We’re delighted to offer a selection of latest releases from our core subjects of Anthropology, History, and Urban Studies, along with our New in Paperback titles.
CREATING A NEW PUBLIC UNIVERSITY AND REVIVING DEMOCRACY
Action Research in Higher Education
Morten Levin and Davydd J. Greenwood
NEW SERIES: Volume 2, Higher Education in Critical Perspective: Practices and Policies
Public universities are in crisis, waning in their role as central institutions within democratic societies. Denunciations are abundant, but analyses of the causes and proposals to re-create public universities are not. Based on extensive experience with Action Research-based organizational change in universities and private sector organizations, Levin and Greenwood analyze the wreckage created by neoliberal academic administrators and policymakers. The authors argue that public universities must be democratically organized to perform their educational and societal functions. The book closes by laying out Action Research processes that can transform public universities back into institutions that promote academic freedom, integrity, and democracy.
Read Introduction: Democracy and Public Universities
DEATH, MATERIALITY AND MEDIATION
An Ethnography of Remembrance in Ireland
Barbara Graham
Volume 7, Material Mediations: People and Things in a World of Movement
In Death, Materiality and Mediation, Barbara Graham analyzes a diverse range of objects associated with remembrance in both the public and private arenas through ethnography of communities on both sides of the Irish border. In doing so, she explores the materially mediated interactions between the living and the dead, revealing the physical, cognitive, emotional, and spiritual roles of the dead in contemporary communities. Through this study, Graham expands the concept of materiality to include narrative, song, senses, emotions, ephemera and embodied experience. She also examines how modern practices are informed by older beliefs and folk religion.
Read Introduction: Contextualizing Death
MEMORY UNBOUND
Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies
Edited by Lucy Bond, Stef Craps, Pieter Vermeulen
Though still a relatively young field, memory studies has undergone significant transformations since it first coalesced as an area of inquiry. Increasingly, scholars understand memory to be a fluid, dynamic, unbound phenomenon—a process rather than a reified object. Embodying just such an elastic approach, this state-of-the-field collection systematically explores the transcultural, transgenerational, transmedial, and transdisciplinary dimensions of memory—four key dynamics that have sometimes been studied in isolation but never in such an integrated manner. Memory Unbound places leading researchers in conversation with emerging voices in the field to recast our understanding of memory’s distinctive variability.
Read Introduction: Memory on the Move
WAR STORIES
The War Memoir in History and Literature
Edited by Philip Dwyer
Although war memoirs constitute a rich, varied literary form, they are often dismissed by historians as unreliable. This collection of essays is the first to explore the modern war memoir, revealing the genre’s surprising capacity for breadth and sophistication while remaining sensitive to the challenges it poses for scholars. Covering conflicts from the Napoleonic era to today, the studies gathered here consider how memoirs have been used to transmit particular views of war even as they have emerged within specific social and political contexts.
Read Chapter 1. Making Sense of the Muddle: War Memoirs and the Culture of Remembering
TRANSNATIONAL STRUGGLES FOR RECOGNITION
New Perspectives on Civil Society since the 20th Century
Edited by Dieter Gosewinkel and Dieter Rucht
Volume 8, Studies on Civil Society
Now more than ever, “recognition” represents a critical concept for social movements, both as a strategic tool and an important policy aim. While the subject’s theoretical and empirical dimensions have usually been studied separately, this interdisciplinary collection focuses on both to examine the pursuit of recognition against a transnational backdrop. With a special emphasis on the efforts of women’s and Jewish organizations in 20th-century Europe, the studies collected here show how recognition can be meaningfully understood in historical-analytical terms, while demonstrating the extent to which transnationalization determines a movement’s reach and effectiveness.
NARRATIVES IN THE MAKING
Writing the East German Past in the Democratic Present
Anselma Gallinat
Despite the three decades that have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the historical narrative of East Germany is hardly fixed in public memory, as German society continues to grapple with the legacies of the Cold War. This fascinating ethnography looks at two very different types of local institutions in one eastern German state that take divergent approaches to those legacies: while publicly funded organizations reliably cast the GDR as a dictatorship, a main regional newspaper offers a more ambivalent perspective colored by the experiences and concerns of its readers. As author Anselma Gallinat shows, such memory work—initially undertaken after fundamental regime change—inevitably shapes citizenship and democracy in the present.
