy, the first of Aristotle’s fallacies independent of language, is the Hidden Man puzzle: you know Coriscus, Coriscus is the one approaching, but you don’t know the one approaching since, e.g., he is wearing a mask. But Aristotle’s account is unclear and Segrave, building on ideas of Giles of Rome and Walter Burley, shows how the fallacy turns on an equivocation over the supposition of the middle term or one of the extremes in a syllogism. Thereby, Segrave is able to counter Bradwardine’s arguments one by one and defend the restrictivist solution. In this volume, Segrave’s text is edited from the three extant manuscripts, is translated into English, and is preceded by a substantial Introduction.
Diversity across the Arabian Peninsula: Language, Culture, Nature
Editor: Fabio Gasparini
Editor: Kamala Russell
Editor: Janet C.E. Watson
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0411
This edited volume brings together a diverse and rich set of contributions on the Arabian Peninsula. Ranging from history, field linguistics, and cultural studies these essays address the diversity of languages, ways of life, and natural environments that have marked the region throughout its history.
Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Technology
Editor: Bas de Boer
Editor: Jochem Zwier
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0421
Our contemporary world is undeniably intertwined with technology, influencing every aspect of human life. This edited volume delves into why modern philosophical approaches to technology closely align with phenomenology and explores the implications of this relationship. Over the past two decades, scholars have emphasized users’ lived experiences and their interactions with technological practices, arguing that technologies gain meaning and shape within specific contexts, actively shaping those contexts in return. This book investigates the phenomenological roots of contemporary philosophy of technology, examining how phenomenology informs analyses of temporality, use, cognition, embodiment, and environmentality. Divided into three sections, the volume begins by exploring the role of phenomenological methods in the philosophy of technology, and further investigates the methodological implications of combining phenomenology with other philosophical schools. The second section examines technology as a phenomenon, debating whether it should be analysed as a whole or through individual artifacts. The final section addresses the practical applications of phenomenological insights in design practices and democratic engagement.
The Ruins of Solitude: Maternity at the Limits of Academic Discourse
Author: Lette Bragg
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2024
Grotesque and Performance in the Art of Aubrey Beardsley
Author: Evanghelia Stead
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0413
This insightful study illuminates previously unexplored aspects of Aubrey Beardsley’s relationship to the grotesque and his use of media, particularly his manipulation of the periodical press. For the first time and with keen intelligence, Evanghelia Stead fully reveals the aesthetic importance of Beardsley’s Bon-Mots vignettes, as well as the relationship between Darwinism, his innovative foetus motif, and Decadence itself.
Meta-Xenakis: New Perspectives on Iannis Xenakis’s Life, Work, and Legacies
Editor: Sharon Kanach
Editor: Peter Nelson
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0390
Meta-Xenakis offers readers a comprehensive collection of insights into the history, works and legacy of Iannis Xenakis, one of the twentieth century’s most significant creative figures. It presents a transcontinental engagement with his life and output, focusing as much on the impact of the questions he posed as on the accomplishments of his body of work.
Nouvelles études sur les lieux de spectacle de la première modernité
Editor: Jeffrey M. Leichman
Editor: Pauline Beaucé
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0400
Les théâtres du passé : des théâtres virtuels ? C’est une des questions passionnantes explorée dans ce livre par des chercheurs et chercheuses en littérature, musicologie, histoire, études théâtrales, histoire de l’art, architecture et sciences du numérique. Ces Nouvelles études sur les lieux de spectacle de la première modernité proposent de relever un défi épistémologique autour de la notion de virtuel pour la recherche en histoire du théâtre en engageant différents formats de réflexion : entretiens, articles multimédia, brèves de méthodologie, exposition virtuelle.
100 Chinese Silences
Author: Timothy Yu
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2024
Rāgs Around the Clock: A Handbook for North Indian Classical Music, with Online Recordings in the Khayāl Style
Author: David Clarke
Music editor: Vijay Rajput
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0313
Rāgs Around the Clock is a rich and vibrant compendium for the discovery and study of North Indian classical music. The theory and practice of rāg are explored through two interlinked resources: a handbook of essays and analyses offering technical, historical, cultural and aesthetic perspectives; and two online albums – Rāg samay cakra and Twilight Rāgs from North India – featuring khayāl singer Vijay Rajput and accompanists.
