Women, Art, Freedom: Artists and Street Politics in Iran offers an insightful look at the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising in Iran, sparked by the tragic murder of Jina Mahsa Amini at the hands of the “morality police” for violating hijab rules. Beyond its feminist undertones and the remarkable courage of the young protesters, what sets this uprising apart from previous ones is the abundant and diverse art it has inspired. This book, rather than merely analyzing the artworks that garnered attention on social media platforms, brings to light lesser-known grassroots artistic movements that played a crucial role within their immediate local communities. Engaging with primarily Iran-based artists, it uncovers their role in shaping guerrilla interventions and street occupations and in articulating distinct forms of peaceful civil disobedience. By drawing on a broad spectrum of historical and theoretical sources, this book further reveals the origins and inspirations of Iran’s protest art. Focusing mainly on the interconnections between the public sphere, women’s bodies, and feminist viewpoints, Women, Art, Freedom underscores the vital role of artists in championing global justice and equality.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The road to Queen Elizabeth II’s implementation of African reforms was rough, especially in the first two decades following her ascension to the throne. In Queen Elizabeth II and the Africans (Leuven UP, 2024), Raphael Chijioke Njoku examines Queen Elizabeth II’s role in the African decolonization trajectories and the postcolonial state’s quest for genuine political and economic liberation since 1947. By locating Elizabeth at the center of Anglophone Africa’s independence agitations, the account harnesses the African interests to tease out the monarch’s dilemma of complying with Whitehall’s decolonization schemes while building an inclusive and unified Commonwealth in which Africans could play a vital role. Njoku argues that to gratify British lawmakers in her complex and marginal place within the British parliamentary system of conservative versus reformist, Elizabeth’s contribution fell short of African nationalists’ expectations on account of her silence and inaction during the African decolonization raptures. Yet ultimately, the author concludes, she helped build an inclusive and unified organization in which Africans could assert and appropriate political and economic autarky. Kanayo Nomeh, Ph.D. Candidate in International Relations at Florida International University, specializing in Africa's diaspora relations, superpowers and geopolitical rivalry, and African-China sociopolitical dynamics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When consulting key works on urban studies, the absence of Central and Eastern European towns is striking. Cities such as Vienna, Budapest, Prague, and Trieste, where such notable figures as Freud, Ferenczi, Kafka, and Joyce lived and worked, are rarely studied in a translocal framework, as if Central and Eastern Europe were still a blind spot of European modernity.  Urban Culture and the Modern City: Hungarian Case Studies (Leuven UP, 2024) expands the scope of literary urban studies by focusing on Budapest and Hungarian small towns, offering in-depth analyses of the intriguing link between literature, the arts, and material culture in the 20th and 21st centuries. The case studies situate Hungarian urban culture within the global flow of ideas as they explore the period of modernism, the mid-century, and the post-1989 era in a context that moves well beyond the borders of the country. Ágnes Györke is associate professor at Károli Gáspár University’s Department of Literary and Cultural Studies in English and principal investigator of the Cosmopolitan Ethics and the Modern City research group. Tamás Juhász is associate professor at Károli Gáspár University where he teaches modern British and American literature, cultural theory and Central European film. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The question of whether to acknowledge a text as a translation and thereby bring attention to the translator’s role has been a central topic in discussions on translation throughout history. While the concept of translator visibility has gained significant prominence in translation studies, it has been criticized for its vagueness, adaptability, and focus on literary contexts. Peter J. Freeth and Rafael Treviño’s Beyond the Translator’s Invisibility: Critical Reflections and New Perspectives (Leuven University Press, 2024) draws on concepts from sociology, the digital humanities, and interpreting studies to address these criticisms and expand the theoretical understanding of translator visibility. It aims to develop and apply theoretical frameworks that go beyond the existing limitations. Beyond the Translator’s Invisibility employs empirical case studies covering various topics, including social media research, reception studies, institutional translation, and literary translation. These case studies demonstrate the significance of understanding the translator’s visibility as a multifaceted concept. By examining the diverse ways translators and translation are made visible, the volume introduces much-needed nuance to a concept that has been pervasive, polarizing, and imprecise within translation studies. In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy interviews Peter J. Freeth and Rafael Treviño about the process of co-editing this book. Ibrahim Fawzy is a literary translator and academic based in Egypt. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, and disability studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The idea that women are dangerous - individually or collectively - runs throughout history and across cultures. Behind this label lies a significant set of questions about the dynamics, conflicts, identities and power relations with which women live today. The Art of Being Dangerous: Exploring Women and Danger through Creative Expression (Leuven UP, 2021) offers many different images of women, some humorous, some challenging, some well-known, some forgotten, but all unique. In a dazzling variety of creative forms, artists and writers of diverse identities explore what it means to be a dangerous woman. With almost 100 evocative images, this collection showcases an array of contemporary art that highlights the staggering breadth of talent among today's female artists. It offers an unparalleled gallery of feminist creativity, ranging from emerging visual artists from the UK to multi-award-winning writers and translators from the Global South. This book emerges from the Dangerous Women Project. For more information, visit dangerouswomenproject.