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: 2026-06-05 01:00:11
May 2026
The Politics of Open Infrastructures: Power, Governance, and Justice in Digital Knowledge Practices
Editor: Katja Mayer
Editor: Astrid Mager
Editor: Renée Ridgway
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2026
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0528
This volume examines how openness is designed, governed, contested and lived in contemporary digital knowledge infrastructures. From open source software and internet standards, to citizen science platforms, public sector data systems and alternative computing practices, the book shows that infrastructures are never neutral technical backbones.
War Machine
Author: Richard A. Carter
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2026
https://doi.org/10.53288/0564.1.00
War Machine is a speculative sounding of the myriad entanglements of technology, ecology, discourse, politics, and conflict shaping the contemporary environment. Taking the tools of geopolitical competition and control as its formal and conceptual basis—wargame simulations, artificial intelligence, weaponised drones, territorial enclosure, and extractivist economics—War Machine presents a series of digitally simulated conflicts over the most ecologically vulnerable areas of the Earth, using the data gathered to generate hybrid visual poems that stand in for the multitude of political, conceptual, and economic battles that are presently raging across the face of a profoundly endangered planet.A hybrid work of generative criticism and poetry, War Machine depicts the intensive complexities of the present moment through conducting an experimental textual performance, attempting to enfold and perform, rather than simply describe, challenging conjunctions of competing discourses and activities. The resulting stream of outputs and interpretive potentials preclude the ascendency of any “definitive” critical narrative, refusing any straightforward integration with existing canons of worldly diagnosis, but also illustrating opportunities for resistant play and critical-creative possibility within the uncertainty.The consciously unconventional gesture at the heart of War Machine is in attempt at modelling an adventurous, forward-facing approach, in both thought and practice, that refuses inaction when dealing with otherwise devastating scenarios. It is an approach that acknowledges head-on myriad worldly harms, seemingly insurmountable, while still contributing to the aesthetic, affective, and conceptual foundations from which alternative modes of knowing, being, and meaning are developed and justified.
Neoliberalism, Democratic Erosion and the Global Struggle for Social Justice
Editor: Tor Halvorsen
Editor: Chris Tapscott
https://doi.org/10.47622/9780639891330
The global expansion of neoliberal capitalism and its contentious relationship with democracy remains one of the most pressing debates of our time. This book offers a comprehensive examination of how capitalism has adapted from merchant and industrial forms into the modern era of financialization which underpins the current globalising order. By tracing the evolution of the state, it explores the deliberate political decisions that have prioritised market efficiency over social welfare.The central thesis of this book is that neoliberalism is not an inevitable evolutionary endpoint of human development, but rather a crafted ideology designed to “tame” democracy through technocratic and judicial constraints. The authors argue that a fundamental tension exists between the market’s “free play of forces” and the democratic principle of social entitlement. As the state shifts from an economic regulator to a market broker, democratic oversight is increasingly displaced by insulated, expert-driven authorities. This restructuring has not only fuelled global inequality but has also turned technology into a tool for digital coloniality, where transnational firms extract value through surveillance and algorithmic optimisation. “Techno-feudalism” epitomises how the contemporary trajectory of datafication serves corporate interests over democratic publics.Unlike literature that merely critiques, this book identifies emerging “geo-economic fragmentation” and the revival of socialdemocratic ideas as openings for democratic renewal. Ultimately, the book argues that the current hegemony is neither inevitable nor irreversible. By analysing the rise of right-wing populism and the growing disillusionment with the neoliberal narrative, the contributors highlight the urgent need to reassert democratic control over economic systems to address the existential threats of environmental collapse and social polarisation.
Lifetimes: A Theory of Timescales and Life Forms
Editor: Helge Jordheim
Editor: Sine Halkjelsvik Bjordal
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2026
https://doi.org/10.53288/0484.1.00
At the beginning of the 21st century, many of our most well-known and dependable forms of keeping, managing, and representing time are losing their grasp on the real. Clocks cannot measure how societies speed up, or come to a standstill during crisis, modern historiography is unable to come up with meaningful narratives about mankind as the sixth extinction event, and calendars are insufficient as tools for societal and political change. Lifetimes: A Theory of Timescales and Life Forms presents an alternative framework for studying lives and times, and the relationships between them.
Building on post-war theories of history, as well as several historical sub-disciplines, such as cultural history, history of science, and medical history, Lifetimes integrates approaches from anthropology, game studies, cultural studies, literary studies, critical heritage studies, science & technology studies, and critical time studies. Times are understood as always existing in plural, as embodied and emergent—in things, in assemblages of things, and in the relations between things. Among them are the lives of humans, but also the lives of viruses, plants, animals, rocks, computers, nations, concepts, policies, technologies, infrastructures, etc.
Lifetimes explores theoretical foundations while at the same time developing them through case studies in individual chapters. The result is a bottom-up theory of temporal multiplicity, conceptually and theoretically open enough to be productive across various academic disciplines. Rather than discussing how different disciplines relate to time, the authors in this edited collection present a theoretically sustained, empirically diverse range of cases, in which times in plural become politically and historically salient. Out of these case-studies a new theory emerges: a theory of lifetimes.
A Multipolar Approach to Early Christian Arabic: Vatican Arabic Ms 13 in the Linguistic Landscape of Early Islam
Author: Phillip W. Stokes
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2026
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0517
This volume offers the most comprehensive linguistic analysis to date of Vatican Arabic MS 13, a late 9th/early 10th-century Arabic Gospel manuscript. Combining meticulous quantitative study with wide-ranging comparative evidence, this book provides an in-depth examination of the manuscript’s orthography, phonology, morphology, morpho-syntax, and syntax. Through extensive charts, tables, and multiple interpretive frameworks, the author illuminates how linguistic features pattern across every dimension relevant to accurate analysis.
Crucially, the study does not treat MS 13 in isolation. Its features are systematically compared with those of other Christian Arabic manuscripts, Quranic traditions, medieval Arabic registers, early poetry, and modern dialects. This contextualised approach situates the manuscript within the rich linguistic diversity of medieval Arabic and challenges long-standing assumptions about ‘Middle Arabic’ and ‘Classical Arabic’. By demonstrating that many features of MS 13 align with broader scribal and linguistic practices of the period, the book makes a compelling case against the notion that scribes worked towards a single, unified register or variety. Rather, they drew creatively and pragmatically from a diverse repertoire of features and linguistic traditions, revealing a far more dynamic and multifaceted approach to written composition than previously recognised.
An outstanding and field-shaping contribution, this volume provides an essential model for future work on Christian Arabic, medieval Arabic varieties, and the history of Arabic more broadly.
Colour Matters: Exploring Chromatic Materialities in the Long Nineteenth Century (1798-1914)
Editor: Stefano Evangelista
Editor: Charlotte Ribeyrol
Editor: Matthew Winterbottom
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2026
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0501
Colour Matters provides a fresh investigation of colour in the long nineteenth century. Across fourteen richly researched essays, the book explores the materiality, politics, and sensory experience of colour—from synthetic dyes and chrome pigments to the role of colour in medicine, gender, empire, and identity.
The Sentencing of Jesus (Gzar-dina de-Yeshu): The ‘Authentic’ Jewish Protocols of the Trial of Jesus
Author: Gideon Bohak
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2026
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0497
By reconstructing an ancient polemical text that has previously been known only in a fragmentary manner, and by situating it both within its Late Antique context and in the context of previous scholarship, this book makes a significant contribution to the study of Judaism, and of Jewish-Christian relations, in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages.
Benjamin Franklin, Orthoepist and Phonetician: Vol. 1: Language, Literacy and Social Mobility in Franklin’s World
Author: Gary D. German
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2026
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0470
This book offers a groundbreaking exploreation of Franklin’s little-studied linguistic legacy – his Reformed Mode of Spelling (1768/1779).
Distributing Knowledge: Openness, Equity, and Higher Education Transformation
Author: Richard F. Heller
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2026
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0520
Inequity is deeply embedded in higher education: in who can access learning, whose knowledge is created and valued, who gets published, and who ultimately benefits from universities’ work. Distributing Knowledge argues that the sector is falling short of its public mission—and that incremental reform is no longer enough.
Benjamin Franklin, Orthoepist and Phonetician: Vol. 2: Colonial American Voices and London Norms: Franklin’s Quest for an Orthographic Reform
Author: Gary D. German
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2026
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0537
Benjamin Franklin has been hailed as an inventor, scientist, printer, author, philosopher, diplomat, philanthropist and political activist and, especially, a founding father of the United States, but few are aware he was also a phonetician. This volume offers a groundbreaking exploration of Franklin’s little-studied linguistic legacy—his Reformed Mode of Spelling (1768/1779). In this short treatise, Franklin outlined a plan for a radical, phonetically-based modernization of the English spelling system that would simultaneously serve as a pronunciation guide for what he envisaged to be ‘correct’ English as well as a practical scheme allowing the unlettered and foreigners to learn to read and write ‘within a week’. The social and sociolinguistic reasons for its inception as well as what that model entailed linguistically are the focus of this book.
April 2026
From the Margins: Migrant Academics’ Narratives of Precarity
Editor: Ladan Rahbari
Editor: Olga Burlyuk
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2026
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0508
From the Margins: Migrant Academics’ Narratives of Precarity is the much-anticipated second volume following Migrant Academics’ Narratives of Precarity and Resilience in Europe published in 2023, and available at https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0331. This new collection deepens and expands the conversation on the lived experiences of migrant academics navigating global academia.
Maintaining the autoethnographic and narrative approach of the first volume, From the Margins brings together diverse voices that challenge the Eurocentric framing of academic mobility by extending the focus beyond Europe to contexts such as the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan, South Africa, and the Middle East. Through deeply personal, creative, and reflexive narratives, the contributors delve deep into the notions of privilege, migration, and precarity, revealing how academic hierarchies and colonial legacies shape everyday experiences of belonging, vulnerability, and resilience.
Bridging scholarship and storytelling, this volume offers an intellectually rich and emotionally resonant exploration of academia’s margins, inviting readers to rethink what knowledge, care, and solidarity mean within and beyond institutional borders. This volume appeals to scholars and students across migration, sociology, postcolonial, gender, race, and border studies, as well as to university leaders and diversity officers. Its interdisciplinary and creative format—including poetry and prose—makes it both accessible and engaging for academic and general audiences alike.
Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education: A Phenomenological View
Editor: Sencer Yeralan
Author: Philip Aka
Author: Derek Baker
Author: Azra Branković
Author: Eka Gegeshidze
Author: Laura Ancona Lee
Author: Christos Michalakelis
Author: Mbulaheni Nthangeni
Author: Efthymia Staiou
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2026
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0525
Artificial intelligence is increasingly embedded in the everyday practices of higher education, shaping assessment, governance, labor, and institutional legitimacy. Rather than presenting a technical guide or policy checklist, this volume instead offers a reflective, multi-voiced examination of what AI means for higher education’s purpose, identity, and future. Its phenomenological grounding shifts the focus from operational questions of implementation to deeper inquiries into how AI reshapes institutions, knowledge, and the academic self.