Read Introduction: Questions of Discourse, Narrative and Memory after Fundamental Regime-Change
AMBASSADORS OF REALPOLITIK
Sweden, the CSCE, and the Cold War
Aryo Makko
During the Cold War, Sweden actively cultivated a reputation as the “conscience of the world,” working to build bridges between East and West and embracing a nominal commitment to international solidarity. This groundbreaking study explores the tension between realism and idealism in Swedish diplomacy during a key episode in Cold War history: the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, culminating in the 1975 Helsinki Accords. Through careful analysis of new evidence, it offers a compelling counternarrative of this period, showing that Sweden strategically ignored human rights violations in Eastern Europe and the nonaligned states in its pursuit of national interests.
Read Introduction
OCCUPATION IN THE EAST
The Daily Lives of German Occupiers in Warsaw and Minsk, 1939-1944
Stephan Lehnstaedt
Translated by Martin Dean
Following their occupation by the Third Reich, Warsaw and Minsk became home to tens of thousands of Germans. In this exhaustive study, Stephan Lehnstaedt provides a nuanced, eye-opening portrait of the lives of these men and women, who constituted a surprisingly diverse population—including everyone from SS officers to civil servants, as well as ethnically German city residents—united in its self-conception as a “master race.” Even as they acclimated to the daily routines and tedium of life in the East, many Germans engaged in acts of shocking brutality against Poles, Belarusians, and Jews, while social conditions became increasingly conducive to systematic mass murder.
Read Introduction
MIGRATION, MEMORY, AND DIVERSITY
Germany from 1945 to the Present
Edited by Cornelia Wilhelm
Preface by Konrard Jarausch
Volume 21, Contemporary European History
Within Germany, policies and cultural attitudes toward migrants have been profoundly shaped by the difficult legacies of the Second World War and its aftermath. This wide-ranging volume explores the complex history of migration and diversity in Germany from 1945 to today, showing how conceptions of “otherness” developed while memories of the Nazi era were still fresh, and identifying the continuities and transformations they exhibited through the Cold War and reunification. It provides invaluable context for understanding contemporary Germany’s unique role within regional politics at a time when an unprecedented influx of immigrants and refugees present the European community with a significant challenge.
Read Introduction
SUSTAINING RUSSIA’S ARCTIC CITIES
Resource Politics, Migration, and Climate Change
Edited by Robert Orttung
NEW SERIES: Volume 2, Studies in the Circumpolar North
“Russia’s Arctic Cities are definitely understudied, as are Arctic urban studies in general. Therefore the focus of this volume is timely and well chosen.” · Florian Stammer, University of Lapland
Urban areas in Arctic Russia are experiencing unprecedented social and ecological change. This collection outlines the key challenges that city managers will face in navigating this shifting political, economic, social, and environmental terrain. In particular, the volume examines how energy production drives a boom-bust cycle in the Arctic economy, explores how migrants from Muslim cultures are reshaping the social fabric of northern cities, and provides a detailed analysis of climate change and its impact on urban and industrial infrastructure.
Read Chapter 1. Russia’s Arctic Cities: Recent Evolution and Drivers of Change
THE MAKING OF THE GREEK GENOCIDE
Contested Memories of the Ottoman Greek Catastrophe
Erik Sjöberg
Volume 23, War and Genocide
During and after World War I, over one million Ottoman Greeks were expelled from Turkey, a watershed moment in Greek history that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. And while few dispute the expulsion’s tragic scope, it remains the subject of fierce controversy, as activists have fought for international recognition of an atrocity they consider comparable to the Armenian genocide. This book provides a much-needed analysis of the Greek genocide as cultural trauma. Neither taking the genocide narrative for granted nor dismissing it outright, Erik Sjöberg instead recounts how it emerged as a meaningful but contested collective memory with both nationalist and cosmopolitan dimensions.
