Open Book Publishers
This page shows the latest publications (in descending order of publication date) from Open Book Publishers.
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Last updated: 2025-05-31 00:00:34
May 2025
Oral Poetry
Author: Ruth Finnegan
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0428
This book offers a comprehensive introduction to the vast field of ‘oral poetry,’ encompassing everything from American folksongs, contemporary pop songs, and Inuit lyrics, to the heroic epics of Homer, biblical psalms, and epic traditions in Asia and the Pacific. Taking a broad comparative approach, it explores oral poetry across Africa, Asia, Oceania, Europe, and the Americas. Drawing on global research, Ruth Finnegan, the author of the seminal Oral Literature in Africa, sheds light on key debates such as the nature of oral tradition, the relationship between poetry and society, the differences between oral and written forms, and the role of poets in predominantly non-literate contexts.
Qur’an Translations in the Eastern Bloc and Beyond
Editor: Johanna Pink
Editor: Mykhaylo Yakubovych
Editor: Elvira Kulieva
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0444
This book offers the first comprehensive exploration of Qur’an translations across the diverse landscapes of the former Eastern Bloc, from Uzbekistan to the German Democratic Republic. With a focus on how Islamic texts have been shaped by state policies, ideological shifts, and religious identities, it traces connections between these regions and the wider world, including Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and China. This volume draws on perspectives from both Sunni and Shia traditions, as well as contributions by non-Muslim scholars. Through archival research and close textual analysis, the contributors demonstrate how translations of the Qur’an have served not only as religious texts but also as reflections of profound transformations in national and religious identities in communist and post-communist societies.
Bioethics: A Coursebook
Author: COMPOST Collective
Author: Emma Moormann
Author: Kristien Hens
Author: Nele Buyst
Author: Ina Devos
Author: Daan Kenis
Author: Lisanne Meinen
Author: Mayli Mertens
Author: Yanni Ratajczyk
Author: Franlu Vulliermet
Author: Christina Stadlbauer
Author: Bartaku Vandeput
Author: Varsha Aravind Paleri
Author: Ilya Gordon Villafuerte
Author: Joke Struyf
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0449
This coursebook offers an expansive exploration of bioethics, an interdisciplinary field examining ethical, social, and legal dilemmas in medicine, life sciences, and beyond. It challenges conventional boundaries, embracing Van Rensselaer Potter’s vision of bioethics as a global, holistic ethics of life—integrating human health, environmental considerations, and transdisciplinary insights.
A Field Guide to Cross-Cultural Research on Childhood Learning: Theoretical, Methodological, Practical, and Ethical Considerations for an Interdisciplinary Field
Editor: Sheina Lew-Levy
Editor: Stephen Asatsa
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0440
This volume addresses the critical gaps in developmental research on childhood learning by advocating for a more inclusive and cross-cultural approach. Recent studies highlight a concerning over-reliance on data from post-industrialized western countries, raising questions about the broader applicability of findings. This book seeks to provide a comprehensive solution, bridging the gap between theory and practice.
Imagery of Hate Online
Editor: Marcus Scheiber
Editor: Uffa Jensen
Editor: Matthias J. Becker
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0447
This edited volume explores the evolving role of visual and multimodal expressions in spreading hate ideologies within digital communication. In digital spaces, hate speech is increasingly conveyed through memes, images, and videos, blending textual and pictorial elements to perpetuate harmful stereotypes and other exclusionary narratives. While historical perspectives on hate imagery are well-documented, this collection emphasises the pressing need for contemporary analysis of visual and multimodal communication in digital environments.
April 2025
Improvising Otherwise: A Decolonial Feminist Approach to Improvisation in Early Modern English Culture
Author: Fatima Lahham
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0451
This volume redefines how we approach early music and cultural histories, intertwining feminist, decolonial, and creative perspectives. Fatima Lahham delves into the improvisational practices of early modern England, situating them within a rich tapestry of musical sources, theological texts, travel narratives, and natural histories. Inspired by Sara Ahmed’s notion of the “feminist ear,” the book amplifies voices and histories often unheard, re-examining the cultural interplay between England and the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century.
Coral Conservation: Global Evidence for the Effects of Actions
Author: Ann Thornton
Author: William H. Morgan
Author: Eleanor K. Bladon
Author: Rebecca K. Smith
Author: William J. Sutherland
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0453
Coral Conservation: Global evidence for the effects of actions provides an essential resource for anyone dedicated to conserving or restoring corals. This comprehensive synthesis of global scientific evidence examines the effectiveness of conservation and restoration actions targeting stony, soft and cold-water coral species inhabiting a diverse range of marine habitats in tropical, temperate and arctic waters from shallow coasts to the deep sea.
Women Writers in the Romantic Age
Author: John Claiborne Isbell
Translator: John Claiborne Isbell
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0458
This groundbreaking book offers a comprehensive review of six hundred and fifty women writers from over fifty national traditions, spanning Europe and the Americas during the transformative years of 1776 to 1848. Framed by revolutionary upheavals, the book explores how women writers shaped and reflected Romanticism’s global currents. It fills a critical scholarly gap, connecting disparate traditions and uncovering voices often overlooked in male-dominated literary histories.
Tragedy and the Witness: Shakespeare and Beyond
Author: Fred Parker
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0435
As he dies, Hamlet pleads with Horatio to ‘report me aright … tell my story’. This book deals with the task of bearing witness to anguish, atrocity, and madness, as these are staged in the tragic theatre. Focusing on the relationship between the protagonist and the onlooker or witness, it explores how the tragic figure, often and understandably viewed as alien or culpable or profoundly strange, struggles to be understood. Centred on Shakespeare, its wide-ranging approach also introduces works by (among others) the Greeks, Racine, Ibsen, Pirandello, Kafka, Beckett, and Kane.
Active Speech: Critical Perspectives on Teresa Deevy
Editor: Úna Kealy
Editor: Kate McCarthy
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0432
‘Active Speech’ is a groundbreaking collection of scholarly essays and practitioner interviews focused on the work of Irish playwright Teresa Deevy. Acts of recovery in the 1980s and 1990s challenged Deevy’s exclusion from the literary canon, reclaiming her contributions as significant to Irish drama and theatre. The recent resurgence of scholarship and productions evidences that, as a deafened woman and Irish playwright, Deevy’s creative power continues to disrupt and tilt the canon of Irish drama, theatre, and performance.
Humans, Dogs and Other Beings: Myths, Stories, and History in the Land of Genghis Khan
Author: Baasanjav Terbish
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0450
Step into the windswept steppes of Mongolia and explore a world where humans and animals have coexisted for centuries in a delicate, profound dance. This groundbreaking book examines the complex relationships between the Mongols and four animals—dogs, marmots, cats, and camels—shedding light on a nomadic culture that is deeply intertwined with its natural environment. Drawing from rich ethnographic accounts, historical records, and personal memoir, the author, of Mongol origin, offers a vivid narrative that intertwines cultural insights with intimate reflections.
March 2025
Αncient Greek II: A 21st-Century Approach
Author: Philip S. Peek
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0441
In this elementary textbook, Philip S. Peek draws on his twenty-five years of teaching experience to present the ancient Greek language in an imaginative and accessible way that promotes creativity, deep learning, and diversity.
Color, Healthcare and Bioethics
Author: Henk ten Have
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0443
This book explores the profound, yet often overlooked, role of color in healthcare and bioethics, arguing that color is far more than a visual or aesthetic element—it actively shapes human experience, perception, and ethical reasoning.
