University Press Week 2025

A young woman’s search for connection with her estranged father, her family’s past, and the Palestinian homeland she can never visit

“[A] definitive work in the genre of Palestinian memoirs that will not only attract readers of Said or Kanafani, but also fans of Joan Didion, Hisham Matar, Ocean Vuong, or James Baldwin." —The New Arab

“Serhan’s memoir, crafted in magnificent prose. . . . is something which is truly cinematic in quality, whose delights and heartbreaks tumble out before the reader as naturally as images fall from a screen. . . . utterly vivid and compelling.” —Jhalak Review

Mai Serhan lives in Cairo and has never been to Palestine, the country from which her family was expelled in 1948. She is twenty-four years old when one morning she receives a phone call from her estranged father. His health is failing and he might not have long to live, so he asks her to join him in China where he runs a business empire about which Mai knows nothing. Mai agrees to go in the hopes that they will become close, but this strange new country is as unknowable to her as her father. There, the ghosts of the Nakba come to haunt them both. With this grief comes violence, and a tragic death brings a whole new meaning to the word erasure.

In a narrative made rich by its layers of fragmentation, as befitting the splintered and disordered existence of exile over generations, this courageous memoir spans Egypt, Lebanon, Dubai, China and, of course, Palestine. It is filled with bitter tragedy and loss and woven through with an understated humor and much grace.

Podcast Studies: Practice into Theory critically examines the emergent field of podcasting in academia, revealing its significant impact on scholarly communication and approaches to research and knowledge creation.

This collection presents in-depth analyses from scholars who have integrated podcasting into their academic pursuits. The book systematically explores the medium's implications for teaching, its effectiveness in reaching broader audiences, and its role in reshaping the dissemination of academic work. Covering a spectrum of disciplines, the contributors detail their engagement with podcasting, providing insight into its use as both a research tool and an object of analysis, thereby illuminating the multifaceted ways in which podcasting intersects with and influences academic life.

The volume provides substantive evidence of podcasting's transformative effect on academia, offering reflections on its potential to facilitate a more accessible and engaging form of scholarly output. By presenting case studies and empirical research, Podcast Studies: Practice into Theory underscores the originality of podcasting as an academic endeavor and its utility in expanding the reach and impact of scholarly work. It serves as a key resource for academics, researchers, and practitioners interested in the application and study of podcasting as a novel vector for knowledge creation and distribution.

Anti-racist movements have continued to grow worldwide after the death of George Floyd in 2020. Following the BLM protests, many promises were made to deal with the impact of structural discrimination. While this led to more talk than action, there has also been meaningful change, some of which has gone under the radar. The US media focused primarily on the backlash that resulted in book bans and laws against having DEI offices in universities.

In contrast, this book, a follow-up to Terri E. Givens’s bestselling book Radical Empathy: Finding a Path to Bridging Racial Divides, highlights the promises that were delivered. It focuses on hope and taking action and creating a positive environment including the use of the radical empathy approach to empower ongoing change.

A visionary look at Central Park’s creation as an urban success story inspiring bold climate action

Climate change is the existential crisis of our time. With extreme heatwaves, wildfires, hurricanes, and floods displacing millions, many wonder: What can I do? Ten Thousand Central Parks challenges the despair of inaction, using the history of Central Park as an unlikely yet urgent environmental parable.

Created in the years immediately before, during, and after the Civil War, Central Park is a radical experiment in urban renewal, transforming a chaotic and polluted terrain into an 843-acre refuge. More than a scenic landmark, it was a visionary public project that provided jobs, green space, and a lasting environmental legacy. Designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the park was America’s first large-scale public works project, undertaken at a time of national crisis and built almost entirely by immigrants. Its creation offers a powerful lesson: Even in turbulent times, cities can be reimagined, and large-scale ecological transformations are possible.

With over half of the world’s population living in cities today, predicted soon to reach nearly 70%, urban green spaces are more crucial than ever. Morris argues that Central Park is not just an artifact of the past but a model for the future. Its 18,000 trees sequester nearly a million pounds of carbon dioxide annually, proving that ambitious, nature-based solutions can improve the quality of life while addressing environmental challenges.

