Molly Guptill Manning - A Librarian's War

Ray Trautman changed Americans' relationship with reading for generations. As the Chief Librarian of the Army, he brought nearly half a billion books, magazines, and comic books to World War II troops. Stateside, he battled against book bans and censorship, and fought for rural libraries and books for the visually impaired. And across his life and career, he brought the joy of reading to millions of Americans.

, author of the New York Times bestseller When Books Went to War, finally puts Ray Trautman where he has also belonged: at the centre of the story. https://oxford.ly/4fLY3TQ See less

Elizabeth B. Bearden - Crip Authority DISABILITY & THE ART OF CONSOLATION IN THE RENAISSANCE

"Crip Authority explores how Renaissance writers and artists with disabilities drew on consolatory literature to enhance their authority and create a sense of disability community across the centuries.

considers how Renaissance writers and artists understood their lived experiences of disability by drawing on the ancient genre of consolation, which aims to comfort people for a variety of hardships, including mental and physical disability. Renaissance writers used the art of consolation to resignify the mental and physical disabilities that their society frequently scorned into an expression of their military, spiritual, political, and most importantly for this study, writerly authority. Bearden names this kind of defiant authorial self-representation crip authority, thereby transgressively cripping our society's ableist notions of who has the ability and authority to write. Disabled authors include Francesco Petrarca, Teresa de Cartagena, Giovani Paolo Lomazzo, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Robert Burton, and John Milton. They all explore their experiences of disability, but their work has rarely or never been considered from a disability studies perspective. Bearden thus brings today's models of disability studies and crip theory together with early modern articulations of disability based on ancient and Renaissance models of military, political, biblical, and literary authority. In sum, Crip Authority makes a significant contribution to the growing field of early modern disability studies and invites us to rethink the extent of crip history and the endurance of disability gain".

LITERACY & POWER IN THE ANCIENT WORLD EDITED BY ALAN K BOWMAN & GREG WOOLI

"This collection attempts to set the study of literacy in the ancient world in the wider contexts of the debates among anthropologists over the impact of writing on society. Was writing a revolutionary innovation, prompting or participating in social change, or a fundamentally repressive and disciplinary technology? The book consists of a series of studies ranging over the whole of the Mediterranean world and much of northern Europe during a period of more than a millennium (c. 600 BC–AD 800). The areas examined include Pharaonic and Hellenistic Egypt, Persia and the Near East, Judaea, classical Greece, and the Roman and the Byzantine empires. Each of the contributors investigates, in his or her particular area of expertise, the changing roles of writing in history, in particular the extent to which writing played an active role in historical change in antiquity".

Eating our plate: how power and inequality shape what we eat by Anand Teltumbde

Eating is the elemental activity we share with all living beings. It’s a process of providing food – fuel needed to sustain the physiological engine that is the body. The body needs carbohydrates for energy, proteins for growth and repair, fats for multiple physiological functions and vitamins and minerals for maintaining health. Yet between the body’s need for nourishment and the food that finally reaches one’s plate lies an entire social world comprising income, caste, religion, gender, geography, culture, state policy and, increasingly, corporate power. Read more on thewire.in

Shuk Ying Chan - Postcolonial Global Justice

Many congratulations to Shuk Ying Chan, whose book

has been awarded the European Consortium for Political Research’s Political Theory Prize! Learn more about the prize and Chan's book, which the jury says has the “potential of giving new momentum to debates in global justice," here: https://hubs.ly/Q04yhtbf0

Arguments with Gandhi’ by Ramachandra Guha HarperCollins India

"By insisting on non-violence, and hastening slowly, Gandhi prepared Indians for using their freedom with greater responsibility when it eventually came." https://scroll.in/.../ramachandra-guhas-new-book-gandhis... An excerpt from ‘

Three new Bengali books based on research on lives of female sex-workers in Kolkata. Anandabajar Patrika 26 September 2026 supple

Three new Bengali books based on research on lives of female sex-workers in Kolkata. Anandabajar Patrika 26 September 2026 supple