We are delighted to inform you that November 19-22, 2015 we will be attending the 47th Annual ASEEES Convention held in Philadelphia, PA. Please stop by our stand to browse our latest selection of books at discounted prices & pick up some free journal samples.
If you are unable to attend, we would like to provide you with a special discount offer. For the next 30 days, receive a 25% discount on all Central and Eastern European titles found on our website. At checkout, simply enter the discount code ASEEES15.
For more information on New and Forthcoming titles please check out brand new interactive online Slavic Studies 2016 Catalog.
We hope to see you in Philadelphia!
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Here is a preview of just some of our newest releases that will be on display:
BORO, L’ÎLE D’AMOUR
The Films of Walerian Borowczyk
Edited by Kamila Kuc, Kuba Mikurda, and Michał Oleszczyk
There has been a recent revival of interest in the work of Polish film director Walerian Borowczyk, a label-defying auteur and “escape artist” if there ever was one. This collection serves as an introduction and a guide to Borowczyk’s complex and ambiguous body of work, including panoramic views of the director’s output, focused studies of particular movies, and more personal, impressionistic pieces. Taken together, these contributions comprise a wide-ranging survey that is markedly experimental in character, allowing scholars to gain insight into previously unnoticed aspects of Borowczyk’s oeuvre.
Read Introduction: A Private Universe
MEMORY AND CHANGE IN EUROPE
Eastern Perspectives
Edited by Małgorzata Pakier and Joanna Wawrzyniak
Foreword by Jeffrey Olick
Volume 16, Contemporary European History
In studies of a common European past, there is a significant lack of scholarship on the former Eastern Bloc countries. While understanding the importance of shifting the focus of European memory eastward, contributors to this volume avoid the trap of Eastern European exceptionalism, an assumption that this region’s experiences are too unique to render them comparable to the rest of Europe. They offer a reflection on memory from an Eastern European historical perspective, one that can be measured against, or applied to, historical experience in other parts of Europe. In this way, the authors situate studies on memory in Eastern Europe within the broader debate on European memory.
NEW IMAGINARIES
Youthful Reinvention of Ukraine’s Cultural Paradigm
Edited and Translated by Marian J. Rubchak
Foreword Martha Kichorowska Kebalo
Having been spared the constraints imposed on intellectual discourse by the totalitarian regime of the past, young Ukrainian scholars now engage with many Western ideological theories and practices in an atmosphere of intellectual freedom and uncensored scholarship. Displacing the Soviet legacy of prescribed thought and practices, this volume’s female contributors have infused their work with Western elements, although vestiges of Soviet-style ideas, research methodology, and writing linger. The result is the articulation of a “New Imaginaries” — neither Soviet nor Western — that offers a unique approach to the study of gender by presenting a portrait of Ukrainian society as seen through the eyes of a new generation of feminist scholars.
Read Introduction
YEARNINGS IN THE MEANTIME
‘Normal Lives’ and the State in a Sarajevo Apartment Complex
Stef Jansen
Volume 15, Dislocations
Shortly after the book’s protagonists moved into their apartment complex in Sarajevo, they, like many others, were overcome by the 1992-1995 war and the disintegration of socialist Yugoslavia More than a decade later, in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, they felt they were collectively stuck in a time warp where nothing seemed to be as it should be. Starting from everyday concerns, this book paints a compassionate yet critical portrait of people’s sense that they were in limbo, trapped in a seemingly endless “Meantime.” Ethnographically investigating yearnings for “normal lives” in the European semi-periphery, it proposes fresh analytical tools to explore how the time and place in which we are caught shape our hopes and fears.
Read Introduction: [or, Towards an Anthropology of Shared Concerns]
THE ENEMY ON DISPLAY
The Second World War in Eastern European Museums
Zuzanna Bogumił, Joanna Wawrzyniak, Tim Buchen, Christian Ganzer and Maria Senina
Volume 7, Museums and Collections
Eastern European museums represent traumatic events of World War II, such as the Siege of Leningrad, the Warsaw Uprisings, and the Bombardment of Dresden, in ways that depict the enemy in particular ways. This image results from the interweaving of historical representations, cultural stereotypes and beliefs, political discourses, and the dynamics of exhibition narratives. This book presents a useful methodology for examining museum images and provides a critical analysis of the role historical museums play in the contemporary world. As the catastrophes of World War II still exert an enormous influence on the national identities of Russians, Poles, and Germans, museum exhibits can thus play an important role in this process.
