Professor Irene Bloemraad studies the political and civic incorporation of immigrants into Western liberal democracies and the consequences of migration for politics and receiving countries’ sense of national belonging. How do migrants gain voice in the political systems where they live?
One stream of research investigates citizenship: acquiring formal citizenship, as well as the experiential and conceptual contours of citizenship as membership beyond legal status. Other research examines the content and transformation of national identities; immigrants’ engagement in electoral and protest politics; and how non-immigrants’ attitudes about migration and immigrants shift depending on whether we talk about human rights, citizenship, family unity, or appeals to national values. Her work has focused on North America and Western Europe.
She joined UBC in 2024 as the inaugural President’s Excellence Chair in Global Migration, with a joint appointment in Political Science and Sociology. She also co-directs the Centre for Migration Studies.
i.bloemraad@ubc.ca
Geoffrey Winthrop-Young is a Professor of German and Nordic Studies in the Department of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies. His main research areas include German media theory (with emphasis on media archaeology and the theory of cultural techniques), chronopolitics (in particular, accelerationism and catastrophism), Science Fiction (with emphasis on alternate history), and the re-emerging mythologies of Nazism.
winthrop@mail.ubc.ca
The volume examines the proliferation of inventorying models and practices as cultural techniques of knowledge organization and production during the long nineteenth century. While inventories are still broadly treated as raw data and unprocessed source materials, the book shows how they function as complex media formats, intersecting and interfering with other material techniques to produce, store, distribute, organize and process cultural information. How do inventories work against and in dialogue with other media of collection, storage and retrieval such as catalogs, indexes, bibliographies, and archives; what new media configurations do techniques of inventorying enable and how, in turn, are such techniques shaped by the media channels and formats they employ; what is at stake in the critical effort of “taking stock”, whether as commercial, bureaucratic, literary, historiographical, or scientific operations; finally, what do such operations tell us specifically about the production and circulation of knowledge in the German nineteenth century?
You can purchase a copy of Taking Stock: Media Inventories in the German Nineteenth Century (2024) here.
*All information is taken from the publisher’s website.
When Keith Busby published his field-shaping Codex and Context in 2002, the work was referred to as ‘groundbreaking’ and ‘monumental’. It prompted scholars of medieval literature to return to manuscripts in their droves. However, Busby’s Codex and Context would also enact another, more gradual movement. His formulation of the term ‘medieval Francophonia’ to describe the presence, power and effect of French outside France would filter steadily into academic enquiry. The term and concept are now widely recognised and applied in global scholarship, including in multiple major projects dedicated to the topic.
This volume brings together a series of cutting-edge studies of medieval Francophonia, covering in one place and for the first time the fullest scope of the concept’s remit, with contributions on history, historiography, language, literature, culture, society and authority. At the same time as offering a timely contribution to the field, this volume pays tribute to Busby’s life work not only to pioneer medieval Francophonia, but also, and moreover, to encourage the study of the medieval through material philology. Each of the studies here, written by Busby’s friends and colleagues, thus roots its approach in a material context.
You can purchase a copy of Medieval French on the Move: Studies in Honour of Keith Busby (2025) here.
*All information is taken from the publisher’s website.
This special edition of Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews was edited by Dr. Babak Amini and Dr. Rebecca Gordon and was published May 3, 2025. You can read Volume 54, Issue 3, “Symposium on Who’s Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler” here.
Dr. Claudio Vellutini book, Entangled Histories: Opera and Cultural Exchange between Vienna and the Italian States after Napoleon, was published on May 23, 2025 by Oxford University Press. You can read more about the book and purchase a copy here.
Overview:
- One of the first musicological books contributing to the field of transnational Habsburg studies
- Proposes new ways of thinking about Italian and German opera in relation to political and cultural changes in Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century
- Sheds new light on both major operatic works by Rossini, Weber, Donizetti, and Verdi, and on lesser-known operas by Mercadante and others
Through a wealth of archival documents and printed materials, Entangled Histories shows how, over the first half of the nineteenth century, opera helped redefine questions of collective identity in the Austrian empire, serving as a testing ground for, among others, theories of language and education, notions of fatherland and citizenship, artistic expressions of cultural hybridity, new forms of managing economic and cultural capital, and practices of collective memory. By emphasizing the entanglements between opera’s aesthetics, its social function, and the ideology underpinning its system of production in different institutional and urban contexts, this book places opera at the intersection of a broad set of political and cultural relationships that for several decades connected Vienna and prominent Italian operatic centers, contributing to a transnational historiography of the art form in the nineteenth century. It also argues that new modes of production and dissemination of opera between Vienna and the Italian states contributed to official cultural policies promoting a supranational identity of the Austrian empire-one that acknowledged, but ultimately transcended cultural differences. As the state emerged victoriously yet completely transformed from over two decades of wars against revolutionary and Napoleonic France, opera-with its long tradition of impresarios, composers, librettists, and performers on the move-became a key tool for bringing some of the different cultural traditions of the Austrian empire into a fruitful mutual dialogue.