Music, Religion and Politics at Worcester Cathedral, 680-1950
Author: Richard Newsholme
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0437
This book provides a comprehensive history of music and liturgy at Worcester Cathedral, from its foundation in the seventh century to the mid-20th century. The author delves into how political shifts, public opinion, and national trends have influenced changes in the cathedral’s practices over time, while also highlighting the distinct local dynamics at play.
Interconnected Traditions: Semitic Languages, Literatures, Cultures—A Festschrift for Geoffrey Khan: Volume 2: The Medieval World, Judaeo-Arabic, and Neo-Aramaic
Editor: Aaron D. Hornkohl
Editor: Nadia Vidro
Editor: Janet C.E. Watson
Editor: Eleanor Coghill
Editor: Magdalen M. Connolly
Editor: Benjamin M. Outhwaite
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0464
Geoffrey Khan’s pioneering scholarship has transformed the study of Semitic languages, literatures, and cultures, leaving an indelible mark on fields ranging from Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic dialectology to medieval manuscript traditions and linguistic typology. This Festschrift, celebrating a distinguished career that culminated in his tenure (2012–2025) as Regius Professor of Hebrew in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge, brings together contributions from a vast and representative array of scholars—retired, established, and up and coming—whose work has been influenced by his vast intellectual legacy.
Interconnected Traditions: Semitic Languages, Literatures, Cultures—A Festschrift for Geoffrey Khan: Volume 1: Hebrew and the Wider Semitic World
Editor: Aaron D. Hornkohl
Editor: Janet C.E. Watson
Editor: Nadia Vidro
Editor: Eleanor Coghill
Editor: Magdalen M. Connolly
Editor: Benjamin M. Outhwaite
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0463
Geoffrey Khan’s pioneering scholarship has transformed the study of Semitic languages, literatures, and cultures, leaving an indelible mark on fields ranging from Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic dialectology to medieval manuscript traditions and linguistic typology. This Festschrift, celebrating a distinguished career that culminated in his tenure (2012–2025) as Regius Professor of Hebrew in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge, brings together contributions from a vast and representative array of scholars—retired, established, and up and coming—whose work has been influenced by his vast intellectual legacy.
Feeling Colour: Chromatic Embodiment in Film Culture, 1950s–1960s
Author: Bregt Lameris
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0380
The shift back from quasi monochrome to coloured motion picture during the 1950s and 1960s famously provided moviegoers the dazzling opportunity to more fully engage their senses, all the while opening new modes of affective possibilities for filmmakers. Set against the intersection of media studies, emotion theory, biology, and digital humanities, Feeling Colour: Chromatic Embodiment in Film Culture (1950s-1960s) delves into the role colour played in the oft-fraught relationship between cinema and its audiences. This transnational analysis of an extensive range of midcentury cinematography examines the multilayered effects which extend beyond the silver screen, offering a high-level theoretical elaboration and in-depth historical exploration of both experimental and mainstream movies.
Troubled People, Troubled World: Psychotherapy, Ethics and Society
Author: Michael Briant
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0416
Therapists endeavour to be non-judgemental and, indeed, are no more qualified to pass judgement on others than anyone else; do they nevertheless learn anything about ethics from their disciplined listening?
The same question was asked after the war about the persecution of the Jews and other minorities, and it’s a very live issue again, faced as we are by movements like ISIS, or Putinism in Russia, that cause great suffering in the name of religious or moral regeneration - a bewildering paradox that David Astor, former editor of The Observer called ‘the scourge’.
Can psychotherapy throw any light on it, or contribute any ideas as to how we might contain, if not prevent, the barbarism it sanctions? Can it offer any insights into a different, more inclusive kind of ethics, and if so, can we glean any guidance from it as to how we might further it?
These are the questions the author explores, drawing on psychoanalytic thinking on these issues for over a century and illustrated by his work with individuals over four decades.
February 2025
Bacterial Genomes: Trees and Networks
Author: Aswin Sai Narain Seshasayee
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0446
In Bacterial Genomes, the evolutionary and regulatory processes that shape bacterial life are brought to life. This textbook offers a conceptual exploration of how bacterial genomes are organized, how they evolve, and how their genetic information is interpreted through intricate molecular networks. Drawing on both cutting-edge research and the historical milestones that shaped microbiology, it illuminates how bacteria navigate the intersection of genetic adaptation and ecological resilience.
The Field Guide to Mixing Social and Biophysical Methods in Environmental Research
Editor: Rebecca Lave
Editor: Stuart Lane
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0418
Despite ongoing debates about its origins, the Anthropocene—a new epoch characterized by significant human impact on the Earth’s geology and ecosystems—is widely acknowledged. Our environment is increasingly a product of interacting biophysical and social forces, shaped by climate change, colonial legacies, gender norms, hydrological processes, and more. Understanding these intricate interactions requires a mixed-methods approach that combines qualitative and quantitative, biophysical and social research.
Two Early Byzantine Bible Manuscripts in Christian Palestinian Aramaic: Codex Climaci Rescriptus II & XI
Author: Kim Phillips
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0455
Despite the ubiquitous use of Greek by the Christian church of the late antique Southern Levant, many Christians in the region also—or only—spoke Aramaic. Today, this dialect, known as Christian Palestinian Aramaic (CPA), is relatively sparsely attested in the form of regional inscriptions and, particularly, in the form of vernacular translations of Greek biblical, liturgical and theological texts. These translations survive predominantly as undertexts within palimpsest manuscripts. Codex Climaci Rescriptus (CCR) is one of the most important palimpsest manuscript sources for the recovery of CPA texts.
Phenomenography in the 21st Century: A Methodology for Investigating Human Experience of the World
Author: Gerlese S. Åkerlind
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0431
Phenomenography offers a distinctive approach to studying human experience of the world, by highlighting different ways in which the same phenomena (concepts, objects, events) are experienced within any group of people. Phenomenography focuses on the relationship between meaning—people’s holistic understanding of phenomena—and structure, that is the part-whole structure of people’s awareness of phenomena. This structure of awareness then forms the basis for identifying differences in the experienced meaning of phenomena, and how awareness needs to change to allow new meanings to emerge—whether educationally, historically, culturally or socially.
New Words to Old Tunes: Genres and Metrics of Lebanese Zajal Poetry
Author: Adnan Haydar
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0424
New Words to Old Tunes: Genres and Metrics of Lebanese Zajal Poetry introduces the rich tradition of Lebanese oral poetry, offering an in-depth study and analysis of its metrics and genres. It presents a novel framework for the proper scansion of meters and emphasises the previously overlooked roles of musical and poetic stress. It details nearly twenty zajal genres, including popular songs that use zajal metrics, and integrates musical notations and web-streamed audio links to enrich the reader’s experience.
Harvesting the Sea in Southeastern Arabia: Volume 1: Regional Studies
Editor: Erik Anonby
Editor: Miranda J. Morris
Editor: Janet C.E. Watson
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0409
Traditional livelihoods and the ecosystems that sustain them are dying out around the world. This book is a collection of research on the relationships between people, their environment, their expertise and their languages along the ecologically fragile coasts of the Arabian Peninsula.
