Michael Haneke – 23 March 1942

For Michael Haneke’s birthday, we have put together some of our relevent titles looking at the film director.

We have also collected some some Film Studies series, and Open Access Film and Television Studies for further browsing. For more content, you can also check out our website by Subject: Film and Television Studies here, or browse by Area, such as Europe, here.


Michael Haneke’s Cinema

The Ethic of the Image

Catherine Wheatley

Wheatley provides excellent close readings of a number of films and crucial film scenes. The book as a whole could be used in conjunction with a film course on Haneke, or its various chapters would lend themselves to discussions in graduate and even undergraduate courses on contemporary European film…The writing style is clear and while it pursues a critical theoretical analysis, it remains free from jargon.   ·  Monatshefte

Volume 7, Film Europa

SHORT-LISTED FOR BEST MOVING IMAGE BOOK BY THE AND/OR BOOK AWARDS; SHORT-LISTED FOR THE 2009 WILLY HAAS AWARD; NOMINATED SIGHT & SOUND MAGAZINE BOOK OF THE MONTH, SEPTEMBER 2009

Sensitive Subjects

The Political Aesthetics of Contemporary German and Austrian Cinema

Leila Mukhida

Through illuminating explorations of Michael Haneke, Valeska Grisebach, Andreas Dresen, and other filmmakers of the post-reunification era, Mukhida develops an analysis centered on film aesthetics and experience, showing how medium-specific devices like lighting, sound, and mise-en-scène can help to cultivate political sensitivity in spectators.

Volume 23, Film Europa

Read freely available introduction.


Existentialism and Contemporary Cinema

A Beauvoirian Perspective

Edited by Jean-Pierre Boulé and Ursula Tidd

This book is an attempt to redress this balance and reopen the dialogue between Beauvoir’s writings and film studies. The authors analyse a range of films, from directors including Claire Denis, Michael Haneke, Lucille Hadzihalilovic, Sam Mendes, and Sally Potter, by drawing from Beauvoir’s key works such as The Second Sex (1949), The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) and Old Age (1970).

Read freely available introduction.


New Austrian Film

Edited by Robert von Dassanowsky and Oliver C. Speck

Out of a film culture originally starved of funds have emerged rich and eclectic works by film-makers that are now achieving the international recognition that they deserve: Barbara Albert, Michael Haneke, Ulrich Seidl, and Stefan Ruzowitzky, to give four examples. This comprehensive critical anthology, by leading scholars of Austrian film, is intended to introduce and make accessible this much under-represented phenomenon.

Read freely available introduction.


Existentialism and Contemporary Cinema

A Sartrean Perspective

Edited by Jean-Pierre Boulé and Enda MacCaffrey

At the heart of this volume is the assertion that Sartrean existentialism, most prominent in the 1940s, particularly in France, is still relevant as a way of interpreting the world today. […] In a scholarly yet accessible style, the contributors exploit the rich interplay between Sartre’s philosophy, plays and novels, and a number of contemporary films including No Country for Old MenLost in Translation and The Truman Show, with film-makers including the Dardenne brothers, Michael Haneke, and Mike Leigh.

Read freely available introduction.


Additional Recommendation: A Title on Austrian Film

Homemade Men in Postwar Austrian Cinema

Nationhood, Genre and Masculinity

Maria Fritsche

“An extraordinary work, in Postwar Austrian Cinema adds to its lucid presentation of the social and aesthetic dynamics of Austrian national cinema after 1945 a welcome number of superb readings of better and lesser-known films. The period is unlikely to be served by a more thoughtful and attentive analysis any time soon.” • Austrian History Yearbook

Volume 15, Film Europa


Film Book Series


Browse Film Europa

“This is a series which, in a very short period of time, has had a huge impact on the field.”  ·  Monatshefte

German cinema is normally seen as a distinct form, but this series emphasizes connections, influences, and exchanges of German cinema across national borders, as well as its links with other media and art forms. Individual titles present traditional historical research (archival work, industry studies) as well as new critical approaches in film and media studies (theories of the transnational), with a special emphasis on the continuities associated with popular traditions and local perspectives.

Volume 29
Volume 28
Volume 27
Volume 26

Browse Visual And Media Cultures Of The Cold War And Beyond

Published by Berghahn Books and the DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

This interdisciplinary series focuses on a range of visual and media cultures in and beyond the Cold War period (1945-1991) in both social and transnational contexts. It explores ways in which film and other media, their creators and audiences, and industries and states participated in, were shaped by and, in turn, shaped cultural relations during the Cold War. Beyond 1991, this series also welcomes interdisciplinary explorations of the legacies of the Cold War and its ongoing cultural impact in a global context.


Check out some of our Open Access Film and Television Studies titles. Browse more here.


Fall of the Berlin Wall, 9 November 1989

35th anniversary

This year marks the 35th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall (9 November 1989)!

To celebrate the Fall of the Berlin Wall, we want to spotlight our Books Series on German Studies. These series span further than only our most recent publications, and include a number of Open Access books, entirely free to read! These blog will be looking at…

Last month, we created a collection of our most recent German Studies titles for German Unity Day, which you can read here.

Lastly, we would like to highlight that our website allow you to Browse by Area: Germany here.


Berghahn Books Series on German Studies


Studies in German History

General Editors: Simone LässigDirector of the German Historical Institute, Washington,
with the assistance of 
Patricia C. Sutcliffe, Editor, German Historical Institute.

Published in Association with the German Historical Institute, Washington

To be published March 2025
Volume 30
Open Access
Volume 29
Open Access
Volume 28
Open Access
Volume 27
Volume 26
Volume 25
Open Access
Volume 24
Volume 23

Perspectives on the History of German Jews

The volumes in this series provide concise introductions to different fields of German-Jewish history with a focus on the topics of politics, society, gender and religion across the last two centuries. Reflecting the latest research developments, these titles are not only valuable resources for scholars but are also accessible to a wider audience. The authors, all experts of German-Jewish history and mostly working at German universities, focus on socio-historical perspectives, including questions of social and cultural history.

The series was first published in German by Schoeningh, now an imprint of Brill. It was edited by Stefanie Schüler-Springorum and Rainer Liedtke on behalf of the Wissenschaftliche Arbeitsgemeinschaft (Academic Working Group) of the Leo Baeck Institute in Germany. The volumes have all been updated for publication in English.

Volume 3
Volume 2
Volume 1

Vermont Studies on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust

Editorial Committee: Jonathan D. HuenerUniversity of Vermont, Susanna SchrafstetterUniversity of Vermont, and Alan E. SteinweisUniversity of Vermont

The University of Vermont has been an important venue for research on the Holocaust since Raul Hilberg began his work there in 1956. These volumes reflect the scholarly activity of UVM’s Miller Center for Holocaust Studies. They combine original research with interpretive synthesis, and address research questions of interdisciplinary and international interest.

Volume 9
Volume 8
Volume 7
Volume 6

New German Historical Perspectives

Series Editor: Paul Betts (Executive Editor), St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford

Established in 1987 this special St. Antony’s series showcases pioneering new work by leading German historians on a range of topics concerning the history of modern Germany, Europe, and the wider world. Publications address pressing problems of political, economic, social, and intellectual history informed by contemporary debates about German and European identity, providing fresh conceptual, international, and transnational interpretations of the recent past.

Volume 13
Volume 12
Volume 11
Volume 10

Monographs in German History

The complexities and peculiarities of German history present challenges on various levels, not least on that of historiography. This series offers a platform for historians who, in response to those challenges, produce important and stimulating contributions to the various debates that take place within the discipline.

