Open Book Publishers
This page shows the latest publications (in descending order of publication date) from Open Book Publishers.
Metadata is licensed as Creative Commons Zero (CC0) and is retrieved from Thoth’s open APIs.
Last updated: 2023-04-30 00:00:24
April 2023
Touching Parchment: How Medieval Users Rubbed, Handled, and Kissed Their Manuscripts: Volume 1: Officials and Their Books
Author: Kathryn M. Rudy
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0337
The Medieval book, both religious and secular, was regarded as a most precious item. The traces of its use through touching and handling during different rituals such as oath-taking, is the subject of Kathryn Rudy’s research in Touching Parchment.
March 2023
Introduction to Systems Biology: Workbook for Flipped-classroom Teaching
Author: Thomas Sauter
Author: Marco Albrecht
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0291
This book is an introduction to the language of systems biology, which is spoken among many disciplines, from biology to engineering. Authors Thomas Sauter and Marco Albrecht draw on a multidisciplinary background and evidence-based learning to facilitate the understanding of biochemical networks, metabolic modeling and system dynamics.
The Last Years of Polish Jewry: Volume 1: At the Edge of the Abyss: Essays, 1927–33
Author: Yankev Leshchinsky
Editor: Robert Brym
Translator: Robert Brym
Translator: Eli Jany
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0341
Ukrainian-born Yankev Leshchinsky (1876–1966) was the leading scholarly and journalistic analyst of Eastern European Jewish socioeconomic and political life from the 1920s to the 1950s. Known as “the dean of Jewish sociologists” and “the father of Jewish demography,” Leshchinsky published a series of insightful and moving essays in Yiddish on Polish Jewry between 1927 and 1937. Despite heightened interest in interwar Jewish communities in Poland in recent years, these essays (like most of Leshchinsky’s works) have never been translated into English. The Last Years of Polish Jewry helps to rectify this situation by translating some of Leshchinsky’s key essays.
Susan Isaacs: A Life Freeing the Minds of Children
Author: Philip Graham
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0297
This revised and expanded edition of Susan Isaacs: A Life Freeing the Minds of Children by Philip Graham, provides a comprehensive biography of a highly influential educationist and psychoanalyst. The book covers Isaacs’ childhood through to the end of her life, making it of great interest to historians of British education and of psychoanalysis as well as to practicing early years teachers and psychoanalysts.
The Poetic Edda: A Dual-Language Edition
Author: Edward Pettit
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0308
This book is an edition and translation of one of the most important and celebrated sources of Old Norse-Icelandic mythology and heroic legend, namely the medieval poems now known collectively as the Poetic Edda or Elder Edda.
February 2023
The European Experience: A Multi-Perspective History of Modern Europe, 1500–2000
Editor: Jochen Hung
Editor: Jaroslav Ira
Editor: Judit Klement
Editor: Andrew Tompkins
Editor: Jan Hansen
Editor: Juan Luis Simal
Editor: Sylvain Lesage
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0323
The European Experience brings together the expertise of nearly a hundred historians from eight European universities to internationalise and diversify the study of modern European history, exploring a grand sweep of time from 1500 to 2000.
Dire Straits-Education Reforms: Ideology, Vested Interests and Evidence
Author: José Ignacio Wert
Author: Montserrat Gomendio
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0332
Responding to an ‘educational emergency’ generated largely by the difficulties of implementing education reforms, this book compares education policies around the world in order to understand what works where. To address the key question of why education reforms are so difficult, the authors take into account a broad range of relevant factors, such as governance, ideology, and stakeholder conflicts of interest, and their interactions with one another.
The Historical Depth of the Tiberian Reading Tradition of Biblical Hebrew
Author: Aaron D. Hornkohl
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0310
This volume explores an underappreciated feature of the standard Tiberian Masoretic tradition of Biblical Hebrew, namely its composite nature. Focusing on cases of dissonance between the tradition’s written (consonantal) and reading (vocalic) components, the study shows that the Tiberian spelling and pronunciation traditions, though related, interdependent, and largely in harmony, at numerous points reflect distinct oral realisations of the biblical text.
January 2023
Reshaping Food Systems to improve Nutrition and Health in the Eastern Mediterranean Region
Author: Ayoub Al-Jawaldeh
Author: Alexa Meyer
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0322
This detailed and comprehensive study examines nutrition and health in the World Health Organization (WHO) Eastern Mediterranean Region, presenting the six game-changing food systems actions proposed by the WHO and the progress of their implementation in the region.
December 2022
Landscapes of Investigation: Contributions to Critical Mathematics Education
Editor: Miriam Godoy Penteado
Editor: Ole Skovsmose
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0316
Creating landscapes of investigation is a primary concern of critical mathematics education. It enables us to organise educational processes so that students and teachers are able to get involved in explorations guided by dialogical interactions. It attempts to address explicit or implicit forms of social injustice by means of mathematics, and also to promote a critical conception of mathematics, challenging the assumption that the subject represents objectivity and neutrality. Landscapes of Investigation provides many illustrations of how this can be done in primary, secondary, and university education. It also illustrates how exploring landscapes of investigation can contribute to mathematics teacher education programmes.