Gazing at the Puerto Rican Anthropological Landscape: The “Natives” Look Far and Wide
Editor: Marisol Ramos
Editor: Manuel Valdés Pizzini
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2026
https://doi.org/10.53288/0540.1.00
Before World War II, most anthropological research in Puerto Rico was led by US anthropologists. The most famous project, The People of Puerto Rico, was directed by American anthropologist Julian Steward and launched the career of renowned scholars such as Sidney Mintz and Eric Wolf. Gazing at the Puerto Rican Anthropological Landscape aims to delineate the development of the post-WWII anthropological field in Puerto Rico by Puerto Rican anthropologists, the so-called “native” anthropologists. The contributors to Gazing at the Puerto Rican Anthropological Landscape deploy the term “native” somewhat ironically, but they also know that who they are affects their positionality vis-à-vis their research subjects. Thus, they retain the term to spark a conversation addressing the complicated feelings that such labels still evoke among non-mainstream anthropologists.
Gazing at the Puerto Rican Anthropological Landscape purposely avoids making Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans a problem to study and instead focuses on a wide variety of epistemological and methodological questions related to the study of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans by “native” anthropologists within local, regional, and global spheres. We posit that the Puerto Rican anthropological landscape transcends the confines of the island of Puerto Rico to encompass its connection and engagement with the larger world, and that it is not limited to the inhabitants of the island of Puerto Rico but embraces members of its diaspora, as well as other groups and ethnicities. On that note, this book seeks to reflect critically on how the academic field of anthropology (research and teaching) in Puerto Rico has evolved, post-WWII, in various engagements with the current debates of contemporary anthropology — theoretical, methodological, socio-cultural, political, and otherwise.
Harvesting the Sea in Southeastern Arabia: Volume 2: Comparative Lexicon of Fish and Other Marine Species
Author: Miranda J. Morris
Author: Erik Anonby
Author: Janet C.E. Watson
Editor: Erik Anonby
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2026
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0538
Along the shores of southeastern Arabia, traditional marine knowledge is fading as languages and ecosystems come under increasing pressure. This second volume of Harvesting the Sea in Southeastern Arabia brings together marine species terminology and associated knowledge in the five coastal Modern South Arabian languages (MSAL) and the Kumzari language of the Musandam Peninsula in eastern Arabia. The materials, collected by the authors in periods between the 1970s and the present, are a testament to communities’ longstanding intimacy with the sea and their resilient livelihoods in the face of often difficult conditions.
Over 2000 marine species names are inventoried, featuring many bony fish and cartilaginous fish, but also including mammals, reptiles, invertebrates, and plants. Terms for fish at various life stages and vocabulary associated with marine species are also provided. The lists are organised in the format of a comparative lexicon, where individual species are compared across the six languages, and as an annotated alphabetical lexicon with a searchable companion file, presenting additional insights collected over the course of fieldwork.
Along with its relevance for communities where this knowledge is being lost as species die out and livelihoods change, this book is an essential resource for anyone interested in learning from the languages, cultures, and ecosystems of Arabia.
Sonic Detection: Necessary Notes for Art and Performance
Author: Rebecca Collins
Author: Johanna Linsley
Contributions by: Naomi Pearce
Contributions by: Xavier de Sousa
Contributions by: Christina Beatty
Contributions by: Nii Obodai
Research by: Amaara Raheem
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2026
https://doi.org/10.53288/0470.1.00
Sonic Detection is part sonic noir, part performance document, and part critical investigation of listening at the margins for readers interested in prospecting the boundaries of performance studies, sound studies, and interdisciplinary writing.The book opens with a group of sonic detectives (exact number unknown) who investigate the mystery of an as-yet-unidentified event that leaves traces only in the acoustic atmosphere. This hybrid fiction propels the reader up and down the UK coast and offers overheard fragments from a faded seaside resort, a container shipping port, a former coal-mining town, and the Scottish headquarters for North Sea oil. A heterogeneous collection of texts follows, from creative-critical essays, performance scores, engagement with the archives of earlier sonic detectives (including poet/performance artist Fiona Templeton and the sound art collective Bow Gamelan Ensemble), to a series of dispatches from expert witnesses with their ears to the ground. Sonic Detection is not so much a monograph as a polygraph, tongue-in-cheek associations with questionable forensic technologies firmly in place. The book emerges from a decade-long collaboration between artists Rebecca Collins and Johanna Linsley, who used eavesdropping as an expanded creative methodology. The project began as a series of hyper-local, community-based performance works in coastal locations in the UK (from Bournemouth to Aberdeen) and grew into an international, multi-disciplinary life work devoted to an ongoing, organized curiosity. Sonic detectives hold open a collective sonorous space. They are the embodiment of the phenomenophile, lingering longer in listening.
The American Archipelago: A New Edition of Oscar Handlin’s Classic Anthology, ‘This Was America’
Author: Oscar Handlin
Editor: Kenneth Weisbrode
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2026
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0495
The collection at hand, Handlin’s classic anthology ‘This Was America’, first published in 1949, gathers Europeans’ travel accounts and perspectives on America from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Rather than presenting a single narrative, Handlin emphasizes variety: contrasting impressions of liberty and inequality, restlessness and rootedness, optimism and critique by people arriving from diverse European backgrounds. His free translations and selective introductions guide readers subtly but leave interpretation open. Over time, these essays shift meaning depending on context—once read as a celebration of American life, they now invite more critical reflection. This new edition reimagines America not as a singular whole but as an “archipelago”: a collection of diverse experiences, perceptions, and contradictions. The metaphor underscores the interplay between unity and multiplicity in American identity.
Pietro Giannone. Autobiography. The Tragedy of a Historian and the Inquisition: Translated with commentary by Thérèse Ridley
Translator: Thérèse Ridley
Contributions by: Thérèse Ridley
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2026
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0483
This edition, translated and annotated by Therese Ridley, not only renders the full autobiography accessible to English readers for the first time, but contextualizes it within modern Italian scholarship. Each chapter is enriched with appendices that include critical sources, commentary, and related correspondence, illuminating the people, events, and philosophical struggles that defined Giannone’s world.
Beyond Popular Science
Author: David H. Silver
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2026
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0526
Beyond Popular Science is not a popular science book. It is not a textbook. It is not an academic monograph. Instead, it occupies a rare and deliberately unconventional space: a work for readers who enjoy scientific storytelling but are no longer satisfied with simplifications that smooth away the real substance of modern science.
Kayfabe Nation: Professional Wrestling, Donald Trump, and the New Cynicism
Author: Neal Hebert
Author: Jon Cogburn
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2026
https://doi.org/10.53288/0563.1.00
What do a pudgy, orange autocrat, and pumped-up men in tights have in common? The connections, while profound, all rest on specific strategies employed by World Wrestling Entertainment during the early 2000s (known as WWE’s “Attitude Era”) when Donald Trump was centrally involved with the promotion of WWE. These are: (1) universally breaking kayfabe, the code of people in the industry not to reveal or admit fakery; (2) Vince McMahon (WWE’s CEO at that time) playing a fictional version of himself as someone constantly humiliated in storylines; (3) the vicious affirmation of traditional gender roles through parables of male domination; and (4) telling stories that encourage viewers to ignore the actual material conditions of WWE “superstars” in favor of conspiratorial fictions involving powerful individual actors. In Kayfabe Nation: Professional Wrestling, Donald Trump, and the New Cynicism, Hebert and Cogburn present a trenchant analysis of Attitude Era WWE, showing the extent to which MAGA is just is a function, or symptom, of Trump’s internalization of WWE’s most objectionable tropes.
Neal Hebert and Jon Cogburn’s goal is not to use WWE merely to understand Trumpism and the related autocratic turn in countries as diverse as El-Sisi’s Egypt, Putin’s Russia, Erdogan’s Turkey, Modi’s India, Bolsonaro’s Brazil, Orbán’s Hungary, Netanyahu’s Israel, and of course Trump’s own America. Beyond that, Kayfabe Nation is a defense of truth against the lie that culminates in the widespread adoption of self-defeating conspiracy theories among the constituency of the right, as well as against the idea, popular in corrupted center-left parties across the planet that political success comes down to adopting better rhetorical strategies, strategies that exist in part to cover over their abandonment of New Deal and socialist ideologies where the material conditions of their constituencies would actually improve.
March 2026
Works for Works, Book 2: “No Rights”
<img src=“https://books.punctumbooks.com/10.53288/0512.1.00_frontcover.jpg” alt=“cover for Works for Works, Book 2:”No Rights”” width=“300”/>
Author: Gavin Keeney
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2026
https://doi.org/10.53288/0512.1.00
Works for Works, Book 2: “No Rights,” privileges works-based agency (praxis) in literary-artistic scholarship. The principal focus of the Franciscan-inspired embrace of a “no rights” status for works of literary-artistic scholarship is toward freeing both author and works from forms of technocratic determinism and neo-utilitarianism associated with regimes of intellectual property rights law and platform cultures. Engaging, and then dispensing with, the concept of “the artistic exception,” a holdover from modernist justifications for art in/for itself, Works for Works nonetheless restores the primacy of the work itself through disconnecting author and work toward a transfiguration of both author and work and the substantiation of a new ecosystem for radical works of artistic-critical inquiry.
Works for Works, Book 2: “No Rights,” follows upon Works for Works, Book 1: Useless Beauty (2022), a structuralist-inspired survey and exposé of the immanentist paradox artist-scholars inhabit in the post-contemporary transition from modernist and post-modernist reflexivity to forms of cultural production that favor no singular raison d’être or socio-cultural, socio-economic, or socio-political bias.
Red Lives: Our Years in the U.S. Communist Party (1950–2000), Vol. 1: Coming of Age in the Communist and Labor Movements
Editor: Jay Schaffner
Editor: Paul Friedman
Editor: Cindy Hawes
Editor: Geoffrey Jacques
Editor: Timothy Johnson
Editor: Carol Pittman
Editor: Donna Ristorucci
Editor: Daniel Rosenberg
Editor: Jackie Saindon
Foreword by: Robin D.G. Kelley
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2026
https://doi.org/10.53288/0455.1.00
Red Lives: Our Years in the US Communist Party (1950–2000) is the first collection of historical analyses and reminiscences by members of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and the Communist youth movement in the US from the 1950s through the 1990s. The nearly fifty first-person testimonies bring to life a missing chapter in the history of US radicalism and demonstrate the influence of the post–World War II generation of Communists on social justice movements.
