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Humanities & Social SciencesFebruary 2026Monasticism and renewal in southern Italy
The Chronicle of Montecassino by Leo Marsicanus, c. 529–1075
by Graham Loud
The chronicle of Leo Marsicanus recounts the history of the abbey of Montecassino from its foundation by St. Benedict in the sixth-century up to 1075. It presents a detailed and compelling story of tribulation and renewal, with the abbey twice destroyed and abandoned in the early Middle Ages and then rebuilt. It concludes with an informative account of the building and dedication of the new abbey church by Abbot Desiderius in 1066-71. The chronicle is also a key source for the more general history of southern Italy in the early Middle Ages, and of the conquest of the region by the Normans during the eleventh century. In addition, Montecassino was one of the great intellectual centres of western Christendom and a major contributor to the reform movement within the Church during the later eleventh century. Leo's chronicle is a crucial witness to that role.
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2024My Italy with Berlusconi
And what has become of it. Essays, conversations, reports
by Michaela Namuth
The political era of media entrepreneur and multi-billionaire Silvio Berlusconi began in 1994. German journalist Michaela Namuth also arrived in Rome at that time. He became prime minister, she became a freelance correspondent for various newspapers. She spent the long period of his government with him. During this time, the populist Berlusconi not only paved the way for a far-right government, he was also an ice-breaker for other right-wing populists in Europe and elsewhere. What else happened during and after Berlusconi's time in power is told in 20 chapters of articles, reports and interviews. The result is a colourful mosaic of contemporary Italy. It is about publishing, design, crime fiction, the mafia, a women's factory, the south and Nutella. Under Berlusconi, the country has changed. Many speak of “Berlusconisation”, by which they mean the gradual weakening of democracy. It is a critical book, but also a declaration of love to a contradictory country whose name still has a special ring to many ears.
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2026The cultural politics of food in South Africa
Media, nourishment, inequality
by Mehita Iqani, Sarah Gibson
Food is both a material system of nourishment, necessary for human survival, and a communicative system that signifies multiple meanings across human cultures. This book explores the cultural politics of food in the South African context, bringing together a range of disciplinary perspectives on the links between media, nourishment, and inequality. The chapters all highlight the multiplicity of meanings that food has in South African society. These include historical perspectives on the impact of colonialism, migration and apartheid had on food and foodways in South Africa; sociological interventions on food and society; aesthetic practices in relation to food; and mediated food cultures in South Africa. Taken together, the book critically explores the multiple ways in which food is never just food, and always linked to complex and shifting modalities of meaning and knowledge in the South African context.
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Literature & Literary StudiesJune 2025Resistance and its discontents in South Asian women's fiction
by Maryam Mirza
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Humanities & Social SciencesNovember 2023
Rethinking Norman Italy
Studies in honour of Graham A. Loud
by Joanna Drell, Paul Oldfield
This volume on Norman Italy (southern Italy and Sicily, c. 1000-1200) honours and reflects the pioneering scholarship of Graham A. Loud. An international group of scholars reassesses and recasts the paradigm by which Norman Italy has been conventionally understood, addressing varied subjects across four key themes: historiographies, identities and communities, religion and Church, and conquest. The chapters revise and refine our understanding of Norman Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, demonstrating that it was not just a parochial Norman or Mediterranean entity but also an integral player in the medieval mainstream.
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Humanities & Social SciencesJanuary 2026United States and Chinese foreign assistance and diplomacy
Aid for dominance
by Salvador Santino Regilme, Obert Hodzi
Aid for Dominance addresses the analytic weaknesses of mainstream analysis of foreign aid, which often focuses on its material dimensions. The book underscores the constitutive relationship between foreign aid as a material resource and the diplomatic discourses and practices that constitute complex bilateral relations between donor and recipient states. Written by two leading scholars of contemporary United States and Chinese foreign policies in the Global South, Aid for Dominance offers a pioneering, theoretically conscious, and empirically rich account of the two great powers' grand strategies in the global development sector. By deploying a multidisciplinary and comparative analysis, this book draws from a wide range of evidentiary materials from primary sources, including data from fieldwork interviews, government documents, local and international newspapers, speeches by high-ranking government officials and diplomats, and secondary data from scholarly publications and policy papers.