Chance Encounters: A Bioethics for a Damaged Planet
Author: Kristien Hens
Illustrator: Christina Stadlbauer
Illustrator: Bart H.M. Vandeput
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0320
In this rigorous and necessary book, Kristien Hens brings together bioethics and the philosophy of biology to argue that it is ethically necessary for scientific research to include a place for the philosopher. As well as ethical, their role is conceptual: they can improve the quality and coherence of scientific research by ensuring that particular concepts are used consistently and thoughtfully across interdisciplinary projects. Hens argues that chance and uncertainty play a central part in bioethics, but that these qualities can be in tension with the attempt to establish a given theory as scientific knowledge: in describing organisms and practices, in a sense we create the world. Hens contends that this is necessarily an ethical activity.
Greening Europe: 2022 European Public Investment Outlook
Editor: Floriana Cerniglia
Editor: Francesco Saraceno
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0328
The third installment of the ‘European Public Investment Outlook’ series is an important and timely publication that draws together recent analyses to recommend significant increases in public investment in green ventures. Compelling data from key economists affiliated with international organizations like the International Monetary Fund, European Investment Bank and the European Commission, as well as academic departments and policy institutes are a clarion call for green investment to boost the economy and put the planet on a sustainable path.
Music in Evolution and Evolution in Music
Author: Steven Jan
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0301
Music in Evolution and Evolution in Music by Steven Jan is a comprehensive account of the relationships between evolutionary theory and music. Examining the ‘evolutionary algorithm’ that drives biological and musical-cultural evolution, the book provides a distinctive commentary on how musicality and music can shed light on our understanding of Darwin’s famous theory – and vice-versa.
Transforming Conservation: A Practical Guide to Evidence and Decision Making
Editor: William J. Sutherland
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0321
There are severe problems with the decision-making processes currently widely used, leading to ineffective use of evidence, faulty decisions, wasting of resources and the erosion of public and political support. In this book an international team of experts provide solutions.
William Rimmer: Champion of Imagination in American Art
Author: Dorinda Evans
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0304
William Rimmer (1816–1879) is arguably the first modernist American sculptor, although his inventive originality has not been fully acknowledged. Rimmer cultivated an art of ideas and personal expression whilst supporting himself as a physician and, later, as a teacher of art anatomy at the Cooper Union School of Design for Women in New York.
November 2022
Engaging with Everyday Sounds
Author: Marcel Cobussen
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0288
‘Engaging With Everyday Sounds’ is a rich and inspiring exploration of the role of sounds in everyday life, including their impact on human actions, emotions, and imagination. Marcel Cobussen intertwines sonic studies with philosophy, sound art, sociology and more to create an impressively lucid and innovative guide to sonic materialism, calling for a re-sensitization to our acoustic environment and arguing that everyday sounds have (micro)political, social, and ethical impact to which we should attend.
The Bible in the Bowls: A Catalogue of Biblical Quotations in Published Jewish Babylonian Aramaic Magic Bowls
Author: Daniel James Waller
Contributions by: Dorota Molin
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0305
The Bible in the Bowls represents a complete catalogue of Hebrew Bible quotations found in the published corpus of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic magic bowls. As our only direct epigraphic witnesses to the Hebrew Bible from late antique Babylonia, the bowls are uniquely placed to contribute to research on the (oral) transmission of the biblical text in late antiquity; the pre-Masoretic Babylonian vocalisation tradition; the formation of the liturgy and the early development of the Jewish prayer book; the social locations of biblical knowledge in late antique Babylonia and socio-religious typologies of the bowls; and the dynamics of scriptural citation in ancient Jewish magic.
Women and Migration(s) II
Editor: Cheryl Finley
Editor: Ellyn Toscano
Editor: Deborah Willis
Editor: Kalia Brooks
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0296
Women and Migration(s) II draws together contributions from scholars and artists showcasing the breadth of intersectional experiences of migration, from diaspora to internal displacement. Building on conversations initiated in Women and Migration: Responses in Art and History, this edited volume features a range of written styles, from memoir to artists’ statements to journalistic and critical essays. The collection shows how women’s experiences of migration have been articulated through art, film, poetry and even food.
Studies in the Masoretic Tradition of the Hebrew Bible
Editor: Daniel J. Crowther
Editor: Aaron D. Hornkohl
Editor: Geoffrey Khan
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0330
This volume brings together papers on topics relating to the transmission of the Hebrew Bible from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern period. We refer to this broadly in the title of the volume as the ‘Masoretic Tradition’. The papers are innovative studies of a range of aspects of this Masoretic tradition at various periods, many of them presenting hitherto unstudied primary sources.
October 2022
Anthropology of Transformation: From Europe to Asia and Back
Editor: Juraj Buzalka
Editor: Agnieszka Pasieka
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0282
This collection of essays is the result of the joint efforts of colleagues and students of the leading social anthropology and post-socialism theorist, Professor Chris Hann. With the thirtieth anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 2019 as their catalyst, the authors reflect upon Chris Hann’s lifelong fieldwork in the discipline, spanning regions as diverse as East Central Europe, Turkey, and the Chinese north-west.
‘Fragile States’ in an Unequal World: The Role of the g7+ in International Diplomacy and Development Cooperation
Author: Isabel Rocha de Siqueira
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0311
This is a book about people. ‘Fragile States’ in an Unequal World: The Role of the g7+ in International Diplomacy and Development Cooperation introduces the members of the g7+, a group formed by 20 conflict-affected states: why they came to believe in politics and policy; how they feel about their work, their family and their communities; and what they want to leave behind for the next generations. It is the story of their personal and collective values, their mistakes, and the challenges they faced, and it will resonate with anyone who has tried to organize and work with a group of very different people.
Diachronic Variation in the Omani Arabic Vernacular of the Al-ʿAwābī District: From Carl Reinhardt (1894) to the Present Day
Author: Roberta Morano
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0298
In this monograph, Roberta Morano re-examines one of the foundational works of the Omani Arabic dialectology field, Carl Reinhardt’s Ein arabischer Dialekt gesprochen in ’Oman und Zanzibar (1894). This German-authored work was prolific in shaping our knowledge of Omani Arabic during the twentieth century, until the 1980s when more recent linguistic studies on the Arabic varieties spoken in Oman began to appear.
Life, Re-Scaled: The Biological Imagination in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Performance
Editor: Liliane Campos
Editor: Pierre-Louis Patoine
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0303
This edited volume explores new engagements with the life sciences in contemporary fiction, poetry, comics and performance. The gathered case studies investigate how recent creative work reframes the human within microscopic or macroscopic scales, from cellular biology to systems ecology, and engages with the ethical, philosophical, and political issues raised by the twenty-first century’s shifting views of life. The collection thus examines literature and performance as spaces that shape our contemporary biological imagination.
The Official Indonesian Qurʾān Translation: The History and Politics of Al-Qur’an dan Terjemahnya
Author: Fadhli Lukman
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0289
This book studies the political and institutional project of Al-Qur’an dan Terjemahnya, the official translation of the Qurʾān into Indonesian by the Indonesian government. It investigates how the translation was produced and presented, and how it is read, as well as considering the implications of the state’s involvement in such a work.
September 2022
The Diaries of Anthony Hewitson, Provincial Journalist, Volume 1: 1865–1887
Editor: Andrew Hobbs
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0262
Anthony Hewitson was a typical Victorian journalist, working in one of the largest sectors of the periodical press, provincial newspapers. His diaries, written between 1862 and 1912, lift the veil of anonymity hiding the people, processes and networks involved in the creation of Victorian newspapers. Andrew Hobbs’s introduction and footnotes provide background and analysis of these valuable documents. This full scholarly edition offers a wealth of new information about reporting, freelancing, sub-editing, newspaper ownership and publishing, and illuminates aspects of Victorian periodicals and culture extending far beyond provincial newspapers.
An Outline of Romanticism in the West
Author: John Claiborne Isbell
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0302
Navigating the landscape of Romantic literature and art across Europe and the Americas, An Outline of Romanticism in the West invites readers to embark upon a literary journey. Showcasing a breadth of theoretical and contextual approaches to the study of Romanticism, John Isbell provides an insightful contemporary overview of the field, paired with wide-ranging comparative reflections on the art and literature that helped shape it.
August 2022
The Classical Parthenon: Recovering the Strangeness of the Ancient World
Author: William St Clair
Editor: Lucy Barnes
Editor: David St Clair
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0279
Complementing Who Saved the Parthenon? this companion volume sets aside more recent narratives surrounding the Athenian Acropolis, supposedly ‘the very symbol of democracy itself’, instead asking if we can truly access an ancient past imputed with modern meaning. And, if so, how?
Second Chance: My Life in Things
Author: Ruth Rosengarten
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0285
In this intimate memoir, Ruth Rosengarten explores the subject of evocative objects through a series of interconnected essays.
Sefer ha-Pardes by Jedaiah ha-Penini: A Critical Edition with English Translation
Author: David Torollo
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0299
This groundbreaking new work is the first full critical edition and English translation of the Hebrew book Sefer ha-Pardes [The Book of the Orchard], written at the end of the thirteenth century by the Provençal Jewish author Jedaiah ha-Penini.
July 2022
Reading the Juggler of Notre Dame: Medieval Miracles and Modern Remakings
Author: Jan M. Ziolkowski
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0284
In this two-part anthology, Jan M. Ziolkowski builds on themes uncovered in his earlier The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity. Here he focuses particularly on the performing arts.
A Complete Guide to Maggot Therapy: Clinical Practice, Therapeutic Principles, Production, Distribution, and Ethics
Editor: Frank Stadler
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022
https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0300
Since the revival of maggot therapy in Western wound care approximately thirty years ago, there has been no comprehensive synthesis of what is known about its clinical practice, supply chain management, and social dimensions. This edited volume fills the information vacuum and, importantly, makes the current state of knowledge freely accessible. It is the first to provide sound, evidence-based information and guidance covering the entire supply chain from production to treatment.
The Power of Music: An Exploration of the Evidence
Author: Susan Hallam
Author: Evangelos Himonides
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0292
Building on her earlier work, ‘The Power of Music: A Research Synthesis of the Impact of Actively Making Music on the Intellectual, Social and Personal Development of Children and Young People’, this volume by Susan Hallam and Evangelos Himonides is an important new resource in the field of music education, practice, and psychology.
