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478 results in Area Studies

Page 1 of 24

Terror on Trial
  • An Ethnography of French Courts
  • Sharon Weill, Denis Salas, Antoine Mégie, Christiane Bésnier
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2026
    Print publication:
    02 July 2026
  • Grounded in court ethnography, this book explores terrorism trials in France. A multidisciplinary research team examines how terrorism logics are reflected, represented, and negotiated within criminal proceedings. Based on hundreds of hearing days – ranging from small terrorism criminal cases to the so-called trials for history, commonly known as the 'Charlie Hebdo' and the 'Bataclan' trials – this study offers a nuanced, bottom-up perspective on the role of courts. Through courtroom immersion, close observation of legal performances, and interviews with judicial actors, it investigates how justice is shaped in practice. Identifying three generations of trials, the book provides original insights into the evolving role of courts in terrorism cases. From an empirical and comparative perspective, it also seeks to make criminal trials of civil law systems more accessible to Anglophone readers, offering a deeper understanding of how terrorism is prosecuted in France, highlighting the role of judges, prosecutors, lawyers, and victims.
Russian Grand Strategy

Russian Grand Strategy
  • The Quest for Major Power Status and a Multipolar World Order
  • Ivan U. Kłyszcz
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2026
    Print publication:
    31 July 2026
  • Why has Russia embraced a global foreign policy after 1991, despite its limitations when compared to the Soviet Union? What distinguishes the current moment from the long-standing Russian quest for major power status is the particular grand strategy adopted by Moscow since the mid-1990s. Here, the grand strategy is labelled as 'multipolarity', and it consists of a series of grand principles that reflect Russia's views on the roles of major powers, the West, and itself. In turn, the specific ways deployed have changed and adapted according to the changing circumstances in which Moscow's foreign policy is deployed. Notably, Russia differentiates in the means used in relations with its neighbours, with the major powers, and with the broader world, but all together are meant to reinforce the goals of Russian multipolarity.
Architecture and Interiors of the Harems in Eighteenth-Century Istanbul

Architecture and Interiors of the Harems in Eighteenth-Century Istanbul
  • Deniz Türker, A. Hilâl Uğurlu
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2026
    Print publication:
    30 June 2026
  • This Element centers the architectural and material worlds created by Ottoman imperial women, foregrounding their decisive role in shaping Istanbul at the end of the eighteenth century. Focusing on Mihrişah Valide Sultan and the sultan's sisters and female relatives, it examines how their patronage transformed the imperial harem at Topkapı Palace and extended into a network of waterfront mansions, charitable complexes, and suburban estates. Drawing on poetic inscriptions, archival correspondence, and visual sources, the study reconstructs the collaborative processes linking these women to stewards, builders, and artisans. It argues that their domestic and architectural interventions constituted powerful expressions of authority, visibility, and political agency within the empire.
Letters and Gifts in the Harems of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul

Letters and Gifts in the Harems of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul
  • Deniz Türker, A. Hilâl Uğurlu
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2026
    Print publication:
    30 June 2026
  • This Element examines the political, architectural, and social transformations of the Ottoman Empire during the reign of Selim III (1789–1807), foregrounding the central role of imperial women in shaping reform. While Selim's military and administrative initiatives reconfigured Istanbul's urban fabric, his mother, sisters, and female relatives actively advanced these efforts through architectural patronage, diplomacy, and gift exchange. Drawing on archival sources, visual materials, and microhistorical analysis, the Element reconstructs the dynamic networks sustained by these women and their stewards. It challenges assumptions of female invisibility, demonstrating instead their strategic visibility, economic agency, and integral participation in imperial governance and cross-cultural exchange.

Birth and Evolution of Islamic Political Theory
  • Political Rationalism from Ibn al-Muqaffa to Ibn Khaldun
  • Gökhan Bacık
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    03 June 2026
  • The literature on Islamic political thought utilises a methodology whose typical characteristic is the arbitrary use of religious, philosophical and political perspectives, as if the differences among them have no effect. This amounts to the theologizing or philosophizing of works of Islamic political theory – written as responses to social, economic and political dynamics – as if they were written as general theoretical formulations of religion or political philosophy.

    To overcome this problem, The Birth and Evolution of Islamic Political Theory first categorizes Islamic political thought as three distinct group categories: the religious view of politics, Islamic political philosophy, and Islamic political theory. In turn, Islamic political theory is defined as the intention to explain and justify politics by invoking social, economic, and political dynamics completely or partially independently of religious and philosophical norms. These dynamics are illustrated by the study of five political rationalists: Ibn al-Muqaffa, al-Mawardi, Nizam al-Mulk, Ibn Tufayl and Ibn Khaldun.

