Your Search Results

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        May 2023

        Pasts at play

        Childhood encounters with history in British culture, 1750–1914

        by Rachel Bryant Davies, Barbara Gribling

        This collection brings together scholars from disciplines including Children's Literature, Classics, and History to develop fresh approaches to children's culture and the uses of the past. It charts the significance of historical episodes and characters during the long nineteenth-century (1750-1914), a critical period in children's culture. Boys and girls across social classes often experienced different pasts simultaneously, for purposes of amusement and instruction. The book highlights an active and shifting market in history for children, and reveals how children were actively involved in consuming and repackaging the past: from playing with historically themed toys and games to performing in plays and pageants. Each chapter reconstructs encounters across different media, uncovering the cultural work done by particular pasts and exposing the key role of playfulness in the British historical imagination.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        July 2024

        Coup in Damascus

        Husni al-Za'im and the birth of Syrian military rule

        by Carl Rihan

        Coup in Damascus is a history of Syria's first military regime. It plots the the fall of Syria's democracy and the rise of its military rulers, particularly Husni al-Zaim, whose brief rule in 1949 represented a profoundly transformative moment for the Syrian nation. It is a history of the thoughts, intentions and motives of political actors underpinning the events that have marked Syria's history after the first Arab-Israeli war, and focuses mainly on the interaction between local, regional and international actors. Unlike most histories of the modern Middle East that tackle broad intervals and that focus on the sequences of events, this history seeks to reconstruct the thought processes behind the events, and anchor them within the epoch's existing political and socioeconomic conditions. It draws on several methodological influences, particularly R.G. Collingwood's 'history as re-enactment of the past'.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2026

        Heritage and healing in Syria and Iraq

        by Zena Kamash

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2025

        Reassembling the social interior

        Historical spaces from contemporary viewpoints

        by Helen McCormack, Jennifer Gray, Anne Nellis Richter

        At the intersection of heritage, design history and contemporary art, this book offers new perspectives on the way historical interiors are encountered by, and viewed and presented for, present-day audiences. Many studies have highlighted the historical significance and meanings embedded in the landscape, architecture, decoration and objects to be found within houses and homes. But what about the social meanings of these spaces? Central to this book is the idea that in reflecting, remaking and reimagining historical interiors, the contributions of artists, designers and craftspeople should be foregrounded in constructing ideas of authenticity, transparency, and materiality in the making process. The chapters present a range of case studies that reflect upon on how historical interiors are remade and reimagined by looking in and out; at how a reassembling of spaces ought to avoid 'a shrinking definition of the social itself' (Latour, 2005). Surveying a range of interior 'types' from a number of historical periods, the book includes contributions from practitioners, scholars and makers. From digital reconstructions of a seventeenth-century Belgian constcamer to the interior and exterior worlds of specific historical figures, including Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Beatrix Potter, the book considers how these spaces have powerful significance for contemporary audiences, particularly in ways that are relatable to shared experiences of work, leisure, family, community, power and politics. This book will be of interest to scholars of the history of interiors and collections, museology, archaeology, architectural history, art, and design history, as well as curators and caretakers of historical sites, spaces and objects.

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2017

        Cultures and caricatures of British imperial aviation

        Passengers, pilots, publicity

        by Gordon Pirie, Andrew Thompson, John M. MacKenzie

        The new activity of trans-continental civil flying in the 1930s is a useful vantage point for viewing the extension of British imperial attitudes and practices. Cultures and caricatures of British imperial aviation examines the experiences of those (mostly men) who flew solo or with a companion (racing or for leisure), who were airline passengers (doing colonial administration, business or research), or who flew as civilian air and ground crews. For airborne elites, flying was a modern and often enviable way of managing, using and experiencing empire. On the ground, aviation was a device for asserting old empire: adventure and modernity were accompanied by supremacism. At the time, however, British civil imperial flying was presented romantically in books, magazines and exhibitions. Eighty years on, imperial flying is still remembered, reproduced and re-enacted in caricature.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        February 2015