These studies are the outcome of many years of collaborative fieldwork with local communities in three main regions of southern and eastern Arabia: the Musandam Peninsula, Dhofar and al-Mahrah, and the island of Soqotra. Bringing together oral literature, traditional scientific knowledge, and marine subsistence at the peripheries of the Arabian seaboard, the volume makes a major contribution to the documentation of the indigenous Modern South Arabian languages (MSAL), regional Arabic, and the Kumzari language, as well as to a greater understanding of their speakers’ mastery in harvesting the seas.
January 2025
The Samaritan Pentateuch: An English Translation with a Parallel Annotated Hebrew Text
Author: Abraham Tal
Author: Moshe Florentin
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0415
This new translation into English seeks to introduce the reader to the character of the Samaritan version of the Pentateuch, while emphasising the fundamental differences between it and the Masoretic version.
The translation is based on a grammatical analysis of each and every word in the text according to its oral pronunciation, informed by examination of the Samaritan translations into Aramaic and Arabic as well as other Samaritan and non-Samaritan sources.
Oral Literary Worlds: Location, Transmission and Circulation
Editor: Sara Marzagora
Editor: Francesca Orsini
Cambridge,UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0405
The discipline of world literature has traditionally focused on written literatures, particularly the novel, with little emphasis placed on the unwritten verbal arts, despite the significance of oral literary expressions around the world, in the past as in the present. This volume redresses this gap by putting the discipline of world literature into dialogue with scholarship on orature and folklore. It asks, what does world literature look like if we start from orature, from oral texts and utterances, and from the performances and audiences that support it?
Arabic in Context: Essays on Language, Dialects, and Culture in Honour of Martin R. Zammit
Editor: Anthony J. Frendo
Editor: Kurstin Gatt
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0445
This Festschrift, Arabic in Context, is a tribute to the remarkable scholarly legacy of the Reverend Professor Martin R. Zammit. It celebrates his extensive contributions to the fields of Semitic Studies, Arabic linguistics, and comparative Semitic philology.
Navigating Our Way to Solutions in Marine Conservation
Editor: Larry B. Crowder
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0395
Navigating Our Way reflects the broader insights and diverse voices revolutionizing marine conservation. This volume brings together an array of scholars, practitioners, and experts from multiple fields, creating a network of trans-disciplinary and multi-cultural perspectives to address the complex problems in marine conservation.
The Art of Becoming Infinite: Mou Zongsan’s Vertical Rethinking of Self and Subjectivity
Author: Gabriella Stanchina
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0442
In addressing fundamental questions of self-consciousness and self-identity, the book contextualizes Mou’s philosophy within contemporary discussions in neuroscience and cognitive science. By placing Mou’s ideas in dialogue with Western thought—examining thinkers like Husserl, Kant, Hegel, and Lévinas—as well as with Daoist and Confucian vision of mind, this work opens a pathway to understanding selfhood beyond purely epistemological boundaries.
Learning Statistics with jamovi: A Tutorial for Beginners in Statistical Analysis
Author: Danielle Navarro
Author: David Foxcroft
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0333
Based on Danielle Navarro’s widely acclaimed and prize-winning book Learning Statistics with R, this elegantly designed textbook offers undergraduate students a thorough and accessible introduction to jamovi, as well as how to get to grips with statistics and data manipulation.
Being in Shadow and Light: Academics in Post/Conflict Higher Education
Editor: Dina Zoe Belluigi
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2025
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0427
Academia and its citizens, during periods of political violence and social conflict, are often overlooked. When attention is given, the focus tends to be on student activism, access to higher education, or curriculum development. The experiences of academics affected by conflict remain under-researched, despite the crucial role they play as educators and in generating, documenting, preserving and challenging knowledges. This is particularly concerning given that academics have−and continue to be−at risk as targets of sanction, persecution and oppression.
December 2024
The Birds That Wouldn’t Sing: Remembering the D-Day Wrens
Author: Justin Smith
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0430
This compelling book offers a unique perspective on D-Day and its aftermath through the personal testimonies of the Wrens who worked for Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay during Operation Overlord. Drawing on public and private archives, it reveals the untold stories of the women serving in the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS), balancing their wartime contributions with the strictures of secrecy and censorship. The narrative is framed by letters from these Wrens, which provide intimate glimpses into both the personal and professional challenges they faced during World War II.
Genetic Narratology: Analysing Narrative across Versions
Editor: Dirk Van Hulle
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0426
Genetic Narratology is the first full-length volume to merge genetic criticism with narratology, offering an innovative approach to understanding literature. By examining the creative process behind literary works through drafts, manuscripts and revisions, this book reveals how narratives are shaped in real time.
Breaking Images: Iconoclastic Analyses of Mathematics and its Education
Editor: Brian Greer
Editor: David Kollosche
Editor: Ole Skovsmose
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0407
These twenty essays explore questions of mathematics as a topic of philosophy, but also the nature and purpose of mathematics education and the role of mathematics in moulding citizens. It challenges the biases and prejudices inherent within uninformed histories of mathematics, including problems of white supremacy, the denial of cultural difference and the global homogenization of teaching methods. In particular, the book contrasts the effectiveness of mathematics and science in modelling physical phenomena and solving technical problems with its ineffectiveness in modelling social phenomena and solving human problems, and urges us to consider how mathematics might better meet the urgent crises of our age.
Investing in the Structural Transformation: 2024 European Public Investment Outlook
Editor: Floriana Cerniglia
Editor: Francesco Saraceno
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0434
The fifth volume in the European Public Investment Outlook series explores how Europe can drive structural transformation through strategic public investment. Reflecting on the lessons from the 2008–2020 polycrisis and recent economic challenges, this timely book examines fiscal policy’s role in both stabilization and long-term economic development.
November 2024
Knowledge: A Human Interest Story
Author: Brian Weatherson
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0425
In this book the author argues for a groundbreaking perspective that knowledge is inherently interest-relative. This means that what one knows is influenced not just by belief, evidence, and truth, but crucially by the purposes those beliefs serve. Drawing from classical Nyāya epistemologies, the book asserts that knowledge rationalizes action: if you know something, it is sensible to act on it—and the best way to square this with an anti-sceptical epistemology is to say that knowledge is interest-relative.
No Prices No Games!: Four Economic Models
Author: Michael Richter
Author: Ariel Rubinstein
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0438
While current economic theory focuses on prices and games, this book models economic settings where harmony is established through one of the following societal conventions:
• A power relation according to which stronger agents are able to force weaker ones to do things against their will. • A norm that categorizes actions as permissible or forbidden. • A status relation over alternatives which limits each agent’s choices. • Systematic biases in agents’ preferences.
These four conventions are analysed using simple and mathematically straightforward models, without any pretensions regarding direct applied usefulness. While we do not advocate for the adoption of any of these conventions specifically – we do advocate that when modelling an economic situation, alternative equilibrium notions should be considered, rather than automatically reaching for the familiar approaches of prices or games.