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Business, Economics & LawJune 2025Southern interregnum
Remaking hegemony in Brazil, India, China, and South Africa
by Alf Gunvald Nilsen, Karl von Holdt, Ruy Braga, Ching Kwan Lee, Fabio Luis Barbosa dos Santos
How do governing elites in the global South attempt to remake hegemony in a conjuncture of durable crisis? This is the question at the core of Southern interregnum, a comparative conjunctural analysis of hegemonic projects in Brazil, India, China, and South Africa. Working with a Gramscian notion of crisis, centred on the interregnum as an enduring period of instability and uncertainty, in which hegemonic authority erodes and competing projects for crisis resolution emerge, the book proposes a novel critical reading of the convulsions that are currently reshaping the political economy of the global South and the world-system. Mapping the variegated trajectories of elite projects to reconcile accumulation and legitimation - and probing the limits of these projects - the book breaks new ground in the study of the contemporary global South.
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Literature & Literary StudiesJanuary 2013The towns of Italy in the later Middle Ages
by Trevor Dean
The towns of Italy in the later middle ages presents over one hundred fascinating documents, carefully selected and coordinated from the richest, most innovative and most documented society of the European Middle Ages. No other English language sourcebook has the same geographical or chronological range. This collection is carefully structured around the crisis of the fourteenth century and arranged in contrasting groups of texts. By connecting documents in translation to recent scholarship and debates, it addresses five key areas of medieval urban history: the physical environment, civic religion, economy, society and politics. Offers students well-translated and effectively contextualised documents along with some guidance to the secondary work of Italian scholars which is largely inaccessible to undergraduate students.
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The ArtsJanuary 2019Cinema - Italy
by Stefania Parigi, Des O'Rawe
A journey to the Italian cinema that overturns established views and opens up new perspectives and interpretations. Its itinerary is organized in four stages. The first is an analysis of the theories of Cesare Zavattini on neorealism which overturns widely accepted positions both on Zavattini and on neorealism. The second confronts a key film of the post-war Italian cinema, Roberto Rossellini's Paisà, by examining the nature of its realism. The third is dedicated to Luchino Visconti: to questions of the use of language exemplified in his La terra trema, the use of settings, costume and light as agents of meaning in his Il Gattopardo and Vaghe stelle dell'Orsa. The final voyage of the film is to the physical and symbolic construction of heaven and earth in the work of Pasolini. Particular attention is given to the representation of the body in his last four films: the grotesque and mythical bodies in popular tradition in his Trilogia di vita and the tortured bodies destroyed by the mass media in Salò.
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2023Socialist republic
Remaking the British left in 1980s Sheffield
by Daisy Payling
Socialist republic is a timely account of 1980s left-wing politics in South Yorkshire. It explores how Sheffield City Council set out to renew the British Left. Through careful analysis of the Council's agenda and how it interacted with trade unions, women's groups, lesbian and gay rights groups and acted on issues such as peace, environmentalism, anti-apartheid and anti-racism, the book draws out the complexities involved in building a broad-based politics which aimed unite class and identity politics. Running counter to 1980s narratives dominated by Thatcherism, the book examines the persistence of social democracy locally, demonstrating how grassroots local histories can enrich our understanding of political developments on a national and international level. The book is essential reading for students, scholars, and activists with an interest in left-wing politics and history.
