Anders als die Andern by Dr. Ervin Malakaj
Dr. Ervin Malakaj's book Anders als die Andern was published on August 1, 2023 by McGill-Queen's University Press. You can purchase a copy here. Released in 1919, Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others) stunned audiences with its straightforward depiction of queer love. Supporters celebrated the film’s moving storyline, while conservative detractors succeeded in prohibiting public screenings. Banned and partially destroyed after the rise of Nazism, the film was lost until the 1970s and only about one-third of its original footage is preserved today...Ervin Malakaj sees the film’s portrayal of the pain of living life queerly as generating a complex emotional identification in modern spectators, even those living in apparently friendlier circumstances. There is a strange comfort in knowing that we are not alone in our struggles, and Malakaj recuperates Anders als die Andern’s mournful cinema as an essential element of its endurance, treating the film’s melancholia both as a valuable feeling in and of itself and as a springboard to engage in an intergenerational queer struggle.
Bilingual Legacies: Father Figures in Self-Writing from Barcelona by Dr. Anna Casas Aguilar
Dr. Anna Casas Aguilar's book Bilingual Legacies: Father Figures in Self-Writing from Barcelona was published by the University of Toronto Press in May 2022. You can purchase a copy here. Bilingual Legacies examines fatherhood in the work of four canonical Spanish authors born in Barcelona and raised during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Drawing on the autobiographical texts of Juan Goytisolo, Carlos Barral, Terenci Moix, and Clara Janés, the book explores how these authors understood gender roles and paternal figures as well as how they positioned themselves in relation to Spanish and Catalan literary traditions.
Cartografias in/justas: representaciones culturales del espacio urbano y rural en la España contemporánea ed. by Dr. Monica Lopez Lerma
Cartografias in/justas: representaciones culturales del espacio urbano y rural en la España contemporánea, edited by Dr. Monica Lopez Lerma, was published by Comares Editorial on May 15, 2024. You can purchase a copy here.
Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in the World of Wen: Reading Sheldon Pollock from the Sinographic Cosmopolis ed. by Dr. Ross King
Sheldon Pollock’s work on the history of literary cultures in the ‘Sanskrit Cosmopolis’ broke new ground in the theorization of historical processes of vernacularization and served as a wake-up call for comparative approaches to such processes in other translocal cultural formations. But are his characterizations of vernacularization in the Sinographic Sphere accurate, and do his ideas and framework allow us to speak of a ‘Sinographic Cosmopolis’? How do the special typology of sinographic writing and associated technologies of vernacular reading complicate comparisons between the Sankrit and Latinate cosmopoleis? Such are the questions tackled in this volume.
Cultural Mobilities Between China and Italy by Dr. Valentina Pedone and Dr. Gaoheng Zhang
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.
Culture Work: Folklore For the Public Good ed. by Dr. Tim Frandy and Dr. B. Marcus Cederström
Culture Work: Folklore For the Public Good edited by Dr. Tim Frandy and Dr. B. Marcus Cederström was published on August 1, 2022 by the University of Wisconsin Press. You can purchase a copy here. How do culture workers construct public arts and culture projects that are effective and transformative? How do we create public humanities projects of the community, for the community, and with the community? How can culture work make a concrete difference in the quality of life for communities, and lead to the creation of a more just world? Why do the public humanities matter? Culture Work explores these questions through real-world examples of cultural and public humanities projects. The innovative case studies analyzed in the book demonstrate the vast numbers of creative possibilities in culture work today—in all their complexities, challenges, and potentialities.
Entangled Histories: Opera and Cultural Exchange between Vienna and the Italian States after Napoleon by Dr. Claudio Vellutini
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
Marx’s Wager: Das Kapital and Classical Sociology by Dr. Thomas Kemple
Dr. Thomas Kemple's book, Marx's Wager: Das Kapital and Classical Sociology, was published on October 13, 2022 by Palgrave Macmillan Cham. You can read more about the book and purchase a copy here. PDF downloads are free for members of the UBC community. Overview:- Demonstrates how influential classical sociologists read Capital
- Identifies the implications of Marx's reception for later social scientists
- Examines how early thinkers understand theory and practice
Medieval French on the Move: Studies in Honour of Keith Busby ed. by Leah Tether, Patrick Moran and Anne Salamon
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. You can purchase a copy of Medieval French on the Move: Studies in Honour of Keith Busby (2025) here.