Diachronic Diversity in Classical Biblical Hebrew
Author: Aaron D. Hornkohl
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0433
According to the standard periodisation of ancient Hebrew, the division of Biblical Hebrew as reflected in the Masoretic tradition is basically dichotomous: pre-exilic Classical Biblical Hebrew (CBH) versus post-Restoration Late Biblical Hebrew (LBH). Within this paradigm, the chronolectal unity of CBH is rarely questioned—this despite the reasonable expectation that the language of a corpus encompassing traditions of various ages and comprising works composed, edited, and transmitted over the course of centuries would show signs of diachronic development. From the perspective of historical evolution, CBH is remarkably homogenous. Within this apparent uniformity, however, there are indeed signs of historical development, sets of alternant features whose respective concentrations seem to divide CBH into two sub-chronolects. The most conspicuous typological division that emerges is between the CBH of the Pentateuch and that of the relevant Prophets and Writings. The present volume investigates a series of features that distinguish the two ostensible CBH sub-chronolects, weighs alternative explanations for distribution patterns that appear to have chronological significance, and considers broader implications for Hebrew diachrony and periodisation and for the composition of the Torah.
Digital Humanities in the India Rim: Contemporary Scholarship in Australia and India
Editor: Myra Gurney
Editor: Hart Cohen
Editor: Ujjwal Jana
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0423
This varied collection delves into illuminating examples of Digital Humanities research and practice currently being undertaken by academics in India and Australia, and seeks to understand the shared challenges as well as the points of similarity and difference between them. From the influence of Netflix on International Relations to contemporary digital adaptations of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, via detours into erobotics (empathic robots) and the cultural specificity of online dating, these essays convey the distinctive breadth and imagination of research in this field.
Digital Humanities is a relatively new discipline in the India Rim, and this novelty has created space for innovative research ideas, as well as the use of traditional methodologies and software in different ways within these unique cultural spaces that could potentially influence how Digital Humanities is conceptualised internationally.
The Struggle You Can’t See: Experiences of Neurodivergent and Invisibly Disabled Students in Higher Education
Author: Ash Lierman
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0420
This book offers a comprehensive review of current research on the higher education experiences of neurodivergent undergraduate students and those with invisible disabilities. Grounded in principles of social justice and equity, this work draws from design thinking, the neurodiversity model, and Universal Design for Learning, to explore the context of higher education in relation to neurodivergent and disabled students.
October 2024
Insolubles: Critical Edition with English Translation
Author: Walter Segrave
Editor: Barbara Bartocci
Editor: Stephen Read
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0359
In light of Bradwardine’s criticisms, Walter Segrave, writing around 1330, defended so-called restrictivism (restrictio) by claiming that such paradoxes exhibited a fallacy of accident. The classic example of this fallacy, the first of Aristotle’s fallacies independent of language, is the Hidden Man puzzle: you know Coriscus, Coriscus is the one approaching, but you don’t know the one approaching since, e.g., he is wearing a mask. But Aristotle’s account is unclear and Segrave, building on ideas of Giles of Rome and Walter Burley, shows how the fallacy turns on an equivocation over the supposition of the middle term or one of the extremes in a syllogism. Thereby, Segrave is able to counter Bradwardine’s arguments one by one and defend the restrictivist solution. In this volume, Segrave’s text is edited from the three extant manuscripts, is translated into English, and is preceded by a substantial Introduction.
Diversity across the Arabian Peninsula: Language, Culture, Nature
Editor: Fabio Gasparini
Editor: Kamala Russell
Editor: Janet C.E. Watson
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0411
This edited volume brings together a diverse and rich set of contributions on the Arabian Peninsula. Ranging from history, field linguistics, and cultural studies these essays address the diversity of languages, ways of life, and natural environments that have marked the region throughout its history.
Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Technology
Editor: Bas de Boer
Editor: Jochem Zwier
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0421
Our contemporary world is undeniably intertwined with technology, influencing every aspect of human life. This edited volume delves into why modern philosophical approaches to technology closely align with phenomenology and explores the implications of this relationship. Over the past two decades, scholars have emphasized users’ lived experiences and their interactions with technological practices, arguing that technologies gain meaning and shape within specific contexts, actively shaping those contexts in return. This book investigates the phenomenological roots of contemporary philosophy of technology, examining how phenomenology informs analyses of temporality, use, cognition, embodiment, and environmentality. Divided into three sections, the volume begins by exploring the role of phenomenological methods in the philosophy of technology, and further investigates the methodological implications of combining phenomenology with other philosophical schools. The second section examines technology as a phenomenon, debating whether it should be analysed as a whole or through individual artifacts. The final section addresses the practical applications of phenomenological insights in design practices and democratic engagement.
Grotesque and Performance in the Art of Aubrey Beardsley
Author: Evanghelia Stead
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0413
This insightful study illuminates previously unexplored aspects of Aubrey Beardsley’s relationship to the grotesque and his use of media, particularly his manipulation of the periodical press. For the first time and with keen intelligence, Evanghelia Stead fully reveals the aesthetic importance of Beardsley’s Bon-Mots vignettes, as well as the relationship between Darwinism, his innovative foetus motif, and Decadence itself.
Meta-Xenakis: New Perspectives on Iannis Xenakis’s Life, Work, and Legacies
Editor: Sharon Kanach
Editor: Peter Nelson
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0390
Meta-Xenakis offers readers a comprehensive collection of insights into the history, works and legacy of Iannis Xenakis, one of the twentieth century’s most significant creative figures. It presents a transcontinental engagement with his life and output, focusing as much on the impact of the questions he posed as on the accomplishments of his body of work.
Nouvelles études sur les lieux de spectacle de la première modernité
Editor: Jeffrey M. Leichman
Editor: Pauline Beaucé
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0400
Les théâtres du passé : des théâtres virtuels ? C’est une des questions passionnantes explorée dans ce livre par des chercheurs et chercheuses en littérature, musicologie, histoire, études théâtrales, histoire de l’art, architecture et sciences du numérique. Ces Nouvelles études sur les lieux de spectacle de la première modernité proposent de relever un défi épistémologique autour de la notion de virtuel pour la recherche en histoire du théâtre en engageant différents formats de réflexion : entretiens, articles multimédia, brèves de méthodologie, exposition virtuelle.
Rāgs Around the Clock: A Handbook for North Indian Classical Music, with Online Recordings in the Khayāl Style
Author: David Clarke
Music editor: Vijay Rajput
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0313
Rāgs Around the Clock is a rich and vibrant compendium for the discovery and study of North Indian classical music. The theory and practice of rāg are explored through two interlinked resources: a handbook of essays and analyses offering technical, historical, cultural and aesthetic perspectives; and two online albums – Rāg samay cakra and Twilight Rāgs from North India – featuring khayāl singer Vijay Rajput and accompanists.
September 2024
Urban Heritage and Sustainability in the Age of Globalisation
Editor: Lilia Makhloufi
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0412
This book offers a deep exploration of architectural and urban heritage, using interdisciplinary and intercultural approaches to assess how historical, social, economic and political factors have impacted heritage development and its sustainability. It sheds light on the stakes of heritage conservation, management and maintenance in today’s globalised world.