June 2022
Neo-Aramaic and Kurdish Folklore from Northern Iraq: A Comparative Anthology with a Sample of Glossed Texts, Volume 1
Author: Geoffrey Khan
Author: Dorota Molin
Author: Masoud Mohammadirad
Author: Paul M. Noorlander
Contributions by: Lourd Habeeb Hanna
Contributions by: Aziz Emmanuel Eliya Al-Zebari
Contributions by: Salim Abraham
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0306
This comparative anthology showcases the rich and mutually intertwined folklore of three ethno-religious communities from northern Iraq: Aramaic-speaking (‘Syriac’) Christians, Kurdish Muslims and—to a lesser extent—Aramaic-speaking Jews.
Neo-Aramaic and Kurdish Folklore from Northern Iraq: A Comparative Anthology with a Sample of Glossed Texts, Volume 2
Author: Geoffrey Khan
Author: Paul M. Noorlander
Author: Masoud Mohammadirad
Author: Dorota Molin
Contributions by: Lourd Habeeb Hanna
Contributions by: Aziz Emmanuel Eliya Al-Zebari
Contributions by: Salim Abraham
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0307
This comparative anthology showcases the rich and mutually intertwined folklore of three ethno-religious communities from northern Iraq: Aramaic-speaking (‘Syriac’) Christians, Kurdish Muslims and—to a lesser extent—Aramaic-speaking Jews.
The Merger Mystery: Why Spend Ever More on Mergers When So Many Fail?
Author: Geoff Meeks
Author: J. Gay Meeks
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0309
Drawing on findings from a wealth of statistical analyses and case evidence from many businesses, the book presents answers to this merger mystery. In a synthesis of ideas from several disciplines, solutions are detected in misaligned incentives, distorted financial engineering and information asymmetry. By revealing how weaknesses at multiple points can interact and cumulate to produce inefficient outcomes, the discussion serves as a corrective to the overwhelmingly positive tone of most commentary on M&A, whilst also advocating changes in participants’ contracts, in taxation, and in regulation which could significantly reduce the number of mergers that fail.
May 2022
Performing Deception: Learning, Skill and the Art of Conjuring
Author: Brian Rappert
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0295
In Performing Deception, Brian Rappert reconstructs the practice of entertainment magic by analysing it through the lens of perception, deception and learning, as he goes about studying conjuring himself.
Who Saved the Parthenon?: A New History of the Acropolis Before, During and After the Greek Revolution
Author: William St Clair
Editor: David St Clair
Editor: Lucy Barnes
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0136
In this magisterial book, William St Clair unfolds the history of the Parthenon throughout the modern era to the present day, with special emphasis on the period before, during, and after the Greek War of Independence of 1821–32.
April 2022
The Voice of the Century: The Culture of Italian Bel Canto in Luisa Tetrazzini’s Recorded Interpretations
Author: Massimo Zicari
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0277
This innovative work considers the notion of bel canto and the manner in which this vibrant tradition lives in the records of Luisa Tetrazzini (1871-1940), one of the most celebrated sopranos ever. Tetrazzini, whose discographic career includes about 120 recordings, belongs to that generation of inspirational performers who heralded the dawn of a new era of music appreciation, alongside such iconic figures as Enrico Caruso, Adelina Patti and Nellie Melba.
A Philosophy of Cover Songs
Author: P.D. Magnus
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0293
In A Philosophy of Cover Songs, P.D. Magnus demonstrates that philosophy provides a valuable toolbox for thinking about covers; in turn, the philosophy of cover songs illustrates some general points about philosophical method.
A Common Good Approach to Development: Collective Dynamics of Development Processes
Editor: Mathias Nebel
Editor: Oscar Garza-Vázquez
Editor: Clemens Sedmak
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0290
This edited collection proposes a common good approach to development theory and practice.
Ecocene Politics
Author: Mihnea Tănăsescu
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0274
Anchored in the diverse ecological practices of communities in southern Italy and Aotearoa/New Zealand, this book devises a unique and considered theoretical response to the shortcomings of global politics in the Ecocene—a new temporal epoch characterised by the increasingly frequent intrusion of ecological processes into political life.
March 2022
A Short History of Transport in Japan from Ancient Times to the Present
Author: John Andrew Black
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0281
A Short History of Transport in Japan from Ancient Times to the Present is a unique study: the first by a Western scholar to place the long-term development of Japanese infrastructure alongside an analysis of its evolving political economy.
February 2022
William Sharp and “Fiona Macleod”: A Life
Author: William F. Halloran
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0276
Drawing extensively on his letters, his wife Elizabeth Sharp’s Memoir, and accounts by friends and associates, this biography provides a lucid and intimate account of William Sharp’s life, from his rejection of the dour religion of his Scottish boyhood, his turn to spiritualism, to his role in the Scottish Celtic Revival in the mid-nineties.
The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form: Cold War, Decolonization and Third World Print Cultures
Editor: Francesca Orsini
Editor: Neelam Srivastava
Editor: Laetitia Zecchini
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0254
This timely volume focuses on the period of decolonization and the Cold War as the backdrop to the emergence of new and diverse literary aesthetics that accompanied anti-imperialist commitments and Afro-Asian solidarity. Competing internationalist frameworks produced a flurry of writings that made Asian, African and other world literatures visible to each other for the first time. The book’s essays examine a host of print culture formats (magazines, newspapers, manifestos, conference proceedings, ephemera, etc.) and modes of cultural mediation and transnational exchange that enabled the construction of a variously inflected Third-World culture which played a determining role throughout the Cold War.