Most histories of US Communism end in 1956 when Red Lives just begins, when McCarthyism was on its final legs, the Civil Rights Movement was sweeping the American South and the whole country, the student movement was taking its first breaths, and a new generation of young people were seeking out socialists, communists, and the Communist Party in order to craft a radical, anti-establishment politics. At a time when the launching of Sputnik, the Cuban Revolution, other revolutions sweeping Africa, and the example of the Vietnamese people fighting for their freedom and independence were inspiring the world, one-third of the world was also socialist, led by the Soviet Union and China. The time was propitious for a new generation in the US to also be seeking out, and joining, the CPUSA. This first volume of Red Lives, Coming of Age in the Communist and Labor Movements, brings the stories of that generation to the forefront of American history at a time when narratives of resistance are more needed than ever before.
Spaces for Action: A Repository of Tools and Methods for a Socially Situated Architectural Education
Editor: Guido Cimadomo
Editor: Ingrid C. Vargas Díaz
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2026
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0503
‘Spaces for Action’ provides a hands-on guide for teachers and students looking to make architectural learning more engaging, collaborative, and socially meaningful.
The book brings together over 80 creative tools that can be adapted to different classrooms, communities, and design challenges. The tools are grouped by teaching approaches—like cooperative teamwork, experiential learning, and transformative practices—and by the stages of the design process: identifying challenges, generating ideas, and putting them into action. Each entry gives a clear overview of what the tool is for, how it works, and what you need to make it happen. You’ll also find tips on group sizes, resources, and possible collaborators, making it easy to bring these methods straight into practice.
Ottoman-Era Documents from the Cairo Genizah
Author: Jane Hathaway
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2026
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0502
This groundbreaking volume marks a rare and transformative contribution to studies of the Cairo Genizah, a vast trove of documents generated by Egypt’s Jewish community between the 10th and 19th centuries. While the Cairo Genizah has long yielded extraordinary insights into Jewish history in the greater Mediterranean region, attention has focused overwhelmingly on documents from the ‘classical’ period (11th–13th centuries). Documents from the later period, when Egypt was ruled by the Mamluk Sultanate and the Ottoman Empire, remain woefully underexplored. This book helps to change that, presenting a meticulously curated collection of later Genizah documents that expand the boundaries of current scholarship.
Make/Unmake: Play at the Centre of Culture Change
Author: Anna Beresin
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2026
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0511
Anna Beresin’s ‘Make/Unmake’ is an engaging and deeply original exploration of children’s play as a powerful cultural force. Drawing on ethnographic research and vivid travel writing, the author journeys to the Midlands region of England to observe three remarkable play-based programs: the Maker{Futures} Mobile Makerspace, the Pitsmoor Adventure Playground, and the GLUE Collective. She captures the voices of playworkers, teachers, and artists and documents the ingenuity of children turning objects into tools of imagination and change.
Dutch Afro Becomings: Hybrid Being in Black Art and Culture
Author: Charl Landvreugd
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2026
https://doi.org/10.53288/0537.1.00
In Dutch Afro Becomings, artist, curator, and researcher Charl Landvreugd argues that we do not yet have a language to understand Dutch Afro-ness, and that it is insufficient to rely on the discourses developed in African American, Black British, or Caribbean cultural theory alone. This critical monograph on continental European Black art and cultural history articulates the specificity of Dutch Afro-ness and the way that Blackness has been translated and (mis)understood across multiple decades of cultural policy, while also providing an incisive analysis of the Dutch state’s aim to showcase “diversity” in a way that is comfortable to the white cultural class, without ever addressing issues of racism or race.
Simultaneously, Landvreugd traces how recent generations of artists are effectively constructing a new visual language to name their Dutch Afro-ness by deepening the way their being is shaped across multiple cultural identities and national histories. These time travelers and wanderers are the Wakaman: cultural workers that embrace their hybridity and multiplicity and have defined, on their own terms and through their own words, their nativity within the Dutch art scene.
Dutch Afro Becomings is a key theoretical and art-historical work, as an introduction to both different international genealogies of Black arts and culture and to the different movements that shaped the specificity of Dutch Afro artists in particular.
Historicizing IQ Testing: Intelligence Assessments and their Role in Norwegian Society from the 1900s to the Present
Editor: Håkon Aamot Caspersen
Editor: Jon Røyne Kyllingstad
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2026
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0471
Intelligence testing has shaped modern society in profound ways, influencing education, psychology, law, and governance. This volume offers the first comprehensive study of the history of IQ testing in a Nordic country, shedding new light on its development, adaptation, and societal impact in Norway.
February 2026
Desire: Subject, Sexuation, and Love
Author: Ana María Munar
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2026
https://doi.org/10.53288/0516.1.00
Have you ever wondered what makes you wake up in the morning? Why not just lay down, stay, and eventually disappear? What is the wanting, the energy, and the grace of liveliness? Desire is at the core of liveliness, and this book explains why it is so. Desire is much more than a mere appendix to love, sex, or our craving to have the latest fashion item. It is what allows the most personal and unique expression of each of us.
Desire: Subject, Sexuation, and Love is a work of gratitude to the Lacanian tradition and feminist philosophy. It creatively uses the story of “The Little Mermaid” by H.C. Andersen, as well as art and popular culture to explain the complex landscape of desire and its relation to love and sexuation. Much of the criticism of psychoanalysis from gender studies and poststructuralism is based on a superficial reading of Jacques Lacan, and Munar corrects this, providing in the first half of the book a rigorous and clear analysis of Lacanian subjectification and sexuation, elucidating their relationship to the nature of desire and love, in order to modify overly simplistic and erroneous interpretations of his thinking on desire.
Desire is essayistic and poetic philosophy, drawing upon and playing with psychoanalysis, philosophy, literature, biography, poetry, and art. As the reader enters the second part of the book, the focus on Lacanian theory recedes, opening a space that is more paradoxical and multiple where Munar engages in creative form as an expression of critique, transforming our understandings of desire and love, which always elude us while also always being present.
Imagining What We Don’t Know: Creative Theory and Critical Bodies
Author: Lisa Samuels
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2026
https://doi.org/10.53288/0483.1.00
Bringing together perception, ecology, community, lingual value, and quantum life, Imagining What We Don’t Know: Creative Theory and Critical Bodies presents twenty-four essays and theory poems that blend interpretive neologisms — wild dialectics, distributed centrality, membranism, deformance, bioautography, transplace, soft text, and more — with readings of visionary philosophers and the art and writing of Algeria, Australasia, the Caribbean, Oceania, the UK, and the US.
Committed to experimental ideation and relational ethics, Imagining What We Don’t Know is for art and theory practitioners, philosophy rebels, creative writers, and anyone who relishes thinking about contemporary art, transnational and transdisciplinary life, and how we imagine with language. Imagining What We Don’t Know presents a biblio-architecture of “blurprints” built with theories of the embodied mind that are elemental, entangled, and electrified by the political. This is creative theory, hovering with alterities of art and interpretation and imagining with critical attention.
Africa in Russian Imperial Culture: Race, Empire, and Representation (1850-1917)
Author: Anita Frison
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2026
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0504
This volume uncovers how Sub-Saharan Africa was imagined in Russian culture from 1850 to 1917. Drawing on travelogues, ethnographic studies, fiction, and museum collections, Anita Frison reveals how Russia—though lacking formal colonies in Africa—nonetheless engaged deeply with Western colonial discourse.
From Erving to Goffman: A Work in Performance?
Author: Yves Winkin
Bethlehem, PA: mediastudies.press, 2026
https://doi.org/10.64629/3f8575cb.e3d5966c
Yves Winkin’s From Erving to Goffman, translated from the French, is an elegantly written and deeply informed account of the sociologist’s life, by one of the world’s leading Goffman scholars.
A Society of Meta-Organizations
Author: Héloïse Berkowitz
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2026
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0505
Our contemporary societies are made of meta-organizations — organizations composed of other organizations. These range from international bodies like the International Whaling Commission, to national industry or business associations like the crowdfunding association Finance Participative France, to local associations such as fisheries co-management committees in Catalunya. Meta-organizations have become a defining feature of how actors coordinate, govern and make collective decisions. But what exactly makes them distinct, and why do they matter — both in theory and in practice?
Neomania: How Our Obsession With Innovation is Failing Science, and How to Restore Trust
Author: Krist Vaesen
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2026
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0507
Drawing on metascience as well as the philosophy and sociology of science, Neomania offers a critical analysis of how this ethos has permeated the norms and institutions of modern science. The book traces its historical emergence, diagnoses its systemic consequences, and articulates a reform agenda centered on coordination, shared research programs, and epistemic integrity—an agenda that goes well beyond the principles of Open Science.
al-Dānī’s al-Taysīr fī al-qirāʾāt al-sabʿ: A Translation with Linguistic Commentary
Author: Marijn van Putten
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2026
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0475
Al-Taysīr fī al-Qirāʾāt al-Sabʿ by the 11th century Andalusian scholar ʾAbū ʿAmr al-Dānī is one of the most influential descriptions of the seven reading traditions of the Qurʾān. It is the work on which the later didactic poem by al-Šāṭibī was based, which still stands as the basis for the teaching of the reading traditions among Muslim specialists. This book makes the highly technical genre of the Qurʾānic reading traditions accessible through a rigorous translation of al-Dānī’s work with extensive elucidating footnotes. Besides a full translation of the text, the book also includes an in-depth introduction, which lays out the history of the reading traditions, details of their transmission, the technical terminology of the Qirāʾāt genre, and summarises the linguistic principles of the reading traditions using modern linguistic terminology and illustrative tables.
Corporeal Aesth/ethics: The Body in Bracha L. Ettinger’s Theory and Art
Author: Anna Kisiel
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2026
https://doi.org/10.53288/0499.1.00
Can we think of an ethics that originates in corporeality, and not in codified or symbolic systems? In Corporeal Aesth/ethics, the body resurfaces as a central category of Bracha L. Ettinger’s theory and art, as well as an interpretive key that allows us to assume ethical responsibility for an Other who is not abstract, or distant, or total. Ettinger’s matrixial theory, a deeply feminist psychoanalytical system, ventures beyond the models of subjectivity based on separation and lack, and thus it helps us rethink togetherness and our own humanity.
Corporeal Aesth/ethics explores how we become subjects not through a series of cuts, but through an encounter with radical openness, modeled upon the intrauterine/pregnancy period. Even though the theorized encounter relies on caring, carrying, and sharing, it is far from pleasant and safe, as we might assume. Indeed, some of the knowledge communicated in this phase of subjectivity-becoming may turn out to be painful, even traumatic. It is this profoundly corporeal encounter, Kisiel contends, that makes it possible to conceive of the body as a site and source of ethics. Envisioned through the lens of the matrixial, a subject (never alone, always in severality) reaches new modes of intimacy and hospitality, occasioned by our universally shared, originary experience of becoming with-in the maternal body.
