Selected eBooks: 2019

Racism after Apartheid, volume four of the Democratic Marxism series, brings together leading scholars and activists from around the world studying and challenging racism. In eleven thematically rich and conceptually informed chapters, the contributors interrogate the complex nexus of questions surrounding race and relations of oppression as they are played out in the global South and global North. Their work challenges Marxism and anti-racism to take these lived realities seriously and consistently struggle to build human solidarities.

With machines mediating most of our cultural practices, and innovations, obsolescence and revivals constantly transforming our relation with images and sounds, media feel more unstable than ever. But was there ever a 'stable' moment in media history? Inventing Cinema proposes to approach this question through an archaeology and epistemology of media machines. The archaeology analyses them as archives of users' gestures, as well as of modes of perception.

Botticelli gave us some of the most stunning Renaissance masterpieces. Paintings like Primavera and The Birth of Venus are as beloved today as at the time of their creation, as evidenced by recent exhibitions around the world. Botticelli's influence and innovations also continue to inspire interest and passionate debate among art historians and lovers of art.

Ethics, Politics and Justice in Dante presents new research on ethics, politics, and justice in the works of Dante Alighieri, including chapters on Dante's conception of the afterlife. Contributors scrutinize the Divine Comedy and Dante's other works in Italian and Latin, showing the evolution of his thought throughout his writing career, with chapters focusing especially on his early philosophical Convivio and on the two "Eclogues" of his final years. Other chapters tackle themes relating to judgment, justice, rhetoric, and literary ethics in the Divine Comedy, as well as the differing public reception and use of Dante's work in Italy and Britain.  

A cultural, social, and medical history of migraine. For centuries, people have talked of a powerful bodily disorder called migraine, which currently affects about a billion people around the world. Yet until now, the rich history of this condition has barely been told. In Migraine, award-winning historian Katherine Foxhall reveals the ideas and methods that ordinary people and medical professionals have used to describe, explain, and treat migraine since the Middle Ages. Touching on classical theories of humoral disturbance and medieval bloodletting, Foxhall also describes early modern herbal remedies, the emergence of neurology, and evolving practices of therapeutic experimentation.

Eva is a coming-of-age story told in fluid, stream-of-consciousness prose that takes readers through the eponymous main character's orthodox Jewish girlhood to marriage to, finally, independence and sexual freedom. Burdened all of her life by feelings of shame, Eva overcomes this legacy of her upbringing at the end of the novel and declares that it is "bodily desire that makes love acceptable.

#identity is among the first scholarly books to address the positive and negative effects of Twitter on our contemporary world.

Since its inception in 2001, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has been met with resistance by various African states and their leaders, who see the court as a new iteration of colonial violence and control. In Affective Justice Kamari Maxine Clarke explores the African Union's pushback against the ICC in order to theorize affect's role in shaping forms of justice in the contemporary period. By detailing the effects of the ICC's all-African indictments, she outlines how affective responses to these call into question the "objectivity" of the ICC's mission to protect those victimized by violence and prosecute perpetrators of those crimes. In analyzing the effects of such cases, Clarke provides a fuller theorization of how people articulate what justice is and the mechanisms through which they do so.

Brenda R. Weber argues that mediated Mormonism contests and reconfigures collective notions of gender, sexuality, race, spirituality, capitalism, justice, and individualism. Focusing on Mormonism as both a meme and an analytic, Weber analyzes a wide range of contemporary media produced by those within and those outside of the mainstream and fundamentalist Mormon churches, from reality television to feature films, from blogs to YouTube videos, and from novels to memoirs by people who struggle to find agency and personhood in the shadow of the church's teachings. The broad archive of mediated Mormonism contains socially conservative values, often expressed through neoliberal strategies tied to egalitarianism, meritocracy, and self-actualization, but it also offers a passionate voice of contrast on behalf of plurality and inclusion.

This book explores the politics, personalities, and social histories that linked fieldwork in Egypt with the varied organizations around the world that received finds. By juxtaposing a diversity of sites for the reception of Egyptian cultural heritage over the period of a century, this book presents new ideas about the development of archaeology, museums and the construction of Egyptian heritage.