Volume 38
Volume 37
Volume 36
Volume 35
Volume 34
Volume 33
Volume 32
Volume 31
Open Access

Culture & Society in Germany

Volume 6
Volume 5
Volume 4
Volume 3

Policies and Institutions: Germany, Europe, and Transatlantic Relations

Volume 5
Volume 4
Volume 3
Volume 2

Modern German Studies

A Series of the German Studies Association

This series offers books on modern and contemporary Germany, concentrating on themes in history, political science, literature and German culture. Publications will include works in English and English translations of significant works in other languages.

Volume 6
Volume 5
Volume 4
Volume 3

You might also be interested in…

Last month, we created a collection of our most recent German Studies titles for German Unity Day, which you can read here.

Indigenous Peoples’ Day

Today is Indigenous Peoples’ Day! Berghahn recognizes the significance of indigenous cultures and in the spirit of this day, we have collected some of our relevant titles below.


Enacted Relations

Performing Knowledge in an Australian Indigenous Community

Franca Tamisari

“This is an excellent exploration and exegesis of Yolngu performance in all its varied forms from ceremonial to popular song and dance … This book is a highly satisfying and compelling read as its penetrating argument utilizes a sophisticated interweaving of theory and ethnography to demonstrate how learning ‘The Law’ is a foundational sense of being in and part of the boneland, (ngaraka), knowing the stories, being able to relate appropriately to kin and country and having the skills, knowledge, rights and ability to perform the songs and dances.” • Fiona Magowan, Queen’s University Belfast.

Volume 15, ASAO Studies in Pacific Anthropology

Read freely available introduction.

Creation and Creativity in Indigenous Lowland South America

Anthropological Perspectives

Edited by Ernst Halbmayer and Anne Goletz

“This volume is an outstanding piece of scholarship, which, from the standpoint of the processes of creation and creativity, accomplishes, in a good measure, a critique and reassessment of current styles on analyzing Amazonian sociality.” • Juan Alvaro Echeverri, Universidad Nacional de Colombia

Read freely available introduction.

Open Access

Indigenous Resurgence

Decolonialization and Movements for Environmental Justice

Edited by Jaskiran Dhillon

“Although the essays were already published a while ago, they have not lost any of their relevance, and one can only wish that thanks to the volume being available through Open Access many people will discover this topical publication.” • Amerindian Research

Read freely available introduction, and more with Open Access.

I Dreamed the Animals

Kaniuekutat: The Life of an Innu Hunter

Georg Henriksen

“Through his own life story, Kaniuekutat speaks to many issues of importance facing the Innu in contemporary times, with an eye on tradition and the lessons of the past…A valuable text for students of anthropology, Native studies, and history.”  ·  Choice

Read freely available introduction.

About the Hearth

Perspectives on the Home, Hearth and Household in the Circumpolar North

Edited by David G. Anderson, Robert P. Wishart, and Virginie Vaté

“Each chapter offers something interesting for the reader…One can list bright and sometimes provocative ideas put forth by each contributor…The main advantage of this book is the ability to spark interest among the most diverse groups of specialists in the field of indigenous cultures.” · Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale

Nordic Paths to Modernity

Edited by Jóhann Páll Árnason and Björn Wittrock

“…the articles, taken together, provide an exciting picture of the diversity that is unified in the Nordic region… [and] a significant contribution to the discussion of multiple modernities.”  ·  Scandinavian-Canadian Studies/Études scandinaves au Canada

Read freely available introduction.

Animism in Rainforest and Tundra

Personhood, Animals, Plants and Things in Contemporary Amazonia and Siberia

Edited by Marc Brightman, Vanessa Elisa Grotti, and Olga Ulturgasheva

“This thoughtful volume is extraordinarily rich and will prompt all of us interested in these questions to think about them from fresh perspectives.” • Anthropological Forum

Read freely available introduction.

The 1926/27 Soviet Polar Census Expeditions

Edited by David G. Anderson

“The contributors have made excellent use of recently opened archives and interviews with descendants of the people surveyed to provide a uniquely human portrait of this seminal project. While the chapters focus most thoroughly on the Nenets, Khanty, and Yakut, the analysis is of broader relevance to an understanding of Siberian peoples during the first stages of the sovietization of the Far North. This book will prove of unique value to historians of the Soviet period as well as to cultural anthropologists specializing in polar peoples. Highly recommended.” • Choice

Indigenous Peoples and Demography

The Complex Relation between Identity and Statistics

Edited by Per Axelsson and Peter Sköld

This interesting collection looks at changes in population studies and examines indigeneity in contexts as different as Australia and Norway. It is particularly valuable with respect to two broad geographic categories: countries originally settled by British colonists, and states in northern Europe… the study of categorization and enumeration offers valuable insights on how ethnic boundaries are established, and how–inevitably–they are challenged and contested.”  ·  Choice

Read freely available introduction.

Narrating the Future in Siberia

Childhood, Adolescence and Autobiography among the Eveny

Olga Ulturgasheva

This thought-provoking and highly original work, relevant especially for students of the anthropology of childhood, supplies an important new chapter to native Siberian ethnography. Highly recommended for anyone seriously interested in today’s Siberia, all levels.”  ·  Choice

The New Media Nation

Indigenous Peoples and Global Communication

Valerie Alia

In sum, New Media Nationoffers scholars of minorities, of digital media and of globalizing indigeneities the opportunity to understand how the practices of producing meanings through discourses of resistance contribute over time to the development and re-invigoration of alternative discourses often thought to have been dissolved by the spread of ‘mass media’. By engaging in micro-analyses of specific cultural discourses and their elaboration in specific emergent media situations, Alia alerts her readers to the importance of the complexity of the local.” • Discourse & Communication

Volume 2, Anthropology of Media

Read freely available introduction.

Hunters in the Barrens

The Naskapi on the Edge of the White Man’s World

Georg Henriksen

Valuable as an example of the anthropology of development and modernization prevalent in northern Canada at the time, the book transcends this genre in the acuity of its ethnographic analysis and beautifully captures a moment – Henriksen began fieldwork in 1966 – when Mushuau Innu were making the transition to permanent communities… This book is important for Algonquian and circumpolar specialists, as well as for students wishing to understand dynamics of hunting societies in modernity. It has also become significant as a historical record both of the Innu people and of anthropology in northern Canada.  ·  Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

Read freely available introduction.

Names and Nunavut

Culture and Identity in the Inuit Homeland

Valerie Alia

“…a thought-provoking book. Alia lays out the intricacies of Inuit naming so clearly, describes the Arctic environment so vividly, and conveys such a rich sense of Inuit values, concerns, and humour that readers are likely to hunger for more information and to pose ethnographic and on mastic questions that press forward the horizons of Inuit ethnography. Names and Nunavut is a welcome addition to Arctic ethnography and should be of interest not only to linguists and anthropologists working in the Arctic but to anyone interested in the relationship between onomasty, personhood, and cosmology and to anyone looking for fresh insights to the micropractices of linguistic and onomastic colonialism”  ·  NAMES: A Journal of Onomastics

Read freely available introduction.

Cultivating Arctic Landscapes

Knowing and Managing Animals in the Circumpolar North

Edited by David G. Anderson and Mark Nuttall

“The edited work contains one of the most interesting sets of northern papers to appear in a very long time…each paper is excellent…this book will hopefully provoke considerable thought…This is a work that should be discussed in terms of the particulars of the various papers, but also for the overview it provides.” – Polar Record

International Day of the Girl Child

Today is the United Nations’ International Day of the Girl Child, and this year’s theme is ‘Girls’ vision for the future’.

Click to expand text: The UN explains more on this year’s International Day of the Girl Child

Today’s generation of girls is disproportionately affected by global crises of climate, conflict, poverty and pushback on hard won gains for human rights and gender equality. Too many girls are still denied their rights, restricting their choices and limiting their futures.