A psychoanalyst, theoretician, and feminist, Ettinger is also an artist. Sharing Ettinger’s conviction that “painting and theory are not different aspects that attest to the same thing, but are rather differentiated levels of working-through,” Kisiel maps the entanglements of the (feminine/motherly) body in both dimensions of Ettinger’s work. In five chapters, this book delineates the project of Ettinger’s corporeal aesth/ethics. It contextualizes the matrixial body, analyzes its humanizing potential, and proposes dialogues of Ettinger’s work with feminism, theology, and Holocaust studies.
Sticky Films
Editor: Kerim Dogruel
Editor: Fadekemi Olawoye
Editor: Clara Podlesnigg
Author: Olja Alvir
Author: Marie Sophie Beckmann
Author: Fabienne Bieri
Author: Miriam De Rosa
Author: Silas Edwards
Author: Rodrigo Faustini dos Santos
Author: Fenja Holz
Author: Philipp Dominik Keidl
Author: Franziska Kohler
Author: Andrea Mariani
Author: Jurij Meden
Author: Emma Merkling
Author: Nils Meyn
Author: Amber Jamilla Musser
Author: Jamal Phoenix
Author: Alexandra Schneider
Author: Laura Teixeira
Author: Julia Willms
Author: Sigal Yona
Stickiness is ambiguous. Sometimes it is a problem, sometimes a solution. It holds a strong affective charge between arousal, lust and disgust. If something is sticky, it promises relation while also threatening unwanted clinginess and the collapse of boundaries between self and other. This volume seeks out moments of stickiness in media cultures, thinking “film” beyond moving images as sediment, residue or layer that transforms, repairs, melts, and splices. Sticky Films explores stickiness in three parts: through sticky feelings, sticky modes of being and becoming, and the representations and material traces of stickiness in audiovisual media.
January 2026
Science in the Salon: Atoms and Animals in Madeleine de Scudéry’s ‘Conversations’ (1680–92): An Essay and Translation
Author: Helena Taylor
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2026
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0465
Madeleine de Scudéry (1607–1701) was a celebrated seventeenth-century novelist and essayist, yet her engagement with natural philosophy and the sciences has been largely overlooked. This volume presents the first English translation of ‘The Story of Two Chameleons’ (1688) and situates it within Scudéry’s broader scientific and philosophical writing. Beyond this seminal text, the book explores her reflections on atomism, natural history, and epistemology, revealing her critical engagement with cutting-edge theories of her time, including a challenge to the Cartesian ‘animal-machine’ hypothesis.
Urban Liquefaction: Rethinking the Relationship between Land and Sea
Editor: Cristián Simonetti
Editor: Michel Lussault
Editor: Tim Ingold
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2026
https://doi.org/10.53288/0532.1.00
From classical times until today, cities have been conceived in the western imagination as ideally confined to the fixities of the land, a space defined in opposition to the fluxes of the sea. Whereas solid land afforded a durable platform for the establishment of property and citizenship, the fluid sea allowed markets—isolated within the secure boundaries of cities—to be connected across the globe though navigation.
Urban Liquefaction: Rethinking the Relationship between Land and Sea attends to the concurrent tensions between solidity and fluidity, permanence and impermanence, and substance and change that remain at the core of the western intellectual tradition, often dividing what is perceived as social from what is perceived as natural in life. Sea level rise poses unprecedented threats to this oppositional relationship, forcing us to reconsider the tension between solidity and fluidity in the design of the built environment. Nearly ten percent of all major cities are likely to be impacted by sea level rise in the coming decades, compromising the necessary infrastructure on which urban life depends. In reality, urban landscapes have been continually in flux, which becomes dramatically visible to urban dwellers mostly in catastrophic events such as earthquakes, tsunamis, alluvions, sinkholes and, above all, soil liquefaction.
Urban Liquefaction gathers contributions from scholars and practitioners working across continents and fields interested in urban life in (and after) the Anthropocene, including anthropology, archaeology, art, architecture, design, human geography, and science studies, to open up an inquiry into these categorical tensions and to speculate on alternative futures for the built environment.
The Case of California
Author: Laurence A. Rickels
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2026
https://doi.org/10.53288/0577.1.00
Focusing on the changing image of the West Coast through such varied social and cultural artifacts as bodybuilding, group therapy, suicide cults, Marilyn Monroe, milk-carton images of missing children, orgies, Mickey Mouse, zombies, teenage slang, shock therapy, and surf music, The Case of California offers a dizzying psycho-history of the twentieth century as crystallized in the symbolic configuration and “case” of California, which case is articulated in relation to German modernism, National Socialism, and Freudian psychoanalysis. As Laurence Rickels writes, “on the personalizable level or label, California is a death cult; on the social, outward, happy-face level, it distributes pleasure via sadomasochism, the adolescent group, or friendship.”
Ultimately, The Case of California excavates the places “California” occupies as concept or placeholder within Freudian psychoanalysis and such systems as the Frankfurt School, East Coast psychoanalysis, and deconstruction. To excavate the full range of “California,” one must apply pressure to a series of adjacent (and often equally marginal or missing) concepts, including group and adolescent psychology, female sexuality, the haunting of music and of mass media at large, the charge of child abuse, and a certain convergence of religious and hysterical conversion.
Passivisation in Semitic, Iranian, Armenian, and Beyond
Editor: Paul M. Noorlander
Editor: Hiwa Asadpour
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2026
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0516
This volume brings together research on passive voice constructions in low-resource languages of Western Asia, a region marked by extraordinary linguistic diversity as well as a long history of cultural suppression and marginalisation. The contributions showcase the passive voice in Semitic, Iranian, Armenian, Greek, and Turkic languages, many of which are endangered, understudied, or confined to diaspora communities and disappearing language islands. Education and cultural expression in these languages remained heavily restricted across parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, underscoring the urgent need for documentation and revitalisation.
Defund Culture: A Radical Proposal
Author: Gary Hall
Bethlehem, PA: mediastudies.press, 2026
https://doi.org/10.64629/3f8575cb.67ab11w2
Defund Culture interrogates the structural inequalities embedded in Britain’s cultural institutions, arguing that meaningful transformation requires not just expanding access, but redistributing resources away from elite structures toward more pluralistic, decolonial alternatives.
Heroines of Greek and Roman Myth: An Intermediate Latin Reader
Author: Maxwell Teitel Paule
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2026
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0496
This volume offers students a fresh approach to reading Latin through the lens of women’s stories in classical myth. The stories, carefully adapted from ancient sources, progress in grammatical and stylistic difficulty, beginning with accessible prose and gradually building toward the complexity of authentic classical Latin. Drawing on Dickinson College’s Latin Core Vocabulary, the book ensures that learners are practicing the most useful words, while less common terms are glossed in-line to promote fluid reading rather than constant translation.
December 2025
Reckoning with Everything
Editor: Benedikt Merkle
Editor: Bernhard Siegert
Author: Geoffrey C. Bowker
Author: Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal
Author: Anna Echterhölter
Author: Eva-Maria Gillich
Author: Moritz Hiller
Author: Jeffrey West Kirkwood
Author: Susanna Lidström
Author: Jussi Parikka
Author: Christoph Rosol
Author: John S. Seberger
Author: Angelika Seppi
Author: Christina Vagt
Author: Adam Wickberg
The transformation of the cultural technique of calculation into a computational environment for the whole planet Earth requires media studies to undergo fundamental changes that go beyond mere reflection on the transformation of global political and economic structures. The becoming environmental of computing confronts us with the fact that the map is the territory: map and territory, media and nature, the Symbolic and the Real, are not distinguished in any categorical way but rather temporarily stabilized results of recursive processes by which they differentiate themselves from each other and call each other into being.However, the cultural technique of calculation has not only become “environmental” since the ubiquity of computation turned cultural techniques into environing techniques. Computation must and has always had to “reckon with everything,” with the materialities of the media that define the environmental conditions of computability, as well as with practices of extracting, storing and transferring data. This volume brings together contributions that seek to describe the environmentality of computation based on selected settings.
Computing Cultures: Knowledges and Practices (1940–1990)
Editor: Arianna Borrelli
Editor: Helena Durnová
Author: Troy Kaighin Astarte
Author: Nathalie Bredella
Author: Marie-José Durand-Richard
Author: Edgar Lejeune
Author: Jacqueline Léon
Author: Elisabetta Mori
Author: Mark Priestley
Highlighting the diverse and fragmentary nature of the so-called “digital turn,” this volume offers a glimpse into the landscape of different computing cultures which emerged side by side between the 1940s and the 1990s, at times sharing some features, yet remaining essentially independent from each other. Some of these cultures disappeared, some thrive until today, but understanding all through their knowledges and practices, interconnections and broader historical context, is essential to deal critically with the visions and dreams, fears and tensions characterizing digital practices in today’s knowledge societies.
Banales Publizieren: Praktiken, Verfahren und Episteme des Selfpublishings
Editor: Elisa Linseisen
Editor: Dorothea Walzer
Author: Julia Bee
Author: Sarah-Mai Dang
Author: Gerko Egert
Author: Annette Gilbert
Author: Erin Rose Glass
Author: Timothy Laquintano
Author: Matthias Preuss
Author: Tom Schmidt
Author: Erika Thomalla
Author: Eva Weinmayr
Praktiken, Verfahren und Episteme des Selfpublishings in Kunst, Literatur und Wissenschaft treten heute konkurrierend neben die institutionalisierte Publikationslandschaft. Dieser Band schlägt vor, die ‚Banalität‘ als wesentliches Merkmal des digitalen Selbstpublizierens zu begreifen. Ziel ist es, die Erweiterung und Überformung der institutionalisierten Verlagslandschaft durch plattformbasierte Publikationsmodelle zu verstehen und zu fragen, inwiefern diese Entwicklung (die eigenen) wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnismodelle und ihre konstitutiven Ein- und Ausschlussprinzipien aufs Spiel setzt. Es geht dabei um die Vermessung eines Feldes von buchförmigen und nicht-buchförmigen digitalen Selbstpublikationen auf Plattformen und im Print-on-Demand-Bereich, das die Grenzen zwischen professionellen Autor:innen und Lai:innen genauso zur Diskussion stellt wie die Unterscheidung von Literatur, Theorie, Kunst und Wissenschaft und ihrer Vermittlung.
“FOLLOW THE PERSON”: Archival Encounters
<img src=“https://books.punctumbooks.com/10.53288/0395.1.00_frontcover.jpg” alt=“cover for”FOLLOW THE PERSON”: Archival Encounters” width=“300”/>
Author: Ammiel Alcalay
Introduction by: Miriam Nichols
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2025
https://doi.org/10.53288/0395.1.00
Poet, novelist, translator, scholar, and critical essayist extraordinaire, Ammiel Alcalay’s intrepid work has always moved across geographic, chronological, political, and linguistic borders. “FOLLOW THE PERSON”: Archival Encounters gathers a dizzying array of texts by Alcalay written over the past fifteen years, all of them having something to do with archival materials. In Alcalay’s case, however, these archives range from more traditional, institutionally-held materials and personal collections to the use of his own experiences and memories as sources for redrawing cultural maps that have too long been divided along sectarian lines of one kind or another.