*All book information is copied from the publisher’s website.
Sound and Sense in Contemporary Theatre: Mad Auralities by Dr. Matthew Tomkinson was published by the University of Toronto Press in January 2025. You can purchase a copy here.
Overview:
- Addresses a need for more research combining sound and mad studies
- Explores the theatrical relationship between sound and mental health differences
- Makes an original contribution to the field by theorizing “mad aurality”
This book is among the first to consider the subject of mad auralities in theatre and performance, asking: what does it mean to hear and listen madly? Drawing widely upon mad studies, critical disability studies, theatre studies, sound studies, queer studies, and critical race theory, it seeks to explore the theatrical relationship between sound and mental health differences by examining a range of case studies in which audience members are immersed in auditory simulations of madness. Ultimately, however, this critical study investigates the shortcomings of simulation as a representational practice, in keeping with the critical tradition of disability studies and mad studies.
Review:
“An impressive and important study that undertakes a vitally needed critical analysis of the staging of madness from the perspective of sound. Tomkinson investigates representational frameworks of madness in contemporary theatre, asking how they inform an audience’s ways of listening. The book invites artists and scholars to consider very carefully the representational politics that permeate soundscapes and, more broadly, the powerful role acousmatic sound plays in shaping the popular imagination with regard to madness.” (Natalie Álvarez, Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies, Toronto Metropolitan University)
*All information taken from publisher’s website.
Dr. Babak Amini‘s book The Making of Council Democracy: State Transformation and Radical Possibilities was published on September 30, 2024 by Rotledge. You can purchase a copy here.
“Council democracy” is a particular form of democratic socialism that strives towards democratic self-governance on the basis of active, free, and associated individuals working cooperatively within a federated council system. Both in political practice and in social theory, “council democracy” has resurfaced periodically in the past, most notably in the interwar period, in the “long 1960s,” and since the turn of the 21st century. This book offers a novel theoretical and methodological approach to the study of “council democracy.” It focuses on the processes that led to the emergence of two of the foundational and most radical instances of “council democratic” movements in Germany during the German Revolution (1918-1919) and in Italy during the biennio rosso (1919-1920). With all their diversities, ambiguities, and shortcomings, these movements, in varying degrees, sought democratic alternatives to autocratic relations, from local to state levels, and to economic relations, from workplace to national levels. The book shows how the processes through which state-led war mobilization transformed the contours of class struggle laid the ground for the emergence of “council democratic” movements with specific characteristics in Germany and Italy and not in the United Kingdom and France.
This special edition of Journal of Classical Sociology was edited by Dr. Babak Amini and Dr. Thomas Kemple and was published by Sage Journals on November 1, 2024. You can read Volume 24, Issue 4, “Presents and Futures of Catalan Studies: A North American Perspective” here.
Dr. Valentina Pedone and Dr. Gaoheng Zhang‘s book Cultural Mobilities Between China and Italy was published on January 1, 2024 by Springer and Palgrave Macmillan. You can purchase a copy here.
This book offers a critical analysis of global mobilities across China and Italy in history. In three periods in the twentieth century, new patterns of physical mobilities and cultural contact were established between the two countries which were either novel at the time of their emergence or impactful on subsequent periods. The first two chapters provide overviews of writings by Italians in China and by Chinese in Italy in the twentieth century. The remaining chapters cover: Republican China’s relationships with Italy and Italian Fascist colonialism in China during the 1920s–1930s; Italian travelers to China during the Cold War from the 1950s to the 1970s; migrations between China and Italy during the 2000s–2010s. In analyzing these cultural mobilities, this book opens a new line of inquiry in Chinese-Italian Cultural Studies, which has been dominated by historical study, and contributes a significant case study to the scholarship on global cultural mobilities.
*All information copied from publisher’s website