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: 2024-12-21 01:00:31
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.
Transparent Minds in Science Fiction: An Introduction to Alien, AI and Post-Human Consciousness
Author: Paul Matthews
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0348
Transparent Minds explores the intersection between neuroscience and science fiction stories. Paul Matthews expertly analyses the narratives of humans and nonhumans from Mary Shelley to Kazuo Ishiguro across 200 years of the genre. In doing so he gives lucid insight into the meaning of existence and self-awareness. Rigorously researched and highly accessible, Matthews argues that psycho-emotional science fiction writers both imitate and inform alien and post-human consciousnesses through exploratory narratives and metaphor.
Shépa: The Tibetan Oral Tradition in Choné
Author: Members of the Choné Tibetan Community
Author: Bendi Tso
Author: Marnyi Gyatso
Author: Mark Turin
Author: Naljor Tsering
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0312
This book contains a unique collection of Tibetan oral narrations and songs known as Shépa, as these have been performed, recorded and shared between generations of Choné Tibetans from Amdo living in the eastern Tibetan Plateau. Presented in trilingual format — in Tibetan, Chinese and English — the book reflects a sustained collaboration with and between members of the local community, including narrators, monks, and scholars, calling attention to the diversity inherent in all oral traditions, and the mutability of Shépa in particular.
September 2023
After the Miners’ Strike: A39 and Cornish Political Theatre versus Thatcher’s Britain: Volume 1
Author: Paul Farmer
Author: Mark Kilburn
Preface by: Rebecca Hillman
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0329
In this rich memoir, the first of two volumes, Paul Farmer traces the story of A39, the Cornish political theatre group he co-founded and ran from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s. Farmer offers a unique insight into A39’s creation, operation, and artistic practice during a period of convulsive political and social change.
Linguistic Theory and the Biblical Text
Editor: Elizabeth Robar
Editor: William A. Ross
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0358
This volume is the result of the 2021 session of the Linguistics and the Biblical Text research group of the Institute for Biblical Research, which addresses the history, relevance, and prospects of broad theoretical linguistic frameworks in the field of biblical studies. Cognitive Linguistics, Functional Grammar, generative linguistics, historical linguistics, complexity theory, and computational analysis are each allotted a chapter, outlining the key theoretical commitments of each approach, their major concepts and/or methods, and their important contributions to contemporary study of the biblical text.
Toevallige ontmoetingen: Bio-ethiek voor een gehavende planeet
Author: Kristien Hens
Illustrator: Christina Stadlbauer
Illustrator: Bart H.M. Vandeput
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0370
In dit rigoureuze en noodzakelijke boek brengt Kristien Hens bio-ethiek en filosofie van de biologie bij elkaar, met het argument dat het ethisch noodzakelijk is om in het wetenschappelijk onderzoek een plaatsje vrij te houden voor de filosofen. Hun rol is behalve ethisch ook conceptueel: zij kunnen de kwaliteit en de coherentie van het wetenschappelijk onderzoek verbeteren door erop toe te zien dat specifieke concepten op een consistente en doordachte manier worden gebruik binnen interdisciplinaire projecten. Hens argumenteert dat toeval en onzekerheid een centrale rol spelen in de bio-ethiek, maar dat die in een spanningsrelatie kunnen raken met de pogingen om bepaalde theorieën ingang te doen vinden als wetenschappelijke kennis: bij het beschrijven van organismen en praktijken creëren we op een bepaalde manier de wereld. Hens stelt dat dit noodzakelijk een ethische activiteit betreft.
Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies: An Introduction
Editor: Ibo van de Poel
Editor: Jeroen Hopster
Editor: Behnam Taebi
Editor: Lily Eva Frank
Editor: Julia Hermann
Editor: Dominic Lenzi
Editor: Sven Nyholm
Editor: Elena Ziliotti
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0366
Technologies shape who we are, how we organize our societies and how we relate to nature. For example, social media challenges democracy; artificial intelligence raises the question of what is unique to humans; and the possibility to create artificial wombs may affect notions of motherhood and birth. Some have suggested that we address global warming by engineering the climate, but how does this impact our responsibility to future generations and our relation to nature? This book shows how technologies can be socially and conceptually disruptive and investigates how to come to terms with this disruptive potential.
Cheap Print and Street Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century
Editor: David Atkinson
Editor: Steve Roud
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0347
This deeply researched collection offers a comprehensive introduction to the eighteenth-century trade in street literature – ballads, chapbooks, and popular prints – in England and Scotland. Offering detailed studies of a selection of the printers, types of publication, and places of publication that constituted the cheap and popular print trade during the period, these essays delve into ballads, slip songs, story books, pictures, and more to push back against neat divisions between low and high culture, or popular and high literature.
August 2023
William Moorcroft, Potter: Individuality by Design
Author: Jonathan Mallinson
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0349
William Moorcroft (1872-1945) was one of the most celebrated potters of the early twentieth century. His career extended from the Arts and Crafts movement of the late Victorian age to the Austerity aesthetics of the Second World War. Rejecting mass production and patronised by Royalty, Moorcroft’s work was a synthesis of studio and factory, art and industry. He considered it his vocation to create an everyday art, both functional and decorative, affordable by more than a privileged few: ‘If only the people in the world would concentrate upon making all things beautiful, and if all people concentrated on developing the arts of Peace, what a world it might be,’ he wrote in a letter to his daughter in 1930.
