New Blog Post

When They Came For Me

The Hidden Diary of An Apartheid Prisoner

When Apollo 11 landed on the moon in 1969, John Schlapobersky was a political prisoner in Pretoria and knew nothing about it – he was in solitary confinement. When he learnt about the landing, he looked for the moon without success from the window of his cell.

Fifty years later he visited the NASA Space Center in Houston and, on seeing the speaker he could not hear when it spoke to the world, he began writing this memoir

Podcast

Salon B

Episode 6

Humor

In the spirit of the April Fool’s Day release date, this episode is themed around ‘humor,’ featuring conversations with Heidi Hakkarainen, author of Comical Modernity: Popular Humour and the Transformation of Urban Space in Late Nineteenth Century Vienna and Veronika Pehe, author of Velvet Retro: Postsocialist Nostalgia and the Politics of Heroism in Czech Popular Culture. We’ll close today’s salon with a reading of a poem by Colin James, “The Betrothal of a Semi Compliant Therefore Semi Coherent, Narcissus,” previously published in Critical Survey.

FocaalBlog

Hege Høyer Leivestad, Johanna Markkula and Elisabeth Schober

Beyond Suez. Escalating Ship Sizes and their Consequences

At the height of this pandemic’s third wave, with many of us sitting in what by now feels like an eternal lockdown, images of a gigantic ship stuck inside the Suez Canal seem to have provided more than just a welcome distraction. The vessel, unable to move one way or another, proved to be immensely relatable, if endless memes flooding the ether over the last few days are any indication at all.

Berghahn Journals

Open Anthropology

A subscribe-to-open (S2O) Open Access model piloted by Berghahn in partnership with Libraria and Knowledge Unlatched for 2020! The aim is to convert 13 Berghahn Anthropology journals to full Open Access on an on-going and sustainable basis.

Digital Archaeology

Unlocking the Love-Lock: The History and Heritage of a Contemporary Custom

Enhanced Love-locks Catalog

Ceri Houlbrook cataloged over 700 love-locks added to Oxford Road Bridge in Manchester from 2014-2019. Using her archaeological data and Timeline.JS, users are here able to view the data collection across 62 months of deposition. At the default zoom, individual dates will indicate all items cataloged on that day. The catalog contains both what are traditionally known as padlocks and “divergent deposits”, or objects that take the form of an array of items from nightclub entrance wristbands to disposable lighters, the variety of which includes obscurity but also pieces that are clearly more personal, even sentimentally valuable.

Featured Series

War and Genocide

General Editors:

Omer Bartov, Brown University
A. Dirk Moses, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

There has been a growing interest in the study of war and genocide, not from a traditional military history perspective, but within the framework of social and cultural history. This series offers a forum for scholarly works that reflect these new approaches.

"The Berghahn series Studies on War and Genocide has immeasurably enriched the English-language scholarship available to scholars and students of genocide and, in particular, the Holocaust." · Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions

Photo Gallery

Silence, Screen, and Spectacle

Rethinking Social Memory in the Age of Information

Edited by Lindsey A. Freeman, Benjamin Nienass, and Rachel Daniell

In an age of information and new media the relationships between remembering and forgetting have changed. This volume addresses the tension between loud and often spectacular histories and those forgotten pasts we strain to hear. Employing social and cultural analysis, the essays within examine mnemonic technologies both new and old, and cover subjects as diverse as U.S. internment camps for Japanese Americans in WWII, the Canadian Indian Residential School system, Israeli memorial videos, and the desaparecidos in Argentina.

Companion Site

Recollectus: A Network of Collections and Recollections

CALL FOR PAPERS: (DE)COMMEMORATION

The toppling of the statue of slave-trader Edward Colston in Bristol, England, by activists on June 7 has spotlighted the ubiquitous presence of memorials that glorify colonial and racist legacies. In the wake of protests in 2020 against police violence and racism, calls to dismantle memorials have reverberated around the globe.