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Category: Meet the Author
Leyla and Eman
Connecting German-Turkish and Syrian-Turkish Stories
By SUSAN BETH ROTTMANN, Özyeğin University
Free Chapter Download: From Threatening to Threatened Jungles
Receive a free eBook chapter of Claudia Leal’s timely examination of the relationship between human societies and the Amazon rain forest here.
Continue reading “Free Chapter Download: From Threatening to Threatened Jungles”A Series on a Series: Part I
Interview with Series Editor Sam Beck, Romani Studies
Did you know Berghahn Books has over one hundred series? Covering a wide range of subjects and areas, Berghahn’s series list continues to grow as new interventions and trends in scholarship are made.
Continue reading “A Series on a Series: Part I”Muted Memories
Heritage-Making, Bagamoyo, and the East African Caravan Trade
BY JAN LINDSTRÖM
Continue reading “Muted Memories”Author news: Ulrich Herbert is Gerda Henkel Visiting Professor 2019/20
The German Historical Institute London (GHIL), the International History Department of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and the Gerda Henkel Foundation in Düsseldorf have appointed Berghahn author Ulrich Herbert to the position of Gerda Henkel Visiting Professor 2019/20. He will give his inaugural lecture on December 10th, 2019 at the German Historical Institute (see the GHIL website for more information).
Continue reading “Author news: Ulrich Herbert is Gerda Henkel Visiting Professor 2019/20”Portable, Digital Heritage and Memories of Place
BY ANDREW REINHARD, author of ARCHAEOGAMING: An Introduction to Archaeology in and of Video Games
September 12 marks the 22nd annual National Video Games Day, a day with hazy origins. When I think about time and video games, a few things come to mind: anniversaries of course, release dates, retirement dates. I found myself wondering: what commercial games premiered in September 1997, the first official #VideoGamesDay (which was the first year I could start buying games for myself with discretionary income)? There are some classics, all for Windows/DOS: Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee, Ultima Online, Fallout. There are also some games lost to time: Breath of Fire III, Croc: Legend of the Gobbos, Close Combat: A Bridge Too Far, Panzer General II, Poy Poy, and Total Annihilation.
Continue reading “Portable, Digital Heritage and Memories of Place”Reverse Angle: Fifty Years of the Cinema of 1968
By Benjamin Halligan, author of DESIRES FOR REALITY: Radicalism and Revolution in Western European Film
My book Desires for Reality: Radicalism and Revolution in Western European Film was first published in 2016, and Berghahn Books just published a paperback edition.
Since the book concerns militant and radical film and film-making and the events of 1968, I very much wanted it to be out before 2018. My intention was that the book could contribute to the discussions that marked the 50th anniversary of 1968, and indeed it did. The ideal, in thinking about 1968, would not be commemoration and nostalgia but an engagement with the ideas of 1968 and their relevancy and challenge to today – that the collective desire to change our realities still, of course, remains, and film-making can still be considered in this context.
While the book deals with many of the now commonly accepted “classics” of that period, it also attempts to recover some still obscure films. In fact, it’s the existence of this divide – between the canonical and the Curate’s Eggs – that was a point of investigation. And, after the book was first published, the reactions to the November 2018 deaths of two film directors who featured heavily in it – Nic Roeg at 90 and Bernardo Bertolucci at 77 – further illustrated this sense of a divide. Their ’68 films are Performance (which Roeg co-directed by Donald Cammell) and Partner respectively. Continue reading “Reverse Angle: Fifty Years of the Cinema of 1968”
Are There Sustainable Cities in the Arctic?
by Robert Orttung
Robert Orttung is the author of Sustaining Russia’s Arctic Cities: Resource Politics, Migration, and Climate Change, which will be available in paperback in 2018. We’re offering 25% off the paperback with code ORT427 on our website.
More than four million people live in the Arctic, but so far few scholars have addressed urban conditions there. In fact, most people living in the Arctic reside in cities. Sustaining Russia’s Arctic Cities: Resource Politics, Migration, and Climate Change is one of the first to try to examine how sustainable these cities are.
The edited volume Sustaining Russia’s Arctic Cities grew out of a multi-disciplinary and multi-national team of scholars interested in the Arctic. The idea to focus on cities came from one of the book’s contributors, Nikolay Shiklomanov, during a meeting of faculty with an interest in the Arctic at George Washington University. Participants represented both natural scientists who study permafrost and climate change, and social scientists interested in migration and energy development. Cities proved to be the meeting ground where all of our interests converged. As resource extraction continues in the Arctic, more workers are moving to the region and building more infrastructure there. However, the extraction and subsequent combustion of fossil fuels leads to warming in many parts of the Arctic, typically at a rate much faster than on other parts of the planet.
The focus of this book is on Russian cities in the Arctic because Russia has gone the farthest of the Arctic countries in developing urban space in the far north. Stalin built large cities in the region as did subsequent Soviet leaders in an effort to develop the rich resources found there.
The book addresses the question of how humans can live in the Arctic while having minimal impact on the environment. There are no easy answers, so the various chapters consider the history of Arctic development in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, policy-making processes for the Arctic in Moscow, the administration of specific Arctic cities, the nature of the workers who make their living in the Arctic, the prospects for land and sea transportation in the region, and what we know about the future climate.
This book is the first of several that we hope to publish in an on-going research project. Currently, Sustaining Russia’s Arctic Cities serves as a foundation for developing an Arctic Urban Sustainability Index. This index will examine five types of variables – economic, social, environmental, governance and planning. The Index is in its early stages and we are reporting progress over time at our project website. The most recent publications include two reports in the 2017 Arctic Yearbook. The project has the support of the National Science Foundation Partnerships for International Research and Education.
We hope that readers from a wide variety of disciplines and perspectives will find the book useful in starting to think more serious about cities in the Arctic. Ultimately, we hope that this research program will lead to useful advice for mayors and other Arctic policy makers as they try to improve lives for the citizens of Arctic cities.
Robert W. Orttung is the research director for the George Washington University Sustainability Collaborative. He is also an associate research professor at GW’s Elliott School of International Affairs. He has written and edited numerous books on Russia and energy politics.
Who is María Lionza?
By Roger Canals, lecturer in the department of social anthropology at the University of Barcelona.
The book A Goddess in Motion: Visual Creativity in the Cult of María Lionza finds its origins in my vivid interest in Afro-Latin American religions, art and visual anthropology. I understand the latter in a broad sense, that is, as an anthropology of images, as an exploration on the act of seeing and being seen, as a visual ethnography and, lastly, as an attempt to write and publish the outcomes of our research, including visual material.
The main goal of A Goddess in Motion: Visual Creativity in the Cult of María Lionza is to explore how this goddess is represented and what people do with –and through– her images in contemporary Venezuelan society and abroad. For those who do not know this amazing figure, let me tell you that María Lionza is a fascinating goddess, still highly unexplored by academia: symbol of the Venezuelan identity, she is represented as Indian, White, Mestiza and as a Black woman, sometimes benevolent and sometimes evil, at once represented with a high sexual component and at once depicted as a mature woman close to the Virgin Mary. The images of María Lionza may be found in many different locations, where they play a variety of roles: on religious altars, in museums and galleries, on television, on the Internet or on the walls of the streets of Venezuelan cities, to mention just a few. Moreover, María Lionza can “descend” into the mediums’ bodies or “appear” in dreams, visions and apparitions.
The challenge of this book is to think of all these images (material, corporeal and mental) as a whole, that is, as a sort of dynamic and open network in which practices, discourses and visual representations mingle.