The Linguistic Classification of the Reading Traditions of Biblical Hebrew: A Phyla-and-Waves Model
Author: Benjamin Paul Kantor
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0210
In recent decades, the field of Biblical Hebrew philology and linguistics has been witness to a growing interest in the diverse traditions of Biblical Hebrew. Indeed, while there is a tendency for many students and scholars to conceive of Biblical Hebrew as equivalent with the Tiberian pointing of the Leningrad Codex as it appears in Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS), there are many other important reading traditions attested throughout history.
The Era of Global Risk: An Introduction to Existential Risk Studies
Editor: SJ Beard
Editor: Martin Rees
Editor: Catherine Richards
Editor: Clarissa Rios Rojas
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0336
This innovative and comprehensive collection of essays explores the biggest threats facing humanity in the 21st century; threats that cannot be contained or controlled and that have the potential to bring about human extinction and civilization collapse. Bringing together experts from many disciplines, it provides an accessible survey of what we know about these threats, how we can understand them better, and most importantly what can be done to manage them effectively.
A Relational Realist Vision for Education Policy and Practice
Author: Basem Adi
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0327
This volume argues that relational realism can help us to make better educational policy that is more effective in practice. Basem Adi draws on critical realism to thoroughly re-examine fundamental assumptions about how government policymaking works, developing an ontological basis from which to examine existing government approaches and imagine an alternative approach based on a relational realist-informed critical pedagogy.
Research, Writing, and Creative Process in Open and Distance Education: Tales from the Field
Editor: Dianne Conrad
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0356
This collection of reflective essays is a treasure trove of advice, reflection and hard-won experience from experts in the field of open and distance education. Each chapter offers tried-and-tested advice for nascent academic writers, delivered with personal, rich, and wonderful stories of the authors’ careers, their process, their research and their writing, and the struggles and triumphs they have encountered in the course of their careers.
Seabirds in the North-East Atlantic: Climate Change Vulnerability and Potential Conservation Actions
Author: Henry Häkkinen
Author: Silviu O. Petrovan
Author: William J. Sutherland
Author: Nathalie Pettorelli
Author: Nigel G. Taylor
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0343
This book was produced by the Zoological Society of London and the University of Cambridge with two aims: to assess seabirds’ vulnerability to climate change in the North-East Atlantic, and to identify potential conservation actions that could reduce this vulnerability.
Digital Transformation: Understanding Business Goals, Risks, Processes, and Decisions
Author: Love Ekenberg
Author: Cecilia Gullberg
Author: Gunnar Wettergren
Author: Mathias Cöster
Author: Gard Titlestad
Author: Alf Westelius
Author: Mats Danielson
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0350
Whilst digitisation is far from a new concept, many assume that simply introducing automation and information systems in various forms will be enough to make their organisation’s operations more efficient. This misconception can often lead to disarray and costly mistakes. Digital Transformation: Understanding Business Goals, Risks, Processes, and Decisions shows how to avoid such issues via careful consideration of what an enterprise really needs.
July 2023
Destins de femmes: French Women Writers, 1750-1850
Author: John Claiborne Isbell
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0346
Destins de femmes is the first comprehensive overview of French women writers during the turbulent period of 1750-1850. John Isbell provides an essential collection that illuminates the impact women writers had on French literature and politics during a time marked by three revolutions, the influx of Romantic art, and rapid technological change.
Breaking Conventions: Five Couples in Search of Marriage-Career Balance at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century
Author: Patricia Auspos
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0318
This rich history illuminates the lives and partnerships of five married couples – two British, three American – whose unions defied the conventions of their time and anticipated social changes that were to come in the ensuing century. In all five marriages, both husband and wife enjoyed thriving professional lives: a shocking circumstance at a time when wealthy white married women were not supposed to have careers, and career women were not supposed to marry.
Folktales of Mayotte, an African Island
Author: Lee Haring
Foreword by: Mark Turin
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0315
The book uncovers the versatility and literary skills of oral narrators in a small African island. Relying on the researches of three French ethnographers who interviewed storytellers in the 1970s-80s, Lee Haring shows a once-colonised people using verbal art to preserve ancient values in the postcolonial world, when the island of Mayotte was transforming itself from a neglected colony to an overseas department of France.
Having Too Much: Philosophical Essays on Limitarianism
Editor: Ingrid Robeyns
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0338
Having Too Much is the first academic volume devoted to limitarianism: the idea that the use of economic or ecosystem resources should not exceed certain limits. This concept has deep roots in economic and political thought. One can find similar statements of such limits in thinkers such as Plato, Aquinas, and Spinoza. But Having Too Much is the first time in contemporary political philosophy that limitarianism is explored at length and in detail.