Read Introduction: The Enemy on Display
THE SPIRIT OF THE LAWS
The Plunder of Wealth in the Armenian Genocide
Taner Akçam and Umit Kurt
Translated by Aram Arkun
Volume 21, War and Genocide
Pertinent to contemporary demands for reparations from Turkey is the relationship between law and property in connection with the Armenian Genocide. This book examines the confiscation of Armenian properties during the genocide and subsequent attempts to retain seized Armenian wealth. Through the close analysis of laws and treaties, it reveals that decrees issued during the genocide constitute central pillars of the Turkish system of property rights, retaining their legal validity, and although Turkey has acceded through international agreements to return Armenian properties, it continues to refuse to do so. The book demonstrates that genocides do not depend on the abolition of the legal system and elimination of rights, but that, on the contrary, the perpetrators of genocide manipulate the legal system to facilitate their plans.
Read Introduction
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New in Paperback
New & Revised
RUSSIAN POSTMODERNISM
New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture
Mikhail N. Epstein, Alexander A. Genis, and Slobodanka M. Vladiv-Glover
“Subtle readings and carefully argued interpretations. The articles and manifestoes, supplemented by a valuable ‘Who’s Who,’ answer a great many of the questions associated with postmodernism in general, and the Russian variety in particular.” · Slavic Review
Recent decades have been decisive for Russia not only politically but culturally as well. The end of the Cold War has enabled Russia to take part in the global rise and crystallization of postmodernism. This volume investigates the manifestations of this crucial trend in Russian fiction, poetry, art, and spirituality, demonstrating how Russian postmodernism is its own unique entity. It offers a point of departure and valuable guide to an area of contemporary literary-cultural studies insufficiently represented in English-language scholarship. This second edition includes additional essays on the topic and a new introduction examining the most recent developments.
Honorable Mention 2013 PROSE Awards, Archaeology and Anthropology section
PLACES OF PAIN
Forced Displacement, Popular Memory and Trans-local Identities in Bosnian War-torn Communities
Hariz Halilovich
Volume 10, Space and Place
“This is, overall, a carefully researched book following the tradition of Geertzian thick description in an effort to contribute theoretically through the concept of translocalism, analyze reflexively via the author’s own history of displacement and emplacement, and comment in a heartfelt way on how refugees recreate social worlds even after massive destruction. Halilovich’s account deserves room in any upper-level, if not introductory, undergraduate or graduate course covering some aspect of international migration, especially forced displacement — a phenomenon impacting some 50 million people around the world today.” · International Migration Review
THE NAZI GENOCIDE OF THE ROMA
Reassessment and Commemoration
Edited by Anton Weiss-Wendt
Volume 17, War and Genocide
“One does not usually praise the introduction to a collection of essays, whose principal function is to provide thematic continuity to a diverse body of works. But in this particular case Weiss-Wendt’s lengthy introduction goes beyond the norm, providing not only continuity but also giving the reader a very scholarly, in-depth overview of the evolution of Roma Holocaust studies…It is this introduction of fresh perspectives and new evidence that makes this book so important. Roma Holocaust studies has long suffered from a dearth of concrete evidence that more fully details the fate of this understudied group. Weiss-Wendt helps to fill this void by opening new pathways of research and discussion for this important dimension of the Holocaust.” · The Russian Review
BRIDGING DIVIDES
Ethno-Political Leadership among the Russian Sámi
Indra Overland and Mikkel Berg-Nordlie
“[These] excellent chapters detail the emergence of cross-border ties between Russia’s Sámi communities and Nordic Sámi, and assess their contributions to cultural renewal . . . The socioeconomic and cultural portrait [drawn] will likely seem all too familiar to scholars of other Arctic and subarctic indigenous populations in northern Eurasia, but some of the information is unique to Russia’s Sámi, making this an indispensable contribution to the documentation of northern peoples. Essential.” · Choice
SOCIALIST ESCAPES
Breaking Away from Ideology and Everyday Routine in Eastern Europe, 1945-1989
Edited by Cathleen M. Giustino, Catherine J. Plum, and Alexander Vari
“… a rare book. It is rare because amidst a plethora of social sciences and historical literature it does not join a chorus of socialism’s dismissal, and amidst a range of anthropological literature it does not simply investigate socialism’s effects on people’s everyday economic, cultural, and social lives… Rather, it seeks to highlight those effects that are usually neglected and negated: the possibility of pleasure and fun of living in the socialist world … [and] provides a much-needed antidote to stereotyped representations of socialism as monotonous, dreary, and dull… Scholars and students of anthropology, sociology, political science, and Eastern European and Slavic studies are sure to enjoy this book.” · Anthropology of East Europe Review
Read INTRODUCTION
SAMIZDAT, TAMIZDAT, AND BEYOND
Transnational Media During and After Socialism
Edited by Friederike Kind-Kovács and Jessie Labov
Volume 13, Contemporary European History
“[The editors] present a wide-ranging array of case studies of unofficial and oppositional media across the socialist bloc, which enrich the growing literature on samizdat while providing one of the first detailed accounts of tamizdat.Many chapters reconstruct the complex networks via which these media circulated to East European domestic audiences and, more important, to the transnational community that could offer theoretical and practical support for dissent outside the host countries. They evoke an almost infinite variety in the type and scale of such media circulation.” · Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History
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Austrian and Habsburg Studies Series
General Editor:Gary B. Cohen
Published in Association with the Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota
Austrian and Habsburg Studies presents volumes on major issues of current scholarly interest regarding the development of society, culture, and government in Austria and other territories of the old Habsburg Monarchy.