The Verb in Classical Hebrew: The Linguistic Reality behind the Consecutive Tenses
Author: Bo Isaksson
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0414
The consecutive tenses are fundamental in all descriptions of Classical Hebrew grammar. They are even basic to the textbooks on Biblical Hebrew. Being fundamental in the verbal system, and part of any beginner’s grammar, they pose a serious problem to a linguistic understanding of the verbal system, since grammars describe an alternation of ‘forms’ or ‘tenses’ in double pairs: wayyiqṭol alternates with its ‘equivalent’ qaṭal, and wə-qaṭal alternates with its ‘equivalent’ yiqṭol. This ‘enigma’ in the verbal system is handled in the book by recognising that the alternation of the consecutive tenses with other tenses, in the reality of the text, represents a linking of clauses. The ‘consecutive tenses’ are clause-types with a natural language connective wa- directly followed by a finite verbal morpheme, a type of clause that expressed continuity in the earliest stage of Semitic. The commonly held assumption that there is a special ‘consecutive waw’ is unwarranted. The use of the ‘consecutive’ clause-types in order to express discourse continuity indicates that Classical Hebrew has retained the old unmarked declarative word order of Semitic syntax. Seen in the light of recent research on the Tiberian reading tradition, the ‘consecutive’ wayyiqṭol can be analysed as a retention of the old Semitic past perfective *wa-yaqtul, which was pronounced wa-yiqṭol in Classical Hebrew. The ‘consecutive’ wə-qāṭal (pronounced wa-qaṭal in the classical language) constitutes the result of an internal Hebrew development into a construction (in the sense of Joan Bybee) already foreshadowed in the earliest Northwest Semitic languages. The book understands the ‘consecutive tenses’ as discourse continuity clauses, which typically form chains of main line clauses. Such chains can be interrupted by other types of clauses. This interruption is a clause linking that receives special attention in the interpretation of the Classical Hebrew verbal system. Chapter six presents a regenerated text linguistics founded on the new terminology.
The Last Years of Polish Jewry: Volume 2: The Permanent Pogrom, 1935–37
Author: Yankev Leshchinsky
Editor: Robert Brym
Translator: Eli Jany
Translator: Robert Brym
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0342
Ukrainian-born Yankev Leshchinsky (1876-1966) was the leading scholarly and journalistic analyst of Eastern European Jewish socioeconomic and political life from the 1920s to the 1950s. Known as “the dean of Jewish sociologists” and “the father of Jewish demography,” Leshchinsky published a series of insightful and moving essays in Yiddish on Polish Jewry between 1927 and 1937. Despite heightened interest in interwar Jewish communities in Poland in recent years, these essays (like most of Leshchinsky’s works) have never been translated into English.
Touching Parchment: How Medieval Users Rubbed, Handled, and Kissed Their Manuscripts: Volume 2: Social Encounters with the Book
Author: Kathryn M. Rudy
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0379
In the late middle ages (ca. 1200-1520), both religious and secular people used manuscripts, was regarded as a most precious item. The traces of their use through touching and handling during different rituals such as oath-taking, public reading, and memorializing the dead, is the subject of Kathryn Rudy’s research in Touching Parchment.
Bitter-Sweet Democracy?: Analyzing citizens’ resentment towards politics in Belgium
Editor: Virginie Van Ingelgom
Editor: Karen Celis
Editor: Louise Knops
Editor: Heidi Mercenier
Editor: François Randour
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0401
Discussions about the ‘crisis of representative democracy’ have dominated scholarly and public discourse for some time now. But what does this phrase actually entail, and what is its relevance today? How do citizens themselves experience, feel and respond to this ‘crisis’? Bitter-Sweet Democracy grapples with the complexities of these questions in the context of citizens’ relations to politics in Belgium—a nation that has experienced political instability and protests as well as social mobilization and democratic vitality in recent years.
Augustus De Morgan, Polymath: New Perspectives on his Life and Legacy
Author: Karen Attar
Author: Adrian Rice
Author: Christopher Stray
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0408
When Augustus De Morgan died in 1871, he was described as ‘one of the profoundest mathematicians in the United Kingdom’ and even as ‘the greatest of our mathematicians’. But he was far more than just a mathematician. Because much of his voluminous written output on various subjects was scattered throughout journals and encyclopaedias, the breadth of his interests and contributions has been underappreciated by historians. Now, renewed interest in De Morgan’s life and work has coincided with the digitization of his extensive library, revealing the extent to which he pioneered and influenced the development of not merely mathematics but also logic, astronomy, the history of mathematics, education, and bibliography.
Trix: The Other Kipling
Author: Barbara Fisher
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0377
This volume represents the first biography of Alice MacDonald Kipling Fleming (1868-1948), known as Trix. Rarely portrayed with sympathy or accuracy in biographies of her famous brother Rudyard, Trix was a talented writer and a memorable character in her own right whose fascinating life was unknown until now. In telling Trix’s story, Barbara Fisher rescues her from the misrepresentations, trivializations, and outright neglect of Rudyard’s many biographers.
An Anthology of Global Risk
Editor: SJ Beard
Editor: Tom Hobson
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0360
This anthology brings together a diversity of key texts in the emerging field of Existential Risk Studies. It serves to complement the previous volume The Era of Global Risk: An Introduction to Existential Risk Studies by providing open access to original research and insights in this rapidly evolving field. At its heart, this book highlights the ongoing development of new academic paradigms and theories of change that have emerged from a community of researchers in and around the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. The chapters in this book challenge received notions of human extinction and civilization collapse and seek to chart new paths towards existential security and hope.
August 2024
The Embassy, the Ambush, and the Ogre: Greco-Roman Influence in Sanskrit Theater
Author: Roberto Morales-Harley
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0417
This volume presents a sophisticated and intricate examination of the parallels between Sanskrit and Greco-Roman literature. By means of a philological and literary analysis, Morales-Harley hypothesizes that Greco-Roman literature was known, understood, and recreated in India. Moreover, it is argued that the techniques for adapting epic into theater could have been Greco-Roman influences in India, and that some of the elements adapted within the literary motifs (specifically the motifs of the embassy, the ambush, and the ogre) could have been Greco-Roman borrowings by Sanskrit authors.
An Annotated Corpus of Three Hundred Proverbs, Sayings, and Idioms in Eastern Jibbali/Śḥərɛ̄́t
Author: Giuliano Castagna
Contributions by: Suhail al-Amri
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0422
This book explores the rich paremiological heritage of Jibbali/Śḥərɛ̄́t, an endangered pre-literate language belonging to the Modern South Arabian sub-branch of Semitic, spoken by an ever-decreasing number of people in the Dhofar governorate of the Sultanate of Oman.
Thinking Blue / Writing Red: Marxism and the (Post)Human
Author: Stephen Tumino
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0324
Thinking Blue/Writing Red interrogates contemporary culture across a range of texts, from the pandemic (‘Covid’ and ‘Trump Speak’) to high theory (Melville’s narratives) and popular culture (Beyoncé’s ‘Formation’ and Super Bowl performance, Twin Peaks , metamodern ‘cli-fi’ films).
Etosha Pan to the Skeleton Coast: Conservation Histories, Policies and Practices in North-west Namibia
Editor: Sian Sullivan
Editor: Ute Dieckmann
Editor: Selma Lendelvo
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0402
Etosha Pan to the Skeleton Coast examines the conservation histories and concerns of one of southern Africa’s most iconic conservation regions: the variously connected ‘Etosha-Kunene’ areas of north-central and north-west Namibia. This cross-disciplinary volume brings together contributions from a Namibian and international group of scholars and conservation practitioners, working on topics ranging from colonial histories to water management, perceptions of ‘wildlife’ and the politics of belonging. Together, these essays confront a critical question: how can the conservation of biodiversity-rich landscapes be reconciled with historical injustices of social exclusion and marginalisation?