From Handwriting to Footprinting: Text and Heritage in the Age of Climate Crisis
Author: Anne Baillot
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0355
Integrating historical, archival and environmental perspectives, From Handwriting to Footprinting illuminates the impact that digitisation has had on the dissemination and preservation of textual heritage and reflects on what its future may hold. It is invaluable reading for anyone interested in textual history from a linguistic or philological perspective, as well as those working on publishing, archival and infrastructure projects that require the storing and long-term preservation of texts, or who want to know how to develop a more mindful attachment to digitised material.
June 2023
Models in Microeconomic Theory: Expanded Second Edition (She)
Author: Martin J. Osborne
Author: Ariel Rubinstein
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0361
Models in Microeconomic Theory covers basic models in current microeconomic theory. Part I (Chapters 1-7) presents models of an economic agent, discussing abstract models of preferences, choice, and decision making under uncertainty, before turning to models of the consumer, the producer, and monopoly. Part II (Chapters 8-14) introduces the concept of equilibrium, beginning, unconventionally, with the models of the jungle and an economy with indivisible goods, and continuing with models of an exchange economy, equilibrium with rational expectations, and an economy with asymmetric information. Part III (Chapters 15-16) provides an introduction to game theory, covering strategic and extensive games and the concepts of Nash equilibrium and subgame perfect equilibrium. Part IV (Chapters 17-20) gives a taste of the topics of mechanism design, matching, the axiomatic analysis of economic systems, and social choice.
Models in Microeconomic Theory: Expanded Second Edition (He)
Author: Martin J. Osborne
Author: Ariel Rubinstein
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0362
Models in Microeconomic Theory covers basic models in current microeconomic theory. Part I (Chapters 1-7) presents models of an economic agent, discussing abstract models of preferences, choice, and decision making under uncertainty, before turning to models of the consumer, the producer, and monopoly. Part II (Chapters 8-14) introduces the concept of equilibrium, beginning, unconventionally, with the models of the jungle and an economy with indivisible goods, and continuing with models of an exchange economy, equilibrium with rational expectations, and an economy with asymmetric information. Part III (Chapters 15-16) provides an introduction to game theory, covering strategic and extensive games and the concepts of Nash equilibrium and subgame perfect equilibrium. Part IV (Chapters 17-20) gives a taste of the topics of mechanism design, matching, the axiomatic analysis of economic systems, and social choice.
For Palestine: Essays from the Tom Hurndall Memorial Lecture Group
Editor: Ian Parker
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0345
This book is a collection of lectures written by reputable scholars who offer diverse perspectives on the historical, political and cultural struggles in Palestine. Encompassed in the pages are sixteen chapters produced for the Tom Hurndall Memorial Lecture Group. Unlike predecessors of this topic, this book offers a thought-provoking and comprehensive analysis of Palestine, including architectural, cultural, legal, sociological, and psychological questions, providing a larger scope of study that has not yet been done before. Ultimately, this book explores oppression in Palestine and beyond in the Middle East.
Decolonial Ecologies: The Reinvention of Natural History in Latin American Art
Author: Joanna Page
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0339
In Decolonial Ecologies: The Reinvention of Natural History in Latin American Art, Joanna Page illuminates the ways in which contemporary artists in Latin America are reinventing historical methods of collecting, organizing, and displaying nature in order to develop new aesthetic and political perspectives on the past and the present.
Play in a Covid Frame: Everyday Pandemic Creativity in a Time of Isolation
Editor: Julia Bishop
Editor: Anna Beresin
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0326
During the international coronavirus lockdowns of 2020–2021, millions of children, youth, and adults found their usual play areas out of bounds and their friends out of reach. How did the pandemic restrict everyday play and how did the pandemic offer new spaces and new content? This unique collection of essays documents the ways in which communities around the world harnessed play within the limiting frame of Covid-19.
May 2023
Migrant Academics’ Narratives of Precarity and Resilience in Europe
Editor: Olga Burlyuk
Editor: Ladan Rahbari
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0331
This volume consists of narratives of migrant academics from the Global South within academia in the Global North. The autobiographic and autoethnographic contributions to this collection aim to decolonise the discourse around academic mobility by highlighting experiences of precarity, resilience, care and solidarity in the academic margins.
An Introduction to Andalusi Hebrew Metrics
Author: José Martínez Delgado
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0351
Delgado presents his view of Andalusi Hebrew metrics, as encountered in medieval manuals of Arabic and Hebrew metrics and scattered notes in the works of Andalusi Hebrew philologists. Whilst twentieth-century scholars spoke about the adaptation of Arabic metrics to Hebrew, he instead approaches these compositions by Andalusi Jews (10th-13th c.) as Arabic metrics written in Hebrew, thus emphasising how Hebrew poetry of the Andalusi Jews can help us to understand the general evolution of Arabic strophic poetry, and its experimental evolution, which is quite unlike classical and strophic Arabic poetry.
The Last Man Who Knew Everything: Thomas Young
Author: Andrew Robinson
Foreword by: Martin Rees
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0344
No one has given the polymath Thomas Young (1773-1829) the all-round examination he so richly deserves—until now. Celebrated biographer Andrew Robinson portrays a man who solved mystery after mystery in the face of ridicule and rejection, and never sought fame.
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.