Written with urgency and optimism, Ten Thousand Central Parks offers a fresh perspective on the climate crisis, rejecting doom in favor of possibility. We need projects on the scale of Central Park— thousands of them—to meet today’s environmental challenges. This book—a boundary-crossing work of narrative nonfiction—is an invitation to think big, act boldly, and embrace radical hope.

Peacekeepers, effective deterrent or potential cause of ultimate disaster? Understanding what nuclear weapons are for has never been more essential.

Dr Patricia Shamai traces the history of nuclear weapons from their first use in 1945 when they brought the Second World War to an end, through the Cold War when they gave rise to peace movements and disarmament efforts to the ominous nuclear landscape today.

Shamai shows how nuclear weapons have, to date, been a deterrent by raising the stakes of war and thereby reducing the chances of certain kinds of conflict. But, she warns, this is not a permanent situation – its continuation depends on the world’s reaction to this threat and ongoing vigilance.

An exploration of the political thought of one of the twentieth century's most influential thinkers and the foremost advocate for the Palestinian cause in the West

Edward Said was one of the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century. A literary scholar with an aesthete’s temperament, he did not experience his political awakening until the 1967 Arab–Israeli war, which transformed his thinking and led him to forge ties with political groups and like-minded scholars. Said’s subsequent writings, which cast light on the interplay between cultural representation and the exercise of Western political power, caused a seismic shift in scholarly circles and beyond. In this intimate intellectual biography, by a close friend and confidant, Nubar Hovsepian offers fascinating insight into the evolution of Said’s political thought.

Through analysis of Said’s seminal works and the debates surrounding them, Edward Said: The Politics of an Oppositional Intellectual traces the influence of Foucault on Said, and how Said eventually diverged from this influence to arrive at a more pronounced understanding of agency, resistance, and liberation. He consequently affiliated more closely with Raymond Williams, Antonio Gramsci, and more contemporaneously, with his friends the late Eqbal Ahmad and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod.

Said held that it is the intellectual’s responsibility to expose lies and deceptions of the holders of power. A passionate advocate for the Palestinian cause, his solidarity did not prevent him from launching a sustained critique of the Palestinian leadership. Hovsepian charts both Said’s engagement with the Palestinian national movement and his exchanges with a host of intellectuals over Palestine, arguing that Said’s interventions have succeeded in changing the parameters of the discourse in the humanities, and among younger Jews searching for political affiliation.

Drawing on his diaries, in which he recorded his meetings with Said, as well as access to some of Said’s private letters, Hovsepian illuminates, in rich detail, the trajectory of Said’s political thinking and the depth and breadth of his engagement with peers and critics over issues that continue to resonate to this day.

A prize-winning historian details his intellectual and political evolution

Written by the author of the landmark book The Wages of Whiteness and one of the key figures in the critical study of race and racism in America, An Ordinary White is the life story of the historian and radical American writer, David Roediger.

With wry wit and keen observation, Roediger chronicles his intellectual and political evolution from growing up in his southern Midwest sundown town to becoming a leading figure in working-class his­tory and Whiteness studies. A latecomer to the New Left, a longtime figure in the Chicago Surrealist Group, and part of the collective reviving of the Charles Kerr Company—the world’s oldest socialist publisher—Roediger captures events and characters absent from standard histories of the left as well as such icons of resistance as Studs Terkel, Noel Ignatiev, Angela Davis, Toni Morrison, and C. L. R. James.

A direct response to the venom, effectiveness, and durability of white nationalist attacks on Critical Race Theory, this memoir describes Roediger’s youth as “ordinary,” both in its unfolding in a lower-middle-class family of southern Illinois workers and in the depth of white racism he was taught. He considers himself “saved” by social movements of his time, including those of labor, against empire, and, above all, the Black Freedom struggle. Public education, dissenting currents in Catholicism, knowledge of the importance of good union jobs, and generative impulses in sports and music helped make his salvation stick.

Roediger’s knowledge of white advantage came from his personal everyday experiences, but among people ordinary enough to guard against the mistaken notion that poor and working-class whites are uniquely the culprits of white nationalism. Importantly he argues against the character­ization of them as intractably racist or incapable of understanding the advantages of whiteness. A teacher in state universities for forty years, Roediger has tirelessly fought against their being hollowed out by corporate values and austerity. In An Ordinary White, he writes movingly of these experiences and what we have lost in our institutions whose soaring rhetoric outstrips any ability to defend education or racial justice.