July 2024
The Diagrammatics of ‘Race’: Visualizing Human Relatedness in the History of Physical, Evolutionary, and Genetic Anthropology, ca. 1770-2020
Author: Marianne Sommer
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0396
This is the first book that engages with the history of diagrams in physical, evolutionary, and genetic anthropology. Since their establishment as scientific tools for classification in the eighteenth century, diagrams have been used to determine but also to deny kinship between human groups. In nineteenth-century craniometry, they were omnipresent in attempts to standardize measurements on skulls for hierarchical categorization. In particular the ’human family tree’ was central for evolutionary understandings of human diversity, being used on both sides of debates about whether humans constitute different species well into the twentieth century. With recent advances in (ancient) DNA analyses, the tree diagram has become more contested than ever―does human relatedness take the shape of a network? Are human individual genomes mosaics made up of different ancestries? Sommer examines the epistemic and political role of these visual representations in the history of ‘race’ as an anthropological category. How do such diagrams relate to imperial and (post-)colonial practices and ideologies but also to liberal and humanist concerns?
June 2024
Feliks Volkhovskii: A Revolutionary Life
Author: Michael Hughes
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0385
Michael Hughes’s groundbreaking new biography provides a vivid history of this notable but hitherto neglected figure of both the political and literary worlds. Based on ten years of research in archives across the world and drawing on sources in multiple languages, this masterful biography explores how Feliks Volkhovskii’s life illuminates broader intellectual and historical questions about the Russian revolutionary movement. It is essential reading for anyone interested in late Imperial Russia and the Russian revolution.
Music and Spirituality: Theological Approaches, Empirical Methods, and Christian Worship
Editor: George Corbett
Editor: Sarah Moerman
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0403
The composer Sir James MacMillan has often referred to music as ‘the most spiritual of the arts’, and for many people, regardless of religious affiliation, this rings true. In listening to music, we are drawn to dimensions of human experience beyond the material. This collection brings together leading scholars from various disciplines – including Christian theology, musicology, and psychology and neuroscience – to interrogate the intimate relationship between music and spirituality.
Antisemitism in Online Communication: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Hate Speech in the Twenty-First Century
Editor: Laura Ascone
Editor: Karolina Placzynta
Editor: Chloé Vincent
Editor: Matthias J. Becker
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0406
Drawing from disciplines such as corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, semiotics, history, and philosophy, this edited collection examines over 100,000 user comments from three language communities. Contributors explore various facets of online antisemitism, including its intersectionality with misogyny and its dissemination through memes and social networks. Through case studies, they examine the reproduction, support, and rejection of antisemitic tropes, alongside quantitative assessments of comment structures in online discussions. Additionally, the volume delves into the capabilities of content moderation tools and deep-learning models for automated hate speech detection. This multidisciplinary approach provides a comprehensive understanding of contemporary antisemitism in digital spaces, recognising the importance of addressing its insidious spread from multiple angles.
The Life of Nuns: Love, Politics, and Religion in Medieval German Convents
Author: Eva Schlotheuber
Author: Henrike Lähnemann
Translator: Anne Simon
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0397
In the Middle Ages half of those who chose the religious life were women, yet historians have overlooked entire generations of educated, feisty, capable and enterprising nuns, condemning them to the dusty silence of the archives. What, though, were their motives for entering a convent and what was their daily routine behind its walls like? How did they think, live and worship, both as individuals and as a community? How did they maintain contact with the families and communities they had left behind? Henrike Lähnemann and Eva Schlotheuber offer readers a vivid insight into the largely unknown lives and work of religious women in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Psychological Perspectives on Musical Experiences and Skills: Research in the Western Balkans and Western Europe
Editor: Blanka Bogunović
Editor: Renee Timmers
Editor: Sanela Nikolić
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0389
This book features recent research on the psychology of music from the Western Balkans, foregrounding its specific topics, methods, and influences by bringing it into productive conversation with complementary research from Western Europe and further afield.
Human Evolutionary Demography
Editor: Oskar Burger
Editor: Ronald Lee
Editor: Rebecca Sear
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0251
Human evolutionary demography is an emerging field blending natural science with social science. This edited volume provides a much-needed, interdisciplinary introduction to the field and highlights cutting-edge research for interested readers and researchers in demography, the evolutionary behavioural sciences, biology, and related disciplines.
Saki (H.H. Munro): Original and Uncollected Stories
Editor: Bruce Gaston
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0365
The short stories of Hector Hugh Munro, better known by his pen name Saki, have remained in print continuously for over a hundred years. This collection is the first of its kind to present his stories as they were originally published in newspapers and magazines, preserving their internal consistency and contemporary references lost in revisions for The Chronicles of Clovis and subsequent collected editions. A trove of annotations and carefully sourced bibliographical information illuminates the Edwardian context behind the thirteen selected stories, of which three (‘Mrs. Pendercoet’s Lost Identity’, ‘The Romance of Business’ and ‘The Optimist’) were only recently rediscovered.
May 2024
Roles and Relations in Biblical Law: A Study of Participant Tracking, Semantic Roles, and Social Networks in Leviticus 17-26
Author: Christian Canu Højgaard
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0376
Leviticus 17–26, an ancient law text known as the Holiness Code, prescribes how particular persons are to behave in concrete, everyday situations. The addressees of the law text must revere their parents, respect the elderly, fear God, take care of their fellow, provide for the sojourner, and so on. The sojourner has his own obligations, as do the priests. Even God is said to behave in various ways towards various persons. Thus, the law text forms an intricate web of persons and interactions.
Music and the Making of Modern Japan: Joining the Global Concert
Author: Margaret Mehl
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0374
In only 50 years, from the 1870s to the early 1920s, Japanese people laid the foundations for the country’s post-war rise as a musical as well as an economic power. Meanwhile, new types of popular song, fuelled by the growing global record industry, successfully blended inspiration from the West with musical characteristics perceived as Japanese.
Teaching Music Performance in Higher Education: Exploring the Potential of Artistic Research
Editor: Gilvano Dalagna
Editor: Stefan Östersjö
Editor: Helen Julia Minors
Editor: Jorge Salgado Correia
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0398
This book contributes presenting examples of artistic research projects that are embedded within Higher Music Performance courses at universities and conservatoires across Europe.
Reign of the Beast: The Atheist World of W. D. Saull and his Museum of Evolution
Author: Adrian Desmond
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0393
In the 1830s, decades before Darwin published the Origin of Species, a museum of evolution flourished in London. Reign of the Beast pieces together the extraordinary story of this lost working-man’s institution and its enigmatic owner, the wine merchant W. D. Saull. A financial backer of the anti-clerical Richard Carlile, the ‘Devil’s Chaplain’ Robert Taylor, and socialist Robert Owen, Saull outraged polite society by putting humanity’s ape ancestry on display. He weaponized his museum fossils and empowered artisans with a knowledge of deep geological time that undermined the Creationist base of the Anglican state. His geology museum, called the biggest in Britain, housed over 20,000 fossils, including famous dinosaurs. Saull was indicted for blasphemy and reviled during his lifetime. After his death in 1855, his museum was demolished and he was expunged from the collective memory. Now multi-award-winning author Adrian Desmond undertakes a thorough reading of Home Office spy reports and subversive street prints to re-establish Saull’s pivotal place at the intersection of the history of geology, atheism, socialism, and working-class radicalism.
Arabic Documents from Medieval Nubia
Author: Geoffrey Khan
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0391
This volume presents an edition of a corpus of Arabic documents data-ble to the 11th and 12th centuries AD that were discovered by the Egypt Exploration Society at the site of the Nubian fortress Qaṣr Ibrīm (situated in the south of modern Egypt).