The French Revolution
  • Events and Ideas
  • Michael Sonenscher
  • Published online:
    31 May 2026
    Print publication:
    25 June 2026
  • Three questions have usually been asked about the French Revolution: why did it happen? why was it so violent? and what was its legacy? These questions seem to beg other, more conceptually ambitious queries about causation, violence or legacies. This book aims to answer both sets of questions by bringing together events and ideas. Michael Sonenscher draws on neglected aspects of eighteenth-century intellectual and political life and thought to demonstrate the importance of ideas for making connections between historical explanation and historical narrative. Concisely synthesizing a broad range of established scholarship, Sonenscher utilises new and fresh information to explore why using ideas as evidence adds a dimension of novelty, possibility, expectation and choice to the social, cultural and political history of the French Revolution.This is history about what was expected, but did not happen, and what was unexpected, but really did.

African Literature in the World
  • Simon Gikandi
  • Published online:
    30 May 2026
    Print publication:
    25 June 2026
  • In African Literature in the World, Simon Gikandi asks: Why do debates on language continue to inform and haunt African writing? What happened when writing replaced orality as the primary form of creative expression? When, how, and why did the novel come to occupy such a dominant role in African literary history? This is a comprehensive study of the histories and theories of African literature in the twentieth century and shows how African writers adopted and transformed the English language and its traditions to account for African identities and experiences. Concerned with writing and reading as forms of mediation, Gikandi provides examples of how imaginative works shaped the public sphere in Africa in relation to decolonization and the politics of language. He explores how the emergence of a modern tradition of African writing has generated new forms of criticism in relation to the form of the novel, modernity, and modernism.

Piratical States
  • British Imperialism in the Indian Ocean World, c.1780–1850
  • Simon Layton
  • Published online:
    30 May 2026
    Print publication:
    18 June 2026
  • This deeply researched, innovative study demystifies the way we think about the pirates of world history. Simon Layton encourages readers to look beyond eighteenth-century Atlantic paradigms of rogue individuals or revolutionary collectives, placing piracy as a concept at the heart of the British imperial project in Asia in the nineteenth century. Piratical States reveals an empire bent on wresting sovereignty over maritime space with its own forms of institutional and outsourced violence. A discourse developed in the official mind of colonial 'men-on-the-spot' castigated an array of indigenous seafaring communities and interrupted state-building across the corridors and chokepoints of global trade. In reports, diaries, correspondence, and memoranda, Britain's self-declared pirate-hunters retold history through a mythology of their own making, transforming piracy into an inherently political and racial category, legitimising the wholesale erasure of their enemies.

Debating medieval Europe
  • The early Middle Ages, c. 450 –c. 1050
  • Edited by Stephen Mossman
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    30 May 2026
  • This is the first of a two-volume textbook that is aimed at first-year undergraduates as they begin their study of medieval history. It covers the period from the so-called ‘fall of Rome’ in the course of the fifth century through to the ‘Norman moment’ in the course of the eleventh. The textbook covers the broad geographical area defined by the former Western Roman Empire in an even-handed fashion, giving equal attention to Iberia and to Sicily as to England and to Francia. Each chapter deals with a given region within a defined chronological framework, but is structured thematically, and deliberately avoids a narrative presentation. The topics of governmentality, identity and religiosity serve as broad overarching categories with which to structure each chapter. The authors outline the scholarly debates within each field, explaining to a student audience what is at stake in those debates, and how different bodies of evidence and different interpretations of that evidence give rise to different perspectives upon early medieval European history. Medieval history can seem to the student as if it were an impenetrable thicket of agreed fact that just has to be learned: nothing could be further from the truth, and this textbook sets out to open the way to an engaged understanding of the period and its sources.

Debating Papal Government, 1305–1635
  • Unobvious Continuities and the Early Modern Papacy
  • D. L. d'Avray
  • Published online:
    29 May 2026
    Print publication:
    25 June 2026
  • Drawing connections between the medieval and early modern papacy, this study give vivid examples of its reactive rather than proactive character. D. L. d'Avray identifies unobvious continuities and challenges temporal divides, tracing themes that cut through the conventional periodisation. Using fresh translations and transcriptions of sources from Roman archives, alongside key passages from medieval canon law commentaries, the book defends the central thesis that papal government was predominantly 'responsive' and papal authority was not imposed from the top but emerged through a series of appeals and responses. D'Avray focuses on religious governance, rather than on the secular aspects of papal power, so the book challenges an exaggerated emphasis on the papal states. Offering a sequel to Debating Papal History, c. 250–c. 1300, this volume presents a different way of thinking about papal history over a long period.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o in Context
  • Edited by James Ogude
  • Published online:
    29 May 2026
    Print publication:
    25 June 2026
  • Ngugi wa Thiong'o in Context offers a compelling and comprehensive reading of the various contexts pivotal to Ngugi wa Thiong'o's practice as a writer. Ngugi drew a complex link between his role as a writer and the contexts within which his works are produced. The desire to come to terms with the past and the shifting historical process in his country is evident throughout his work. The volume shows that, for a writer whose work is steeped in biographical life experiences and historical events, context is even more special. It must be recovered through imagination and re-imagined as part of Ngugi's self-writing. One of the aims of this volume is to displace the notion of context as a reified site of retrieval and self-evident knowledge, and also to see how this sense of context offers readers of his vital writings new and disruptive ways of re-reading Ngugi's texts.

The Cambridge History of American Popular Culture
  • Edited by Lauren Rabinovitz
  • Published online:
    29 May 2026
    Print publication:
    25 June 2026
  • The Cambridge History of American Popular Culture is a comprehensive treatment of American popular culture. It is organized around the major time frames for defining American history, as well as genres of popular culture and, pivotally, around historical instances where American popular culture has been a key transformative agent shaping American history, values, and society. This ambitious book by a team of scholarly experts from across the humanities offers unique historical breadth and depth of knowledge about the ongoing power of commercial entertainment. The Cambridge History of American Popular Culture is a fresh, original and authoritative treatment of the aesthetics, producers and artists involved in American popular culture, a phenomena that exerts tremendous cultural power both domestically and internationally.

Communism in an Enchanted World
  • Chinese Folk Religion under Mao Zedong
  • S. A. Smith
  • Published online:
    29 May 2026
    Print publication:
    04 June 2026
  • Drawing together decades of research, Steve Smith explores the survival and adaptation of folk beliefs in Mao's China in the face of seismic social change and growing political repression. Bringing an oftenneglected aspect of modern Chinese history to the fore, he shows how folk religion maintained a vital presence in everyday life. In myriad ways, through Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism, spirit mediums and spirit healing, divination, geomancy, and the reform of traditional marriage and funeral rites, rituals, and beliefs provided resources for adaptation and resistance to the regime. Nevertheless the survival of folk religion must be set against the secularizing forces that the regime unleashed. This unique history gives readers a vivid sense of life under Mao Zedong as vibrant, contentious, and resilient – a far cry from stereotypes of a secular, regimented, and monochrome society.

‘I Felt All This’
  • Enslaved People's Emotional Lives in the Antebellum US South
  • Beth R. Wilson
  • Published online:
    29 May 2026
    Print publication:
    25 June 2026
  • Drawing on methods from the history of emotions to study enslaved people's lives, Beth R. Wilson exposes the social, cultural and political role that emotion played in the US South. Exploring both individual and collective emotions, Wilson shows how enslaved people resisted white people's attempts to restrict their feelings and expressions by developing their own emotional ideals and expectations. Moving through case studies that examine a range of underexplored forms of testimony, the book introduces readers to slave narratives, letters, written interviews and recorded testimony to show that emotion was central to how enslaved people resisted, survived and remembered the system of slavery. Enslaved people's descriptions of their individual experiences of love, pain, grief and joy are woven throughout this study, which provides a framework that historians can use to paint a nuanced, detailed and empathetic picture of the complex emotional impact of slavery.

Protective Clubs
  • How Leaders Cooperate in African Regional Organizations
  • Christina Cottiero
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2026
    Print publication:
    25 June 2026
  • How do African leaders cooperate through regional intergovernmental organizations (RIOs) to manage political and security threats? Do the particular interests of heads of state really matter for explaining how these organizations address crises and intervene in their members' domestic affairs? Protective Clubs reveals how presidents across Africa cooperate in RIOs to protect themselves from threats, such as military coups. Cottiero argues that heads of state concerned with their personal survival often treat RIOs as bases for organizing, in essence, mutual protection clubs based on reciprocity. Leaders who cooperate and maintain 'good standing' with co-members are more likely to receive back-up during crises, while leaders who destabilized co-members are more likely to be abandoned or punished. Employing original datasets on security interventions and leader exile, interviews, and Nigerian presidential archive records, Protective Clubs shows how collusion among leaders matters not just for particular leaders, but for regional stability and democracy.

The Cambridge Companion to Song China
  • Edited by Cong Ellen Zhang
  • Published online:
    28 May 2026
    Print publication:
    18 June 2026
  • This engaging Cambridge Companion introduces readers to the richness, complexity and diversity of one of the most important periods in Chinese history: the Song dynasty, 960–1279 CE. Bringing together leading scholars from Asia, Europe, and the United States, it provides an overview of key institutions, political, economic and military history, while also delving into the everyday lived experience of medieval China. Together, the authors create a vividly detailed and intimate portrayal of people, places, ideas, and material culture at both the 'centre' and 'margins' of Song society. They explore the lives of people and groups from diverse backgrounds, as well as places and things from the Yellow River to the publication of Buddhist prints and medical formularies. This volume highlights the brilliant accomplishments of Song scholarship in recent decades and provides an inspirational introduction for future researchers.

A Man of the World
  • Tom Mboya, the Cold War and Decolonization in Kenya
  • Daniel Branch
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2026
    Print publication:
    02 July 2026
  • Tom Mboya was one of the most important global political figures of the age of decolonisation. Widely acknowledged to be a member of the top tier of African nationalist leaders, he was also one of Kenya's founding fathers. Using Mboya's papers in addition to several other archives, Daniel Branch demonstrates how much of his political success at home and abroad was derived from his cultivation and adept use of an extensive international network of supporters, particularly in the United States. A Man of the World explores how Mboya built this network among civil rights activists, labour leaders and political figures. Branch explores in detail the great controversies that Mboya's global network created within Kenyan politics up until his assassination in July 1969, particularly the funding he received from sources connected to the CIA. In doing so, this study sets Kenya's decolonisation in its global context and demonstrates how the Cold War influenced its outcome.

Demobilising the Far Right
  • Patterns and Processes from Demonstration Campaigns in Germany, England, and Austria
  • Michael C. Zeller
  • Published online:
    27 May 2026
    Print publication:
    11 June 2026
  • Demobilising the Far Right focuses on dynamics of mobilisation, counter-mobilisation, and state coercion to offer a new comparative study of far-right demonstration campaigns across Austria, England, and Germany from 1990–2020. With rigorous qualitative comparative analysis and process-tracing case studies, the book explores what factors drive the demobilisation of far-right movements and the critical role of state and societal responses. By examining key far-right groups like the British National Party and the German People's Union, it sheds light on a crucial yet underexplored area of social movement theory. Combining innovative methodology with rich empirical analysis, Demobilising the Far Right provides vital insights for understanding political violence, extremism, and protest movements as well as how states and social actors respond, and the implications for democratic societies.

An Introduction to Chinese Linguistics
  • Chan Lü, Zev Handel
  • Published online:
    26 May 2026
    Print publication:
    18 June 2026
  • Grounded in descriptive linguistics, this textbook introduces the basics of the major subfields of linguistics, as well as the Chinese writing system, for students with no prior linguistic training. It presents the Chinese language from the perspective of both modern linguistics and its longstanding philological legacy, as well as providing historical and sociolinguistic context. Chapters cover phonology and phonetics, morphology, lexicon, lexical semantics, syntax, sign language and braille. Authentic, real-world examples are drawn from Chinese newspapers, websites, and social media to facilitate meaningful linguistic analysis, while other examples contrast English and Chinese to help students grasp key concepts. Students will also benefit from the robust pedagogical approach, which includes learning objectives, guiding questions, checkpoint summaries, discussion questions, exercises, further readings, and bilingual glossaries. Supplementary resources provide answers to exercises, sample course syllabi, links to resources, and recordings of sounds.

Middle East from Empire to Sealed Identities
  • Lorenzo Kamel
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    23 May 2026
  • This compelling analysis of the modern Middle East – based on research in 19 archives and numerous languages – shows the transition from an internal history characterised by local realities that were plural and multidimensional, and where identities were flexible and hybrid, to a simplified history largely imagined and imposed by external actors. The author demonstrates how the once-heterogeneous identities of Middle Eastern peoples were sealed into a standardised and uniform version that persists to this day. He also sheds light on the efforts that peoples in the region – in the context of a new process of homogenisation of diversities – are exerting in order to get back into history, regaining possession of their multifaceted pasts.

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