From Memory to Marble Vol 1: The Historical Frieze of the Voortrekker Monument, Part I: The Frieze
Author: Elizabeth Rankin
Author: Rolf Michael Schneider
Cape Town: African Minds, 2024
September 2024
State Power in Land Reform: Barriers to implementation in the Western and Northern Cape, South Africa, 1990–2006
Author: Thorvald Gran
Cape Town: African Minds, 2024
https://doi.org/10.47622/9781928502869
ANC land reform started on a good footing with the RDP, but has since moved to a policy of supporting entrepreneurial emerging middle-class black farmers rather than the immiserated rural subsistence farmers. This has shifted government funding and support towards the urban areas leaving rural areas destitute.
In State Power in Land Reform, the author relies on a robust theoretical frame, extensive policy analysis and empirical data to advocate for a new engagement with local communities through rejuvenated municipalities, that is, through strong local institutions.
State Power in Land Reform provides a valuable analytical account for both the historian and the archive.
The Dream-Slaves
Author: Darieck Scott
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2024
Urban Heritage and Sustainability in the Age of Globalisation
Editor: Lilia Makhloufi
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0412
This book offers a deep exploration of architectural and urban heritage, using interdisciplinary and intercultural approaches to assess how historical, social, economic and political factors have impacted heritage development and its sustainability. It sheds light on the stakes of heritage conservation, management and maintenance in today’s globalised world.
Revisiting Africa’s Flagship Universities: Local, National and International Dynamics
Author: James Ransom
Cape Town: African Minds, 2024
https://doi.org/10.47622/9781928502951
Revisiting Africa’s Flagship Universities: National, International, and Local Dynamics offers a compelling exploration of Africa’s large, public higher education institutions. The book delves into the evolving roles of these universities, examining how they navigate their responsibilities at national, international and local levels.
The book uncovers the tensions between global aspirations, national relevance and local realities. In doing so, this insightful work sheds light on the unique challenges and opportunities faced by African flagship universities, revealing their potential as forces for local, national and international collaboration and development.
Revisiting Africa’s Flagship Universities provides rigorous evidence on the relevance of higher education at the local and national level, and the interrelation between these and the burgeoning international roles of universities. This book makes for important reading for university staff, policymakers, and anyone interested in the future of higher education in Africa.
The Verb in Classical Hebrew: The Linguistic Reality behind the Consecutive Tenses
Author: Bo Isaksson
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0414
The consecutive tenses are fundamental in all descriptions of Classical Hebrew grammar. They are even basic to the textbooks on Biblical Hebrew. Being fundamental in the verbal system, and part of any beginner’s grammar, they pose a serious problem to a linguistic understanding of the verbal system, since grammars describe an alternation of ‘forms’ or ‘tenses’ in double pairs: wayyiqṭol alternates with its ‘equivalent’ qaṭal, and wə-qaṭal alternates with its ‘equivalent’ yiqṭol. This ‘enigma’ in the verbal system is handled in the book by recognising that the alternation of the consecutive tenses with other tenses, in the reality of the text, represents a linking of clauses. The ‘consecutive tenses’ are clause-types with a natural language connective wa- directly followed by a finite verbal morpheme, a type of clause that expressed continuity in the earliest stage of Semitic. The commonly held assumption that there is a special ‘consecutive waw’ is unwarranted. The use of the ‘consecutive’ clause-types in order to express discourse continuity indicates that Classical Hebrew has retained the old unmarked declarative word order of Semitic syntax. Seen in the light of recent research on the Tiberian reading tradition, the ‘consecutive’ wayyiqṭol can be analysed as a retention of the old Semitic past perfective *wa-yaqtul, which was pronounced wa-yiqṭol in Classical Hebrew. The ‘consecutive’ wə-qāṭal (pronounced wa-qaṭal in the classical language) constitutes the result of an internal Hebrew development into a construction (in the sense of Joan Bybee) already foreshadowed in the earliest Northwest Semitic languages. The book understands the ‘consecutive tenses’ as discourse continuity clauses, which typically form chains of main line clauses. Such chains can be interrupted by other types of clauses. This interruption is a clause linking that receives special attention in the interpretation of the Classical Hebrew verbal system. Chapter six presents a regenerated text linguistics founded on the new terminology.