Moving from the Beats and the Black Arts Movement to the Middle East, “FOLLOW THE PERSON” recalibrates our sense of living history while offering new possibilities for encounters that have been relegated to oblivion or never even imagined. Culled from a variety of eclectic sources and contexts, encountering these essays together offers a completely different experience of Alcalay’s essays, one that argues for a methodology based on minutely recorded events and historical contexts, and for necessary human and cultural encounters that provide models for a new, reinvigorated critical vocabulary.
As Miriam Nichols writes in her Introduction, “Follow the tenuous threads in this collection of writings and you may end up at the looted National Museum in Baghdad during the American invasion, or in the Hoover Institute at Stanford University where most Iraqi state archives wound up. You may find yourself at Bashcharshiya, the market in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war, or in Palestine, on May 14, 1948. Maybe, if you are keen, you will pick up the thread that leads to 17th-century colonial Massachusetts, or perhaps you will stay in New York, rummaging through garbage cans with Diane di Prima, looking for journals and letters tossed out by a lover.” Whichever path you take, you will find multiple worlds, all rendered by Alcalay with light and compassion.
Broken: Illness and Disability in Antônio Francisco Lisboa, Camilo Castelo Branco, Clarice Lispector, Victor Willing, Paula Rego and Ana Palma
Author: Maria Manuel Lisboa
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0500
‘Broken: Illness and Disability in Antônio Francisco Lisboa, Camilo Castelo Branco, Clarice Lispector, Victor Willing, Paula Rego and Ana Palma’ traces the lives and works of six major artists and writers from Portugal, Brazil, and Britain through the lens of ‘being broken’—in body, mind, or both. Spanning from the eighteenth century to the present, the volume explores how sociopolitical and somatic factors such as mental illness, psychological abuse, arthritis, genital mutilation, and multiple sclerosis shaped their creativity, while also reflecting broader national, social, sexual, and political pressures.
More with More: Investing in the Energy Transition: 2025 European Public Investment Outlook
Editor: Floriana Cerniglia
Editor: Francesco Saraceno
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0499
This outlook offers a timely and insightful exploration of Europe’s energy transition, a process that lies at the heart of today’s environmental, economic, and political debates. It examines the diverse commitments undertaken by European countries as they navigate the challenges of decarbonization and the shift to sustainable energy systems. By analyzing both the policy frameworks and the concrete instruments adopted to reach ambitious climate and energy goals, the book sheds light on the strategies shaping the continent’s future.
Solidarity in Contingency: Rorty’s Constructive Project
Editor: Elin D. Huckerby
Editor: Marianne Janack
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0487
Richard Rorty (1931–2007), once dubbed ‘the man who killed truth’, is best known for challenging the idea that philosophy provides foundational knowledge. Yet beyond the controversy lies a vital, underexplored side of Rorty’s work: his constructive vision for fostering democratic solidarity in a world shaped by contingency and uncertainty. This volume shifts focus from defending Rorty to applying his insights for today’s fractured, post-truth culture.
November 2025
Voix de Glace / Voice of Ice
Author: Alta Ifland
Introduction by: John Taylor
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2025
https://doi.org/10.53288/0589.1.00
Voix de Glace/Voice of Ice is a series of prose poems about the estranged self living outside of one’s native land and away from one’s native tongue. Romanian poet Alta Ifland writes first in French, then translates her work into English, before returning to the original French for further revisions, a process of linguistic reconciliation as much as translation.
Published in a bilingual, French–English edition, Ifland repeatedly turns to remembered images of her unnamed homeland to animate her unfamiliar home, creating, what poet Gary Young calls “a brilliant collection of prose poems document[ing] the quest for a coherent self, an authentic identity born out of the chaos of language and history.” He continues, “Ifland’s poems trace a radical process of de-creation—dismemberment of the body, dissolution of the ego, abandonment of the self—and the reinvention of a new identity, purified by the acid of tears. This new creation—tentative and rarified, “a child’s body of light”—earns a tenuous existence, but it proves to be enough to withstand the omnipresent threat of oblivion.”
Voix de Glace/Voice of Ice won the 2008 Prix Louis Guillaume du Poème en Prose/Louis Guillaume Prize for Prose Poetry.
This title is a second revised and expanded edition, released as part of punctum’s Special Collections project.
Perceptron
Author: James E. Dobson
Author: Rena J. Mosteirin
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2025
https://doi.org/10.53288/0408.1.00
Perceptron is a work of experimental poetry and a critical biographical reading of Frank Rosenblatt (1928–1971) and his 1957 invention, the Perceptron. The Perceptron was the first widely publicized and used machine learning device and the origin of much contemporary neural network technology. Rosenblatt was a psychologist, a computer engineer, a musician, an amateur astronomer, a sailor, and a poet. The Perceptron was born from an interdisciplinary mix of ideas and was so far ahead of its time that it was widely misunderstood by other scientists and the public.
This mechanical invention, imagined as an alternative to general purpose digital computers, and its algorithmic implementation as a simulation of the device was deeply rooted in mid-twentieth century neuroscience and psychological theories of behavior. Introduced to the world by one newspaper under the headline “Shades of Frankenstein!” in 1958, following a public demonstration in Maryland sponsored by the US Navy, the Perceptron was a radical new approach to designing computer systems. What made it different was its design as a simplified model of animal vision systems. The Perceptron could perform pattern recognition and matching from a collection of simple visual objects. It was innovative and impressive, but it was also constantly oversold by its financial supporters, the press, and by its inventor.
Perceptron traces, contextualizes, and celebrates the ideas that would become embedded in this early thinking machine and that animated the excitement and promise that would eventually turn to frustration and failure during Rosenblatt’s tragically short lifetime.
Education 2.0: Chronicles of Technological and Cultural Change in Egypt
Editor: Linda Herrera
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0489
Education 2.0 offers a compelling portrait of Egypt’s bold attempt to overhaul its public education system amid sweeping political and technological transformation. Drawing on extensive oral history interviews, this book traces the launch and rollout of the ‘New Education System’ initiated by the Ministry of Education in 2018, designed to modernize curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment in the digital age and change the ‘culture of learning’. The volume moves fluidly from macro-level state planning to the lived experiences of teachers and students, exploring the promises and pitfalls of top-down reform.
A Place of Dreams: Desire, Deception and a Wartime Coming of Age
Author: Alison Twells
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0461
This book is a compelling blend of mystery, history, and creative non-fiction, that brings to life the wartime story of Norah Hodgkinson (1925-2009), a working-class schoolgirl, later clerical worker, and a prolific diarist. The book opens with a sailor’s letter of thanks for a pair of socks that Norah had knitted for the Royal Navy Comforts Fund in 1940―a gift that led to an exciting romance with the sailor’s dashing airman brother. But as the author pieces together Norah’s diary entries and the sailor’s letters, questions emerge about the men’s identities and intentions. ‘A Place of Dreams’ uncovers a dark tale of male rivalry and wartime anonymity, and a young woman’s appetite for life and love amidst unexpected dangers.
Joyce’s Choices: New Textual Parallels in James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’, ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, and ‘Ulysses’
Author: R. H. Winnick
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0429
This major new study of the textual parallels that permeate James Joyce’s three most widely read works––‘Dubliners’, ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, and ‘Ulysses’––documents and discusses some eight hundred instances, just over seven hundred of them in ‘Ulysses’ alone, of previously unrecognized, unidentified, or misidentified echoes, most of them verbatim, of antecedent texts ranging from major and minor works of English, Irish, Italian, French and other literatures to the poems, plays, popular songs, hymns, comic operas, triple-deckers, dime novels, penny dreadfuls, and print advertisements of his own day.
A Portrait of Samuel Hartlib: In Search of Universal Betterment
Author: Charles Webster
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0486
The 2013 digitization of the vast Hartlib Papers archive highlighted the pressing need for a comprehensive modern study of Samuel Hartlib (1600–1662), a central figure in seventeenth-century intellectual life. Though educated in Eastern Europe, Hartlib spent his adult life in London, where he became a prolific correspondent and chronicler. His Ephemerides, spanning 1634 to 1660, and his extensive correspondence with leading thinkers across Britain and Protestant Europe offer an unparalleled window into the era’s religious, political, and scientific ferment.
The Intertwined World of the Oral and Written Transmission of Sacred Traditions in the Middle East
Editor: Alba Fedeli
Editor: Geoffrey Khan
Editor: Johan Lundberg
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0498
In the medieval Middle East, the scriptures of Christianity, Judaism and Islam were transmitted in written and oral form. The means of written transmission and the textualisation of the oral reading of these scriptures exhibit many parallels, which reflect cultural contact and convergence across the various religious communities. This volume is the outcome of a project, funded jointly by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, that aimed to bring together strands of research related to various aspects of the transmission of these sacred texts in order to reach a deeper understanding of the intertwined world of the three major religions of the Middle East at their formative periods of development during the early Islamic centuries.
Allocation, Distribution, and Policy: Notes, Problems, and Solutions in Microeconomics
Author: Samuel Bowles
Author: Weikai Chen
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0466
This work provides a problem-based and policy oriented approach to teaching microeconomics, development, labor, environment, public economics and topics in business, management and public policy to upper level undergraduates, masters and doctoral students.
October 2025
The Negated Institution: Report from a Psychiatric Hospital
Editor: Franco Basaglia
Translator: John Foot
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2025
https://doi.org/10.53288/0513.1.00
The Negated Institution: Report from a Psychiatric Hospital was first published in 1968 in Italian and caused an immediate sensation. It was an instant bestseller and was translated into numerous languages, but never into English. Edited by the Venetian psychiatrist Franco Basaglia, the book is a collection of writings, interviews, and debates which tell the story of the transformation of the Psychiatric Hospital in Gorizia, on the northeast border of Italy, into an open and “negated” institution. This story of an historically unique process of de-institutionalization—with the elimination of walls and barriers, the humanization of the hospital, the introduction of debates and meetings, the unlocking of wards, and the questioning of the very basis of all psychiatric hospitals—struck a nerve with the student and worker movements of 1968. It also gave a voice to the patients themselves, telling their stories of violence but also of liberation.
The Negated Institution was highly sensitive to the contradictions of this project of opening up and negation, and called for the abolition of the entire system of psychiatric asylums, as well as new ways of understanding and contextualising mental illness and mental health. It led to debates in many countries within and outside of psychiatry and played a part in the 1978 “Basaglia law,” which eventually closed down the entire psychiatric hospital system in Italy—the first example of such total closure in the world, which endures to our contemporary moment.
This is the first translation into English of this seminal text. The translator, John Foot, is an expert in the life and work of Franco Basaglia and has added notes and a critical introduction.