The Taking of Vimy Ridge explores the life and works of William Ivor Castle, a Canadian official First World War photographer known for staging and manipulating his photographs.

Castle shot more than 1000 photographs during his time as official photographer attached to the Canadian Corps, and his iconic (though sometimes manipulated) scenes of war created a sensation at London’s Grafton Galleries during the war. But the remainder of his wartime oeuvre, and Castle himself, are less well-remembered today.

The Taking of Vimy Ridge analyzes the unique relationship between Castle and the Canadian War Records Office and distinguishes several of Castle’s never-before-identified manipulated works as he attempted to illustrate the Battle of Vimy Ridge—one of Canada’s most mythologized First World War battles—to audiences around the world.

Drawing from Canadian and British archival records, as well as Castle’s complete body of work from the Battle of Vimy Ridge, this richly illustrated book offers a much more expansive understanding of Castle's contribution to both war photography and our understanding of portrayals of the First World War, including a close interpretation of the technical choices he made in framing his images, and the context in which this oeuvre developed.

Graphic Refuge is the first in-depth study of comics about refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, and detainees by artists from the Global North and South. Co-written by two leading scholars of nonfiction comics, the book explores graphic narratives about a range of refugee experiences, from war, displacement, and perilous sea crossings to detention camps, resettlement schemes, and second-generation diasporas.

Through close readings of work by diverse artists including Joe Sacco, Sarah Glidden, Don Brown, Olivier Kugler, Jasper Rietman, Hamid Sulaiman, Leila Abdelrazzaq, Thi Bui, and Matt Huynh, Graphic Refuge shows how comics challenge dominant representations of the displaced and bring a radical politics of refugee agency and refusal into view. Rather than simply affirming the “humanity” of the refugee, these comics demand that we apprehend the historical construction of categories such as “citizen” and “refugee” through systems of empire, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism.

Building on scholarship in critical refugee studies, architecture and infrastructure studies, and postcolonial theory, Davies and Rifkind argue that refugee comics move us through this wider recognition and towards more expansive ideas of refuge as a lived political relationship.

Amie Souza Reilly bought an old house in the suburbs. She had just gotten remarried and was looking forward to a new start with her new husband and her six-year-old son. But immediately after moving in, the next-door neighbors began a crusade to push them out. The two brothers followed her, peered in her windows, stood in her yard, trapped her inside her car. As they broke boundary after suburban boundary, she found herself implicated in their violence.

Human/Animal merges personal narrative and cultural criticism to unleash the complicated relationship between instinct and action, violence and regret. This bestiary-in-essays wrestles American colonialism, horror films, feminism, and gender studies to confront the intrusive neighbors the author could not. Ultimately, this book asks larger questions about proximity, care, and the line between human and animal.

Illustrated with the author’s own sketches, Human/Animal: A Bestiary in Essays grapples not only with Reilly’s place in her neighborhood, but with America’s past and current political climate.

Deyohahá:ge:, “two roads or paths” in Cayuga language, evokes the Covenant Chain-Two Row Wampum, known as the “grandfather of the treaties.” Famously, this Haudenosaunee wampum agreement showed how Indigenous people and newcomers could build peace and friendship by respecting each other’s cultures, beliefs, and laws as they shared the river of life.

Written by members of Six Nations and their neighbours, this book introduces readers not only to the 17th-century history of how the Dutch and British joined the wampum agreement, but also to how it might restore good relations today. Many Canadians and Americans have never heard of the Covenant Chain or Two Row Wampum, but 200 years of disregard have not obliterated the covenant. We all need to learn about this foundational wampum, because it is resurging in our communities, institutions, and courthouses—charting a way to a future.

The writers of Deyohahá:ge: delve into the eco-philosophy, legal evolution, and ethical protocols of two-path peace-making. They tend the sacred, ethical space that many of us navigate between these paths. They show how people today create peace, friendship, and respect—literally—on the river of everyday life.