Learning, Marginalization, and Improving the Quality of Education in Low-income Countries
Editor: Daniel A. Wagner
Editor: Nathan M. Castillo
Editor: Suzanne Grant Lewis
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0256
Improving learning evidence and outcomes for those most in need in developing countries is at the heart of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal on Education (SDG4). This timely volume brings together contributions on current empirical research and analysis of emerging trends that focus on improving the quality of education through better policy and practice, particularly for those who need improved ‘learning at the bottom of the pyramid’ (LBOP).
The Neo-Aramaic Oral Heritage of the Jews of Zakho
Author: Oz Aloni
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0272
Aloni focuses on three genres of the Zakho community’s oral heritage: the proverb, the enriched biblical narrative and the folktale.
January 2022
Horos: Ancient Boundaries and the Ecology of Stone
Author: Thea Potter
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0266
In Horos, Thea Potter explores the complex relationship between classical philosophy and the ‘horos’, a stone that Athenians erected to mark the boundaries of their marketplace, their gravestones, their roads and their private property.Potter weaves this history into a meditation on the ancient philosophical concept of horos, the foundational project of determination and definition, arguing that it is central to the development of classical philosophy and the marketplace.
December 2021
Making the Void Fruitful: Yeats as Spiritual Seeker and Petrarchan Lover
Author: Patrick J. Keane
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0275
Shedding fresh light on the life and work of William Butler Yeats—widely acclaimed as the major English-language poet of the twentieth century—this new study by leading scholar Patrick J. Keane questions established understandings of the Irish poet’s long fascination with the occult: a fixation that repelled literary contemporaries T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden, but which enhanced Yeats’s vision of life and death.
Mary Warnock: Ethics, Education and Public Policy in Post-War Britain
Author: Philip Graham
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0278
This biography illuminates the life and thought of Baroness Mary Warnock, whose active years spanned the second half of the twentieth century, a period during which opportunities for middle-class women rapidly and vastly improved.
Auld Lang Syne: A Song and its Culture
Author: Morag Josephine Grant
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0231
In Auld Lang Syne: A Song and its Culture, M. J. Grant explores the history of this iconic song, demonstrating how its association with ideas of fellowship, friendship and sociality has enabled it to become so significant for such a wide range of individuals and communities around the world.
Coping: A Philosophical Guide
Author: Luc Bovens
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0268
Coping and Philosophy is a collection of philosophical essays on how we deal with life’s challenges. We hope for better times, but what is hope and is it a good thing to hope? How do we look back and make sense of our lives in the face of death? What is the nature of love and how do we deal with its hardships? What makes for a genuine apology and is there too much or too little apologizing in this world? Can we effect changes in ourselves to adapt to our circumstances? And how can we sense of all the counsel that people have: be grateful, don’t cry over spilled milk, eat well, …
November 2021
The Great Reset: 2021 European Public Investment Outlook
Editor: Floriana Cerniglia
Editor: Francesco Saraceno
Editor: Andrew Watt
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0280
This timely and insightful collection of essays written by economists from a range of academic and policy institutes explores the subject of public investment through two avenues. The first examines public investment trends and needs in Europe, addressing the initiatives taken by European governments to tackle the COVID-19 recession and to rebuild their economies. The second identifies key domains where European public investment is needed to build a more sustainable Europe, from climate change to human capital formation.
Epidicus by Plautus: An Annotated Latin Text, with a Prose Translation
Author: Catherine Tracy
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0269
Epidicus, a light-hearted comedy by Plautus about the machinations of a trickster slave and the inadequacies of his bumbling masters, appears here in both its original Latin and a sparkling new translation by Catherine Tracy. Epidicus, the cunning slave, is charged with finding his master’s illegitimate daughter and the secret girlfriend of his master’s son, but a comedy of mistaken identities and competing interests ensues. Amid the mayhem, Epidicus aims to win his freedom whilst risking some of the grislier punishments the Romans inflicted on their unfortunate slaves.
Documentary Making for Digital Humanists
Author: Darren R. Reid
Author: Brett Sanders
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0255
Documentary Making for Digital Humanists sets out the fundamentals of filmmaking, explores academic discourse on digital documentaries and online distribution, and considers the place of this discourse in the evolving academic landscape.
Forms of Life and Subjectivity: Rethinking Sartre’s Philosophy
Author: Daniel Rueda Garrido
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0259
‘Forms of Life and Subjectivity: Rethinking Sartre’s Philosophy’ explores the fundamental question of why we act as we do. Informed by an ontological and phenomenological approach, and building mainly, but not exclusively, on the thought of Sartre, Daniel Rueda Garrido considers the concept of a “form of life” as a term that bridges the gap between subjective identity and communities.
October 2021
Ancient Greek I: A 21st Century Approach
Author: Philip S. Peek
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0264
In this elementary textbook, Philip S. Peek draws on his twenty-five years of teaching experience to present the ancient Greek language in an imaginative and accessible way that promotes creativity, deep learning, and diversity.
Circulation and Control: Artistic Culture and Intellectual Property in the Nineteenth Century
Editor: Marie-Stéphanie Delamaire
Editor: Will Slauter
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0247
The nineteenth century witnessed a series of revolutions in the production and circulation of images. From lithographs and engraved reproductions of paintings to daguerreotypes, stereoscopic views, and mass-produced sculptures, works of visual art became available in a wider range of media than ever before. But the circulation and reproduction of artworks also raised new questions about the legal rights of painters, sculptors, engravers, photographers, architects, collectors, publishers, and subjects of representation (such as sitters in paintings or photographs). Copyright and patent laws tussled with informal cultural norms and business strategies as individuals and groups attempted to exert some degree of control over these visual creations.
September 2021
Negotiating Climate Change in Crisis
Editor: Steffen Böhm
Editor: Sian Sullivan
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0265
Climate change negotiations have failed the world. Despite more than thirty years of high-level, global talks on climate change, we are still seeing carbon emissions rise dramatically. This edited volume, comprising leading and emerging scholars and climate activists from around the world, takes a critical look at what has gone wrong and what is to be done to create more decisive action.
A Handbook and Reader of Ottoman Arabic
Author: Esther-Miriam Wagner
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0208
This volume is the first linguistic work to focus exclusively on varieties of Christian, Jewish and Muslim Arabic in the Ottoman Empire of the 15th to the 20th centuries, and present Ottoman Arabic material in a didactic and easily accessible way.
August 2021
From Goethe to Gundolf: Essays on German Literature and Culture
Author: Roger Paulin
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0258
From Goethe to Gundolf: Essays on German Literature and Culture is a collection of Roger Paulin’s groundbreaking essays, spanning the last forty years.
What Works in Conservation: 2021
Editor: William J. Sutherland
Editor: Silviu O. Petrovan
Editor: Rebecca K. Smith
Editor: Lynn V. Dicks
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0267
This book provides an assessment of the effectiveness of 2526 conservation interventions based on summarized scientific evidence.
July 2021
Politics and the Environment in Eastern Europe
Editor: Eszter Krasznai Kovacs
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0244
This volume draws together essays by early-career academic researchers from across eastern Europe.
Human Cultures through the Scientific Lens: Essays in Evolutionary Cognitive Anthropology
Author: Pascal Boyer
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0257
This volume brings together a collection of seven articles previously published by the author, with a new introduction reframing the articles in the context of past and present questions in anthropology, psychology and human evolution. It promotes the perspective of ‘integrated’ social science, in which social science questions are addressed in a deliberately eclectic manner, combining results and models from evolutionary biology, experimental psychology, economics, anthropology and history.
Towards an Ethics of Autism: A Philosophical Exploration
Author: Kristien Hens
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0261
What does it mean to say that someone is autistic? Dynamics of Autism is an exploration of this question and many more.
June 2021
Reading Backwards: An Advance Retrospective on Russian Literature
Editor: Timothy Langen
Editor: Muireann Maguire
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0241
This edited volume employs the paradoxical notion of ‘anticipatory plagiarism’—developed in the 1960s by the ‘Oulipo’ group of French writers and thinkers—as a mode for reading Russian literature. Reversing established critical approaches to the canon and literary influence, its contributors ask us to consider how reading against linear chronologies can elicit fascinating new patterns and perspectives.
Technology, Media Literacy, and the Human Subject: A Posthuman Approach
Author: Richard S. Lewis
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0253
This book addresses these issues by providing a transdisciplinary method that allows for both practical and theoretical analyses of media investigations. Informed by postphenomenology, media ecology, philosophical posthumanism, and complexity theory the author proposes both a framework and a pragmatic instrument for understanding the multiplicity of relations that all contribute to how we affect—and are affected by—our relations with media technology.
May 2021
Inventory Analytics
Author: Roberto Rossi
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0252
Inventory Analytics is the first book of its kind to adopt a practicable, Python-driven approach to illustrating theories and concepts via computational examples, with each model covered in the book accompanied by its Python code.
On the Literature and Thought of the German Classical Era: Collected Essays
Author: Hugh Barr Nisbet
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0180
This elegant collection of essays ranges across eighteenth and nineteenth-century thought, covering philosophy, science, literature and religion in the ‘Age of Goethe.’ A recognised authority in the field, Nisbet grapples with the major voices of the Enlightenment and gives pride of place to the figures of Lessing, Herder, Goethe and Schiller.
Writing and Publishing Scientific Papers: A Primer for the Non-English Speaker
Author: Gábor L. Lövei
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0235
Writing and Publishing Scientific Papers stands out from its field by targeting scientists whose first language is not English. While also touching on matters of style and grammar, the book’s main goal is to advise on first principles of communication.
Shaping the Digital Dissertation: Knowledge Production in the Arts and Humanities
Editor: Virginia Kuhn
Editor: Anke Finger
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0239
Shaping the Digital Dissertation aims to provide insights, precedents and best practices to graduate students, doctoral advisors, institutional agents, and dissertation committees. This edited collection will be a useful resource for the wider academic community and anyone interested in the future of doctoral studies.
A Victorian Curate: A Study of the Life and Career of the Rev. Dr John Hunt
Author: David Yeandle
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0248
‘A Victorian Curate: A Study of the Life and Career of the Rev. Dr John Hunt’ is an absorbing personal account of the corruption and turmoil in the Church of England at this time. It will appeal to anyone interested in this history, the relationship between science and religion in the nineteenth century, or the role of the curate in Victorian England.
April 2021
Diversity and Rabbinization: Jewish Texts and Societies between 400 and 1000 CE
Editor: Gavin McDowell
Editor: Ron Naiweld
Editor: Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0219
This volume is dedicated to the cultural and religious diversity in Jewish communities from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Age and the growing influence of the rabbis within these communities during the same period.
Right Research: Modelling Sustainable Research Practices in the Anthropocene
Editor: Chelsea Miya
Editor: Oliver Rossier
Editor: Geoffrey Rockwell
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0213
The essays in this volume critically examine scholarly research practices in the age of the Anthropocene, and ask what accountability educators and researchers have in ‘righting’ their relationship to the environment.
New Perspectives in Biblical and Rabbinic Hebrew
Editor: Aaron D. Hornkohl
Editor: Geoffrey Khan
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0250
This volume contains peer-reviewed papers in the fields of Biblical and Rabbinic Hebrew that advance the field by the philological investigation of primary sources and the application of cutting-edge linguistic theory. These include contributions by established scholars and by students and early career researchers.
March 2021
Middlemarch: Epigraphs and Mirrors
Author: Adam Roberts
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0249
In Middlemarch, George Eliot draws a character passionately absorbed by abstruse allusion and obscure epigraphs. Casaubon’s obsession is a cautionary tale, but Adam Roberts nonetheless sees in him an invitation to take Eliot’s use of epigraphy and allusion seriously, and this book is an attempt to do just that.
Classical Music: Contemporary Perspectives and Challenges
Editor: Paul Boghossian
Editor: Michael Beckerman
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0242
This kaleidoscopic collection reflects on the multifaceted world of classical music as it advances through the twenty-first century. With insights drawn from leading composers, performers, academics, journalists, and arts administrators, special focus is placed on classical music’s defining traditions, challenges and contemporary scope.
Romanticism and Time: Literary Temporalities
Editor: Sophie Laniel-Musitelli
Editor: Céline Sabiron
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0232
‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time’. This original edited volume takes William Blake’s aphorism as a basis to explore how British Romantic literature creates its own sense of time. It considers Romantic poetry as embedded in and reflecting on the march of time, regarding it not merely as a reaction to the course of events between the late-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, but also as a form of creative engagement with history in the making.
Arab Media Systems
Editor: Carola Richter
Editor: Claudia Kozman
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0238
This volume provides a comparative analysis of media systems in the Arab world, based on criteria informed by the historical, political, social, and economic factors influencing a country’s media. Reaching beyond classical western media system typologies, ‘Arab Media Systems’ brings together contributions from experts in the field of media in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) to provide valuable insights into the heterogeneity of this region’s media systems.
February 2021
Like Nobody’s Business: An Insider’s Guide to How US University Finances Really Work
Author: Andrew C. Comrie
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0240
Grounded in hard data, original analyses, and the practical experience of a seasoned administrator, this book provides refreshingly clear answers and comprehensive insights for anyone on or off campus who is interested in the business of the university: how it earns its money, how it spends it, and how it all works.
Jane Austen: Reflections of a Reader
Author: Nora Bartlett
Editor: Jane Stabler
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0216
This volume presents an exhilarating and insightful collection of essays on Jane Austen – distilling the author’s deep understanding and appreciation of Austen’s works across a lifetime. The volume is both intra- and inter-textual in focus, ranging from perceptive analysis of individual scenes to the exploration of motifs across Austen’s fiction.
January 2021
The Marvels Found in the Great Cities and in the Seas and on the Islands: A Representative of ’Aǧā’ib Literature in Syriac
Translator: Sergey Minov
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0237
This volume presents the original text, accompanied by an English translation and commentary, of a hitherto unpublished Syriac composition, entitled the Marvels Found in the Great Cities and in the Seas and on the Islands.
‘The Philosophes’ by Charles Palissot
Editor: Jessica Goodman
Editor: Olivier Ferret
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0201
This masterful and highly accessible translation of Les Philosophes opens up this polemical text to a non-specialist audience. It will be a valuable resource to non-Francophone scholars and students working on the philosophical exchanges of the Enlightenment.
Acoustemologies in Contact: Sounding Subjects and Modes of Listening in Early Modernity
Editor: Emily Wilbourne
Editor: Suzanne G. Cusick
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0226
In this fascinating collection of essays, an international group of scholars explores the sonic consequences of transcultural contact in the early modern period. They examine how cultural configurations of sound impacted communication, comprehension, and the categorisation of people. Addressing questions of identity, difference, sound, and subjectivity in global early modernity, these authors share the conviction that the body itself is the most intimate of contact zones, and that the culturally contingent systems by which sounds made sense could be foreign to early modern listeners and to present day scholars.