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Humanities & Social SciencesApril 2021The future of U.S.–India security cooperation
by Šumit Ganguly, M. Chris Mason
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2017Borders and conflict in South Asia
The Radcliffe Boundary Commission and the partition of Punjab
by Lucy Chester
Borders and conflict in South Asia is the first full-length study of the 1947 drawing of the Indo-Pakistani boundary in Punjab. Using the Radcliffe commission as a window onto the decolonization and independence of India and Pakistan, and examining the competing interests, both internal and international, that influenced the actions of the various major players, it highlights British efforts to maintain a grip on India even as the decolonization process spun out of control. Drawing on extensive archival research in India, Pakistan, and Britain, combined with innovative use of cartographic sources, the book paints a vivid picture of both the partition process and the Radcliffe line's impact on Punjab. This book will be vital reading for scholars and students of colonialism, decolonization, partition, and borderlands studies, while providing anyone interested in South Asia's independence with a highly readable account of one of its most controversial episodes.
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Literature & Literary StudiesJanuary 2013Eleventh-century Germany
The Swabian chronicles
by I. Robinson
Three of the most important chronicles of eleventh-century Germany were composed in the south-western duchy of Swabia. The chronicles reveal how between 1049 and 1100 the centripetal attraction of the reform papacy became the dominant fact of intellectual life in German reformed monastic circles. In the abbey of Reichenau Herman 'the Lame' composed a chronicle of the reign of Emperor Henry III (1039-56). His pupil, Berthold of Reichenau, continued his master's work, composing a detailed account of 1076-1079 in Germany. Bernold, a clergyman of Constance, continued the work of Herman and Berthold in a text containing the fullest extant account of 1080-1100. Herman's waning enthusiasm for the monarchy and growing interest in the newly reformed papacy were intensified in Berthold's chronicle, and writing in the new context of the reformed monasteries of south-western Germany, Bernold preached total obedience to the Gregorian papacy. The Swabian chronicles are an indispensable resource to the student of the changing loyalties and conflicts of eleventh-century Germany.
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Humanities & Social SciencesMay 2026The Carolingian South
by Sam Ottewill-Soulsby, Graeme Ward
The Carolingian South turns the Frankish world upside down by taking as its subject the lands of the Carolingian empire south of the Loire and the Alps. It assembles an international group of scholars from different disciplines to examine how the Carolingians defined and were defined by this region. This book asks how Carolingian power was created and negotiated in the south. It views the Frankish empire from the perspective of the Christian and Muslim polities of the Mediterranean, while also following the movement of people and ideas through the endlessly fascinating world that they made.
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2026Globalising the Nordic Model
From exceptionalism to entanglement
by Mary Hilson
The five Nordic countries - Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden - frequently attract attention as examples of a 'Nordic model'. The meanings of the term vary, but especially since the global financial crisis of 2008-9 the Nordic countries have often been portrayed positively, as examples of economic dynamism, innovation and social equality. Studies of these images of the Nordic countries and Nordic region and their international circulations are now a well-established field of research. This volume explores how the Nordic model has been shaped by global entanglements, in exchange not only with Western Europe and North America, but also with the Global South. Drawing on selected case studies, the volume offers new perspectives on the meanings of the Nordic model and Nordic exceptionalism in a global context during the half century since c. 1970.
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Humanities & Social SciencesJuly 1995Fascist Italy
by John Whittam
Fascist Italy is a concise introduction to the phenomenon of Italian fascism and its impact. The author balances an up-to-date re-evaluation of political, diplomatic and military developments with a full assessment of the more neglected domestic and cultural dimensions of the subject. With the aid of documents and recent research on the subject, this book presents an analysis of the origins of the movement, the reasons behind its political success and the methods used to construct and consolidate a regime capable of resolving the problems of mass society in the 20th century. Within his broad-ranging analysis, Whittam places particular emphasis on the attempts to exert social control, the interaction of party and state, the tension between revolutionary and conservative tendencies and on the role of Il Duce. Mussolini's triumphs and failures in peace and war and his ultimate responsibility for the disintegration of the regime are discussed objectively. ;
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Teaching, Language & ReferenceDecember 2020Living politics after war
by Johanna Söderström, Emmanuel Pierre Guittet