Yet, recent analysis shows that girls are not only courageous in the face of crisis, but hopeful for the future. Every day, they are taking action to realize a vision of a world in which all girls are protected, respected and empowered. But girls cannot realize this vision alone. They need allies who listen to and respond to their needs. 

With the right support, resources and opportunities, the potential of the world’s more than 1.1 billion girls is limitless. And when girls lead, the impact is immediate and wide reaching: families, communities and economies are all stronger, our future brighter. It is time to listen to girls, to invest in proven solutions that will accelerate progress towards a future in which every girl can fulfil her potential.

Read Five game-changing solutions with and for adolescent girls, the background of International Day of the Girl Child, Vanessa Nakate on how the climate crisis impacts girls, and more from the UN page here.

In the spirit of this day, we have compiled a collection of some of our titles looking at girlhood below, with free to read introductions and some open access titles.

For more content, you can browse though our books by subject ‘Gender Studies and Sexuality’ here, or take a look at our book series ‘Transnational Girlhoods’ here.


To be published January 2025

Girls Take Action

Activism Networks by, for, and with Girls and Young Women

Edited by Catherine Vanner

The repression of the rights of girls and women is continuously threatened in a wide range of global cultural contexts. From the rise in laws restricting reproductive freedom to the growth in essentialist ideas about gender and the backlash to the #MeToo movement, the challenges facing girls and young women are as diverse as the activism networks established to address them. Girls Take Action shines light on the myriad ways girls and young women are exercising agency in the face of injustice, considering especially the role of community and collaboration in fostering activism networks and ultimately a more transnational understanding of girlhood.

Volume 8, Transnational Girlhoods

To be published November 2024

Becoming Good Women

Schooling, Aspirations and Imagining the Future Among Female Students in Sri Lanka

Laura Shamali Batatota

For female Sinhalese students attending a national school in the Central Province of Sri Lanka, the school serves as a significant base for cultural production, particularly in reproducing ethno-religious hegemony under the guise of ‘good’ Buddhist girls. It illustrates that tuition space acts as an important site for placemaking, where students play out their cosmopolitan aspirations whilst acquiring educational capital. Drawing on theories of social reproduction, the book examines young people’s aspirations of ‘figuring out’ their identity and visions of the future in the backdrop of nation-building processes within the school.

Volume 7, Lifeworlds: Knowledges, Politics, Histories

Open Access

Black Schoolgirls in Space

Stories of Black Girlhoods Gathered on Educational Terrain

Edited by Esther O. Ohito and Lucía Mock Muñoz de Luna

Locating Black girls’ desires, needs, knowledge bases, and lived experiences in relation to their social identities has become increasingly important in the study of transnational girlhoods. Black Schoolgirls in Space pushes this discourse even further by exploring how Black girls negotiate and navigate borders of blackness, gender, and girlhood in educational spaces. The contributors of this collected volume highlight Black girls as actors and agents of not only girlhood but also the larger, transnational educational worlds in which their girlhoods are contained.

Volume 7, Transnational Girlhoods

Read freely available introduction, and more with Open Access.

Girls in Global Development

Figurations of Gendered Power

Edited by Heather Switzer, Karishma Desai, and Emily Bent

“This collection is a well-imagined, important, incisive contribution to the fields of girlhood studies, development studies, and gender studies that deftly exposes the contradictions, complications, and limits of the “Girls in Development” paradigm and the ways it shapes the current landscape of development and thus the lives of girls around the world.” • Jessica Taft, University of California Santa Cruz

Volume 6, Transnational Girlhoods

Read freely available introduction.

Open Access

The Girl in the Pandemic

Transnational Perspectives

Edited by Claudia Mitchell and Ann Smith

The Girl in the Pandemic makes a unique and much-needed contribution to the scholarship on Girlhood Studies in times of crises in different global contexts and particularly including scholarship from the global south and north.” • Relebohile Moletsane, University of KwaZulu-Natal

Volume 5, Transnational Girlhoods

Read freely available introduction, and more with Open Access.

Punching Back

Gender, Religion and Belonging in Women-Only Kickboxing

Jasmijn Rana

“Jasmijn Rana has written an engaging, well-crafted and long-anticipated ethnography of the intersectionally gendered and racialized experience of Muslim Dutch women, drawn from her own apprenticeship in women-only kickboxing venues in the southern neighbourhoods of The Hague.” • Paul Silverstein, Reed College

Volume 5, New Anthropologies of Europe: Perspectives and Provocations

Read freely available introduction.

Ӧmie Sex Affiliation

A Papuan Nature

Marta Rohatynskyj

“It offers a unique contribution to the literature on Papua New Guinea societies. The ethnography was collected at a time when it was possible to engage with people who had witnessed and participated in complex rites which have lapsed or been replaced by recent introductions.” • James Leach, CNRS

Volume 14, ASAO Studies in Pacific Anthropology

Read freely available introduction.

An American Icon in Puerto Rico

Barbie, Girlhood, and Colonialism at Play

Emily R. Aguiló-Pérez

“The book provides a thought-provoking and insightful exploration of the transnational impact of Barbie as a cultural object, highlighting the importance of critically examining the cultural products that shape our understanding of gender, race, and identity.” • Women’s Studies

Volume 4, Transnational Girlhoods

Read freely available introduction.

Living Like a Girl

Agency, Social Vulnerability and Welfare Measures in Europe and Beyond

Edited by Maria A. Vogel and Linda Arnell

“This collection truly captures what it means to live like a girl in contemporary Europe, and it is sure to be a key resource for scholars working in the area for years to come.” • Fiona Vera-Gray, Durham University

Volume 3, Transnational Girlhoods

Read freely available introduction.

Ethical Practice in Participatory Visual Research with Girls

Transnational Approaches

Edited by Relebohile Moletsane, Lisa Wiebesiek, Astrid Treffry-Goatley, and April Mandrona

“[This] is an outstanding book with highly fascinating chapter contributions theorizing significant issues of co-researchers, and thereby offering a how-to for conducting participatory research in an ethical manner.” • Participatory Research Methods

Volume 2, Transnational Girlhoods

Read freely available introduction.

Deconstructing Dolls

Girlhoods and the Meanings of Play

Edited by Miriam Forman-Brunell

In recent decades, emerging scholarship in the field of girlhood studies has led to a particular interest in dolls as sources of documentary evidence. Deconstructing Dolls pushes the boundaries of doll studies by expanding the definition of dolls, ages of doll players, sites of play, research methods, and application of theory. By utilizing a variety of new approaches, this collected volume seeks to understand the historical and contemporary significance of dolls and girlhood play, particularly as they relate to social meanings in the lives of girls and young women across race, age, time, and culture.

Read freely available introduction.

The Girl in the Text

Edited by Ann Smith

“Ann Smith’s collection provides both inspiration and a challenge to readers, writers, and researchers of girls and girls themselves to transverse physical and conceptual borders critically to write their own transnational girl into lived and textual existence.” • Girlhood Studies

Volume 1, Transnational Girlhoods

Read freely available introduction.


For more content, you can browse though our books by subject ‘Gender Studies and Sexuality’ here, or take a look at our books series ‘Transnational Girlhoods’ here.


Berghahn Journals

Girlhood Studies
An Interdisciplinary Journal

Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal is a peer-reviewed journal providing a forum for the critical discussion of girlhood from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, and for the dissemination of current research and reflections on girls’ lives to a broad, cross-disciplinary audience of scholars, researchers, practitioners in the fields of education, social service and health care and policy makers.

Aspasia
The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History 

Aspasia is the international peer-reviewed annual of women’s and gender history of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe (CESEE). It aims to transform European women’s and gender history by expanding comparative research on women and gender to all parts of Europe, creating a European history of women and gender that encompasses more than the traditional Western European perspective.