Jesus and the Making of the Modern Mind, 1380-1520
Author: Luke Clossey
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0371
For his fifteenth-century followers, Jesus was everywhere – from baptism to bloodcults to bowling. This sweeping and unconventional investigation looks at Jesus across one hundred forty years of social, cultural, and intellectual history. Mystics married him, Renaissance artists painted him in three dimensions, Muslim poets praised his life-giving breath, and Christopher (“Christ-bearing”) Columbus brought the symbol of his cross to the Americas. Beyond the European periphery, this global study follows Jesus across – and sometimes between – religious boundaries, from Greenland to Kongo to China.
April 2024
The Nordic Minuet: Royal Fashion and Peasant Tradition
Editor: Petri Hoppu
Editor: Anne Margrete Fiskvik
Editor: Egil Bakka
Cambridge,UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0314
This major new anthology of the minuet in the Nordic countries comprehensively explores the dance as a historical, social and cultural phenomenon. One of the most significant dances in Europe, with a strong symbolic significance in western dance culture and dance scholarship, the minuet has evolved a distinctive pathway in this region, which these rigorous and pioneering essays explore.
(An)Archive: Childhood, Memory, and the Cold War
Editor: Mnemo ZIN
Editor: Iveta Silova
Editor: Nelli Piattoeva
Editor: Zsuzsa Millei
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0383
What was it like growing up during the Cold War? What can childhood memories tell us about state socialism and its aftermath? How can these intimate memories complicate history and redefine possible futures? These questions are at the heart of the (An)Archive: Childhood, Memory, and the Cold War. This edited collection stems from a collaboration between academics and artists who came together to collectively remember their own experiences of growing up on both sides of the ‘Iron Curtain’. Looking beyond official historical archives, the book gathers memories that have been erased or forgotten, delegitimized or essentialized, or, at best, reinterpreted nostalgically within the dominant frameworks of the East-West divide. And it reassembles and (re)stores these childhood memories in a form of an ‘anarchive’: a site for merging, mixing, connecting, but also juxtaposing personal experiences, public memory, political rhetoric, places, times, and artifacts. Collectively, these acts and arts of collective remembering tell about possible futures―and the past’s futures―what life during the Cold War might have been but also what it has become.
A Grammar of the Jewish Arabic Dialect of Gabes
Author: Wiktor Gębski
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0394
This volume undertakes a linguistic exploration of the endangered Arabic dialect spoken by the Jews of Gabes, a coastal city situated in Southern Tunisia. Belonging to the category of sedentary North African dialects, this variety is now spoken by a dwindling number of native speakers, primarily in Israel and France. Given the imminent extinction faced by many modern varieties of Judaeo-Arabic, including Jewish Gabes, the study’s primary goal is to document and describe its linguistic nuances while reliable speakers are still accessible. Data for this comprehensive study were collected during fieldwork in Israel and France between December 2018 and March 2022.
Tangible and Intangible Heritage in the Age of Globalisation
Editor: Lilia Makhloufi
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0388
Tangible and Intangible Heritage in the Age of Globalisation offers a rich collection of perspectives on the complex interplay between tangible and intangible heritage. These essays illustrate the need to redefine heritage as an interdisciplinary and intercultural concept. They interrogate heritage paradigms while also providing concrete recommendations to promote the preservation of physical heritage spaces, and the cultural practices and social relationships that depend on them.
Heavy Metal: Earth’s Minerals and the Future of Sustainable Societies
Editor: Philippe D. Tortell
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0373
Heavy Metal: Earth’s Minerals and the Future of Sustainable Societies brings together world-leading experts from across the globe to reimagine the future of mineral exploration and mining in a post-fossil fuel world.
Translating Russian Literature in the Global Context
Editor: Cathy McAteer
Editor: Muireann Maguire
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0340
Translating Russian Literature in the Global Context examines the translation and reception of Russian literature as a world-wide process. This volume aims to provoke new debate about the continued currency of Russian literature as symbolic capital for international readers, in particular for nations seeking to create or consolidate cultural and political leverage in the so-called ‘World Republic of Letters’. It also seeks to examine and contrast the mechanisms of the translation and uses of Russian literature across the globe.
March 2024
No Life Without You: Refugee Love Letters from the 1930s
Editor: Franklin Felsenstein
Introduction by: Rachel Pistol
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0334
The letters and journals of Ernst Moritz and Vera Hirsch Felsenstein, two German Jewish refugees caught in the tumultuous years leading to the Second World War, form the core of this book. Abridged in English from the original German, the correspondence and diaries have been expertly compiled and annotated by their only son who preserves his parents’ love story in their own words. Their letters, written from Germany, England, Russia, and Palestine capture their desperate efforts to save themselves and their family, friends and businesses from the fascist tyranny. The book begins by contextualizing the early lives of Moritz and Vera.
Byron and Trinity: Memorials, Marbles and Ruins
Editor: Adrian Poole
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0399
This is a collection of reprinted essays about the life and writing of Lord Byron and the themes of ‘memorials, marbles and ruins’ that were prominent in his thinking and feeling.
Eliza Orme’s Ambitions: Politics and the Law in Victorian London
Author: Leslie Howsam
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0392
Why are some figures hidden from history? Eliza Orme, despite becoming the first woman in Britain to earn a university degree in Law in 1888, leading both a political organization and a labour investigation in 1892, and participating actively in the women’s suffrage movement into the early twentieth century, is one such figure.
A Country of Shepherds: Cultural Stories of a Changing Mediterranean Landscape
Author: Kathleen Ann Myers
Translator: Grady C. Wray
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0387
This book draws on the life stories told by shepherds, farmers, and their families in the Andalusian region in Spain to sketch out the landscapes, actions, and challenges of people who work in pastoralism. Their narratives highlight how local practices interact with regional and European communities and policies, and they help us see a broader role for extensive grazing practices and sustainability.
February 2024
Genetic Inroads into the Art of James Joyce
Author: Hans Walter Gabler
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0325
This book is a treasure trove comprising core writings from Hans Walter Gabler‘s seminal work on James Joyce, spanning fifty years from the analysis of composition he undertook towards a critical text of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, through the Critical and Synoptic Edition of Ulysses, to Gabler‘s latest essays on (appropriately enough) Joyce’s sustained artistic innovation.
Tener Demasiado: Ensayos Filosóficos sobre el Limitarismo
Editor: Ingrid Robeyns
Translator: Héctor Iñaki Larrínaga Márquez
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0354
‘Tener demasiado’ es el primer volumen académico dedicado al limitarismo: la idea de que el uso de los recursos económicos o de los ecosistemas no sobrepasen ciertos límites.
How Divine Images Became Art: Essays on the Rediscovery, Study and Collecting of Medieval Icons in the Belle Époque
Author: Oleg Tarasov
Translator: Stella Rock
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0378
How Divine Images Became Art tells the story of the parallel ‘discovery’ of Russian medieval art and of the Italian ‘primitives’ at the beginning of the twentieth century. While these two developments are well-known, they are usually studied in isolation. Tarasov’s study has the great merit of showing the connection between the art world in Russia and the West, and its impact in the cultural history of the continent in the pre-war period.