Xouth, The Ape: A Tale of Manners
Author: Iakovos Pitsipios
Translator: Neo G. Christodoulides
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0493
‘Xouth, the Ape’, published in 1848 by Iakovos Pitsipios is a pioneering and satirical Greek novel that deftly blends humour, cultural critique, and biting social commentary. The novel is set in the aftermath of the Greek War of Independence. The story follows a young Greek man, desperate to present himself as a European aristocrat, who finds himself entangled with Xouth—an ape who is, in fact, a German travel writer transformed as punishment for his vanity and prejudices.
Property: Colonial Histories and Messages to the Future
Author: Ulrike Bergermann
Lüneburg: meson press, 2025
To possess something is to lose something: Starting from this seemingly contradictory claim this essay invokes various registers to defamiliarize the ways in which property structures subjectivity, world relations and affects. Intertwined with colonialism, racism and sexism, concepts of property have found an echo in piracy and “postcolonial copyright.” At the level of theory, a crossing out and a reversal of time are required to undo property-related violence and its mindsets. At the level of artistic practice new modes of appropriation become imaginable. And while the commons will not be restored, multiple modes of having and commoning are possible.
Performance Research Methods: Interdisciplinary Methods for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies
Editor: Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink
Editor: Laura Karreman
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0469
‘Performance Research Methods’ is the first comprehensive guide to contemporary methodologies in performance studies, offering a clear and structured overview of the tools currently shaping research in theatre, dance, and performance. While many volumes focus on individual methods, this book uniquely surveys a range of approaches, presenting their historical background, analytical potential, practical application, and interdisciplinary relevance.
Ontohackers: Radical Movement Philosophy in the Age of Extinctions and Algorithms, Part III: Metahistories of Movement: Philosophies in Becoming
Author: Jaym*/Jaime del Val
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2025
https://doi.org/10.53288/0545.1.00
Part III provides is a critical history of (movement) philosophies, exposing the rise of the mechanistic vision as dominant anomaly emerging from a variety of other older proposals which have continued to exist in the background, returning more strongly since the 19th century, while exposing the limitations of recent attempts to free movement from the metaphysical tradition, which the book associates to the rise of human supremacism and its associated mass extinction cycle. The book proposes that movement is the core hidden motif of philosophy and diagnoses philosophies following a metaphilosophical and metaformative methodology that considers the perceptual–kinetic frames and biases underlying them. It is both a sketch for future expansion and an appendix to the previous two volumes, which grounds RMP in a critical revision of the literature, exposing the differences, while undoing some errors, and rescuing philosophies like that of many Presocratics from the misreading stemming from Aristotle. Hereby a shift from philosophia to philokinesia is proposed, toward a thinking of the body in motion, reversing philosophy from a tool of human supremacism to an undoing of it and a regeneration of movement diversification – and with it life – in the Biosphere.
Hylo Narrans: Echoes of Material Marronage
Author: Kevin Toksöz Fairbairn
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0476
This book explores the acoustic agency of brass as a vital medium through which histories of extraction, resistance, and collective creativity resonate. Blending metalwork, experimental instrument-building, and philosophical inquiry, the book listens closely to brass not just as material, but as storyteller—what the author calls hylo narrans, echoing Sylvia Wynter’s invocation of homo narrans. Grounded in their practice spanning artisanal craftsmanship and industrial labor, the author examines how materials respond, resist, and reshape meaning within the workshop, the concert hall, and the broader social fabric. By introducing chimeracords—hybrid sound objects forged from factory detritus—and their affordance for sonic experimentation, Hylo Narrans challenges Western narratives of purity, utility, and control, inviting readers to consider alternative storylines posed by materials-in-flight.
Grammar of Etulo: A Niger-Congo (Idomoid) Language
Author: Chikelu I. Ezenwafor-Afuecheta
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0467
This work provides the first detailed linguistic description of the grammar of Etulo, a language spoken in Nigeria by a minority group in Benue and Taraba states. This description establishes Etulo as a tone language characterised by a predominant SVO word order, non-inflectional morphology, prominent aspectual values, obligatory complement verbs and verb serialization, among other features. This grammar also serves as a foundation for further description of the Etulo grammar and for the development of pedagogical materials needed in Etulo language teaching.
Dismantling Gender Barriers in STEM: Perspectives from the Global South
Editor: Hannah Whitehead
Editor: Matilda Dipieri
Cape Town: African Minds, 2025
https://doi.org/10.47622/9781067253776
Education and science are foundational to international development, yet gender inequities in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) persist globally. While these disparities are widespread, most research and discourse on gender in STEM originates from the Global North. This edited collection amplifies contributions from the Global South, presenting twelve case studies supported by Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC). The case studies are led by researchers across Africa and Latin America who investigate gender inequities in STEM within their local or regional contexts.
Organised around four interwoven themes, (1) building gender-responsive and equitable STEM institutions, (2) leveraging data to address gender disparities, (3) fostering leadership and mentorship for women in STEM, and (4) ensuring support across academic and career pathways, the book offers a comprehensive view of the challenges and innovations shaping gender equity in STEM. Taken together, these chapters provide critical insights and recommendations to promote gender equity in STEM across the Global South and beyond.
From the Chilean Laboratory to World-Communication: Armand Mattelart’s Intellectual Journey
Author: Mariano Zarowsky
Translator: William Quinn
Translator: Peter Simonson
Bethlehem, PA: mediastudies.press, 2025
https://doi.org/10.64629/3f8575cb.08e7ds72
From the Chilean Laboratory to World-Communication follows Armand Mattelart’s intellectual trajectory through Cold War geopolitics and the rise of critical communication studies in Latin America and Europe.
Польові зйомки: Оцифрування документальної спадщини у складних умовах
Editor: Джоді Баттерворт
Editor: Ендрю Пірсон
Editor: Патрік Сазерленд
Editor: Адам Фаркухар
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0480
Цей посібник обов’язково треба прочитати, якщо ви плануєте розпочати науковий проект з оцифрування. Посібник відповідає специфікаціям проєктів EAP (Програма збереження архівів, що перебувають під загрозою зникнення) Британської бібліотеки, він наповнений хорошими практичними рекомендаціями щодо планування та реалізації успішного проекту з оцифрування в потенційно складних умовах.
A Grammar of Jordanian Arabic
Author: Bruno Herin
Author: Enam Al-Wer
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0410
The present grammar is based on empirical data collected over more than three decades. It investigates the phonology and morphosyntax of Jordanian Arabic, with a focus on the traditional sedentary varieties of Central and Northern Jordan, locally known as Balgawi and Horani.
Crossings: Migrant Knowledges, Migrant Forms
Editor: Natalya Din-Kariuki
Editor: Subha Mukherji
Editor: Rowan Williams
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2025
https://doi.org/10.53288/0417.1.00
Crossings: Migrant Knowledges, Migrant Forms brings together activists, artists, scholars, and migrants with diverse histories to explore what the experience of migration does with, and to, knowledge, and how its own ways of knowing find expressive form. As the volume’s authors think about physical and imaginative crossings, and the traversals and transactions of knowledge they entail, the book itself crosses and complicates disciplinary and formal boundaries and the barriers between critical and creative intervention. Crucially, it brings together voices and forms emerging out of the experience of dislocation with responses to the encounters it generates.
The volume’s discussions begin in the early modern world, and move freely across periods to dwell on the urgent experience of migrancy in our own times, while also responding to an urgent need to connect the local with the global experience of migrant knowledge and migrant aesthetics. Crossings stakes the claim that creative art, backed by humanities-based thinking, can meet the imaginative and ethical demands that the unknowable reality of mass displacement places on us, in a way that governments, institutions, and public discourse have calamitously failed to do. But aesthetic practice itself needs to be re-positioned if it is to rise to these political and human challenges, negotiating the points of friction between its own predilections and the matter of migration.
Crossings offers “migrant forms” – art about migration, objects from migrant life shaped into artifacts, and migrant self-expressions – as the means of this imaginative re-orientation, and a tool for activating a radical alternative to economic models of social benefit. Crossings takes its place in an emergent ecology of migrant forms, both speaking to and participating in that ecology.
September 2025
Imaginary Death
Author: Mariko Nagai
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2025
https://doi.org/10.53288/0531.1.00
A man dies. He dies because he must—because without his death, there is no story, and, in the end, no history itself.
So begins Mariko Nagai’s Imaginary Death, a creative nonfiction book that examines how the author’s grandfather, an ordinary man born in a small village in the early 20th century, is unmade and remade into a perfect Japanese Imperial Soldier by the era he was born into. In the kaleidoscope composed of archival documents, letters, journals, research, interviews, and photographs, Imaginary Death traces the life of a man who fought and died for the empire, whose death, obscured by lack of documentation, must be composited of many possible ways men could die in Papua New Guinea. Only forty out of four thousand men from the regimental unit survived by the end of the repatriation in 1946: his was one small death out of many.
In the tradition of James Agee and Walker Evans’s seminal work on the Great Depression Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Imaginary Death is a work that is part meditation, part history, and part fragments of memory that tell a story of a Japanese soldier’s life and death during World War II. Ultimately, Imaginary Death is a textual landscape of imagination, fact, history, and dreams all intersecting to create a psychological terrain that is not limited in the same way as history or nonfiction books, but is rather a new imaginative cartography, no less real than history itself.
Sensing Violence: Reading with the Marquis de Sade
Author: Will McMorran
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0488
What does reading fictional violence do to us as readers? To find out, this provocative and original book turns to the works of an author synonymous with sexual violence: the Marquis de Sade. Drawing on psychology, cognitive literary studies, and empirical research, it argues that reading is a fundamentally embodied act – and one that implicates us far more than we might like to think in fictional depictions of violence.
Representation Theory: A Categorical Approach
Author: Jan E. Grabowski
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0492
This volume offers a fresh and modern introduction to one of abstract algebra’s key topics. Guiding readers through the transition between structure theory and representation theory, this textbook explores how algebraic objects like groups and rings act as symmetries of other structures. Using the accessible yet powerful language of category theory, the book reimagines standard approaches to topics such as modules and algebras in a way that unlocks modern treatments of more advanced topics such as quiver representations and even representations of Hopf algebras and categories.
Questions on the Posterior Analytics (Second Redaction)
Editor: Iacopo Costa
Editor: Gustavo Fernández Walker
Editor: Ana María Mora-Márquez
Translator: John Longeway
Translator: Matthew Wennemann
Author: Simon of Faversham
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0468
The commentary edited here, together with the accompanying translation, offers new insight into Simon of Faversham’s philosophy—a fascinating chapter in the history of late medieval thought. It also deepens our understanding of the philosophical discussions on demonstration and related topics that took place during the early period of Europe’s university history, and of the ways in which these discussions drew on earlier philosophical developments in non-European traditions, notably the Islamic philosophical tradition.
