The book presents a diverse range of critical and creative approaches to the archive on local, global, communal and activist-artistic fronts, and it is informed by archival methods that emerge from workshops, translation practice, medieval-modern poetic practice, creative writing, publishing history, as well as those of the exhibition and the installation. By placing creative practice and critical medievalist research about the archive into conversation, the book rethinks the boundaries of the medieval archive (both temporal and institutional) and argues for an expanded understanding of new scholarship with creative practice at its core.

Collected in this volume are essays by world-leading scholars, prize-winning poets and writers, as well as previously unpublished work by artists, which all examine archives as caches of knowledge. There are collaborative dialogues that approach bodies, bones and landscapes as domains that form new archives over time. The book also includes engagements in archival acts that revive or incite new exchanges with the materials of the medieval past – whether from the perspective of class, Queer Studies or Indigenous history – and challenge the ongoing and urgent issue of archival access.

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Through a comparison of case studies from multiple national backgrounds, Hosts, Hospitals and Hospitalities shows how the concept of hospitality shapes the way in which we relate with the Other in diverse – as well as changing – cultural, political, social and environmental contexts. By examining the issues of hospitality from a post-pandemic standpoint, which revised the roles of our private and public spaces in the aftermath of Covid-19, by dwelling on novel issues of climate emergency and by focusing on current developments in terms of migration and displacement, the book adds new light and significant theoretical and methodological perspectives to previous debates about hospitality.

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The volume considers the role of storytelling and experimental, creative and often collaborative interventions across, between and beyond disciplines. Contributions include reflections on the uses of poetry in youth and climate justice work, conversational life stories as a research method in sociological studies of kinship formation, analysis of the potentials and pitfalls of centring researcher positionality and lived experience as a basis for scholarly analysis, relationality and the ethics of ethnographic work with radical political movements, speculative imaginings of the future of political organising and notions of rigour and care for the living and the dead in racialised archives.

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The extracts are accompanied by essays that explore the ideas in the context of their time and link to the concepts of post-1972 translation studies. All of the extracts were originally written in languages other than English and most make their debut here in English translation, amplifying the accessibility and significance of these previously overlooked contributions.

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This concise textbook teaches beginner students the grammar of documents written in Sahidic Coptic, and provides the historical and cultural context required for reading primary sources through informal as well as more formal and religious texts.

There are 20 language lessons followed by 7 chapters of sample reading and a detailed vocabulary list.

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Cue Walter Benjamin’s Ark which re-reads the life and work of Walter Benjamin via the curious life of his only child. The focal point is Stefan’s dramatic voyage from England to Australia in 1940, a voyage rich in intellectual suggestion, shared as it was with obscure men with famous names such as Wittgenstein, Kafka, Marx and Wilde. Central to the book is the one substantive text that can be ascribed to Stefan: Benjamin’s meticulous transcription of Stefan’s utterances as an infant. This fascinating text has been largely overlooked, despite the insistence of Benjamin’s biographers that ‘it continued to play a role in Walter Benjamin’s writing until the end of his life’. This book thus seeks not only to bring into view the intriguing figure that is Stefan but also to identify him as that most crucial of Benjaminian spectres, namely, the secret ‘you’ or addressee of Benjamin’s writings.

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Contributors from different fields explore and advance debates in literary geography from diverse transnational perspectives through close readings of canonical and less familiar cultural and literary productions in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and Japanese, in locales spanning Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe. In this way, Space, Affect, Memory decentres the anglophone bias of established scholarly approaches in literary geography, probing terminologies and methodologies from different national traditions.

Finally, Space, Affect, Memory interweaves the visual arts by engaging with photography, performance and architecture. As a result, the volume offers a fresh, comparative perspective on the intermingling of space, affect and memory that lies at the heart of literary geography and comparative literature. These efforts converge in a shared attempt to pluralize the field (geographies) and to showcase the numerous possibilities of creative, transdisciplinary interaction between media, performance and representation, across cultures.

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An introductory chapter presents the language in its genetic, geographical, and typological contexts, and its multi-layered lexicon. There follow chapters on phonology, word formation and derivational morphology, nominal morphology, deictic elements, the verbal system, adjectival modification, adverbial modification, morphosyntax, and morphosemantics. This final chapter is a distillation of features of the language that are central to understanding how it conceives of and portrays the world.

In addition to grammatical analysis and discussion, A Grammar of Khowar features numerous original example sentences, mostly contributed by senior, highly competent speakers of the language. A significant number of examples are drawn from oral texts recorded by the author in several villages. They are presented in roman representation and are accompanied by a complete morphological analysis and English translation.

Additionally, an Appendix contains a 30-page sample text, presented first in Khowar’s Perso-Arabic script then by roman-based morphological analysis and an English translation by the author.

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The textbook includes access to audio files, additional activities and links to the exercises.

Praise for Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic

‘Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic, distinct from the Muslim and Christian dialects of Baghdad, was spoken by Jews for over a millennium. This book is an invaluable resource for those aspiring to study and teach the spoken Arabic dialect of Baghdad, setting a benchmark for instructional textbooks on other dialects. The author is renowned authority on Iraqi Judeo-Arabic and has extensively published on Jewish Iraqi dialects. In this volume he integrates his vast pedagogical experience, skilfully blending texts, grammar, vocabulary, and exercises focused on daily life. This book significantly contributes to the ongoing efforts to document, preserve, and study this notable dialect, thereby ensuring its preservation from oblivion.’ Ofra Tirosh-Becker, Professor and Head of the Center for Jewish Languages, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

‘This textbook comes at a time of increasing interest in Judeo-Baghdadi language and culture, as Jews of Iraqi descent recognize the urgency of learning the language from their Arabic-speaking relatives. Students will find this book easy to use, either in a class context or on their own.’ Sarah Bunin Benor, Founding Director, HUC-JIR Jewish Language Project, and Founding Co-editor, Journal of Jewish Languages

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As one of the best-preserved members of a larger but lesser-known Dalecarlian (or Dalmål) sub-branch of the Scandinavian languages, Elfdalian is a unique language to study. The purpose of the grammar is to account for Late Classical, or ‘Preserved’, Elfdalian from linguistic, historical and sociolinguistic angles, and to make the language, including both its archaic and innovative features, accessible to a wider audience.

The grammar has multiple target groups: people in Övdaln who wish to revitalise or reclaim their language in a more original form than the one it was transferred into through language decline and Swedish influence since the beginning of the twentieth century; those who wish to transmit the language to others through preschool, school or adult instruction; and likewise others who wish to study a lesser-known North Germanic language. Linguists may find Elfdalian interesting from the angles of comparative historical linguistics, language structure, as well as sociolinguistics and language planning.

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