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Review Date: 30 September 2023

The very first displays in Milk, a major Wellcome Collection exhibition, convey the strangeness of a food we all know well. Entitled 'the story of milk', the opening room sparks reflection on the oddness of the narratives and images imprinted on a deceptively simple part of our diet.

Review Date: 09 April 2021

The historian Lucy Delap, author of The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Century  (CUP, 2007), winner of the 2008 Women’s History Network Prize, has now published another book—Feminisms: A Global History (Penguin in the UK, and the University of Chicago Press in the US). This book, at nearly 400 pages, is a truly global history, dealing with 250 years of feminisms.

Review Date: 27 November 2020

Mira Siegelberg’s important monograph retrieves and explores the debates in a range of different forums on a subject of fundamental significance: how, in the author’s words, ‘the problem of statelessness informed theories of rights, sovereignty, international legal order, and cosmopolitan justice, theories developed when the conceptual and political contours of the modern interstate order were being worked out, against the background of some of the most…

Review Date: 02 October 2020

Tom Rice’s book offers an extensive and cogent history of the Colonial Film Unit (CFU) from its early conception in the minds of bureaucrats and educational specialists to its dissolution following the wave of independence movements in the mid-20th century.

Review Date: 31 July 2020

The 18th century is still the least popular among Ottoman historians. Recently, with the influential counter-narrative of Ottoman decline and the coining of a new term—the 'Second Ottoman Empire'—by Baki Tezcan, our understanding of periodization in Ottoman history has changed. It is now recognized that there was no golden age followed by centuries of decline.

Review Date: 24 July 2020

Covid-19 has fuelled widespread panic across the world. Every day there are new cases of infected people and deaths. We became accustomed to seeing crowds of people emptying stores from all necessary provisions. In most discussions, there are constant references to various forms of panic surrounding Covid-19. Headlines such as “Do not panic,” “Remain calm,” “Be smart but don’t panic” became ubiquitous.

Review Date: 24 April 2020

During the interwar period, the figure of the ‘New Man’ constituted a powerful symbol of the promise and potential of a thorough-going political and anthropological revitalisation of society, which could effectively counteract widely-perceived notions of crisis and decline in the aftermath of the Great War.

Review Date: 28 November 2019

Francis Bacon’s unfinished utopian novel The New Atlantis is often invoked in scholarship about early modern scientific projects. With its ‘Merchants of Light’ who gather information and bring it back to the House of Solomon, The New Atlantis seems to capture perfectly the aspirations of a group of European scholars who saw themselves as reassessing the bases of knowledge by revaluing personal experience.

Review Date: 22 August 2019

‘This book’, writes Jeffrey A. Auerbach in his Introduction to Imperial Boredom, ‘is very much about how people felt’ [his italics]. As such, it takes its place in a growing body of scholarship that explores through individual lives the mind-set that under-pinned the empire project, both individually and on a collective level.

Review Date: 15 August 2019

Never has the extraordinarily rich literature on mass atrocity seemed more relevant as ongoing reports from around the world remind us that we live in an age of genocide. This vast repertoire of scholarly work can appear at maximum capacity with countless overarching theoretical frameworks of mass violence.