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Awkward Archives: Ethnographic Drafts for a Modular Curriculum (Archive Books, 2022) proposes a manual for academic teaching and learning contexts. An ethnographic research approach is confronted with the demands of archival research as both disciplines challenge their inner logics and epistemologies. Through fieldwork and ethnographic tools and methods, both analogue and digital, the editors take various contemporary archival sites in Berlin as case studies to elaborate on controversial concepts in Western thought. Presenting as such a modular curriculum on archives in their awkwardness—with the tensions, discomfort and antagonisms they pose. With case studies on Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the Hahne-Niehoff Archive and the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, among others This book is available open access  here.  Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Ontology and Ritual Theory”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lesly Deschler Canossi and Zoraida Lopez-Diago's edited volume Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation: Another Way of Knowing (Leuven UP, 2022) questions how the Black female body, specifically the Black maternal body, navigates interlocking structures that place a false narrative on her body and that of her maternal ancestors. Drawing on a wide range of scholarly inquiry and contemporary art, this book addresses these misconceptions and fills in the gaps that exist in the photographic representation of Black motherhood, mothering, and mutual care within Black communities. The essays and interviews, paired with a curated selection of images, address the complicated relationship between Blackness and photography and in particular its gendered dimension, its relationship to health, sexuality, and digital culture - primarily in the context of racialized heteronormativity. This collection, then, challenges racist images and discourses, both historically and in its persistence in contemporary society, while reclaiming the innate brilliance of Black women through personal stories, history, political acts, connections to place, moments of pleasure, and communal celebration. This visual exploration of Black motherhood through pictures made by Black woman-identifying photographers thus serves as a reflection of the past and a portal to the future and contributes to recent scholarship on the complexity of Black life and Black joy. This book emerges from the project Women Picturing Revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Regarded as the “9th Art”, French bande desinée have a much longer history of serious socio-political engagement than American comics. Since the Algerian War (1954–62), postcolonialism, migration, anti-racism are major themes in francophone comics. Mark McKinney’s newest book studies the genre from the formal dismantling of the French colonial empire in 1962 up to the present. Postcolonialism and Migration in French Comics (Leuven UP, 2021) analyses comics representing a gamut of perspectives on immigration and postcolonial ethnic minorities, ranging from staunch defense to violent rejection. Individual chapters are dedicated to specific artists, artistic collectives, comics, or themes, including avant-gardism, undocumented migrants in comics, and racism in far-right comics. Dr. Mark McKinney is Professor of French at Miami University, Ohio. Postcolonialism and Migration in French Comics(Leuven University Press, 2020) is the final installment of a trilogy of sorts that includes The Colonial Heritage of French Comics (Liverpool University Press, 2011) and Redrawing French Empire in Comics (Ohio State University Press, 2013). Dr. McKinney co-edited with Alec G. Hargreaves, Post-Colonial Cultures in France (Routledge, 1997) and edited History and Politics in French-Language Comics and Graphic Novels (University Press of Mississippi, 2008). From 2008-2015, along with Laurence Grove and Ann Miller, he edited the academic journal European Comic Art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dealing with the colonial archive entails acknowledging the inability to know everything, accounting for the archive’s limited and incomplete condition. Dealing with the colonial archive is not merely about stories of the past but also about the history of the present, and how it is interrupted by the past. — Irene Hilden, in conversation with New Books Network. With a firm commitment to postcolonial scholarship, Absent Presences in the Colonial Archive: Dealing with the Berlin Sound Archive's Acoustic Legacies (Leuven University Press, 2022) presents a historical ethnography of a metropolitan institution that participated in the production and preservation of colonial structures of power and knowledge. This book examines sound objects and listening practices that render the coloniality of knowledge fragile and inconsistent, revealing the absent presences of colonial subjects who are given little or no place in established national narratives and collective memories. Based on research at the Berlin Sound Archive (Lautarchiv), which consists of an extensive collection of sound recordings compiled for scientific purposes in the first half of the 20th century, Irene Hilden engages with the archive by focusing on recordings produced under colonial conditions. This publication is available as a free ebook at OAPEN Library, JSTOR, Project Muse, and Open Research Library. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology and a volunteer at Interference Archive. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In When Art Isn’t Real: The World's Most Controversial Objects under Investigation (Leuven University Press, 2022), Dr. Andrew Shortland and Dr. Patrick Degryse examine how an initially valueless object becomes worth hundreds of millions. And vice versa. The art world is a multi-billion-dollar industry which captures world headlines on a regular basis, for both good and bad reasons. This book deals with one of the most-discussed areas of controversy: high-profile objects that have experts arguing about their veracity. Some may have been looted, others may be fakes, some may be heavily restored or misattributed. Often, in these cases, analytical science is called on to settle a dispute. The authors of this book have decades of experience in this field, working on a range of objects dating from prehistory to the twentieth century. They present seven of the most famous cases from the Getty Kouros to the Turin Shroud – some of which are still contested, and examine how a few words from a connoisseur or scientist can make a virtually valueless object worth hundreds of millions. And vice versa. “We want to give readers some feel for the people involved. A feel for those period or material experts who give their opinion on an object’s validity from its looks, feel, even smell. A feel for the analysts, who employ their sicnetific equipment to the object and give their opinion from the numbers and pictures that are derived from them. A feel for the experts working with, in parallel with, and occasionally against each other.” This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does it take to become a digitally agile scholar? This manual explains how academics can comfortably navigate the digital world of today and tomorrow. It foregrounds three key domains of digital agility: getting involved in research, education and (community) service, mobilising (digital) skills on various levels, and acting in multiple roles, both individually and interlinked with others. After an introduction that outlines the foundations of the three-dimensional framework, the chapters focus on different roles and skills associated with evolving as a digital scholar. There is the author, who writes highly specialised texts for expert peers; the storyteller, who crafts accessible narratives to a broader audience in the form of blogs or podcasts; the creator, who uses graphics, audio, and video to motivate audiences to delve deeper into the material; the integrator, who develops and curates multimedia artefacts, disseminating them through channels such as websites, webinars, and open source repositories; and finally the networker, who actively triggers interaction via social media applications and online learning communities. Additionally, the final chapters offer a blueprint for the future digital scholar as a professional learner and as a change agent who is open to and actively pursues innovation. Informed by the authors' broad and diverse personal experience, Evolving as a Digital Scholar: Teaching and Researching in a Digital World (Leuven UP, 2021) offers insight, inspiration, and practical advice. It equips a broad readership with the skills and the mindset to harness new digital developments and navigate the ever-evolving digital age. It will inspire academic teachers and researchers with different backgrounds and levels of knowledge that wish to enhance their digital academic profile. Free ebook available at OAPEN Library, JSTOR and Project Muse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode of New Books in History features an interview with Anke Gilleir, professor of Modern German Literature at KU Leuven, about her new edited volume, Strategic Imaginations: Women and the Gender of Sovereignty in European Culture (Leuven University Press, 2020). Dr. Gilleir has a longstanding interest in under appreciated female intellectuals, starting with her dissertation cum first monograph on Johanna Schopenhauer, read alongside Pierre Bourdieu, exploring particularly mechanisms of power and the symbolic importance of those mechanisms. She has also addressed similar themes with Therese Huber, Caroline Pichler, Rosa Luxemburg, and Margarete Sussman. As part of this ongoing concern with how women interact with political power, she came to edit this delightful volume. Though the cases studies represent a real breadth temporally, spatially, and even in subject and source material, all the essays work together very well to make a very tight argument. Political sovereignty has been a major theme in European thought from the very beginning of intellectual reflection on community. Philosophy and political theory, historiography, theology, and literature and the arts have, often in dialogue with one another, sought to represent or recalibrate notions of rule. Yet whatever covenant was imagined, sovereign rule has consistently been figured as a male prerogative While in-depth studies of historical women rulers have proliferated in the past decades, these have not systematically explored how all women rulers throughout the entirety of European culture have had to operate in a context that could not think power as female – except in grotesque terms. Strategic Imaginations demonstrates that this constitutive tension can only be brought out by studying women’s political rule in a comparative and longue durée manner. The book offers a collection of essays that brings together studies of female sovereignty from the Polish-Lithuanian to the British Commonwealth, and from the Middle Ages to the genesis of modern democracy. It addresses historical figures and takes stock of the rich yet unsettling imagination of female rule in philosophy, literature and art history. For all the variety of geographical, social, and historical contexts it engages, the book reveals surprising resonances between the strategies women rulers used and the images and practices they adopted in the context of an all-pervasive skepticism toward female rule. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It is a major challenge to write the history of post-WWII architectural theory without boiling it down to a few defining paradigms. An impressive anthologizing effort during the 1990s charted architectural theory mostly via the various theoretical frameworks employed, such as critical theory, critical regionalism, deconstructivism, and pragmatism. Yet the intellectual contours of what constitutes architectural theory have been constantly in flux. It is therefore paramount to ask what kind of knowledge has become important in the recent history of architectural theory and how the resulting figure of knowledge sets the conditions for the actual arguments made. The contributions in The Figure of Knowledge: Conditioning Architectural Theory, 1960s-1990s (Leuven UP, 2020) focus on institutional, geographical, rhetorical, and other conditioning factors. They thus screen the unspoken rules of engagement that postwar architectural theory ascribed to. Free ebook available at OAPEN Library, JSTOR and ProjectMuse Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Adjunct Professor at Alfred State College and the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices