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…
General Editors: Simone Lässig, Director of the German Historical Institute, Washington, with the assistance of Patricia C. Sutcliffe, Editor, German Historical Institute.
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.
Editorial Committee: Jonathan D. Huener, University of Vermont, Susanna Schrafstetter, University of Vermont, and Alan E. Steinweis, University 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.
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.
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.
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.
The 9th of November is World Adoption Day! As described on the official website, “The day was created for the purpose of celebrating family, raising awareness for adoption and raising funds to support families in the adoption journey“. This year marks a decade since its creation. Read more from the organisation’s page here.
The first section of our blog is a collection of our latest titles relating to the studies of adoption, including books from the highlighted series, ranging from recent to backlist.
An Ethnopsychological Perspective on Kinship and Person in a Micronesian Society
Manuel Rauchholz
“It makes a unique contribution to our understanding of traditional child adoption, a topic that has received considerable attention from anthropologists working in Oceania, and especially in Micronesia.”• Donald H. Rubinstein, University of Guam
Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives on the Kazakh of Western Mongolia
Anna Odland Portisch
Telling the story of the author’s time living with a Kazakh family in a small village in western Mongolia, this book contextualizes the family’s personal stories within the broader history of the region. […] These are stories of migration across generations, bride kidnappings and marriage, domestic violence and alcoholism, adoption and family, and how people have coped in the face of political and economic crisis, poverty and loss, and, perhaps most enduringly, how love and family persist through all of this.
“This is an important book, which examines the practice of adoption from the perspective of an expert who has been exposed to the defective operation of a bureaucratic system. It re-examines critically and rigorously the role of social workers in adoption cases and it does so in a forceful and compelling way.”· Alon Harel, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
“This superb anthology extends the emphasis on technology that has become such a prominent feature of much recent anthropological work on kinship…In this richly ethnographic text, the most familiar problems produce the most unusual answers…Each chapter brilliantly combines kinship as a matrix with kinship as a tool, using ethnographic examples that leap off the page.” · Journal of Anthropological Research
Biological and Social Perspectives on Alloparenting in Human Societies
Edited by Gillian Bentley and Ruth Mace
“[This book] brings together high-quality papers from many different fields: endocrinology, evolutionary biology, demography, economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology… It can be seen as a practical tool for researchers in the field, and it provides a large amount of data across a wide range of populations and helps to find a common ground between theories emerging from different fields […]” · BioOne. Research Evolved
Reproductive Technology and the Shariah in Lebanon
Morgan Clarke
“Social scientists interested in any of these areas of study will benefit from familiarizing themselves with Clarke’s work. Those who are particularly interested in the study of reproductive technologies will find notions of milk kinship and adoption aversion useful in considering how ART is contextualized globally. Students of kinship will benefit from this text because it provides a case study of how a culturally relative approach to kinship enriches our understanding of the meanings and markers of the important relationships within a culture/religious tradition.” · Contemporary Sociology
Race, ethnicity and nation are all intimately linked to family and kinship, yet these links deserve closer attention than they usually get in social science, above all when family and kinship are changing rapidly in the context of genomic and biotechnological revolutions. Drawing on data from assisted reproduction, transnational adoption, mixed race families, Basque identity politics and post-Soviet nation-building, this volume provides new and challenging ways to understand race, ethnicity and nation.
Gender, Technology, and Biopolitics in the New Millennium
Edited by Marcia C. Inhorn
Reproductive disruptions, such as infertility, pregnancy loss, adoption, and childhood disability, are among the most distressing experiences in people’s lives. Based on research by leading medical anthropologists from around the world, this book examines such issues as local practices detrimental to safe pregnancy and birth; conflicting reproductive goals between women and men; miscommunications between pregnant women and their genetic counselors; cultural anxieties over gamete donation and adoption; the contested meanings of abortion; cultural critiques of hormone replacement therapy; and the globalization of new pharmaceutical and assisted reproductive technologies […]”.
“Transnational adoption is growing phenomenon and Norway has led the way in its legal and social development. In this pioneering study, Norwegian scholar, Signe Howell, brings to the subject not only anthropological insight but the personal experience of an adoptive parent. Her remarkable book is based on comprehensive research both in Norway and in the countries of origin of adopted children, throwing new light on the way that the children identify as Norwegians despite the tendency of adults to associate with their birth places. Howell’s findings are of great interest and significance for families and policy makers worldwide”. · John R. Gillis, Professor Emeritus of History, Rutgers University
The Culture of Policies and Practices in American Adoption
Judith S. Modell
“This book offers a thought-provoking exposition of the ironies of adoption, and by extension, the inconsistencies of our social attitudes toward parenting in general.” · Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare
General Editors: Soraya Tremayne, Founding Director, Fertility and Reproduction Studies Group and Research Affiliate, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford, Marcia C. Inhorn, William K. Lanman, Jr. Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs, Yale University, and Philip Kreager, Director, Fertility and Reproduction Studies Group, and Research Affiliate, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and Institute of Human Sciences, University of Oxford
Understanding the complex and multifaceted issue of human reproduction has been, and remains, of great interest both to academics and practitioners. This series includes studies by specialists in the field of social, cultural, medical, and biological anthropology, medical demography, psychology, and development studies. Current debates and issues of global relevance on the changing dynamics of fertility, human reproduction and sexuality are addressed.
Series Editors: Hayley MacGregor, Professor of Medical Anthropology and Global Health, Institute of Development Studies, and Ian Harper, Professor of Anthropology of Health and Development, University of Edinburgh
This series invites submissions (monographs or edited volumes) from scholars engaged in rethinking the ‘biosocial’ and the interconnectedness of biological and social dynamics in shaping human experience.
In recent years, significant changes and new phenomena such as the COVID-19 pandemic, advances in neurosciences and genetics, and concern about the anthropocene and global warming have advanced thinking about complex biosocial relations and the ways in which these come to be mutually constituted. Contemporary phenomena are also redefining the boundaries between the bio- and social sciences and the humanities. This involves a wide range of academic disciplines at the intersections of natural, ecological, medical and social sciences, as linked to social and biological anthropology, sociology, environmental studies, biomedicine, global health and also development studies.
We seek multiple perspectives, inter and cross-disciplinary conversations that value the varied contributions required to address our current global challenges across a diversity of regions. We are also interested in historical accounts and genealogies of the biosocial in different traditions. Thus the aim of this series is to make available to the informed public, undergraduates and postgraduate students the current and cutting edge research and debates that define these emergent parameters.
The series is supported by the RAI Biosocial Committee.
The 29th October 2024 is the International Day of Care and Support! As the United Nations explains, “Care work, both paid and unpaid, is crucial to the future of decent work. Growing populations, ageing societies, changing families, women’s secondary status in labour markets and shortcomings in social policies demand urgent action on the organization of care work from governments, employers, trade unions and individual citizens.” If not adequately addressed, current deficits in care service provision and its quality will create a severe and unsustainable global care crisis and increase gender inequalities at work.“.
Read more on the Care Economy and the International Day of Care and Support on UN’s page here.
The first section of our blog is a collection of our latest titles relating to the studies of care and support, including the more recent books from the highlighted series.
Latest Berghahn books in the study of care and support
Narratives of Vulnerable Populations and Their Caregivers
Edited by Cecilia Sem Obeng and Samuel Gyasi Obeng
“This book demonstrates that the anthropological approach is uniquely suited to uncovering how people live their lives and see their world without imposing judgment… Recommended.” • Choice
Stories of Refuge, Aid, and Repair in the Global South
Edited by Arzoo Osanloo & Cabeiri deBergh Robinson
“This volume is a timely and seminal contribution to understanding our time when humanitarian crisis unfolds in myriad forms in various sites. The perspectives on humanitarianism from the global South featured in this volume are both rich in their ethnographic grounding and multi-faceted in the analytical insights.”• Jiazhi Fengjiang, University of Edinburgh
How Self-Government, Infrastructures, and Care Transform the State in Serbia
André Thiemann
“This is a very impressive book. The analysis is developed in sustained, thoughtful and detailed engagement with a very broad range of existing literature.• Stef Jansen, University of Sarajevo
Sterilization, Care and Reproductive Chronicity in Rural North India