Careful Village and Other ‘Khashag’ from Tibet: The Amdo Comedies of Menla Jyab
Author: Menla Jyab
Translator: Timothy Thurston
Translator: Tsering Samdrup
Editor: Timothy Thurston
Editor: Tsering Samdrup
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0452
This volume offers a unique glimpse into the world of khashag, a vibrant genre of Tibetan spoken comic dialogues from the area Tibetans call Amdo, with the first ever publication of 11 annotated translations of scripts by its leading performer, Menla Jyab. Emerging in the 1980s during a period of cultural revival in Tibetan communities, khashag fused traditional Tibetan expression with influences from Han Chinese xiangsheng (crosstalk), evolving into a medium of sharp societal critique and joyous entertainment. Menla Jyab, a pioneering performer, used his platform in radio, television, to craft comedies described as ‘having meaning in every line’.
Models in Political Economy: Collective Choice, Voting, Elections, Bargaining, and Rebellion
Author: Martin J. Osborne
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0490
This volume explores topics that lie at the core of political economy: collective choice, voting, elections, bargaining, and rebellion. It presents the main formal models used to study the behavior of individuals and groups in political contexts, from choosing public policies and participating as voters and candidates in elections, to staging revolutions. Complete mathematical proofs are provided, to clarify the assumptions and deepen understanding.
Interprofessional Approach to Refugee Health: A Practical Guide for Interdisciplinary Health and Social Care Teams
Editor: Emer McGowan
Editor: Djenana Jalovcic
Editor: Sarah Quinn
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0479
As global displacement reaches unprecedented levels, health and social care professionals increasingly find themselves supporting people with refugee experience whose health and wellbeing needs are complex, urgent, and often unmet. This timely and practical book provides essential guidance for professionals—particularly those new to working in this context—on how to deliver compassionate, culturally responsive, and effective care to forcibly displaced individuals and communities.
Technoscientific Globalisation from Below
Editor: Mathieu Quet
Editor: Koichi Kameda
Editor: Jessica Pourraz
Editor: Yves-Marie Rault-Chodankar
Manchester, UK: Mattering Press, 2025
https://doi.org/10.28938/mw20-c7f3
Global South populations, firms and governments play a key role in redefining the relationship between sciences, technologies and markets on an international scale. Forces shaping the future of global technoscience emerge from unexpected places, prompting a reassessment of global power processes. This volume contains rich case studies studying technoscientific globalization ‘from below’ drawn from fieldwork in Asia, Latin America and Africa, examining the interplay between technology, power, and society at the global scale. The cases are grounded in postcolonial Science and Technology Studies and address a range of topics including pharmaceutical markets, scientific developments and digital practices. This approach illuminates the multiple creative ways in which subaltern players appropriate, divert, overturn or bypass prevailing views on technology and market construction.
The Mediterranean Question
Author: Iain Chambers
Author: Marta Cariello
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2025
https://doi.org/10.53288/0539.1.00
Whose Mediterranean are we talking about? What languages are most appropriate to its reception and understanding? With two-thirds constituted by the histories and cultures of its African and Asian shorelines and hinterlands, and its principal spoken language – in all its variants and dialects – being Arabic, then the Mediterranean clearly exceeds the Western frame of explanation. Without pretending to speak for or in the name of these ignored and repressed dimensions, The Mediterranean Question explores the gap between the Mediterranean reduced to a European and Western mirror by listening and attending to some of those other histories, cultures, and lives.
How to puncture prevalent European understandings of the Mediterranean? The colonizing impulse inscribed in Western historiography cannot be undone simply by adding previously repressed and unacknowledged histories. Instead, a re-examination of the premises and procedures that produced such exclusions leads to a valuable change in coordinates. An order of knowledge that creates subaltern objects of study to reconfirm European centrality and subjectivity is interrogated. Insisting on a politics of registration and listening, further critical incentives drawn from the trans-local dissemination of literature, music, cinema, and the visual arts can be deployed to query existing representations.
In this more ragged and open series of maps, there lies no complete picture but rather a challenge to the violence of existing explanations. Insisting that present-day knowledge is sustained in asymmetrical relations of power, The Mediterranean Question promotes a reconfiguration of historical archives and cultural ties, casting a critical light on the deeper histories that have made the Mediterranean, Europe, and Western modernity. Proposing a series of intersecting analyses that underline the colonial constitution of the present and its mobile and creolized formation, Chambers and Cariello seek to establish new coordinates for thinking and practicing the possibilities of another Mediterranean.
August 2025
‘Casina’ by Plautus: An Annotated Latin Text, with a Prose Translation
Translator: Catherine Tracy
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0482
This edition features the complete Latin text of the play, richly annotated with grammatical and vocabulary notes to support comprehension. A clear prose translation accompanies the original, offering accessible insight into the humor and intrigue of the play. The introduction provides historical and cultural context, situating the farce within ancient Athenian and Roman comedic traditions.
The Ants
Author: Sawako Nakayasu
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2025
https://doi.org/10.53288/0552.1.00
The Ants is a study not of, but through, ants. In a dashing sequence of prose pieces, Sawako Nakayasu takes the human to the level of the ant, and the ant to the level of the human. Prima facie, The Ants is a catalogue of insect observations and observations of insects. But the exposé of insect life humbles and disrupts the myopia that is human life, where experience is seen in its most raw and animal form and human “nouveau-ambitious” and “free-thinking” lifestyles become estranged, uncovered, and humbled. Found in dumpling soups and remembered in childhood vignettes, these ants trail through what Nakayasu describes as the “industry of survival,” exploring interfaces of love, ambition, and strategy. The danger is not in sentiment, but rather, in a gash, a wall, an argument, an intention. Is it more lonely to be crushed into the core of a non-mechanical pencil, to be isolated in the safety of home, or to “find” “it” “all” at the very very last moment? The Ants is the distance, the break, and the tenuous wilderness between exoskeleton and endoskeleton, and Nakayasu puts her finger on it, and it, and it.
This title is a new and expanded edition released as part of punctum’s Special Collections project, containing additionally seventeen bilingual English–Japanese poems from the chapbook Insect Country E: Bilingual Insects.
Jerome’s Sources in His Translation of the Hebrew Bible
Author: Paul Rodrigue
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0474
At the close of the fourth century CE, Jerome of Stridon—renowned Latin scholar, theologian, and priest—undertook the monumental task of translating the Hebrew-Aramaic Bible into Latin. The result of this effort, now known as the Vulgate, has long been regarded as a foundational text of Western Christianity. In this volume, Paul Rodrigue investigates the sources that Jerome may have drawn upon in the process of translation.
City of Capital and Labour: The Making and Transformation of Industrial Manchester
Author: Tom Saunders
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0459
This compelling book explores the evolution of industrial Manchester, offering a fresh perspective on its built environment through the lens of architecture, archaeology, and social history. Richly illustrated and designed for both academic and general audiences, it sheds new light on Manchester’s transformation during the Industrial Revolution, highlighting how the city’s physical form shaped and was shaped by its socio-economic and cultural dynamics.
Mapping Goffman’s Invisible College
Author: Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz
Bethlehem, PA: mediastudies.press, 2025
https://doi.org/10.64629/3f8575cb.dwb73w6d
Mapping Goffman’s Invisible College offers new insight into how academic communities take shape and how ideas move through informal networks.
The Poet as Experiencer: Wallace Stevens and Nonhuman Intelligence
Author: Adam Staley Groves
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2025
https://doi.org/10.53288/0296.1.00
In The Poet as Experiencer: Wallace Stevens and Nonhuman Intelligence, Adam Staley Groves approaches Stevens, not merely as poet–thinker but rather as experiencer and theorist of what is today called “the phenomenon” (UFOs). Challenging both Stevens scholarship and our broader understanding of poetic consciousness, the book presents a radical appraisal of Stevens’s oeuvre as an extended, coded testimony of contact with nonhuman intelligence. Drawing from journals, uncollected poems, and landmark works such as Harmonium and The Necessary Angel, Groves argues that Stevens’s poetic evolution mirrors the psychological and spiritual trajectory of an experiencer grappling with anomalous phenomena long before cognitive frameworks for such were culturally available.
From moths and owls to missing time and the ethics of the imagination, Groves reads Stevens’s work as a sustained effort to reckon with anomalous phenomena whose language has not yet come. Through careful textual analysis and historical correlation, Groves positions the poet within a lineage that includes Coleridge, Baudelaire, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, who are recast not only as theorists of the imagination but as precursors to a modern metaphysical crisis now resurfacing through the contemporary discourse on UFOs and UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena). Integrating rigorous literary scholarship with insights from ufology, psychology, and metaphysical philosophy, Groves investigates Stevens’s use of abstraction, the ethics of poetic imagination, and the emergence of the “true subject” as a form of ontological rupture. In doing so, the book bridges the hermetic with the historical, and the poetic with the paranormal.
Sounding the Bookshelf 1501: Music in a Year of Italian Printed Books
Author: Tim Shephard
Author: Oliver Doyle
Author: Ciara O’Flaherty
Author: Annabelle Page
Author: Laura Ştefănescu
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0473
This volume explores how everyday texts in Renaissance Italy engaged with music, sound, and hearing. Of the 358 known editions printed in 1501, only a few contained formal music notation or specialist theory. Yet a surprising wealth of musical knowledge emerges from religious texts, classical commentaries, lifestyle guides, poetry, and more. These sources—rarely penned by professional musicians—reflect the broader cultural presence of music in early 16th-century life, touching on themes like music’s moral influence, its role in education, and its scientific understanding.
Sea-ice: Vol. 3 in the FicSci Series
Cape Town: African Minds, 2025
https://doi.org/10.47622/9781067253653
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 hybridised 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 bringing together creative writers with a sea ice scientist based in a chemical and materials engineering department.
The presented research invited contemplation of scientific aspects of the properties, formation and behaviour of sea ice, especially in the Southern Ocean. The creative writings that emerged offer new directions for thinking about the relation between creative expression and Antarctic science.
July 2025
Characters in Film and Other Media: Theory, Analysis, Interpretation
Author: Jens Eder
Translator: Jens Eder
Translator: Stephen Lowry
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0283
Characters are central to the creation and experience of films and other media. Their cultural significance is profound, but they also raise a wide range of questions. This book provides a comprehensive theory that guides the analysis and interpretation of characters across four dimensions: as represented beings with physical, psychological, and social characteristics; as artefacts with aesthetic structures; as meaningful symbols; and as symptoms of socio-cultural origins and effects. Integrating insights from film, media, and literary studies as well as philosophy, psychology and sociology, the book offers a broad range of approaches for understanding characters and the emotional responses they evoke.
The Economics of Cultural Loss: Harm and Resilience in North American Indigenous Communities
Author: Mukesh Eswaran
Foreword by: Ronald L. Trosper
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0477
Why do North American Indigenous Peoples face such grave conditions in health, poverty, and mortality—including alarmingly high rates of suicide, alcoholism, and drug abuse? In this groundbreaking book, Mukesh Eswaran confronts these urgent questions through the lens of economics, focusing deeply on an underexplored aspect: the erosion of Indigenous culture. While empirical studies have shed some light on Indigenous struggles, Eswaran argues that mainstream economic theory fails to grasp the unique realities of Indigenous communities. His work introduces innovative models that incorporate cultural and communal values—particularly the sacredness of land and the importance of extended family and communal life—as foundational components of Indigenous well-being.
