Prof Amiya P Sen and Mr Nandan Dasgupta - MEMORIALIZING BENGALI LIVES, LEGENDS AND CULTURAL LONGINGS - ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF GHULAM MURSHID

Congratulations to

for collating and editing this book in memory of Ghulam Murshid — a tribute to an academic and a thinker whose vision straddled continents. This volume compelled me to finally wrap up my never-ending research on the European Impact on Bengali Cuisine — something that I had been working on, for quite a long time. In short — do you know that each one of these foods came from America and Europe and could find their way into our cuisine and into our lives only between the last 200 and 90 years? Potato, Green Chilli, Papaya, Guava, Pineapple, Tomato, Pea, Cauliflower, Cabbage, Carrot, Beet, Capsicum, Ole Kopi, Shalgom, Cocoa for chocolate, Peanut, Tobacco, , Rajma, Sopeda (Chikoo), Vanilla? We know bread, biscuit and tea were introduced by Europeans in India — but so were chop, cutlet, soup, stew, even chhana for our sweets. Dishes like lau chingri, shukto, potoler dorma were impacted by Europeans. Items like luchi, radhaballabhi, and maida-based foods were popularised in Bengal thanks to Western-technology flour mills.

The Telegraph, dated 14.9.2026, Jayanta Sengupta has written about the legacy of five great historians from Bengal,

In an op-ed article in

all of whom have passed away now. The selection, as the author states, is based on his personal choices, and -- therefore -- has some amount of arbitrariness. Yet, the five whose works he has presented in a nutshell -- Ranajit Guha, Tapan Raychaudhuri, Ashin Das Gupta, Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, and Sumit Sarkar -- are all great historians on their own rights. Their works have reshaped how the discipline is practised in India. They were all born in 1920s and 1930s and studied in my alma mater, Presidency College. Three of them also received their doctorates from the University of Calcutta. All five were prolific authors in both English and Bengali. The statistics would remain similar if we include some other world-famous Bengali historians who were their contemporaries and near-contemporaries -- Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya and Rajat Kanta Ray to name a few. It was a time when Presidency was the finest undergraduate college in South Asia at least in terms of producing historians and Calcutta University still the premiere research University. The next generations also included Bengali historians of global repute, and still Presidency produced the bulk of them, though Delhi-based universities -- Jawaharlal Nehru University and Delhi University -- gradually outperformed the Kolkata-based universities in their research outputs. Those were different times. JNU and DU, especially the former, are now in ruins. India's finest centres of historical learning have been systematically demolished. Presidency, Calcutta University, and Jadavpur await their turns. It is, indeed, high time that we remember the heights we had reached in historical scholarship, as Sengupta makes us revisits the works of five outstanding historians. See less

BHARATSAHITYAKATHA BY SISIRKUMAR DAS - VISVABHARATI REPRINT

অনেকদিন পরে পুনর্মুদ্রণ করা গেল শিশিরকুমার দাশের সেই দারুণ বইটার। আবার পাওয়া যাচ্ছে বিশ্বভারতী গ্রন্থনবিভাগে।

Paolo Livieri, “Philosophy and Religion in Hegel” (Cambridge University Press, 2026) #philosophy #religion #hegel

New Release: Paolo Livieri, “Philosophy and Religion in Hegel” (Cambridge University Press, 2026) #philosophy #religion #hegel

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".