Eva Fiks
“Sterilization ‘camps’ have earned a bad press in India – and rightly so. Yet, as Eva Fiks demonstrates in her elegant intervention, coercion is entangled with care for village women contending with the reproductive chronicity that is integral to their daily lives.”• Patricia Jeffery, Professor Emerita, University of Edinburgh
“This is a theoretically solid book presenting unique data and perspectives on survival strategies in a broad meaning. The focus is on the most marginalized populations of the world, outlining local, long-term trajectories of their dealing with challenges and uncertainties.”• Jónína Einarsdóttir, University of Iceland
“The book provides remarkable insights into the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on front-line workers in North Carolina who care for the residential elderly (and) uses an excellent combination of ethnographic and epidemiological methods to provide in-depth qualitative insights while contextualized by the larger quantitative world of disease transmission.”• Linda M. Whiteford, University of South Florida
“In this book Hadley lays bare the complex contexts surrounding aging and male childlessness in particular in a powerfully emotive and academically rigorous manner. The book contains a powerful message to those in academia and policymakers and institutional stakeholders, of the urgent need to acknowledge this structurally excluded population. The book is of interest not only to gerontologists but anthropologists, demographers, embryologists, psychologists, sociologists, practitioners in health and care, counsellors, social workers and students at all levels and the general public.”• British Society of Gerontology
Reconfiguring Kinship along Gender and Generational Lines
Carolin Leutloff-Grandits
“This book is based on careful and in-depth ethnographic research, and it expertly embeds its findings in patterns on broader historical and geographical scales. The book displays all the hallmarks of high-quality anthropological research.”• Stef Jansen, University of Sarajevo
“This is a really good, in fact vital, contribution to our understanding of aged care. This is an opinion enhanced in part by the political context, at least in Australia, in which aged care is being discussed. In this country, which has an aging population and inadequate quality and quantity of aged care facilities, an opportunity exists to ask different kinds of questions – one of which might be about being at home in an institutional home”.• Simone Dennis, Università di Bologna
Rethinking Aging and Caregiving in Contemporary East Asian Societies
Edited by Jeanne Shea, Katrina Moore and Hong Zhang
“This is a fascinating book which inspires us with new insights and deep thoughts. Through the description of the subjective practice of caregiving and the discourse of positive aging, the book has in fact come back to the essence of filial piety, focusing on subjectivity, dignity, love, responsibility, harmony and continuity in families, communities and the state, which is beyond social transformations and challenges of time.”• Asian Journal of Social Studies
“Overall, this volume offers valuable empirical and theoretical contributions to the anthropology of care and transnational families. It is highly recommended reading for students and scholars seeking insights into novel care practices and care relations in this fast-changing field.”• International Journal of Care and Caring
An Ethnography of Healthcare and Decision-Making in Bhutan
Jonathan Taee
“This book is a welcome pioneering ethnography based on case studies that demonstrate a clear understanding of the way in which public health care services in Bhutan integrate both biomedical and ’traditional’ medicine.”• Mona Schrempf, Free University, Berlin
click to expand on… Editors: Robbie Davis-Floyd, Rice University, Houston and Ashish Premkumar, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University
Robbie Davis-Floyd PhD, Adjunct Professor, Dept. of Anthropology, Rice University, Houston, Fellow of the Society for Applied Anthropology, and Senior Advisor to the Council on Anthropology and Reproduction, is a well-known medical/reproductive anthropologist and international speaker and researcher in transformational models in childbirth, midwifery, obstetrics, and reproduction.
Ashish PremkumarMD is an Assistant Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, as well as a maternal-fetal medicine subspecialist practicing at the John H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital of Cook County, Illinois. He is also a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at The Graduate School at Northwestern University.
Obstetricians are the primary drivers of the research on and the implementation of interventions in the birth process that have long been the subjects of anthropological critiques. In many countries, they are also primary drivers of violence, disrespect, and abuse during the perinatal period. Yet there is little social science literature on obstetricians themselves, their educational processes, and their personal rationales for their practices. Thus, this dearth of social science literature on obstetricians constitutes a huge gap waiting to be filled. These ground-breaking edited collections seek to fill that gap by officially creating an “anthropology of obstetrics and obstetricians” across countries and cultures—including biopolitical and professional cultures—so that a broad and deep understanding of these maternity care providers and their practices, ideologies, motivations, and diversities can be achieved.
General Editors: Soraya Tremayne, Founding Director, Fertility and Reproduction Studies Group and Research Affiliate, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford, Marcia C. Inhorn, William K. Lanman, Jr. Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs, Yale University, and Philip Kreager, Director, Fertility and Reproduction Studies Group, and Research Affiliate, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and Institute of Human Sciences, University of Oxford
Understanding the complex and multifaceted issue of human reproduction has been, and remains, of great interest both to academics and practitioners. This series includes studies by specialists in the field of social, cultural, medical, and biological anthropology, medical demography, psychology, and development studies. Current debates and issues of global relevance on the changing dynamics of fertility, human reproduction and sexuality are addressed.
A few more of our titles not shown in latest books section above:
Volume 44
Privileges of Birth: Constellations of Care, Myth, and Race in South Africa by Jennifer J. M. Rogerson
Volume 38
Reconceiving Muslim Men: Love and Marriage, Family and Care in Precarious Times, edited by Marcia C. Inhorn and Nefissa Naguib
Ageing Without Children: European and Asian Perspectives on Elderly Access to Support Networks, edited by Philip Kreager and Elisabeth Schröder-Butterfill
General Editor: Jacqueline Waldren (1937-2021), was Research Associate at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Oxford University and Director, Deia Archaeological Museum and Research Centre, Mallorca.
Migration, modernization, technology, tourism, and global communication have had dynamic effects on group identities, social values and conceptions of space, place, and politics. This series features new and innovative ethnographic studies concerned with these processes of change.
An additional title to those shown in latest books section above:
The consequences of aging will influence most areas of contemporary life around the globe, from the makeup of households and communities and systems of care to attitudes toward health, disability and life’s end. Engaging a cross-cultural framework, this series publishes monographs and collected works that examine these widespread transformations with a perspective on the entire life course and a particular focus on mid/late adulthood.
An additional title to those shown in latest books section above:
Volume 2
Unforgotten: Love and the Culture of Dementia Care in India by Bianca Brijnath
The 16th October 2024 is World Food Day! As the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations explains, “‘Foods’ stands for diversity, nutrition, affordability, accessibility and safety. A greater diversity of nutritious foods should be available in our fields, fishing nets, markets, and on our tables, for the benefit of all.” Read more from their page here.
Knowledge Reproduction and Political Economy of Cooking in Morocco
Katharina Graf
“An important contribution to the growing ethnographic literature on cooking and social life, Graf’s Food and Families in the Making stands out for its careful analysis and evocation of the senses (beyond just five), and for its well-developed autoethnography of learning cooking. A must-read for those interested in the social production of taste and in the most up-to-date approaches to sensory ethnography.”• David Sutton Southern Illinois University
“This is a valuable addition to the anthropology of food and interdisciplinary food studies. The volume’s contributors analyze a wealth of interesting phenomena from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives.”• Giovanni Orlando, Food sustainability consultant
“The book provides a detailed and dense study of eating-feeding practices spread among school-age children, their parents and their school environment in post-transitional Poland. The book is very interesting, much needed and refers to the important dimension of late capitalist systems in Central Eastern Europe.”• Tomasz Rakowski, University of Warsaw
Production, Exchange and Consumption in West African Migration
Maria Abranches
“This ethnographically and theoretically rich volume provides an understanding of how people and their food transform their space. Recommended.”• Choice
“This is an excellent book, ‘a little gem’, which provides a highly original contribution to both the fields of anthropology of wine and of postsocialist economies by focusing on an under-researched area.”• Marion Demossier, University of Southampton
“With writing that is highly readable, clear, and well-paced, this book will appeal to students and scholars alike, especially those studying food and cooking, Greece, and risk, and is an exceptional example of studying food practices for their theoretical bounty.”• Food, Culture & Society
The matsutake mushroom continues to be a highly sought delicacy, especially in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean cuisine. Matsutake Worlds explores this mushroom through the lens of multi-species encounters centered around the matsutake’s notorious elusiveness. The mushroom’s success, the contributors of this volume argue, cannot be accounted for by any one cultural, social, political, or economic process. Rather, the matsutake mushroom has flourished as the result of a number of different processes and dynamics, culminating in the culinary institution we know today.