A captivating portrait of Westbeth, the legendary artists’ residence that shaped contemporary art, activism, and New York’s cultural landscape for over fifty years

In 1970, the former Bell Telephone Laboratories in Manhattan was transformed into Westbeth, an ambitious experiment in urban renewal that became the world’s largest and longest-running art­ists’ residence. Home to generations of visual artists, musicians, writers, dancers, and performers, Westbeth has fostered creativity, community, and activism for over fifty years.

From legendary photographer Diane Arbus and conceptual artist Hans Haacke to avant-garde theater pioneers like Joe Chaikin and Gloria Miguel, Westbeth has nurtured some of the most influential voices in contemporary art. Beyond its creative legacy, the residence has been a hub for social change. Its artists played leading roles in the anti-Vietnam protests, LGBTQ+ rights movements, feminist art collectives, and urban preservation efforts.

In Creative Ozone, Miriam Chaiken offers a rare insider’s look at this extraordinary community. Drawing on intimate interviews with multiple generations of Westbeth residents, including those who grew up in the building as “feral children” immersed in art from birth, Chaiken captures the spirit of a place where creativity and activism are inseparable. She explores how Westbeth artists have weathered gentrification, economic upheavals, and major historical events, from 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy to the ongoing pandemic, revealing the resilience of this one-square-block artistic village. Blending vivid storytelling with cultural history, Creative Ozone is a tribute to the artists who shaped, and were shaped by, New York City.

Rich with character-driven narratives, this book will captivate art lovers, history buffs, and anyone fascinated by the creative life. Whether you’re drawn to the bohemian legends of Greenwich Vil­lage, the evolution of urban spaces, or the intersection of art and activism, Creative Ozone offers an unforgettable portrait of a community like no other.

A stunning exploration of New York’s most enchanting fountains

New York City’s fountains are more than just decorative features—they are historical landmarks, cultural icons, and dynamic works of art that shape the city’s landscape. In Fabulous Fountains of New York, award-winning author and native New Yorker Stephanie Azzarone takes readers on a captivating journey through the artistry, history, and hidden stories behind these remarkable waterworks.

From the grandeur of Central Park’s Bethesda Fountain to the sleek modern cascades of the Unisphere in Queens, this beautifully illustrated book showcases more than fifty fountains across all five boroughs. Alongside these celebrated landmarks, Azzarone uncovers lesser-known gems, such as Triumph of the Human Spirit and the long-forgotten temperance fountains, revealing how they reflect the city’s evolving cultural and political landscape.

With vivid storytelling, she traces the work of the architects and artists who shaped these fountains, exploring the historical events they commemorate and the scandals, controversies, and tragedies that surround them. Whether serving as refreshing retreats on hot summer days, symbols of civic pride, or gathering places for contemplation and protest, New York’s fountains have played a vital role in the city’s life.

Accompanied by breathtaking photography by Robert F. Rodriguez, Fabulous Fountains of New York captures the beauty and movement of these dynamic waterworks—from classical bronze and stone sculptures to contemporary interactive installations. Perfect for history buffs, architecture enthusiasts, and urban explorers, this book invites readers to rediscover New York through its most mesmerizing fountains.

A trailblazing journalist who took on New York’s Gilded-Age injustices

Zoe Anderson Norris was a woman ahead of her time. A Kentucky-born belle turned fearless Manhattan journalist, she used her pen as a weapon in the fight for justice. From exposing slumlords and corrupt politicians to advocating for impoverished immigrants, she captured the injustices of her era with a wit and tenacity that still resonate today. In this first biography of Norris, independent scholar Eve Kahn restores her legacy, illuminating her work as a novelist, magazine publisher, and social reformer who challenged the powerful and gave voice to the oppressed.

A prolific writer and editor, Norris chronicled the struggles of Lower East Side immigrants in her self-published periodical, The East Side, often going undercover to report on the harsh realities of tenement life. She documented tragedies such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, publicly denounced predatory men, and advised women on seizing control of their destinies. With her bohemian spirit, she led the Ragged Edge Klub, a gathering of artists, writers, and social critics who rejected the status quo.