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German Unity Day

Commemorating German Reunification

German Unity Day is celebrated on October 3rd. Tag der Deutschen Einheit celebrates the 1990 reunification of the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic with ceremonial acts and the citizens’ festival Bürgerfest.

In the spirit of this day, we have compiled some of our German Studies titles below.

You can browse our books by area: Germany here.


Shifting Paradigms in Contemporary German Politics and Policy

Edited by Eric Langenbacher

Germany has undergone more change in the past two years than it has experienced in decades. In the fall of 2021, the Social Democratic Party unexpectedly surged to first place in the Bundestag elections, going on to lead a coalition of SPD, Greens, and Free Democrats that promised to “dare more progress” domestically. Then just two months after the new government was installed, Russia invaded Ukraine. The contributions in this volume investigate the altered state of German politics and predict the trajectory of Europe’s leading power in the transformed geopolitical environment.

Read freely available introduction.

Shaping Tomorrow’s World

A Twentieth-Century History of West German, Cold War, and Global Futures Studies

Elke Seefried

“This new book marks a milestone in the still young field that investigates the history of the future.” • Historische Zeitschrift

Read freely available introduction.

Intimate Histories

African Americans and Germany since 1933

Nadja Klopprogge

Intimate Histories focuses on intimate relations as sites of shared pasts connecting African American and German history in the years between 1933 and 1990. By tracing topics that include anti-miscegenation laws, forced sterilization, casual sexual encounters, marriage, and friendships, Intimate Histories broadens our understanding of African American–German relations during the so-called “century of extremes.”

Volume 12, Explorations in Culture and International History

Read freely available introduction.

Don’t Need No Thought Control

Western Culture in East Germany and the Fall of the Berlin Wall

Gerd Horten

“Horten has written a fascinating, very readable, analytically sharp monograph, based on an impressive amount of primary and secondary sources… The average East German, not the few dissidents or the few fanatics on top, are the real heroes of his narrative.” • H-Soz-Kult

Read freely available introduction.

Children are Everywhere

Conspicuous Reproduction and Childlessness in Reunified Berlin

Meghana Joshi

“There are some unique and important discussions [in this book] that I have not seen elaborated elsewhere and certainly not brought together in one place.” • Heide Castañeda, University of South Florida

Volume 53, Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives

Read freely available introduction.

German Division as Shared Experience
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Postwar Everyday

Edited by Erica Carter, Jan Palmowski, and Katrin Schreiter

“All told, this volume successfully brings together its fascinating chapters into a powerful interdisciplinary analysis. German Division as Shared Experience is a significant achievement that will serve as a bedrock for future research on the ‘entanglement’ of the Cold War Germanies. The editors and contributors have produced a genuinely pathbreaking book.” • The Journal of Modern History

Read freely available introduction.

Friendship without Borders

Women’s Stories of Power, Politics, and Everyday Life across East and West Germany

Phil Leask

“Beginning and advanced students can learn much from this highly readable book. Its bottom-up view of postwar German history is revealing even to the expert. Its subtle and perceptive interpretations of attitudes about gender and womanhood, Heimat and the German past, politics and everyday life are enlightening. It provokes one to think about friendship, the psychology of groups, and ageing in new and refreshing ways. A most worthwhile read.” • German History

Read freely available introduction.

The Politics of Personal Information

Surveillance, Privacy, and Power in West Germany

Larry Frohman

“This is an important book crafted by a master of intellectual history. It will be widely consumed and discussed among German historians and a wide range of intellectuals interested in the origins of the modern surveillance state. Essential.” • Choice

Read freely available introduction.

Inside Party Headquarters

Organizational Culture and Practice of Rule in the Socialist Unity Party of Germany

Rüdiger Bergien

Everyday life in the East German Socialist Unity Party revolved heavily around maintaining the “party line” in all areas of society, whether through direct authority or corruption. Spanning a long period of the GDR’s history, from 1946 through 1989, Rüdiger Bergien presents the first study that examines the complexities of the central party’s communist apparatus. He focuses on their role as ideological watchdogs, as they fostered an underbelly and “inner life” for their employees to integrate the party’s pillars throughout East German society. Inside Party Headquarters reviews not only the party’s modes power and state interaction, but also the processes of negotiation and disputation preceding formal Politburo decisions, advancing the available detail and discourse surrounding this formative and volatile stretch of German history.

Read freely available introduction.

France and the German Question, 1945–1990

Edited by Frédéric Bozo and Christian Wenkel

“These impressively researched chapters persuasively demonstrate that France was a leader in addressing postwar concerns with West Germany. Furthermore, the authors argue that France sought a constructive relationship with West Germany as early as 1945. From the economic rebuilding of the 1950s through de Gaulle’s desire to transform the continent and negotiations with the Eastern bloc following Ostpolitik to Mitterand’s support for German reunification within a European framework, this collection makes clear that the fates of the two countries were often inextricably linked. Highly Recommended.” • Choice

Read freely available introduction.

The Guardians of Concepts

Political Languages of Conservatism in Britain and West Germany, 1945-1980

Martina Steber

Since 1945, what ‘conservative’ means has troubled intellectuals, politicians and parties in the United Kingdom and West Germany. In Britain conservatism was an accepted term of the political vocabulary, denoting a particular tradition of political thought and practice. In West Germany, by contrast, conservatism was a difficult concept for the young democracy to swallow. It carried a heavy antiliberal and antidemocratic burden and led people to question whether there was a place for conservatism within democratic culture after all.

The Guardians of Concepts scrutinizes the debates about conservatism in the UK and the Federal Republic of Germany from the late 1940s to the early 1980s. Informed by historical semantics, it conceives of conservatism as a flexible linguistic structure, and shows the importance of language for the self-understanding of many conservatives, who not by chance, have regarded themselves as the guardians of concepts. The intense national and transnational debates about the meaning of conservatism had far-reaching consequences and continue to influence politics today.

Volume 9, Studies in British and Imperial History

Read freely available introduction.

End Game

The 1989 Revolution in East Germany

Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk

“This story is so far little known and not a big topic of the German public. Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk closes our knowledge gaps in an impressive way” • Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Volume 26, Studies in German History

Read freely available introduction.

Open Access

Comrades in Arms

Military Masculinities in East German Culture

Tom Smith

“This book is important because it opens avenues of research into queerness in East Germany’s National People’s Army (NVA)… Smith’s book is commendable for breaking barriers in masculinity studies and offering a refreshing second look at the NVA… Highly Recommended. All readers.” • Choice

Read freely available introduction.

Gendering Post-1945 German History

Entanglements

Edited by Karen Hagemann, Donna Harsch, and Friederike Brühöfener

“This volume achieves a tremendous feat in its breadth, though its forte lies in its diverse contexts, uses, and understandings of gender—including its co-constituency with race and sexuality… This collection offers a much-needed re-narrativization of a divided Germany that centers gender, race, and sex in the shaping of citizenry during postwar nation-making.” • Feminist German Studies

Read freely available introduction.

Rethinking Social Movements after ’68

Selves and Solidarities in West Germany and Beyond

Edited by Belinda Davis, Friederike Brühöfener, and Stephen Milder

“A volume on social movements in the 1970s and 1980s is very welcome and timely. Now that there exists a solid corpus of monographs on the Long Sixties, serious research on the 1970s is slowly beginning to see the light of day – less so on the 1980s. Thus, Rethinking Social Movements after ’68 will begin to fill a growing need.” • Gerd-Rainer Horn, Sciences Po

Volume 31, Protest, Culture & Society

Read freely available introduction.

A History Shared and Divided

East and West Germany since the 1970s

Frank Bösch

“…the range and rigour make this handbook a useful point of entry for specialists and students alike interested in understanding the transformation of Germany in the last half century.” • European History Quarterly

Read freely available introduction.