Edited by Angela N. H. Creager and Jean-Paul Gaudillière
“The editors have brought together enough international work to form a broad picture of changes in the global food system. This is an extremely welcome view of how those changes were received in different places at different times.”• Technology and Culture
“The nuanced discussion of the Nyanja concepts of nourishment, as it relates to the dietary quality of vitamina (vitamins) ascribed to certain foods and as dependent on ‘interdependence, cooperative labor, compassion, and moral intelligence’, is thoughtful and challenging…Recommended.”• Choice
“Nourishing the Nation: Food as National Identity in Catalonia presents a captivating and compelling ethnographic study centered on Catalonia, exploring nationalist movements and tangible cultural aspects. This book holds immense appeal for students across diverse fields within the social sciences, effectively connecting history, anthropology, and even political science. Furthermore, the book showcases innovation and creativity by employing photo-elicitation as a method in ethnographic research. Despite its theoretical sophistication, the book maintains an approachable and engaging style, making it accessible even to the general public with an interest in understanding Catalonia’s rich history, and how the Catalans’ take pride with their gastronomic tradition.”• Anthropology Book Forum
Edited by Paul Collinson, Iain Young, Lucy Antal, and Helen Macbeth
“[This book] provides a holistic understanding of food-related activities and behaviour … both theoretical and empirical arguments are covered in a balanced manner. The volume takes cognisance of the ‘minutiae of food experiences’ (p. 19) of people with respect to sustainability, cutting across the globe.”• European Association of Social Anthropologists Journal
“One of the ethnography’s strengths lies in the theoretical frameworks that are used to delve further into the construction of a good that circulates globally and whose value is closely associated with a heritage site. Another is the author’s long-term engagement with the region: this insider status offers a unique perspective on groups of people who are not easy to access… I would recommend this book for both graduate and undergraduate teaching. The chapters stand well on their own and the volume as a whole offers an excellent example of long-term ethnographic research.”• JRAI
Editors: Janet Chrzan, University of Pennsylvania and John A. Brett, University of Colorado Denver
Published in Association with the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition (SAFN) and in Collaboration with Rachel Black and Leslie Carlin
The dramatic increase in all things food in popular and academic fields during the last two decades has generated a diverse and dynamic set of approaches for understanding the complex relationships and interactions that determine how people eat and how diet affects culture. These volumes offer a comprehensive reference for students and established scholars interested in food and nutrition research in Nutritional and Biological Anthropology, Archaeology, Socio-Cultural and Linguistic Anthropology, Food Studies and Applied Public Health.
Click to expand: Reviews
“I feel that this set will be exceptionally useful not only for anthropologists, but also for ethnographers, demographers, and others conducting research within food systems and food studies. With the burgeoning interest in food research at all levels, and with new graduate programs in the field, this book has the potential to be a crucial resource for scholars in the field… I look forward to requiring this as reading for my graduate students and advanced undergraduates.”· Teresa Mares, University of Vermont
“Unlike other resources I’ve come across, this set covers methods used in the traditional four fields of anthropology, ranging from highly quantitative and scientific oriented research to qualitative, culture oriented work… These volumes function as inclusive how-to manuals, providing examples of different questions each type of research might address as well as their limitations. Each chapter includes a helpful, extensive bibliography.”· Amy Bentley, New York University
“This set offers a comprehensive overview of methods across the discipline and beyond, providing readers with basic (and in some cases advanced) insights into why particular methods are useful and how those methods can be implemented… This is an unparalleled and comprehensive collection.”· David Beriss, University of New Orleans
Vol. 3, Food Health: Nutrition, Technology, and Public Health
Vol. 2, Food Culture: Anthropology, Linguistics and Food Studies
Vol. 1, Food Research: Nutritional Anthropology and Archaeological Methods
Series Editor: Helen Macbeth, Oxford Brookes University
Eating is something all humans must do to survive, but it is more than a biological necessity. Producing food, foraging, distributing, shopping, cooking and, of course, eating itself are all are deeply inscribed as cultural acts. This series brings together the broad range of perspectives on human food, encompassing social, cultural and nutritional aspects of food habits, beliefs, choices and technologies in different regions and societies, past and present. Each volume features cross-disciplinary and international perspectives on the topic of its title. This multidisciplinary approach is particularly relevant to the study of food-related issues in the contemporary world.