        Crafting design in Italy

        From post-war to postmodernism

        by Catharine Rossi, Christopher Breward, Bill Sherman

        Crafting design in Italy is the first book to examine the role that craft played in post-war Italian design, one of the most celebrated design episodes in the twentieth century. Craft was vital to the development of Italian design, and it has been so far overlooked. This book examines the multiple ways craft shaped Italian design from 1945 to the 1980s in the context of bigger socio-economic, cultural and political change; from post-war reconstruction to the economic 'miracle' of the 1960s, to the rise of the countercultural Radical Design movement and advent of postmodernism. It consists of case studies on design areas including product, furniture, fashion, glass and ceramics to bring to light previously unknown makers and objects as well as re-examine design 'icons' such as Gio Ponti's Superleggera chair and Ettore Sottsass's Memphisware. It also offers a model for analysing design and craft's relationship in other contexts, including today. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2022

        Reconstructing lives

        by Vanja Kovacic

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        June 2017

        Monstrous adaptations

        Generic and thematic mutations in horror film

        by Richard Hand, Jay McRoy

        The fifteen groundbreaking essays contained in this book address the concept of adaptation in relation to horror cinema. Adaptation is not only a key cultural practice and strategy for filmmakers, but it is also a theme of major importance within horror cinema as a hole. The history of the genre is full of adaptations that have drawn from fiction or folklore, or that have assumed the shape of remakes of pre-existing films. The horror genre itself also abounds with its own myriad transformations and transmutations. The essays within this volume engage with an impressive range of horror texts, from the earliest silent horror films by Thomas Edison and Jean Epstein through to important contemporary phenomena, such as the western appropriation of Japanese horror motifs. Classic works by Alfred Hitchcock, David Cronenberg and Abel Ferrara receive cutting-edge re-examination, as do unjustly neglected works by Mario Bava, Guillermo del Toro and Stan Brakhage.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        April 2022

        Held in contempt

        by Hannah White

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        November 2009

        Re-evaluating Irish national security policy

        Affordable threats?

        by Michael Mulqueen

        On the afternoon of September 11 2001 the Irish Prime Minister (Taoiseach), Bertie Ahern ordered the 'heads of the security services of key government departments' to undertake a complete re-evaluation of measures to protect the state from attack. Hence, underway within hours of the 9/11 outrage in the United States was potentially the most far-reaching review of Irish national security in decades. This book, the first major academic investigation of Irish national security policy as it has operated since 9/11, provides a theoretically informed analysis of that re-evaluation and the decisions which have been taken as a consequence of it up until September 2008. In so doing it draws on unprecedented access to Ireland's police, security and intelligence agencies; over twenty senior personnel agreed to be interviewed. Theoretically the author demonstrates the utility to the analysis of national security policy of three conceptual models of historical institutionalism, governmental politics and threat evaluation. The text is of interest to scholars of Security Studies, International Relations and Politics, as well as state and NGO personnel, journalists and general readers. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Sociology
        November 2016

        Death and security

        Memory and mortality at the bombsite

        by Charlotte Heath-Kelly. Series edited by Peter Lawler, Emmanuel Pierre Guittet

        Making a bold intervention into critical security studies literature, this book explores the ontological relationship between mortality and security. It considers the mortality theories of Heidegger and Bauman alongside literature from the sociology of death, before undertaking a comparative exploration of the memorialisation of four prominent post-terrorist sites: the World Trade Centre in New York, the Bali bombsite, the London bombings and the Norwegian sites attacked by Anders Breivik. By interviewing the architects and designers of these reconstruction projects, the book shows that practices of memorialisation are a retrospective security endeavour - they conceal and re-narrate the traumatic incursion of death. Disaster recovery is replete with security practices that return mortality to its sublimated position and remove the disruption posed by mortality to political authority. The book will be of significant interest to academics and postgraduates working in the fields of critical security studies, memory studies and international politics.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        September 2010

        Photography and memory in Mexico

        Icons of Revolution

        by Andrea Noble

        Photography and memory in Mexico traces the 'life stories' of some of the famous photographic images made during the 1910 revolution, which have been repeatedly reproduced across a range of media in its aftermath. Which photographs have become icons of the revolution and why these particular images and not others? What is the relationship between photography and memory of the conflict? How do we construct a critical framework for addressing the issues raised by iconic photographs? Placing an emphasis on the life, afterlife and also the pre-life of those iconic photographs that haunt the post-revolutionary landscape, Andrea Noble approaches them as dynamic objects, where their rhetorical power is derived from a combination of their visual eloquence and their ability to coordinate patterns of identification with the memory of the revolution as a foundational event in Mexican history. Richly-illustrated, this book will be of interest to all those interested in photography, memory studies, and Mexican cultural history. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        January 2018

        Wa(h)re Gefühle

        Authentizität im Konsumkapitalismus

        by Eva Illouz, Michael Adrian

        »Zeit für Gefühle«, »Schrei vor Glück«, »Aus Freude am Fahren« – Werbeslogans wie diese illustrieren aufs Schönste einen zentralen Mechanismus des zeitgenössischen Kapitalismus: Waren produzieren Gefühle und zugleich werden Gefühle zu Waren. Wie kam es zu dieser Verschränkung von Emotionen und Konsum? Was bedeutet sie für die Identität des modernen Subjekts? Und wie lassen sich wahre Gefühle erkennen und Warengefühle kritisieren? Die hier versammelten Beiträge gehen diesen Fragen in konkreten Feldern (z. B. Tourismus, Musik, Sexualität) nach und fügen sich zu einer umfassenden Ethnographie des Strebens nach emotionaler Authentizität – jener modernen Erfahrung, so die These dieses Buches, die durch die Koproduktion von Gefühlen und Konsumpraktiken erst erzeugt wird.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        April 2026

        Re-examining nineteenth-century Easts

        Gendered narratives of encounter

        by Claudia Capancioni, Julia Kuehn, Mariaconcetta Costantini

        Re-examining nineteenth-century Eastscontributes novel approaches to gendered and gendering fictions and travel writing in and of the cultural-geographical-ideological contexts surrounding nineteenth-century Easts. It examines underexplored stories of travel and narratives of encounter to reconsider the western allure of travelling to the Easts - from the Balkans to the Middle and Far East, through a range of diverse critical approaches. It discusses writers - travellers, novelists, and short-story writers - who authored texts based on their varied experiences in eastern lands. It also analyses how views of eastern places became a rich source of material for identity formations related to Empire but also discussions about masculinity and femininity at 'home'.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        September 2025

        Industrial memory in North East England

        Negotiating northernness

        by Victoria Allen

        Industrial memory in North East England examines how the region's industrial myth and memory have been articulated in the renegotiation of northernness. The book offers a critical contextualisation of the concept of northernness and the English North, and an introduction to the concept of the PopCultural Portfolio, a mixed-methods approach to conjunctural analysis in cultural and memory studies. The book provides six richly illustrated case studies to demonstrate the practical application of cultural studies' expansive and inclusive understanding of texts, bringing together materials from North East football, folk, indie and exhibition culture to establish how the North East's industrial past continues to be remembered and functionalised as industrial memory. In turn, the conjunctural analysis demonstrates how industrial memory is articulated and mythologised as north(east)ernes in contemporary popular culture.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        July 2025

        Threads of labour

        Tapestry of an ex-industrial community

        by Lisa Taylor

        Charting a collaborative art-based project using carpet-making skills and the industrial heritage of the region, the book investigates how a cleaved ex-industrial community used arts methodologies as a cohesion strategy. Drawing on images from the company's archives, the book mines the history of Firths Carpets Limited, a firm that carpeted interiors across the globe from the mid-1800s. Women's labour and tastes were business critical to the production and sale of Firths carpets. Drawing on the author's personal connection to the village, an ethnographic sensibility and novel research techniques, ex-worker responses to a village radically altered by ruination are explored. Ex-workers felt nostalgia for the dignity of work and a sense of homesickness in a village ghosted by industrial spectres of the past. Threads of Labour argues that left-behind deindustrialised places require acts of social re-making if their communities are to survive.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2025

        Straight nation

        Heteronormativity and other exigencies of postcolonial nationalism

        by Pavan Mano

        In Straight Nation, Pavan Mano reveals the logic of straightness that sits at the heart of postcolonial nationalism in Singapore. Mano rejects the romantic notion of the nation as a haven of belonging, showing it to be a relentless force that is allied with heteronormativity to create a host of minoritized and xenologized figures. Through meticulous exploration and close reading of a swathe of texts, Mano unveils the instrumental role of sexuality in structuring the national imaginary. The book adroitly demonstrates how queerness is rendered foreign in postcolonial Singapore and functions alongside technologies of "race", gender, and class. A provocative critique of narrow contemporary identity politics and its concomitant stymying of a more ambitious political critique, Straight Nation sets out an argument that moves beyond the negativity of traditional critique into a space of (re)thinking, (re)building and (re)imagining.

      Subscribe to our

      newsletter