The History of the Stasi

East Germany’s Secret Police, 1945-1990

Jens Gieseke

“Gieseke treats… many issues with careful and lucid analysis, confining himself to the known facts. He rejects the hyperbolic in favor of more mundane explanations. The truth is bad enough… Essential.” • Choice

Read freely available introduction.

The Path to the Berlin Wall

Critical Stages in the History of Divided Germany

Manfred Wilke

“…constitutes a superlative model of combining biography with the study of nationalism. The latter constitutes the most novel contribution of this well-researched, straightforward historical depiction of Kohl’s ideology and its impact upon the continuing development of German national identity… Recommended” · Choice


Berghahn Journals

GERMAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY

Editor: Jeffrey J. Anderson, Georgetown University

German Politics and Society is a joint publication of the BMW Center for German and European Studies (of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University) and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). These centers are represented by their directors on the journal’s Editorial Committee.

German Politics and Society is a peer-reviewed journal published and distributed by Berghahn Journals. It is the only American publication that explores issues in modern Germany from the combined perspectives of the social sciences, history, and cultural studies.

WORLD TOURISM DAY

The 27th of September is World Tourism Day, and the United Nations’ theme in 2024 is “Tourism and Peace” to highlight the capacity for tourism to bridge connections and understandings between nations and cultures.

As the United Nations’ page describes it:

Tourism, often highlighted for its role in economic development, also plays a significant role in fostering peace. On a global level, where nations are interconnected and interdependent, Tourism, an industry made by people and for people, emerges as a compelling and dynamic force to defy stereotypes and challenge prejudices.

This sector can be perceived as the epitome of intercultural dialogue; it allows meeting the “other”, learning about different cultures, hearing foreign languages, tasting exotic flavours, bonding with other human beings, and building tolerance. In essence, it is a mind-broadening educational and spiritual experience.

Read more on the UN’s World Tourism Day here.

In the spirit of this day, we have compiled some of our latest titles looking at Tourism Studies below.

For more content, you can browse our Travel and Tourism subject page here.


Open Access

Unexpected Encounters

Migrants and Tourists in the Mediterranean

Francesco Vietti

“The Mediterranean … has been shaped by the migration phenomena related to the colonial history and more recently to the crisis of receiving refugees – the author skillfully maneuvers through the history of the region’s multiple mobilities and connectivities … My overall opinion about the book is very positive.” • Natalia Bloch, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań

Volume 4, Articulating Journeys: Festivals, Memorials, and Homecomings

Read freely available introduction, and more with Open Access.

Open Access

Footprints in Paradise

Ecotourism, Local Knowledge, and Nature Therapies in Okinawa

Andrea E. Murray

“… a wonderful ethnographic work…As readers navigate through shared narratives and collective histories, they cannot help but feel they are immersed within the Okinawan culture. Libraries with anthropological collections focusing on Pacific Island studies (with a primary focus on Japan) or cultural heritage tourism should have a copy of this work. Highly recommended.” • Choice

Volume 40, New Directions in Anthropology

Read freely available introduction, and more with Open Access.

World Heritage Craze in China

Universal Discourse, National Culture, and Local Memory

Haiming Yan

“This book brings a wealth of information and spirited discussion to a wide readership and could readily be considered for courses on heritage issues in Asia and globally.” • Asian Perspectives

Read freely available introduction.

Expeditionary Anthropology

Teamwork, Travel and the ”Science of Man”

Edited by Martin Thomas and Amanda Harris

“Martin Thomas and Amanda Harris’s edited volume makes important steps towards understanding the history of the sociopolitical formations that are embedded in, and around, the idea of the expedition.” • Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI)

Volume 33, Methodology & History in Anthropology

Read freely available introduction.

The Long Journey

Exploring Travel and Travel Writing

Edited by Maria Pia Di Bella and Brian Yothers

“Because the essays represent a variety of disciplines—among them literature, history, and anthropology—the book offers a refreshing view of the field as a whole…Highlights include Wendy Bracewell’s insightful take on masculinity and the Balkans (via work ranging from Sara Mills’s to Moma Dimić’s) and Keith Newlin’s unvarnished examination of Jack and Charmian London’s insular journey to Melanesia. This engaging and useful text should invigorate both new and seasoned scholars of the genre….Recommended” • Choice

Read freely available introduction.

The Romance of Crossing Borders

Studying and Volunteering Abroad

Edited by Neriko Musha Doerr and Hannah Davis Taïeb

“Overall, this edited volume illustrates the complexities of affective encounters as students and young volunteers cross borders and engage with cultural diversity. Important is the relevance of understanding, studying, and acknowledging how affect impacts subject-making as students travel. There are also important insights that allow practitioners, teachers and programme co-ordinators to think strategically about how to better direct or address affective encounters in more meaningful and productive ways.” • Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI)

Read freely available introduction.

Transforming Study Abroad

A Handbook

Neriko Musha Doerr

“Doerr’s work makes a unique contribution to the international education scholarship by grouping together the key terms supporting the dominant discourse and putting them under the spotlight for a closer examination. For easy practical reference, the author chooses to focus on one term in each chapter. While using theories to expose the study abroad clichés, the author manages to keep her language simple and easy to understand.” • McGill Journal of Education

Read freely available introduction.

Momentous Mobilities

Anthropological Musings on the Meanings of Travel

Noel B. Salazar

“Salazar’s book is immensely readable because he is not held back by writing regular academic prose. Momentous Mobilities, true to its subtitle, is an intense and meditative musing on the subject. It will be valuable to sociologists, anthropologists, scholars of migration, and non-specialists alike.” • JRAI

Volume 4, Worlds in Motion

Read freely available introduction.

Revisiting Austria

Tourism, Space, and National Identity, 1945 to the Present

Gundolf Graml

“Gundolf Graml’s book presents a fresh, enterprising assessment of the role played by tourism in the construction of ‘Austrianness’ under the Second Republic…[It] offers much to mull over and invigorates both tourism and Austrian history with new approaches.” • Journal of Austrian Studies

Volume 28, Austrian and Habsburg Studies

Read freely available introduction.

Tourism and Informal Encounters in Cuba

Valerio Simoni

Tourism and Informal Encounters in Cuba offers useful material for academics such as ethnographers and sociologists and researchers in the business community, but also for politicians, tourists, and commercial enterprises to understand the nature and impact of the “Cuban hustler.” Well grounded in academic theory, it draws on prior investigations as well as the author’s own experiences over a ten-year period in Cuba.” • New West Indian Guide

Volume 38, New Directions in Anthropology

Read freely available introduction.

Travel and Representation

Edited by Garth Lean, Russell Staiff, and Emma Waterton

“This is a well-written book that disentangles, through sound interdisciplinary scholarship, the multiple workings of travel representations, their effects on people, and their limits…[It] is definitely recommended reading for graduate students and scholars with an interest in how travel, including tourism, is represented and how both travel and its representations mutually influence each other.” • JRAI (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute)

Read freely available introduction.

The Good Holiday

Development, Tourism and the Politics of Benevolence in Mozambique

João Afonso Baptista

“What the book offers most is a rich, detailed, and highly personal account of how everyday life is experienced within a community centred on a developmentourism project. It also offers a valuable source of reflection on the process and challenges of doing ethnographic research, particularly in postcolonial settings. In this way, it stands as a useful ethnography to illustrate discussions of tourism, development, community, participation, governance – many of the concepts central to our teaching and whose complexity we often find so difficult to convey to students.” • Anthropos

Volume 30, EASA Series

Read freely available introduction.

Tourism Imaginaries

Anthropological Approaches

Edited by Noel B. Salazar and Nelson H. H. Graburn

“This book establishes ‘imaginaries’ as part of the conceptual apparatus of the anthropology of tourism [and] contributes to social anthropology more generally by exploring how tourism imaginaries intersect with broader cultural and ideological structures… The wealth of its ethnography, combined with its innovative conceptual approaches, exemplifies the strengths anthropology is bringing to interdisciplinary tourism studies.” · Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

Read freely available introduction.

