New open access books published in January 2025
Posted on 31st January, 2025
2025 has begun in the best way possible- with four brand new open access books!
Our first book of the year, The Laissez-Faire Peasant: Post-socialist rural development in Serbia examines manifestations of peasant autonomy, both in response to and independent of state rural development policies through a multi-sited ethnography of three Serbian villages. It is shown how these factors impede state programs for rural development while enabling the spontaneous flourishing of local communities. By focusing on the agency of rural residents, the book finds that peasants are resilient and competent agents who do not need government plans to thrive.
This was closely followed by Alice Stevenson’s Contemporary Art and the Display of Ancient Egypt argues that the contemporary and the ancient do not necessarily inform each other. Rather than explore how contemporary artists have been inspired by Egypt, this book examines how they have shaped the language and discourse around study of the Egyptian past by looking at the wider field of public display in which both have been historically situated. Building on this critical history of practice, the book draws from experiments in bringing contemporary artistic sculptures, conceptual pieces, multimedia films, sounds, smells and performances into galleries: at the British Museum in London, the Egyptian Museum in Turin and the State Museum of Egyptian Art in Munich. These are used to explore what contemporary art does in these spaces, the motivations for inviting artists in, and the legacies of those interventions. It ends with a reflection on how academics and curators can be involved in the creative process and how artists contribute to academic research.
The edited collection Palaeontology in Public: Popular science, lost creatures and deep time followed. This delightful book considers the connections between palaeontology and public culture across the past two centuries. In so doing, it explores how these public dimensions have been crucial to the develo Dinosaurs feature, of course, including Spinosaurus, Winsor McCay’s ‘Gertie the Dinosaur’ and the creatures of Jurassic Park and The Lost World. A must for anyone with an interest in history of science, palaeontology and culture.
The final book of the month was the immensely important War Essays. In this fantastically absorbing book, Zainab Bahrani charts the devastation, cultural cleansing and targeted erasure of Iraq’s past, and argues that the topics of archaeology, history and memory must be analysed within the larger geopolitical issues of the contemporary Middle East. The essays present a counter-narrative of events that historicize the position of the historian and illustrate the enduring colonial practices of archaeology. Set within a narrative that reflects at once upon the violence of war and the processes of writing, an archaeologist’s personal journey unfolds. War Essays intertwines the autobiographical with the historical and analytical aspects of scholarship, weaving an eye-witness account of war with theoretical discussions around writing, the relationship of monuments, historical landscapes and memory, and how one’s sense of place in the world is disrupted by war. Definitely not one to miss.
We’ll be back again next month with a round up of the very best open access books. As always, stay safe!