New open access books published in July 2025
Posted on 6th August, 2025
July’s sunny weather wasn’t an excuse to relax at UCL Press – we’ve been busier than ever with five new open access books! Covering topics from historical memory and mental health to kinship, sensory heritage, and literary masculinity, these titles are, as always, freely available to download from our website.
An important addition to historical scholarship, Conversations with Third Reich Contemporaries: From Luke Hollands Final Account presents excerpts from filmed interviews conducted by British documentary filmmaker Luke Holland. Most interviewees were young adults when the war ended; some had benefited from Nazism. The book raises critical awareness of issues around representation, authenticity and the co-production of narratives. Download it free.
The ground-breaking Petty Tyranny and Soulless Discipline? Patients, policy and practice in public mental hospitals in England, 1918–1930 examines England’s public mental hospitals for the working class after the First World War. Narratives of patients’ difficult daily lives are interwoven with analysis of competing agendas from campaigners, government and new medical knowledge, to build a complex picture of mental health provision. Download free.
The fantastic Marriage Matters: Imagining love and belonging in Uganda engages with new and classic anthropological theory, and gender studies about kinship, marriage, relatedness and temporality. It examines how partnership, kinship, child filiation, friendship, ideas about love and commitment have been changing, and how Ugandans imagine past and future relationship between genders and generations. Download it free.
Presenting studies of historical environments through the lens of the senses, New Sensory Approaches to the Past: Applied methods in sensory heritage and archaeology showcases the latest approaches to sensory research through real-world scenarios of human−environment connections. Interdisciplinary examples of diverse sensory in-situ studies will enable readers to replicate and enhance their own investigations. Whether you’re a student, academic or researcher, it’s a fantastic read. Download it free.
Finally, the latest volume of the Comparative Literature and Culture series, Heterosexual Masculinities and the Self-Reflexive Novel examines how the narratives of, J. M. Coetzee, Milan Kundera, Philip Roth and Mario Vargas Llosa, offer a standpoint through which to address the inscription of heterosexual masculinity into Western literary legacy and the ways in which masculinity is re-fashioned in contemporary self-reflexive novels. Download it free.
We’ll be back again next month with a round up of the very best open access books. As always, stay safe!