Japanese Tourism

Spaces, Places and Structures

Carolin Funck and Malcolm Cooper

The volume’s scope suggests how daunting the editors’ task was, and they do a credible job, addressing issues ranging from governmental policy to heritage tourism to the possibilities of virtual tourism in the 21st century.  This is a good introduction to the subject… what the authors do accomplish is significant, particularly for comparative tourism studies…Highly recommended.  ·  Choice

Volume 5, Asia-Pacific Studies: Past and Present


For more content, you can browse our Travel and Tourism subject page here.


Berghahn Journals

JOURNEYS
The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing

Journeys ceased publication in 2022. All articles we currently publish for the journal, since 2000, are Free Access in order to ensure their ongoing availability.

Journeys is an interdisciplinary journal that explores travel as a practice and travel writing as a genre, reflecting the rich diversity of travel and journeys as social and cultural practices as well as their significance as metaphorical processes. The dual focus on experience and genre makes Journeys unique among scholarly journals concerning travel and is intended to draw into conversation scholars in such varied disciplines as anthropology, literary studies, social history, religious studies, human geography, and cultural studies.

Open Access Articles

ANTHROPOLOGICAL JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN CULTURES
Hiking the Via Alpina: Logos, Eros and the Trails to Freedom
Jonathan Atari and Jackie Feldman (Vol. 32, Issue 2)

ANTHROPOLOGY IN ACTION
Tourism and COVID-19: Intimacy Transformed or Intimacy Interrupted?
Hazel Andrews (Vol. 27, Issue 2)

FOCAAL
Afterlives of depopulated places: Development through extractivism and rural tourism
Dragan Đunda (Vol. 2023, Issue 96)

MUSEUM WORLDS
Air Connectivity and Proximity of Large Airports as an Added Value for Museums
Lázaro Florido-Benítez (Vol. 11)

The Politics of Indigeneity and Heritage: Indonesian Mortuary Materials and Museums
Kathleen M. Adams (Vol. 8)

RELIGION AND SOCIETY
Discourses, Bodies, and Questions of Sharedness in Kenya’s Wellness Communities
Sarah M. Hillewaert (Vol. 12)

Totemic Outsiders: Ontological Transformation among the Makushi
James Andrew Whitaker (Vol. 12)

Free access to the following articles until October 5, 2024 with code TOURISM24 Redemption details: bit.ly/3F5lmqg

CONTENTION
Environmental Movement Interventions in Tourism and Energy Development in the North Atlantic: Connecting the Social Movement Societies and Players and Arenas Perspectives
Mark C.J. Stoddart, Alice Mattoni, and Elahe Nezhadhossein (Vol. 8, Issue 2)

FRENCH POLITICS, CULTURE & SOCIETY
Le Rallye Méditerranée-le Cap: Racing towards Eurafrica?
Megan Brown (Vol. 38, Issue 2)

ISRAEL STUDIES REVIEW
“Hot Guys” in Tel Aviv: Pride Tourism in Israel
Amit Kama and Yael Ram (Vol. 35, Issue 1)

NATURE AND CULTURE
Explicating Ecoculture: Tracing a Transdisciplinary Focal Concept
Melissa M. Parks (Vol. 15, Issue 1)

REGIONS & COHESION
Ciudades turísticas: ¿sostenibles? Caso Cancún
Pilivet Aguiar Alayola, Christine McCoy Cador, and Lucila Zárraga Cano (Vol. 11, Issue 2)

TRANSFERS
Essaying to Decenter the (White, Male, Elite) Tourist Gaze
Stephen L. Harp (Vol. 13, Issue 1-2)

Past, Present, and Future of Peripheral Mobilities in Portugal: The Portuguese Narrow-Gauge Railway System (1870s–2010s)
Hugo Silveira Pereira (Vol. 11, Issue 1)

International Day of Peace

The 21st of September is the International Day of Peace, established by the United Nations in 1981. This year marks the 25th anniversary of the General Assembly adopting the Declaration and Programme of Action on a Culture of Peace.

As the United Nations’ page describes it:

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the United Nations General Assembly’s adoption of the Declaration and Programme of Action on a Culture of Peace. In that declaration, the United Nations’ most inclusive body recognized that peace “not only is the absence of conflict, but also requires a positive, dynamic participatory process where dialogue is encouraged and conflicts are solved in a spirit of mutual understanding and cooperation.”

In a world with rising geopolitical tensions and protracted conflicts, there has never been a better time to remember how the UN General Assembly came together in 1999 to lay out the values needed for a culture of peace. These include: respect for life, human rights and fundamental freedoms; the promotion of non-violence through education, dialogue and cooperation; commitment to peaceful settlement of conflicts; and adherence to freedom, justice, democracy, tolerance, solidarity, cooperation, pluralism, cultural diversity, dialogue and understanding at all levels of society and among nations. In follow-up resolutions, the General Assembly recognized further the importance of choosing negotiations over confrontation and of working together and not against each other.

The Constitution of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) starts with the notion that “wars begin in the minds of men so it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed”. It is this notion that framed the theme and logo of this year’s observance of the International Day of Peace. The ideas of peace, the culture of peace, need to be cultivated in the minds of children and communities through formal and informal education, across countries and generations.

The International Day of Peace has always been a time to lay down weapons and observe ceasefires. But it now must also be a time for people to see each other’s humanity. Our survival as a global community depends on that. The International Day of Peace was established in 1981 by the United Nations General Assembly. Two decades later, in 2001, the General Assembly unanimously voted to designate the Day as a period of non-violence and cease-fire.

Information taken from the UN’s page, for more details, please read more here.

In the spirit of this day, we have compiled some of our latest titles looking at peace studies below.

For more content, you can browse our Peace and Conflict Studies subject page here.


To be published December 2024

The Paris Peace Conference of 1919

The Challenge of a New World Order

Edited by Laurence Badel, Eckart Conze, and Axel Dröber

For more than a century, the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 has remained an object of historical scrutiny. As an attempt to consolidate peace in the wake of World War I and to prevent future conflict, it was instrumental in shaping political and social dynamics both nationally and internationally. Yet, in spite of its implications for global conflict, little consideration has been given to the way the Paris Peace Conference constructed a new global order. In this illuminating and geographically wide-ranging reassessment, The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 reconsiders how this watershed event, its diplomatic negotiations and the peace treaties themselves gave rise to new dynamics of global power and politics. In doing so it highlights the way in which the forces of nationality and imperiality interacted with, and were reshaped by, the peace.