But Norris’s courage came at a personal cost. Her life was marked by tumultuous relationships, family estrangement, and battles against the very injustices she exposed. She endured financial struggles, unfaithful or deadbeat husbands, and social ostracization for her refusal to remain silent. In her final issue of The East Side, she eerily predicted her own death, an uncanny premonition that made national headlines before she faded into obscurity.

With meticulous research and captivating storytelling, Kahn brings Norris’s extraordinary life back into the spotlight. Drawing on newly uncovered archival materials, including Norris’s own writings, letters, and investigative reports, Queen of Bohemia Predicts Own Death sheds light on a fearless journalist whose influence on investigative reporting and social justice continues to be felt today. This biography is a compelling testament to the power of the written word in the fight for truth and equity.

A powerful guide for dealing with traumatised communities in the wake of conflict and disaster.

What are the human consequences of conflict, and how should healthcare and social services respond? In this book, David Bolton provides an answer to these urgent questions, drawing on more than twenty-five years of service experience in Northern Ireland and elsewhere.

Focusing on the work he undertook with colleagues following the devastating Omagh bombing in 1998, Bolton reveals how needs were assessed and how evidence-based services were put in place. He describes the training and education programmes that were developed to assist first those communities directly affected by the bombing and later the wider population traumatised by the years of conflict. Crucially, he places the mental-health needs of affected communities at the heart of the political and peace processes that follow.

The second edition of this clear and practical book includes new chapters on the challenges of promoting justice and reconciliation in a post-conflict situation. It is essential reading for those planning for and responding to conflict-related disasters, policy makers, service commissioners and providers, politicians, civil servants and peace makers.

From the US to Europe and beyond, diversity and inclusion efforts are increasingly being caught in the crossfire of a culture war. As the backlash against ‘DEI’ grows, fairness and dignity are being reframed as divisive – rather than just smart business. So how did we get here, and what can we do about it?

Very few of us are skilled in inclusion, hoping it will be enough to be ‘nice’. However, this optimistic attitude can turn would-be allies into passive bystanders. This book is for anyone who wants to support equality: inside are tools and practical guidance to help navigate complexity, challenge complacency and take meaningful action.

The no-fly zone is a frequently used instrument in the US foreign policy arsenal, despite detrimental, or even catastrophic, results. This book examines why the instrument has such a hold on leaders’ imaginations and rhetoric despite its patchy record in practice.

Examining detailed historical case studies from conflicts in Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, South Sudan/Darfur, Libya and Syria, the book shows how debates about, and actual use of, no-fly zones in US foreign policy have not been primarily about managing conflict or protecting civilians. Instead, the focus is often on navigating contradictory international and domestic political incentives and constraints, leading to US intervention in an ill-considered and incremental manner.

In the aftermath of Britain’s 2016 decision to leave the EU, the Irish-American ethnic lobby remobilized to defend the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement from the threats posed by Brexit.

Drawing on interviews in Washington, Belfast, Dublin and London, Cowell-Meyers and Gallaher explore how the lobby shaped US policy towards Brexit in order to prevent the reimposition of a hard border on the island of Ireland and preserve peace. The authors also consider the lobby’s approach to other contentious issues, including a united Ireland and Troubles-related investigations.

Between August 2022 and July 2024, GMB Union membership at Amazon’s BHX4 Coventry warehouse skyrocketed, with 37 days of strike action resulting in a 28.5% pay rise. Yet despite this, the union narrowly lost a ballot that would have forced Amazon to grant formal recognition.

Based on ethnographic research and reflective essays from worker-leaders and organizers, this book offers a rich case study of the factors contributing to the union’s successes and setbacks. It provides a practical organizing model applicable beyond Amazon, offering strategies to engage the workforce, sustain support and develop leadership. An essential toolkit for those navigating the complexities of evolving labour practices, with particular relevance for precarious workers and workplaces where access is limited.

"An evocative, unpredictable novel."—Words Without Borders

A breathtaking novel of longing, uncertainty, and ultimately of hope, written by an International Prize for Arabic Fiction-winning author and an International Booker-prize winning translator

Azzan is a beekeeper in a rural community in Oman. Devoted to tending his bees and searching for wild hives, he encounters Thamna, a lone shepherd woman, on a mountain slope and is captivated by her and her honey-colored eyes.