The Last Years of Polish Jewry: Volume 2: The Permanent Pogrom, 1935–37
Author: Yankev Leshchinsky
Editor: Robert Brym
Translator: Eli Jany
Translator: Robert Brym
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0342
Ukrainian-born Yankev Leshchinsky (1876-1966) was the leading scholarly and journalistic analyst of Eastern European Jewish socioeconomic and political life from the 1920s to the 1950s. Known as “the dean of Jewish sociologists” and “the father of Jewish demography,” Leshchinsky published a series of insightful and moving essays in Yiddish on Polish Jewry between 1927 and 1937. Despite heightened interest in interwar Jewish communities in Poland in recent years, these essays (like most of Leshchinsky’s works) have never been translated into English.
boy says: (a book with no ending)
Author: Néstor Ponce
Translator: Max Ubelaker Andrade
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2024
Touching Parchment: How Medieval Users Rubbed, Handled, and Kissed Their Manuscripts: Volume 2: Social Encounters with the Book
Author: Kathryn M. Rudy
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0379
In the late middle ages (ca. 1200-1520), both religious and secular people used manuscripts, was regarded as a most precious item. The traces of their use through touching and handling during different rituals such as oath-taking, public reading, and memorializing the dead, is the subject of Kathryn Rudy’s research in Touching Parchment.
The Diary of Anna Comnena, or The Very Political Adventures of a Transgender Byzantine Princess in African Elevators
Author: Tis Kaoru Zamler-Carhart
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2024
Bitter-Sweet Democracy?: Analyzing citizens’ resentment towards politics in Belgium
Editor: Virginie Van Ingelgom
Editor: Karen Celis
Editor: Louise Knops
Editor: Heidi Mercenier
Editor: François Randour
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0401
Discussions about the ‘crisis of representative democracy’ have dominated scholarly and public discourse for some time now. But what does this phrase actually entail, and what is its relevance today? How do citizens themselves experience, feel and respond to this ‘crisis’? Bitter-Sweet Democracy grapples with the complexities of these questions in the context of citizens’ relations to politics in Belgium—a nation that has experienced political instability and protests as well as social mobilization and democratic vitality in recent years.
Augustus De Morgan, Polymath: New Perspectives on his Life and Legacy
Author: Karen Attar
Author: Adrian Rice
Author: Christopher Stray
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0408
When Augustus De Morgan died in 1871, he was described as ‘one of the profoundest mathematicians in the United Kingdom’ and even as ‘the greatest of our mathematicians’. But he was far more than just a mathematician. Because much of his voluminous written output on various subjects was scattered throughout journals and encyclopaedias, the breadth of his interests and contributions has been underappreciated by historians. Now, renewed interest in De Morgan’s life and work has coincided with the digitization of his extensive library, revealing the extent to which he pioneered and influenced the development of not merely mathematics but also logic, astronomy, the history of mathematics, education, and bibliography.
Trix: The Other Kipling
Author: Barbara Fisher
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0377
This volume represents the first biography of Alice MacDonald Kipling Fleming (1868-1948), known as Trix. Rarely portrayed with sympathy or accuracy in biographies of her famous brother Rudyard, Trix was a talented writer and a memorable character in her own right whose fascinating life was unknown until now. In telling Trix’s story, Barbara Fisher rescues her from the misrepresentations, trivializations, and outright neglect of Rudyard’s many biographers.
An Anthology of Global Risk
Editor: SJ Beard
Editor: Tom Hobson
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0360
This anthology brings together a diversity of key texts in the emerging field of Existential Risk Studies. It serves to complement the previous volume The Era of Global Risk: An Introduction to Existential Risk Studies by providing open access to original research and insights in this rapidly evolving field. At its heart, this book highlights the ongoing development of new academic paradigms and theories of change that have emerged from a community of researchers in and around the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. The chapters in this book challenge received notions of human extinction and civilization collapse and seek to chart new paths towards existential security and hope.
August 2024
The Embassy, the Ambush, and the Ogre: Greco-Roman Influence in Sanskrit Theater
Author: Roberto Morales-Harley
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0417
This volume presents a sophisticated and intricate examination of the parallels between Sanskrit and Greco-Roman literature. By means of a philological and literary analysis, Morales-Harley hypothesizes that Greco-Roman literature was known, understood, and recreated in India. Moreover, it is argued that the techniques for adapting epic into theater could have been Greco-Roman influences in India, and that some of the elements adapted within the literary motifs (specifically the motifs of the embassy, the ambush, and the ogre) could have been Greco-Roman borrowings by Sanskrit authors.
An Annotated Corpus of Three Hundred Proverbs, Sayings, and Idioms in Eastern Jibbali/Śḥərɛ̄́t
Author: Giuliano Castagna
Contributions by: Suhail al-Amri
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0422
This book explores the rich paremiological heritage of Jibbali/Śḥərɛ̄́t, an endangered pre-literate language belonging to the Modern South Arabian sub-branch of Semitic, spoken by an ever-decreasing number of people in the Dhofar governorate of the Sultanate of Oman.
Night-sky: Vol. 2
Editor: Mehita Iqani
Editor: Wamuwi Mbao
Cape Town: African Minds, 2024
https://doi.org/10.47622/9781928502920
What is science communication? This collection proposes that it can be creative writing aimed at the heart, rather than information directed to the mind.
FicSci playfully subverts the term ‘science fiction’ to offer an experimental process that explores the limits of imagination in relation to scientific possibility (and vice versa). FicSci is an experiment in hybridized creative practice that induces new forms of knowledge-making between the hard sciences and the social world. This collection offers writing that emerged from an encounter that brought twelve creative writers together with an astronomer.
The presented science invited contemplation of scientific aspects of the night sky, in specific X-ray binary stars, extra-galactic sources, and magellanic clouds. The creative writings that emerged are attendant to the wider potentialities of scientific thought, and reveal how methodologies for storying the scientific encounter are creatively multi-form.
Thinking Blue / Writing Red: Marxism and the (Post)Human
Author: Stephen Tumino
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0324
Thinking Blue/Writing Red interrogates contemporary culture across a range of texts, from the pandemic (‘Covid’ and ‘Trump Speak’) to high theory (Melville’s narratives) and popular culture (Beyoncé’s ‘Formation’ and Super Bowl performance, Twin Peaks , metamodern ‘cli-fi’ films).
Taunting the Useful
Author: Loumille Métros
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2024
Etosha Pan to the Skeleton Coast: Conservation Histories, Policies and Practices in North-west Namibia
Editor: Sian Sullivan
Editor: Ute Dieckmann
Editor: Selma Lendelvo
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0402
Etosha Pan to the Skeleton Coast examines the conservation histories and concerns of one of southern Africa’s most iconic conservation regions: the variously connected ‘Etosha-Kunene’ areas of north-central and north-west Namibia. This cross-disciplinary volume brings together contributions from a Namibian and international group of scholars and conservation practitioners, working on topics ranging from colonial histories to water management, perceptions of ‘wildlife’ and the politics of belonging. Together, these essays confront a critical question: how can the conservation of biodiversity-rich landscapes be reconciled with historical injustices of social exclusion and marginalisation?
Voices from Nubia: Critical Essays on Contemporary Nubian Literature from Egypt
Editor: Mona M. Radwan
Editor: Amal Mazhar
Editor: Faten I. Morsy
Foreword by: Rasheed El-Enany
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2024
Rocklands: On Becoming the First Generation of Black Psychologists in Post-Apartheid South Africa
Author: Liezille Jean Jacobs
Cape Town: African Minds, 2024
https://doi.org/10.47622/9781928502890
This book makes a brave and erudite scholarly contribution to the field of psychology. Its method is unconventional but carefully considered. Those who have provided comments on the manuscript unanimously concur – this book is essential reading for students and academics, families and patriarchs in equal measure.
July 2024
The Diagrammatics of ‘Race’: Visualizing Human Relatedness in the History of Physical, Evolutionary, and Genetic Anthropology, ca. 1770-2020
Author: Marianne Sommer
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0396
This is the first book that engages with the history of diagrams in physical, evolutionary, and genetic anthropology. Since their establishment as scientific tools for classification in the eighteenth century, diagrams have been used to determine but also to deny kinship between human groups. In nineteenth-century craniometry, they were omnipresent in attempts to standardize measurements on skulls for hierarchical categorization. In particular the ’human family tree’ was central for evolutionary understandings of human diversity, being used on both sides of debates about whether humans constitute different species well into the twentieth century. With recent advances in (ancient) DNA analyses, the tree diagram has become more contested than ever―does human relatedness take the shape of a network? Are human individual genomes mosaics made up of different ancestries? Sommer examines the epistemic and political role of these visual representations in the history of ‘race’ as an anthropological category. How do such diagrams relate to imperial and (post-)colonial practices and ideologies but also to liberal and humanist concerns?
Containment: Technologies of Holding, Filtering, Leaking
Author: Daniela Agostinho
Author: Hélène Frichot
Author: Meredith Jones
Author: Chris Otter
Author: Paul Graham Raven
Author: Helen Runting
Author: Yolande Strengers
Author: Nanna Bonde Thylstrup
Author: Dinesh Wadiwel
Editor: Zoë Sofoulis
Editor: Marie-Luise Angerer
Editor: Ingrid Richardson
Editor: Hannah Schmedes
Lüneburg: meson press, 2024
Containers are ubiquitous and inescapable. From handbags to houses, barrels to databases, captivating gameworlds to the “bag of stars” that Ursula Le Guin calls the universe, containers furnish infrastructures for living and action while extending our capacities for managing things across space and time. They not only give shape to our lifeworlds: they form and transform our bodies and being.
The chapters in Containment: Technologies of Holding, Filtering, Leaking traverse technologies, bodies, ontologies and imaginaries, reflecting on what different container technologies, containment strategies, and container metaphors tell us about ourselves and how we relate to our worlds. With common reference to Zoë Sofia’s (2000) foundational essay on container technologies, contributors draw on media and cultural studies, social history, architecture, and postdualistic approaches in philosophy and social science to explore liminalities of containment both as and beyond holding.
Atlas of Petromodernity
Author: Alexander Klose
Author: Benjamin Steininger
Translator: Ayça Türkoğlu
Foreword by: Stephanie LeMenager
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2024
June 2024
Feliks Volkhovskii: A Revolutionary Life
Author: Michael Hughes
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0385
Michael Hughes’s groundbreaking new biography provides a vivid history of this notable but hitherto neglected figure of both the political and literary worlds. Based on ten years of research in archives across the world and drawing on sources in multiple languages, this masterful biography explores how Feliks Volkhovskii’s life illuminates broader intellectual and historical questions about the Russian revolutionary movement. It is essential reading for anyone interested in late Imperial Russia and the Russian revolution.
Music and Spirituality: Theological Approaches, Empirical Methods, and Christian Worship
Editor: George Corbett
Editor: Sarah Moerman
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0403
The composer Sir James MacMillan has often referred to music as ‘the most spiritual of the arts’, and for many people, regardless of religious affiliation, this rings true. In listening to music, we are drawn to dimensions of human experience beyond the material. This collection brings together leading scholars from various disciplines – including Christian theology, musicology, and psychology and neuroscience – to interrogate the intimate relationship between music and spirituality.
Wilhelm Reich versus the Flying Saucers: An American Tragedy
Author: James Reich
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2024
Antisemitism in Online Communication: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Hate Speech in the Twenty-First Century
Editor: Laura Ascone
Editor: Karolina Placzynta
Editor: Chloé Vincent
Editor: Matthias J. Becker
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0406
Drawing from disciplines such as corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, semiotics, history, and philosophy, this edited collection examines over 100,000 user comments from three language communities. Contributors explore various facets of online antisemitism, including its intersectionality with misogyny and its dissemination through memes and social networks. Through case studies, they examine the reproduction, support, and rejection of antisemitic tropes, alongside quantitative assessments of comment structures in online discussions. Additionally, the volume delves into the capabilities of content moderation tools and deep-learning models for automated hate speech detection. This multidisciplinary approach provides a comprehensive understanding of contemporary antisemitism in digital spaces, recognising the importance of addressing its insidious spread from multiple angles.