Historiographies of Game Studies: What It Has Been, What It Could Be
Editor: Alisha Karabinus
Editor: Carly A. Kocurek
Editor: Cody Mejeur
Editor: Emma Vossen
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2025
https://doi.org/10.53288/0441.1.00
Historiographies of Game Studies offers a first-of-its-kind reflection on how game studies as an academic field has been shaped and sustained. Today, game studies is a thriving field with many dedicated national and international conferences, journals, professional societies, and a strong presence at conferences in disciplines like computer science, communication, media studies, theater, visual arts, popular culture, and others. But, when did game studies start? And what (and who) is at the core or center of game studies? Fields are defined as much by what they are not as by what they are, and their borderlands can be hotly contested spaces.
In this anthology, scholars from across the field consider how the boundaries of game studies have been established, codified, contested, and protected, raising critical questions about who and what gets left out of the field. Over more than two dozen chapters and interviews with leading figures, including Espen Aarseth, Kishonna Gray, Henry Jenkins, Lisa Nakamura, Kentaro Matsumoto, Ken McAllister, and Janet Murray, the contributors offer a dazzling array of insightful provocations that address the formation, propagation, and cultivation of game studies, interrogating not only the field’s pasts but its potential futures and asking us to think deliberately about how academic fields are collectively built.
‘Wisdom and Greatness in one Place’: The Alexandrian Trader Moses ben Judah and his Circle
Author: Dotan Arad
Author: Esther-Miriam Wagner
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0352
The manuscript collections of the Bodleian Library contain a corpus of dozens of documents from the archive of Moses ben Judah. A leader of the Jewish community in Alexandria, he was also a prominent businessman and in contact with individuals from Cairo to Sicily. This collection of documents at the Bodleian likely did not emerge from the Cairo Genizah, but from another depository, and appears to have been buried at some point.
Reading: Performance and Materiality in Hebrew and Aramaic Traditions
Editor: Hector M. Patmore
Editor: Hindy Najman
Editor: Stefan Schorch
Editor: Jeroen Verrijssen
Editor: Hanneke van der Schoor
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0457
This volume contains the proceedings the ‘Reading: Performance and Materiality in Hebrew and Aramaic Traditions’ colloquium, hosted at the University of Oxford in 2023, and jointly sponsored by the Oriel Centre for the Study of the Bible and the European Research Council project, ‘TEXTEVOLVE.’ The aim of the colloquium was to investigate Jewish approaches to the reading of texts, with a focus on reading practices that were applied to Hebrew and Aramaic texts in antiquity and the early Middle Ages.
Surveillance and Control of Dengue Vectors in the United States and Territories
Author: Roberto Barrera
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0472
‘Surveillance and Control of Dengue Vectors in the United States and Territories’ offers a comprehensive exploration of the challenges and strategies involved in managing dengue vectors, particularly Aedes mosquitoes, in the US and its territories. With over 13 million dengue cases reported in the Americas in 2024 alone, this timely book synthesizes critical information on vector species, transmission cycles, and effective surveillance and control methods.
Barge Life: On Jean Vigo’s “L’Atalante”
<img src=“https://books.punctumbooks.com/10.53288/0480.1.00_frontcover.jpg” alt=“cover for Barge Life: On Jean Vigo’s”L’Atalante”” width=“300”/>
Author: Florian Deroo
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2025
https://doi.org/10.53288/0480.1.00
Waves washing up against the hull, a bed and a small stove, the deck hatch sealed shut — the vessel is the ultimate dwelling.
How to live together in cramped quarters? How to create a microcosm against hostile surroundings? In Barge Life, Florian Deroo tackles these question by looking at a mythical classic of French cinema: Jean Vigo’s 1934 film L’Atalante. A work brimming with the energies of surrealism and anarchism, L’Atalante follows a young couple, two shipmates, and a clowder of cats who dwell in the belly of a river barge. Deroo offers a wide-ranging essay on the film, revealing how it invokes a small group that withdraws from the rhythm of modern life to establish a different kind of existence elsewhere. In L’Atalante’s most riveting moments, the river barge becomes a vehicle for a powerful fantasy: a flexible collective life, lived in sensuous interdependence.
Combining film criticism, philosophy, and biography, this book reconsiders a forerunner of the French New Wave and the early death of its director. Drawing readers into the living spaces of L’Atalante, Deroo explores the allure of retreating into a self-sufficient shelter, along with its intractable problems.
Stories of Hope: Reimagining Education
Editor: Sandra Abegglen
Editor: Tom Burns
Editor: Richard F. Heller
Editor: Rajan Madhok
Editor: Fabian Neuhaus
Editor: John Sandars
Editor: Sandra Sinfield
Editor: Upasana Gitanjali Singh
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0462
Bringing together a diverse range of educators and practitioners, this collection showcases real-world innovations that challenge the status quo and offer glimpses of a more humane and inspiring educational future. From rethinking systems and curriculum design to fostering imaginative collaboration and exploring the role of technology, the book highlights practical, hopeful interventions that are already making a difference.
June 2025
When Katherine Brewed, a Play: Telling the Story of the Peasants’ Revolt and Today’s New Radical Theatre
Contributions by: Mark O’Brien
Author: John Cresswell
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0456
In the sweltering heat of 1381, England’s feudal foundations trembled as the Peasants’ Revolt erupted—a rebellion that would forever echo through history. Triggered by an oppressive poll tax but fuelled by deeper injustices, this uprising saw land workers, artisans, and commoners rise to challenge the authority of landowners, church, and crown. ‘When Katherine Brewed’ brings this momentous event to life on stage, blending historical fidelity with a bold, radical perspective.
Zonen: Für eine kritische Ökologie in den Geisteswissenschaften
Editor: Jörg Dünne
Editor: Eva Horn
Editor: Birgit Schneider
Author: Florian Auerochs
Author: Jeanne Etelain
Author: Mary Louise Pratt
Author: Robert Stockhammer
Lüneburg: meson press, 2025
Die Erde befindet sich in einem vom Menschen bewirkten, tiefgreifenden Veränderungsprozess. Um dieses dringliche Problem neu anzugehen, nehmen die Autor*innen dieses Bandes den Begriff der „Zone“ zum Ausgangspunkt für eine kritische Ökologie.
Das „Denken in Zonen“ hält der Makro-Perspektive des Planetarischen den Blick auf das Heterogene und Prozesshafte, auf die Übergänge, Grenzen und Singularitäten von Räumen entgegen. In den Vordergrund rücken damit die Handlungsmacht und Relationalität von Räumen, um die drastischen, ebenso materiellen wie epistemischen Veränderungen und Verschiebungen im Verhältnis des Menschen zur Erde im Anthropozän besser zu fassen.
Mit Aufsätzen von Florian Auerochs, Jeanne Etelain, Mary Louise Pratt und Robert Stockhammer versammelt dieser Band erstmals maßgebliche Zugänge zu Begriff und Ästhetik der Zone, die seine Tragweite als Instrument ökologischen Denkens in den Kulturwissenschaften aufzeigen.
Gefühle Vermessen: Zur Genealogie des Affective Computing
Author: Lisa Schreiber
Lüneburg: meson press, 2025
Seit Anfang der 2010er Jahre beschäftigt sich das Affective Computing mit der Entwicklung von digitalen Technologien zur automatischen Erfassung menschlicher Gefühle. Das sogenannte emotion detection operiert auf Grundlage des Facial Action Coding System (FACS), einem Klassifikationssystem für Emotionen, das verspricht, Gefühle anhand der Bewegung der Gesichtsmuskeln zu entschlüsseln. Das FACS transportiert jedoch ein Gefühlsparadigma, das ungelöste Probleme aus der Vorgeschichte der Emotionsforschung bündelt. Gefühle Vermessen untersucht das Nachwirken dieser Probleme in der computergestützten Depressionsforschung und Autismustherapie, welche die Verfahren des Affective Computing anwenden. Im Zentrum steht die Frage, warum das Codierungssystem trotz dieser Ambivalenzen eine mächtige Produktivität entfaltet.
‘Thou Shalt Not Stand Idly By’: Jews of Conscience on Palestine
Editor: Susan Landau
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0481
This volume is a timely and powerful collection of Jewish dissent against Zionism and the impact of Israeli statehood on the indigenous Palestinian population. Bridging history, politics, theology, and conflict studies, this book traces a moral and intellectual tradition of resistance from within the global Jewish community—one rooted in values of justice, equality, and compassion. From early twentieth-century critics like Ahad Ha’am and Hannah Arendt to contemporary scholars, rabbis, journalists, and activists, the voices gathered here challenge the dominant narratives that conflate Judaism with Zionism.
Linking Education and the Local Economy: Intermediaries in a Furniture Ecosystem
Author: André Kraak
Cape Town: African Minds, 2025
https://doi.org/10.47622/9781067253714
Linking Education and the Local Economy examines the collapse of linkages between South Africa’s post-school education and training system and the declining furniture industry. Using a case study approach, it explores reasons behind the erosion of the sector’s competitiveness. The book shows how intermediaries – organisations or individuals bridging gaps between fi rms, education providers and government – could revitalise the industry by fostering collaboration, knowledge exchange and innovation.
Social Constructions of Gender-Based Violence in African Countries
Editor: Tinuade Adekunbi Ojo
Editor: Tanusha Raniga
Editor: Samson Sambian Konlan
https://doi.org/10.47622/9780639891309
Based on rich, contextual analysis from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Ethiopia, Social Constructions of Gender-Based Violence in African Countries offers an exploration of gender-based violence that moves beyond definition to examine the profound psychological social and economic impacts of GBV, framing it as a critical barrier to human rights and prosperous societies. The analysis is set against the backdrop of international frameworks such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals and Africa Agenda 2063, while critically assessing national policies and legislative milestones within the four focus countries.
A central theme is the critique of governmental failures and the essential role of non-state actors. The book highlights how civil society organisations, aid institutions and research bodies fill critical gaps in service delivery, particularly for the most vulnerable, and provide novel assessments and interventions. It gives specific attention to the exacerbated challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, which revealed severe deficiencies in protection systems and pushed women into greater danger during lockdowns.
Ultimately, Social Constructions of Gender-Based Violence in African Countries is a call for proactive, transformative action. It argues for improved gender justice through increased female representation in leadership, financial empowerment for women and robust, evidence-based policies. It is an indispensable resource for policymakers, human service professionals and scholars across Africa and beyond, providing the insights needed to re-evaluate existing strategies and formulate effective, empowering responses to end gender-based violence.