Across the breathtaking vistas of Oman’s remote mountains and plains, Azzan’s troubled past and present unfold. A disappointment to his family, he turns to drink, and ultimately discovers the healing power of his beekeeping, before an accident in which he loses all.

Zahran Alqasmi’s masterful novel thrums forward with a subtle momentum. His lucid, poetic writing conveys a visceral sense of time and place, of the fragile ecologies inhabited by both bees and humans alike, in this intense and compelling novel of loss and hope.

"A veritable roadmap, not only to the complex issues surrounding their reigns, but also to the tale of their modern rediscovery. "—Stephen P. Harvey, Ahmose and Tetisheri Project, Abydos

An innovative account of the lives and times of the ‘warrior king’ Thutmose III, and the female pharaoh Hatshepsut, by renowned Egyptologist Aidan Dodson

Thutmose III and Hatshepsut are among the best-known figures in Egyptian history. Thutmose has been called the “Napoleon of ancient Egypt,” during whose reign Egypt’s armies penetrated deep into northern Syria and consolidated Egyptian dominion over much of Sudan. Hatshepsut, one of the handful of female pharaohs, also took to the battlefield, but is best known today for a great trading expedition, down the Red Sea coast to the mysterious land of Punt.

At first, Hatshepsut served simply as regent for her young nephew-stepson Thutmose, but subsequently the two shared the throne of Egypt as co-pharaohs for over a decade. Later, as sole king, Thutmose devoted much of the rest of his life to military matters and large-scale building works, continuing the work of Hatshepsut that created much of the core of the great temple of Karnak. During the very last years of his life, Thutmose launched an attack on the memory of Hatshepsut, with most of her images destroyed. Yet, some four centuries later, Thutmose III and Hatshepsut were still remembered together as great figures of the past, whose conception of pharaonic kingship served as the model for later rulers, into the eighth century BC.

This book, illustrated in full color, traces what we know about the lives and times of Thutmose and Hatshepsut, and the monuments they built to guarantee their afterlives. It then explores their posthumous reputations in ancient times, and ends with the story of how the two pharaohs emerged from the mists of time during the nineteenth century AD, to resume their places in history.

A sustained critique of postwar reconstruction in Syria as a politically neutral process

In 2011, emboldened by the Arab Spring, the Syrians rose up against their government. The Syrian regime used violence to suppress the protests, so that what began as pro-democracy protests eventually morphed into a civil war with heavy outside intervention. Today, the Assad regime has fallen, but large parts of the country lie in ruins, millions of Syrians are displaced, and the economy is in freefall. Reconstruction as Violence delves into the complex interplay of post-conflict reconstruction in Syria, challenging the traditionally held dichotomy between the end of violence and the commencement of rebuilding.

The contributors to this volume—architects, urbanists, geographers, and historians—employ critical concepts such as urbicide, domicide, and “civilian crisis architecture” to argue against the conventional theoretical frameworks that support a neat separation of phases. They illustrate how reconstruction often extends the dynamics of conflict into the urban and social realms, suggesting that the built environment becomes a battleground for further violence. They emphasize the importance of acknowledging the historical, economic, societal, legal, and bureaucratic contexts that shape reconstruction efforts, arguing for initiatives that prioritize equity, inclusivity, and community participation.

Reconstruction as Violence starkly underscores the authors’ stance that to overlook any of these dimensions, or to disengage from the reconstruction process altogether, represents a political choice with potentially detrimental effects on Syria and beyond in the Arab world, where countries like Palestine, Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Lebanon, and Sudan are undergoing similar cycles of destruction and rebuilding. It calls for a reimagined approach to reconstruction, one that fosters peace, resilience, and social justice in post-conflict societies.

Contributors:
Sawsan Abou Zainedin, Madaniya, London, UK
Ammar Azzouz, University of Oxford, UK
Valérie Clerc, Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, France
Emma Katherine DiNapoli, human rights lawyer, London, UK
Omar Ferwati, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK
Rim Lababidi, architect and independent scholar, Ohio, USA
Wendy Pullan, University of Cambridge, UK
Nasser Rabbat, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
Hashim Sarkis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
Deen Sharp, London School of Economics, UK
Heghnar Watenpaugh, University of California Davis, CA, USA