Studies in the Grammar and Lexicon of Neo-Aramaic
Editor: Geoffrey Khan
Editor: Paul M. Noorlander
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0209
The papers in this volume represent the full range of research that is currently being carried out on Neo-Aramaic dialects. They advance the field in numerous ways. In order to allow linguists who are not specialists in Neo-Aramaic to benefit from the papers, the examples are fully glossed.
Photography in the Third Reich: Art, Physiognomy and Propaganda
Editor: Christopher Webster
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0202
This lucid and comprehensive collection of essays by an international group of scholars constitutes a photo-historical survey of select photographers who embraced National Socialism during the Third Reich. These photographers developed and implemented physiognomic and ethnographic photography, and, through a Selbstgleichschaltung (a self-co-ordination with the regime), continued to practice as photographers throughout the twelve years of the Third Reich.
The Image of Africa in Ghana’s Press: The Influence of Global News Organisations
Author: Michael Serwornoo
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0227
The Image of Africa in Ghana’s Press is a comprehensive and highly analytical study of the impact of foreign news organisations on the creation of an image of Africa in its own press. Identifying a problematic focus on the Western media in previous studies of the African media image, Serwornoo uses the Ghanaian press as a case study to explore the effects of centuries of Afro-pessimistic discourse in the foreign press on the continent’s self-description.
December 2020
Terrestrial Mammal Conservation: Global Evidence for the Effects of Interventions for Terrestrial Mammals Excluding Bats and Primates
Author: Nick A. Littlewood
Author: Ricardo Rocha
Author: Rebecca K. Smith
Author: Philip A. Martin
Author: Sarah L. Lockhart
Author: Rebecca F. Schoonover
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2020
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0234
Terrestrial Mammal Conservation provides a thorough summary of the available scientific evidence of what is known, or not known, about the effectiveness of all of the conservation actions for wild terrestrial mammals across the world (excluding bats and primates, which are covered in separate synopses).
Mendl Mann’s ‘The Fall of Berlin’
Translator: Maurice Wolfthal
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2020
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0233
Mendl Mann’s autobiographical novel The Fall of Berlin tells the painful yet compelling story of life as a Jewish soldier in the Red Army. Menakhem Isaacovich is a Polish Jew who, after fleeing the Nazis, finds refuge in the USSR. Translated into English from the original Yiddish by Maurice Wolfthal, the narrative follows Menakhem as he fights on the front line in Stalin’s Red Army against Hitler and the Nazis who are destroying his homeland of Poland and exterminating the Jews.
November 2020
Maria Stuart
Translator: Flora Kimmich
Introduction by: Roger Paulin
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2020
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0217
Flora Kimmich’s new translation carefully preserves the spirit of the original: the pathos and passion of Mary in captivity, the high seriousness of Elizabeth’s ministers in council, and the robust comedy of that queen’s untidy private life. Notes to the text identify the many historical figures who appear in the text, describe the political setting of the action, and draw attention to the structure of the play.
The Atheist’s Bible: Diderot’s ‘Éléments de physiologie’
Author: Caroline Warman
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2020
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0199
The Atheist’s Bible challenges prevailing scholarly views on Diderot’s Éléments, asserting its contemporary philosophical importance, and prompting its readers to inspect more closely this little-known and little-studied work. This book is accompanied by a digital edition of Jacques-André Naigeon’s Mémoires historiques et philosophiques sur la vie et les ouvrages de Denis Diderot (1823), a work which, Warman argues, represents the first publication of Diderot’s Éléments, long before its official publication date of 1875.
Plato’s ‘Republic’: An Introduction
Author: Sean McAleer
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2020
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0229
This book is a lucid and accessible companion to Plato’s Republic, throwing light upon the text’s arguments and main themes, placing them in the wider context of the text’s structure. In its illumination of the philosophical ideas underpinning the work, it provides readers with an understanding and appreciation of the complexity and literary artistry of Plato’s Republic.
October 2020
Making up Numbers: A History of Invention in Mathematics
Author: Ekkehard Kopp
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2020
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0236
Making up Numbers: A History of Invention in Mathematics offers a detailed but accessible account of a wide range of mathematical ideas. Starting with elementary concepts, it leads the reader towards aspects of current mathematical research.
B C, Before Computers: On Information Technology from Writing to the Age of Digital Data
Author: Stephen Robertson
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2020
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0225
Treading the line between philosophy and technical history, Robertson draws on his extensive technical knowledge to produce a text which is both thought-provoking and accessible to a wide range of readers.
Global Warming in Local Discourses: How Communities around the World Make Sense of Climate Change
Editor: Michael Brüggemann
Editor: Simone Rödder
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2020
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0212
Global news on anthropogenic climate change is shaped by international politics, scientific reports and voices from transnational protest movements. This timely volume asks how local communities engage with these transnational discourses.
Introducing Vigilant Audiences
Editor: Daniel Trottier
Editor: Rashid Gabdulhakov
Editor: Qian Huang
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2020
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0200
This ground-breaking collection of essays examines the scope and consequences of digital vigilantism – a phenomenon emerging on a global scale, which sees digital audiences using social platforms to shape social and political life. Longstanding forms of moral scrutiny and justice seeking are disseminated through our contemporary media landscape, and researchers are increasingly recognising the significance of societal impacts effected by digital media.