Read Introduction: Cosmopolitan memory and the Greek genocide narrative
NEW IN PAPERBACK
MATTERS OF TESTIMONY
Interpreting the Scrolls of Auschwitz
Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams
“In Matters of Testimony, Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams use the tools of literary criticism to analyse these formidable texts and offer new reflections on the scrolls. What sets the book apart is the way in which the authors consider how to read the Auschwitz scrolls, assessing their value as testimony… In that sense—and this is not the least significant element of this important book—they endeavour to reintegrate the Auschwitz scrolls into the general scholarship of Holocaust writing. This is incredibly interesting in the sense that the authors of the scrolls themselves asked the seminal questions that now structure this subfield of Holocaust studies… Matters of Testimony is an important work of scholarship.” · Jewish Quarterly
Check out Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams’s piece on Slate’s The Vault and also Searching for Feelings: The Scrolls of Auschwitz and Son of Saul on the Berghahn Blog.
Read Introduction: Matters of Testimony
JEWISH MEDICAL RESISTANCE IN THE HOLOCAUST
Edited by Michael A. Grodin
Foreword by Joseph Polak
Afterword by Yulian Rafes
“[Grodin] compiled a fascinating series of articles documenting a little-known aspect of the Holocaust: medical resistance by Jewish physicians and health care workers… The articles cover a wide range of topics related to health care… [and] are fascinating to read. They inspire both compassion for those affected and awe of the courage of the health care professionals who risked their own lives to assist and save fellow Jews. Their sanctification of life, the core Jewish value, is duly honoured here. Libraries supporting programs in medical history, Holocaust studies, and bioethics will definitely want this book for their collections.” · Association of Jewish Libraries Reviews
U.S. FOREIGN POLICY AND THE OTHER
Edited by Michael Patrick Cullinane and David Ryan
“…the book is a valuable contribution to the field of U.S. foreign policy literature. Its greatest contribution will be in its elucidation of the symbiotic relationship between U.S. identity and the identification of U.S. adversaries, with the recognition that a nuanced understanding of its adversaries may facilitate the drafting of more successful foreign policies… The book should find a wide audience within the foreign policy analysis field and become a valuable addition to many libraries.” · International Social Science Review
“The ambitious scope of this book could make it a profitable addition to an advanced undergraduate or graduate seminar. Because each essay is brief, the collection could be assigned with complementary texts to encourage students to put scholars into conversation with each other.” · Journal of American History
A WORLD OF POPULATIONS
Transnational Perspectives on Demography in the Twentieth Century
Edited by Heinrich Hartmann and Corinna R. Unger
“…an important step in writing global or transnational histories of demographic ideas and discourses… The volume offers insights into global and local interactions, covers major aspects of global family planning programmes and “overpopulation” debates, as well as contains case studies on the United States, Poland, Chile, South Korea, Turkey, Kenya, and Melanesia.” · H-Soz-Kult
“I learned something new on almost every page of A World of Populations, despite having worked very closely in this field. The case studies herein are surprising and fascinating, offering new geographies and perspectives. This book has made me intrigued and curious about demography and world population all over again.” · Alison Bashford, University of Cambridge, author of Global Population
SOUNDS OF MODERN HISTORY
Auditory Cultures in 19th- and 20th-Century Europe
Edited by Daniel Morat
“…this highly readable and well-sequenced text synthesises key research on the history of sound, bringing the work of the burgeoning field’s seminal figures into dialogue with that of emerging scholars of the history of European sound cultures.” · Melbourne Historical Journal
“As a whole, this collection provides a fine introduction to Sound Studies for historians of modern Europe and, at the same time, contributes new material to the growing body of work in this field. The collective work on World War I is perhaps the most original and compelling, but there is excellent scholarship throughout.” · German History
“…presents an excellent contribution to the social studies of sound…In contrast to the more common ocular-centricity of the history of the senses, this book explores the social dimensions of sound as an independent and new area of research.” · Sounds of Modern History