The Life of Nuns: Love, Politics, and Religion in Medieval German Convents
Author: Eva Schlotheuber
Author: Henrike Lähnemann
Translator: Anne Simon
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0397
In the Middle Ages half of those who chose the religious life were women, yet historians have overlooked entire generations of educated, feisty, capable and enterprising nuns, condemning them to the dusty silence of the archives. What, though, were their motives for entering a convent and what was their daily routine behind its walls like? How did they think, live and worship, both as individuals and as a community? How did they maintain contact with the families and communities they had left behind? Henrike Lähnemann and Eva Schlotheuber offer readers a vivid insight into the largely unknown lives and work of religious women in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Psychological Perspectives on Musical Experiences and Skills: Research in the Western Balkans and Western Europe
Editor: Blanka Bogunović
Editor: Renee Timmers
Editor: Sanela Nikolić
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0389
This book features recent research on the psychology of music from the Western Balkans, foregrounding its specific topics, methods, and influences by bringing it into productive conversation with complementary research from Western Europe and further afield.
The Presence of Absence: Meditations on the Unsayable in Writing
Author: Katina L. Rogers
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2024
Human Evolutionary Demography
Editor: Oskar Burger
Editor: Ronald Lee
Editor: Rebecca Sear
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0251
Human evolutionary demography is an emerging field blending natural science with social science. This edited volume provides a much-needed, interdisciplinary introduction to the field and highlights cutting-edge research for interested readers and researchers in demography, the evolutionary behavioural sciences, biology, and related disciplines.
A Story of Witchery
Author: Jennifer Calkins
Illustrator: Thor Harris
Introduction by: Amy Gerstler
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2024
Saki (H.H. Munro): Original and Uncollected Stories
Editor: Bruce Gaston
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0365
The short stories of Hector Hugh Munro, better known by his pen name Saki, have remained in print continuously for over a hundred years. This collection is the first of its kind to present his stories as they were originally published in newspapers and magazines, preserving their internal consistency and contemporary references lost in revisions for The Chronicles of Clovis and subsequent collected editions. A trove of annotations and carefully sourced bibliographical information illuminates the Edwardian context behind the thirteen selected stories, of which three (‘Mrs. Pendercoet’s Lost Identity’, ‘The Romance of Business’ and ‘The Optimist’) were only recently rediscovered.
May 2024
Elementare Ekstasen: Sondierungen der Technosphäre
Author: Léa Perraudin
Lüneburg: meson press, 2024
Elementare Ekstasen überschwemmen, erodieren und evaporieren die wohlsortierten Grenzziehungen zwischen Technik, Umwelt und Mensch. Als Neuverortung im Spannungsfeld medienökologischer, neomaterialistischer und technikfeministischer Theoriebildung werden hier all jene Widerständigkeiten und Un/Verfügbarkeiten sondiert, die von techno-kapitalistisch protegierten Operationen nicht zu tilgen sind. Was hieße es, die planetarische Implikation der Technosphäre aus Mikroperspektiven zu denken, mit ihren Überlappungen, Leerstellen, Fragmentierungen, Akkumulationen des Technischen zu schreiben? Entlang ihrer materiellen Prozessualität werden elementare Medien wie Regen, Minerale, Staub und Schaum zur Gegenwartsdiagnose. Angesichts der umfassenden Ökologisierungstendenzen und ihrer experimentellen Verarbeitung in Medienkunst und Interfacedesign verdichtet sich ein kritisches Begriffsinventar, das die makrologische Karriere des Technischen anders denkt.
Roles and Relations in Biblical Law: A Study of Participant Tracking, Semantic Roles, and Social Networks in Leviticus 17-26
Author: Christian Canu Højgaard
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0376
Leviticus 17–26, an ancient law text known as the Holiness Code, prescribes how particular persons are to behave in concrete, everyday situations. The addressees of the law text must revere their parents, respect the elderly, fear God, take care of their fellow, provide for the sojourner, and so on. The sojourner has his own obligations, as do the priests. Even God is said to behave in various ways towards various persons. Thus, the law text forms an intricate web of persons and interactions.
Music and the Making of Modern Japan: Joining the Global Concert
Author: Margaret Mehl
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0374
In only 50 years, from the 1870s to the early 1920s, Japanese people laid the foundations for the country’s post-war rise as a musical as well as an economic power. Meanwhile, new types of popular song, fuelled by the growing global record industry, successfully blended inspiration from the West with musical characteristics perceived as Japanese.
Speaking with the Dead: An Ethnography of Extrahuman Experience
Author: Matt Tomlinson
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2024