Series Editors: Jakob Klein, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and Melissa L. Caldwell, University of California, Santa Cruz
While eating is a biological necessity, the production, distribution, preparation, consumption, and disposal of food are all deeply culturally inscribed activities. Taking an anthropological perspective, this book series provides a forum for critically engaged, ethnographically grounded work on the cultural, social, political, economic, and ecological aspects of human nutrition and food habits. The monographs and edited collections in this series present timely, food-related scholarship intended for researchers, academics, students, and those involved in food policy, businesses, and activism. Covering a wide range of topics, geographic regions and mobilities across regions, the series decenters dominant, often western-centered approaches and assumptions in food studies.
A few more of our titles not shown above:
Berghahn Journals
Enjoy FREE Access to the following articles until Oct 23!Use code FOODDAY. Redemption details here: bit.ly/3F5lmqg
As described by the International Union of Architects, “World Architecture Day (WAD), created by the International Union of Architects (UIA) in 1985, is celebrated annually on the first Monday of October. This day coincides with the United Nations World Habitat Day, aligning the architectural community’s efforts with global urban development goals.”. This year’s theme is ‘Empowering the next generation to participate in urban design’. Read more from their page here.
In the spirit of this day, we have compiled some of our Architecture titles below, spanning across subjects, with free to read introductions.
Bodily, geographic, and architectural sites are embedded with cultural knowledge and social value. This series provides ethnographically rich analyses of the cultural organization and meanings of these sites of space, architecture, landscape, and places of the body. Contributions examine the symbolic meanings of space and place, the cultural and historical processes involved in their construction and contestation, and how they communicate with wider political, religious, social, and economic institutions.
The Yenidze Cigarette Factory of 1909 was constructed as an industrial, architectural object that advertised Dresden as a center for the tobacco trade. Born from a unique client-architect relationship between Hugo Zietz and Martin Hammitzsch, the factory’s importance to modernism has been understated. Smoke and Mirrors uncovers the history of the factory’s planning, design, and construction, and for the first time, apart from the building’s historical narrative, positions this addition to Dresden’s skyline within the formative histories of the modern movement.
Edited by Ulrike Spring, Johan Schimanski and Thea Aarbakke
“This is a fine and rich collection of essays on the topic of the literary museum, notably on the writer’s house museum. It offers engaging perspectives and new horizons that in the international scholarship on this topic will be highly appreciated.”• Harald Hendrix, University of Utrecht
Anthropological Perspectives on Changing Practices of Dwelling and Building
Edited by Jonathan Alderman and Rosalie Stolz
“An interesting and worthwhile collection, covering a wide range of different themes relating to change and transformation related to the house.”• Monica Janowski, University of London
Architecture, Material Culture and the Workhouse under the New Poor Law
Charlotte Newman and Katherine Fennelly
“This is an excellent and fascinating examination of how archaeology can inform the study of poverty in nineteenth century England. The work takes as its focus the exploration of workhouses and how the analysis of the built material culture can aid our understanding of them. It exemplifies the value of using detailed case studies to interrogate and critique national models and understandings of social experience. To tell, what Hicks and Beaudry have called, ‘stories that matter’.”• Matthew Jenkins, University of York
“While there has been an exponential growth in the literature on refugees and forced migration over the past decade, the issue of shelter has received very little attention. This volume fills that important gap in an admirable manner.”• Jeff Crisp, University of Oxford
Edited by A.-Chr Engels-Schwarzpaul, Lana Lopesi, and Albert L. Refiti
“The authors make an important contribution to understanding spatial relationships within indigenous communities. The book highlights an important, and often overlooked, connection between space, time, and the built environment by breaking the disciplinary bounds that often confine our understandings.”• Jamon Alex Halvaksz, University of Texas at San Antonio
Nordic Maritime Museums’ Portrayals of Shipping, Seafarers and Maritime Communities
Annika Bünz
A characteristic trait of the maritime museums is that they are often located in a contemporary and/or historical environment from which the collections and narratives originate. The museum can thereby be directly linked to the site and its history. It is therefore vital to investigate the maritime museums in terms of relationships between landscape, architecture, museum and collections. This volume unravels the kinds of worlds and realities the Nordic maritime museums stage, which identities and national myths they depict, and how they make use of both the surrounding maritime environments and the architectural properties of the museum buildings.