The Kingdom and the Qur’an: Translating the Holy Book of Islam in Saudi Arabia
Author: Mykhaylo Yakubovych
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0381
This book presents a detailed analysis of the translation of the Qur’an in Saudi Arabia, the most important global actor in the promotion, production and dissemination of Qur’an translations. Mykhaylo Yakubovych provides a comprehensive historical overview of the debates surrounding the translatability of the Qur’an, as well as exploring the impact of the burgeoning translation and dissemination of the holy book upon Wahhabi and Salafi interpretations of Islam. Backed by meticulous research and drawing on a wealth of sources, this work illuminates an essential facet of global Islamic culture and scholarly discourse.
January 2024
Classical Music Futures: Practices of Innovation
Editor: Karoly Molina
Editor: Peter Peters
Editor: Neil Thomas Smith
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0353
This edited volume brings together contributions from a wide range of international academics and practitioners. It traces innovations within classical music practice, showing how these offer divergent visions for its future. The interdisciplinary contributions to the volume highlight the way contrasting ideas of the future can effect change in the present.
Divine Style: Walt Whitman and the King James Bible
Author: F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0357
Dobbs-Allsopp, Professor of Old Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary, explicitly approaches Whitman from the perspective of a biblical scholar. Utilising his wealth of expertise in this field, he constructs a compelling, erudite and methodical argument for the King James Bible’s importance in the evolution of Whitman’s style – from his signature long lines to the prevalence of parallelism and tendency towards parataxis in his works.
December 2023
Synopses and Lists: Textual Practices in the Pre-Modern World
Editor: Teresa Bernheimer
Editor: Ronny Vollandt
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0375
Textual practices in pre-modern societies cover a great range of representations, from the literary to the pictorial. Among the most intriguing are synopses and lists. While lists provide a complete enumeration of ideas, people, events, or terms, synopses juxtapose one against the other. To understand how they were planned, produced, and consumed, is to gain insight into the practices of what one can call management of knowledge in a time before our own.
‘Wit’s Wild Dancing Light’: Reading the Poems of Alexander Pope
Author: William Hutchings
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0372
The book is a chronological reading of Alexander Pope’s poems, from the Pastorals (1709) to the four-book Dunciad (1743). Each of the 26 chapters forming the volume selects examples for detailed scrutiny, demonstrating how close reading can generate understanding of a whole poem and how critical appraisal can build into a creative survey of an entire poetic career.
Modelling Between Digital and Humanities: Thinking in Practice
Author: Arianna Ciula
Author: Øyvind Eide
Author: Cristina Marras
Author: Patrick Sahle
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0369
This volume presents an exploration of Digital Humanities (DH), a field focused on the reciprocal transformation of digital technologies and humanities scholarship. Central to DH research is the practice of modelling, which involves translating intricate knowledge systems into computational models. This book addresses a fundamental query: How can an effective language be developed to conceptualize and guide modelling in DH?
Financing Investment in Times of High Public Debt: 2023 European Public Investment Outlook
Editor: Floriana Cerniglia
Editor: Francesco Saraceno
Editor: Andrew Watt
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0386
The fourth book in the ‘European Public Investment Outlook’ series focuses on the urgent issue of how to finance needed investment in critical tangible and intangible infrastructure given high levels of public debt, a thorny problem facing many governments across Europe. Drawing on expertise from academics, researchers at public policy institutes and international governance bodies, the contributors analyse the current situation and prospects and propose feasible solutions.
November 2023
The Standard Language Ideology of the Hebrew and Arabic Grammarians of the ʿAbbasid Period
Author: Benjamin Paul Kantor
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0382
In the present book we survey six specific characteristics of a ‘standard language ideology’ that appear in both the writings of the Hebrew grammarians who wrote in Judeo-Arabic and the Arabic grammarians during the ʿAbbasid period. Such striking lines of linguistic-ideological similarity suggest that it may not have been only grammatical concepts or literary genres that the medieval Hebrew grammarians inherited from the Arabic grammatical tradition, but a way of thinking about language as well.
Health Care in the Information Society: Volume 1 - From Adventure of Ideas to Anarchy of Transition
Author: David Ingram
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0335
In this fascinating book David Ingram traces the history of information technology and health informatics from its pioneers in the middle of the twentieth century to its latest developments.
Health Care in the Information Society: Volume 2 - From Anarchy of Transition to Programme for Reform
Author: David Ingram
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0384
In this fascinating book David Ingram traces the history of information technology and health informatics from its pioneers in the middle of the twentieth century to its latest developments.
Prismatic Jane Eyre: Close-Reading a World Novel Across Languages
Author: Kayvan Tahmasebian
Author: Ida Klitgård
Author: Matthew Reynolds
Author: Andrés Claro
Author: Annmarie Drury
Author: Mary Frank
Author: Paola Gaudio
Author: Rebecca Ruth Gould
Author: Yunte Huang
Author: Eugenia Kelbert
Author: Ana Teresa Marques dos Santos
Author: Cláudia Pazos-Alonso
Author: Abhishek Jain
Author: Ulrich Timme Kragh
Author: Léa Rychen
Author: Madli Kütt
Author: Yousif M. Qasmiyeh
Author: Eleni Philippou
Author: Céline Sabiron
Author: Giovanni Pietro Vitali
Author: Jernej Habjan
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0319
Jane Eyre, written by Charlotte Brontë and first published in 1847, has been translated more than five hundred times into over sixty languages. Prismatic Jane Eyre argues that we should see these many re-writings, not as simple replications of the novel, but as a release of its multiple interpretative possibilities: in other words, as a prism.
Misunderstandings: False Beliefs in Communication
Author: Georg Weizsäcker
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0367
What do we expect when we say something to someone, and what do they expect when they hear it? When is a conversation successful? The book considers a wide set of two-person conversations, and a bit of game theory, to show how conversational statements and their interpretations are governed by beliefs. Thinking about beliefs is suitable for communication analysis because beliefs are well-defined and measurable, allowing to differentiate between successful understandings and their less successful counterparts: misunderstandings.
October 2023
Higher Education for Good: Teaching and Learning Futures
Editor: Laura Czerniewicz
Editor: Catherine Cronin
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0363
After decades of turbulence and acute crises in recent years, how can we build a better future for Higher Education?
Thoughtfully edited by Laura Czerniewicz and Catherine Cronin, this rich and diverse collection by academics and professionals from across 17 countries and many disciplines offers a variety of answers to this question. It addresses the need to set new values for universities, trapped today in narratives dominated by financial incentives and performance indicators, and examines those “wicked” problems which need multiple solutions, resolutions, experiments, and imaginaries.
The Predatory Paradox: Ethics, Politics, and Practices in Contemporary Scholarly Publishing
Author: Amy Koerber
Author: Jesse C. Starkey
Author: Karin Ardon-Dryer
Author: R. Glenn Cummins
Author: Lyombe Eko
Author: Kerk F. Kee
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0364
In today’s ‘publish or perish’ academic setting, the institutional prizing of quantity over quality has given rise to and perpetuated the dilemma of predatory publishing. Upon a close examination, however, the definition of ‘predatory’ itself becomes slippery, evading neat boxes or lists which might seek to easily define and guard against it. This volume serves to foreground a nuanced representation of this multifaceted issue. In such a rapidly evolving landscape, this book becomes a field guide to its historical, political, and economic aspects, presenting thoughtful interviews, legal analysis and original research. Case studies from both European-American and non-European-American stakeholders emphasize the worldwide nature of the challenge faced by researchers of all levels.