Paperback Available

Peace at All Costs

Catholic Intellectuals, Journalists, and Media in Postwar Polish–German Reconciliation

Annika Elisabet Frieberg

“This knowledgeably written study succeeds in exemplarily reopening a conceptual approach that is important for international relations on a hitherto rather neglected source basis and providing important insights for the understanding of both discourses of reconciliation in general and the history of German-Polish relations in particular.” • Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas

Volume 23, Studies in Contemporary European History

Read Introduction

Paperback Available

In the Shadow of the Great War

Physical Violence in East-Central Europe, 1917–1923

Edited by Jochen Böhler, Ota Konrád, and Rudolf Kučera

“Overall, the volume offers a broad panorama of the history of violence in East Central Europe. The individual essays are thematically diverse and offer an excellent synthesis of multilingual sources of research literature and theory.” • H-Soz-Kult

Read Introduction

200 Years of Peace

New Perspectives on Modern Swedish Foreign Policy

Edited by Nevra Biltekin, Leos Müller and Magnus Petersson

“This generous collection of essays portrays salient aspects of Sweden’s policy of neutrality throughout the last 200 years. A truly stimulating read including splendid and sometimes thought-provoking interpretations. The book deserves international attention.” • Rasmus Mariager, University of Copenhagen

Read Introduction

Durable Solutions

Challenges with Implementing Global Norms for Internally Displaced Persons in Georgia

Carolin Funke

“I really enjoyed reading this monograph…. This book is much more than  area studies research on Georgia as this volume is likely to bear theoretical implications generalizable beyond the Georgian case study. Empirical data collected through ethnographic participant observation, elite interviews, and focus groups is rich and fascinating.” • Huseyn Aliyev, University of Glasgow

Volume 44, Forced Migration

Read Introduction

Reconciliation Road

Willy Brandt, Ostpolitik and the Quest for European Peace

Benedikt Schoenborn

Maybe the parties involved in negotiating an end to the war in Ukraine can revisit some of Brandt’s creative thinking and personal gestures as inspiring examples for the beginnings of a new reconciliation. They can use Benedikt Schoenborn’s excellent study of reconciliation and Ostpolitik as their guide.” • H Diplo

Volume 25, Studies in Contemporary European History

Read Introduction

On Mediation

Historical, Legal, Anthropological and International Perspectives

Edited by Karl Härter, Carolin Hillemanns and Günther Schlee

“A very nice compilation of interesting articles on mediation and related practices of third-party conflict regulation from various perspectives, including legal, anthropological, sociological, historical, psychological and philosophical perspective.” • Daniel Girsberger, University of Lucerne

Volume 22, Integration and Conflict Studies

Read Introduction

Paperback Available

Peaceful Selves

Personhood, Nationhood, and the Post-Conflict Moment in Rwanda

Laura Eramian

“This is richly detailed and an often startling ethnography with sharp insights and resonance for learning about post-conflict moments and the potential future for settings within, and far beyond, modern Rwanda.” • Conflict & Society

2019 CANADIAN ANTHROPOLOGY SOCIETY LABRECQUE-LEE BOOK PRIZE HONORABLE MENTION

Read Introduction


For more content, you can browse our Peace and Conflict subject page here.


National Cinema Day UK

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This Saturday 31st of August, cinemas across the UK will be offering largely discounted tickets in celebration of National Cinema Day, sharing the experience and enjoyment of the big screen with audiences.

In the spirit of this day, we have compiled our latest titles in cinema studies below.

For more content, you can browse our Film & Television subject page here.


Paperback Available

Hotbeds of Licentiousness

The British Glamour Film and the Permissive Society

Benjamin Halligan

“Halligan thrives when exploring a text’s cultural contradictions and the cracks in the philosophies underpinning the work. However, the book’s greatest asset is in taking these films (which rarely appear in most histories of British cinema) seriously.” • Choice

Read Introduction

Science on Screen and Paper

Media Cultures and Knowledge Production in Cold War Europe

Edited by Mariana Ivanova and Juliane Scholz

“With a focus on global scientific culture during the Cold War, this anthology incisively demonstrates how scientific media were never simply transparent tools for research or pedagogy, but also crucial components within powerful geopolitical institutions.” • Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa, Seattle University.

Read Introduction

Documenting Socialism

East German Documentary Cinema

Edited by Seán Allan and Sebastian Heiduschke

More than 30 years after the collapse of the German Democratic Republic, its cinema continues to attract scholarly attention. Documenting Socialism moves beyond the traditionally analyzed feature film production and places East Germany’s documentary cinema at the center of history behind the Iron Curtain. Covering questions of gender, race and sexuality and the complexities of diversity under the political and cultural environments of socialism, the specialist contributions in this volume cohere into an introductory milestone on documentary film production in the GDR.

Read Introduction

Open Access

Migration, Dislocation and Movement on Screen

Edited by Ruxandra Trandafoiu

Contemporary screen industries such as film and television have become primary sites for visualizing borders, migration, maps, and travel as processes of separation and dislocation, but also connection. Migration, Dislocation and Movement on Screen pulls case studies in film and television industries from throughout Europe, North Africa, and Asia to interrogate the nature of movement via moving images. By combining theoretical, interdisciplinary engagements with empirical research, this volume offers a new way to look at screen media’s representations of our contemporary world’s transnational and cosmopolitan imaginaries.

Read Introduction

To be published October 2024

Kubrick’s Mitteleuropa

The Central European Imaginary in the Films of Stanley Kubrick

Edited by Nathan Abrams and Jeremi Szaniawski

“With some fascinating insights into an unusual topic new to Kubrick studies, this wide-ranging collection of essays firmly and persuasively situates Stanley Kubrick’s work in the art and culture of Central Europe.” • Robert Kolker, the University of Maryland, author of A Cinema of Loneliness, co-author of Kubrick: An Odyssey

Enchanted by Cinema

Wilhelm Thiele between Vienna, Berlin, and Hollywood

Edited by Jan-Christopher Horak and Andréas-Benjamin Seyfert

William Thiele is remembered today as the father of the sound film operetta with seminal classics such as Drei von der Tankstelle (1930). While often considered among the most accomplished directors of Late Weimar cinema, as an Austrian Jew he was vilified during the onset of the Nazi regime in 1933 and fled to the United States where he continued making films until the end of his career in 1960. Enchanted by Cinema closely examines the European musical film pioneer’s work and his cross-cultural perspective across forty years of filmography in Berlin and Hollywood to account for his popularity while discussing issues of ethnicity, exile, comedy, music, gender, and race.

Read Introduction

Cinematically Transmitted Disease

Eugenics and Film in Weimar and Nazi Germany

Barbara Hales

Propaganda played an essential role in influencing the attitudes and policies of German National Socialism on racial purity and euthanasia, but little has been said on the impact of medical hygiene films. Cinematically Transmitted Disease explores these films for the first time, from their inception during the Weimar era and throughout the years to come. In this innovative volume, author Barbara Hales demonstrates how medical films as well as feature films were circulated among the German people to embed and enforce notions of scientific legitimacy for racial superiority and genetically spread “incurable” diseases, creating and maintaining an instrumental fear of degradation in the German national population.

Read Introduction

Edges of Noir

Extreme Filmmaking in the 1960s

Michael Mirabile

Edges of Noir challenges the notion that noir film nearly vanished after 1958 until its subsequent “neo-noir” revival between 1973 and 1981. The 1960s, regardless of critical neglect, include some of the most provocative films of the post-World War II decades. Often formally disruptive and experimental, films including Shock Corridor (1963), Mirage (1965), The 3rd Voice (1960), and Point Blank (1967) evoke controversial issues of the era, deriving dynamic influences amongst exploitation cinema, sensationalistic American B movies, and the European New Wave movement. Whether the focus is on nuclear destruction, mind control, or surveillance, late noir films, above all else, vividly portray the collective fears from the time.

Read Introduction

Stories between Tears and Laughter

Popular Czech Cinema and Film Critics

Richard Vojvoda

While histories of Czech cinema often highlight the quality of Czechoslovak New Wave films made in the 1960s, post-socialist Czech cinema receives little attention. Through a methodology of historical reception, Stories between Tears and Laughter explores how attitudes towards post-socialist Czech cinema have shifted but still viewed it as popular cinema. By analysing publicity materials, reviews and articles, Richard Vojvoda offers a new perspective on the notions of cultural value and quality that have been shaping the history of post-socialist Czech cinema.