National Narratives, Monument Preservation and Architectural Work in the Nineteenth Century
Edited by Dragan Damjanović and Aleksander Łupienko
“The book Forging Architectural Tradition is an excellent contribution for anyone interested in the creation of national narratives around architectural buildings. It is suitable for architects, art historians, historians, sociologists, cultural researchers, and the general cultural public, as well as anyone interested in the national narratives of ‘small’ nations. The topics explored in the book should not be viewed as a part of the distant past but as still current as the historical processes described in the book can help us deal with problems related to the politicization of heritage that is still evident today.”• Prostor
Poetry, Architecture, and Coloniality at the Open City
Maxwell Woods
“At the heart of the project are the politics of avant-gardism and of the brutally repressive dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. Though not an easy read, this is certainly a volume that specialists in visionary experiments of the 20th century will want to take into account…Recommended.”• Choice
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.
“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
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
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
“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)
“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
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)
“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
“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
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
“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
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)
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
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
“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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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
“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
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
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.
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.
“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
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.
“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
“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
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
“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
“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
“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
“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
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 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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Happy Women in Translation Month! Initiated in 2014 by Meytal Radzinski, this year marks the 10-year anniversary of this celebration. WIT Month is an international and inclusive project that aims to get the voices of women — writing in languages other than English — heard, shared and discussed. There is a large gender disparity in translated literature, as demonstrated on the graphs below*. For example, women make up, at most, 34% of translated literature, and only 36% of writing translated into English comes from non-European countries, highlighting the necessary intersectionality of this project.
In honour of this month, we have compiled a collection of some of our titles featuring women in translation down below. These range from women’s narratives to academic research and essays.
*These figures are from the official WIT website but lacks dating. For more information, and an incredible list of further resources, please visit Women in Translation.
Debating German State Crimes in the Long Twentieth Century
Annette Weinke Translated from the German by Nicholas Evangelos Levis
“This book is complicated, and not for the beginner. It covers much ground, and quickly. Weinke does not so much create a usable narrative as destroy usable, but unfortunately inaccurate, narratives. Her book should be required reading for anyone producing new scholarship in these fields.”• Journal of Modern History
The Rediscovery and Commemoration of Russia’s Repressive Past
Zuzanna Bogumił Translated from the Polish by Philip Palmer
“[The book’s] considerable value as a contribution to Soviet and post‐Soviet memory studies is undeniable. Bogumił’s work should become a must‐read for everyone who works in the field of the memory of political repressions.”• Soviet & Post-Soviet Politics & Society
Identity and Ambivalence among the Eurasian Macanese
Marisa C. Gaspar Translated by Roopanjali Roy
“Focusing on the manipulation of language and food, Marisa Gaspar’s monograph constitutes obligatory reading for anyone who is puzzled by the way in which the past challenges the future and vice versa”.• João Pina-Cabral, University of Kent
Marie Cartier, Isabelle Coutant, Olivier Masclet, and Yasmine Siblot Translated by Juliette Rogers
“[The volume] shows the value of investigating middle-class Western neighborhoods and especially of the historical changes in such sites. The study is a contribution to the anthropology of Europe as well as to urban anthropology and to the anthropology of class, and it usefully complicates and even debunks some preconceptions about suburban life, immigration, class, and politics.”• Anthropology Review Database
Gabriele Herz Translated by Hildegard Herz and Howard Hartig
“These memoirs by Gabriele Herz have great significance in that they describe the experiences of a Jewish woman as well as that of non-Jewish prisoners, as seen by her, during the early years of national-socialist internment policy. In this sense it is a rare document of the literature of memories.” · H-Soz.-u.Kult
“Jesenská’s essays offer firsthand observations on a society that was slowly imploding between the years 1920 and 1939 [and] will certainly encourage lively classroom debates (especially in women’s studies, political science and history courses) concerning politics, the condition of women, and social problems of yesterday and today.” · Slavic and East European Journal
Translated, edited, and annotated by Hanna Ballin Lewis
“… if the reader wishes to hear the street cries of the revolution, climb the barricades …, experience the hopes and anxieties of a city gripped with political uncertainty and stripped of its trees from the boulevards, and witness the actress Rachel Felix sing the Marseillaise at the end of her performance …, then this is the book to buy.” · French History
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 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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For updates on these and other Berghahn titles as well as all other exciting developments from Berghahn Books, become a Facebook fan, follow us