Volume 18, Forthcoming!
SACRIFICE AND REBIRTH
The Legacy of the Last Habsburg War
Edited by Mark Cornwall and John Paul Newman
When Austria-Hungary broke up at the end of the First World War, the sacrifice of one million men who had died fighting for the Habsburg monarchy now seemed to be in vain. This book is the first of its kind to analyze how the Great War was interpreted, commemorated, or forgotten across all the ex-Habsburg territories. Each of the book’s twelve chapters focuses on a separate region, studying how the transition to peacetime was managed either by the state, by war veterans, or by national minorities. This “splintered war memory,” where some posed as victors and some as losers, does much to explain the fractious character of interwar Eastern Europe.
Volume 17
UNDERSTANDING MULTICULTURALISM
The Habsburg Central European Experience
Edited by Johannes Feichtinger and Gary B. Cohen
Multiculturalism has long been linked to calls for tolerance of cultural diversity, but today many observers are subjecting the concept to close scrutiny. After the political upheavals of 1968, the commitment to multiculturalism was perceived as a liberal manifesto, but in the post-9/11 era, it is under attack for its relativizing, particularist, and essentializing implications. The essays in this collection offer a nuanced analysis of the multifaceted cultural experience of Central Europe under the late Habsburg monarchy and beyond. The authors examine how culturally coded social spaces can be described and understood historically without adopting categories formerly employed to justify the definition and separation of groups into nations, ethnicities, or homogeneous cultures. As we consider the issues of multiculturalism today, this volume offers new approaches to understanding multiculturalism in Central Europe freed of the effects of politically exploited concepts of social spaces.
Volume 16, New in Paperback!
THE VIENNESE CAFÉ AND FIN-DE-SIÈCLE CULTURE
Edited by Charlotte Ashby, Tag Gronberg and Simon Shaw-Miller
“Like a well-made Mélange, this volume is rich and satisfying.” · Slavonic and East European Review
The Viennese café was a key site of urban modernity around 1900. In the rapidly growing city it functioned simultaneously as home and workplace, affording opportunities for both leisure and intellectual exchange. This volume explores the nature and function of the coffeehouse in the social, cultural, and political world of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Just as the café served as a creative meeting place within the city, so this volume initiates conversations between different disciplines focusing on Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century. Contributions are drawn from the fields of social and cultural history, literary studies, Jewish studies and art, and architectural and design history. A fresh perspective is also provided by a selection of comparative articles exploring coffeehouse culture elsewhere in Eastern Europe.
Volume 15, New in Paperback!
TERRITORIAL REVISIONISM AND THE ALLIES OF GERMANY IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR
Goals, Expectations, Practices
Edited by Marina Cattaruzza, Stefan Dyroff & Dieter Langewiesche
“…richly deserve to be read by experts in the field as it provides an excellent survey of the latest work on Eastern, Central, and Southern European history in the modern period.” · H-Soz-u-Kult
A few years after the Nazis came to power in Germany, an alliance of states and nationalistic movements formed, revolving around the German axis. That alliance, the states involved, and the interplay between their territorial aims and those of Germany during the interwar period and World War II are at the core of this volume. This “territorial revisionism” came to include all manner of political and military measures that attempted to change existing borders. Taking into account not just interethnic relations but also the motivations of states and nationalizing ethnocratic ruling elites, this volume reconceptualizes the history of East Central Europe during World War II. In so doing, it presents a clearer understanding of some of the central topics in the history of the war itself and offers an alternative to standard German accounts of the period and East European national histories.
For a full list of titles please visit the series webpage.
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