Read Introduction

Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe

From Communism to Capitalism

Edited by Masha Shpolberg and Lukas Brasiskis

“This collection provides a comprehensive analysis of Eastern European film culture and ecocinema, integrating them expertly to provide a deep historical and geocultural analysis of variations in ecocinematic representations and the ways these film cultures have been engaging with environmental matters. The contextualization of existing scholarship with the particularities of Eastern European political and cultural history is exciting and innovative.” • Pietari Kaapa, University of Warwick

Read Introduction

The Cinematic Language of Theo Angelopoulos

Vrasidas Karalis

“This illuminating book offers a powerful synthesizing account of the films of Theo Angelopoulos by framing them within a biographical context. By positioning Angelopoulos’ work within an array of philosophical, cinematic, and art-historical contexts, the author brings us closer to Angelopoulos’ existential, political, philosophical and aesthetic quests.” • Lydia Papadimitriou, Liverpool John Moores University

Read Introduction


For more content, you can browse our Film & Television subject page here.


Berghahn Journals

SCREEN BODIES
The Journal of Embodiment, Media Arts, and Technology

Editor: Andrew Ball, Emerson College

Current Issue: Volume 9, Issue 1 (June 2024)

Women’s Equality Day

Women’s Equality Day is celebrated each year on August 26th to commemorate the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, granting women the right to vote.

Today the observance of Women’s Equality Day has grown to mean much more than just sharing the right to the vote, but also calls attention to women’s continuing efforts toward full equality. Numerous International organisations continue to work to provide women across the globe with equal opportunities to education and employment, pushing against suppression and violence towards women and against the discrimination and stereotyping which still occur in every society. For more information on the history and for further resources please visit www.nwhp.org


To be published in November 2024

BECOMING GOOD WOMEN

Schooling, Aspirations and Imagining the Future Among Female Students in Sri Lanka

Laura Shamali Batatota

Volume 7, Lifeworlds: Knowledges, Politics, Histories

For female Sinhalese students attending a national school in the Central Province of Sri Lanka, the school serves as a significant base for cultural production, particularly in reproducing ethno-religious hegemony under the guise of ‘good’ Buddhist girls. It illustrates that tuition space acts as an important site for placemaking, where students play out their cosmopolitan aspirations whilst acquiring educational capital. Drawing on theories of social reproduction, the book examines young people’s aspirations of ‘figuring out’ their identity and visions of the future in the backdrop of nation-building processes within the school.

Open Access

BLACK SCHOOLGIRLS IN SPACE

Stories of Black Girlhoods Gathered on Educational Terrain

Edited by Esther O. Ohito and Lucía Mock Muñoz de Luna

Volume 7, Transnational Girlhoods

Locating Black girls’ desires, needs, knowledge bases, and lived experiences in relation to their social identities has become increasingly important in the study of transnational girlhoods. Black Schoolgirls in Space pushes this discourse even further by exploring how Black girls negotiate and navigate borders of blackness, gender, and girlhood in educational spaces. The contributors of this collected volume highlight Black girls as actors and agents of not only girlhood but also the larger, transnational educational worlds in which their girlhoods are contained.

Read Introduction

STATE INTIMACIES

Sterilization, Care and Reproductive Chronicity in Rural North India

Eva Fiks

Volume 4, Lifeworlds: Knowledges, Politics, Histories

“The book draws on detailed ethnographic research and is rich with empirical details that are framed within larger debates on women’s health, care, and state formation. The introduction immediately draws in the reader. It is a well-written and well-researched book.” • Lipika Kamra, Jindal Global University

Read Introduction

CONTESTED FEMININITIES

Representations of Modern Women in the German Illustrated Press, 1920-1960

Jennifer Lynn

In this comprehensive, long-view study on the concept of the Neue or Moderne Frau (New or Modern Woman) that spans the Weimar Republic, Third Reich, post-war period, and a divided Germany, Contested Femininities explores how different political and social groups constructed images of women to present competing visions of the future. It takes the highly contested representations of women presented in the illustrated press and examines how they emerged as crucial markers of modernity. In doing so it reveals the surprising continuity of these images across political periods and reflects on how debates over paid work, the gender division of labor in the household, the politics of the body, and consumption, played a central role in how different German regimes defined the Modern Woman.

Read Introduction

Open Access

INVISIBLE LABOURS

The Reproductive Politics of Second Trimester Pregnancy Loss in England

Aimee Louise Middlemiss

Volume 54, Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives

“In this original and conceptually sophisticated project Middlemiss handles incredibly difficult interview material with extraordinary sensitivity and care. She does not shy away from difficult details but makes these often very raw stories more understandable through serious analytic work.” • Linda L. Layne, University of Cambridge

Read Introduction

GIRLS IN GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT

Figurations of Gendered Power

Edited by Heather Switzer, Karishma Desai, and Emily Bent

Volume 6, Transnational Girlhoods

“This collection is a well-imagined, important, incisive contribution to the fields of girlhood studies, development studies, and gender studies that deftly exposes the contradictions, complications, and limits of the “Girls in Development” paradigm and the ways it shapes the current landscape of development and thus the lives of girls around the world.” • Jessica Taft, University of California Santa Cruz

Read Introduction

Gender in Germany and Beyond

GENDER IN GERMANY AND BEYOND
Exploring the Legacy of Jean Quataert
Edited by Jennifer V. Evans and Shelley E. Rose

“This is a collection of excellent scholarly historical essay honoring the late professor Jean H. Quataert. The articles by her colleagues and her former students further explore research themes (labor, law, and human rights) that were especially important features of Quataert’s own scholarly development” • Karen Offen, Stanford University

Read Introduction

Girl in the Pandemic

Open Access

THE GIRL IN THE PANDEMIC
Transnational Perspectives
Edited by Claudia Mitchell and Ann Smith

Volume 5, Transnational Girlhoods

The Girl in the Pandemic makes a unique and much-needed contribution to the scholarship on Girlhood Studies in times of crises in different global contexts and particularly including scholarship from the global south and north.” • Relebohile Moletsane, University of KwaZulu-Natal

Read Introduction

Cosmopolitan Refugees

COSMOPOLITAN REFUGEES
Somali Migrant Women in Nairobi and Johannesburg
Nereida Ripero-Muñiz

Volume 44, Forced Migration

“This is a fine book that offers fascinating comparative material from two well-chosen locations to discuss the lives and identity of Somali women migrants in Kenya and South Africa. It is theoretically astute and contains much important ethnographic material. I can see it becoming a key reference for the study of Somali diaspora in particular, and diaspora and identity in general.”                 • Neil Carrier, University of Bristol

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Punching Back

PUNCHING BACK
Gender, Religion and Belonging in Women-Only Kickboxing
Jasmijn Rana

Volume 5, New Anthropologies of Europe: Perspectives and Provocations

“Jasmijn Rana has written an engaging, well-crafted and long-anticipated ethnography of the intersectionally gendered and racialized experience of Muslim Dutch women, drawn from her own apprenticeship in women-only kickboxing venues in the southern neighbourhoods of The Hague.” • Paul Silverstein, Reed College

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Paperback Available

WAITHOOD
Gender, Education, and Global Delays in Marriage and Childbearing
Edited by Marcia C. Inhorn and Nancy J. Smith-Hefner

Volume 47, Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives

“Using a wide range of qualitative and quantitative methods with participants from multiple countries, contributing authors find that there are multiple ways to understand the liminality implied by “waithood.”…This book could be used in courses on political science, women’s studies, sociology, and ethnic studies…Recommended” • Choice

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Berghahn Journals

Girlhood Studies
An Interdisciplinary Journal

Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal is a peer-reviewed journal providing a forum for the critical discussion of girlhood from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, and for the dissemination of current research and reflections on girls’ lives to a broad, cross-disciplinary audience of scholars, researchers, practitioners in the fields of education, social service and health care and policy makers.

Aspasia
The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History 

Special Issue: A Hundred Years of International Women’s Day in CESEE

Aspasia is the international peer-reviewed annual of women’s and gender history of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe (CESEE). It aims to transform European women’s and gender history by expanding comparative research on women and gender to all parts of Europe, creating a European history of women and gender that encompasses more than the traditional Western European perspective.


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