? = Review forthcoming
ARTS AND DESIGN
- Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion
Edited by Joanne B. Eicher, emeritus regent's professor, University of Minnesota. Berg Publishers, £995.00. ISBN 9781847881045
This 10-volume resource explores the dressed and adorned body across cultures and throughout history. Featuring over 2,000 illustrations, it is aimed at students in anthropology, art history, museum studies, cultural studies, and fashion and textiles.
BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
- Resolving Ecosystem Complexity
By Oswald J. Schmitz, Oastler professor of population and community ecology, Yale University. Princeton University Press, £44.95 and £24.95. ISBN 9780691128481 and 8498
Drawing on empirical examples, Schmitz illustrates species' use of evolutionary ecological strategies to negotiate a predator-eat-predator world, suggesting that the implications of species trade-offs are critical to making ecology a predictive science.
BUSINESS AND MANAGEMENT STUDIES
- The Dominance of Management: A Participatory Critique
By Leonard Holmes, reader in management, Roehampton University. Ashgate, £55.00. ISBN 9780754611844
Holmes offers a fresh analysis of the rise of managerialist approaches to development. Using two British inner-city community development projects as case studies, he seeks to demonstrate how "managed development" runs counter to participatory values and aspirations of communities receiving development aid.
EDUCATION
- Our Speaker Today: A Guide to Effective Lecturing
By Allan Gaw, clinical trials unit director, University of Glasgow. SA Press, £18.99. ISBN 9780956324214
This user-friendly guide to lecturing draws on Gaw's 25 years of experience in the field. Via an accessible, step-by-step approach, it features practical advice for new lecturers as well as those struggling to find the occupation enjoyable.
ENGINEERING
- Graph Theoretic Methods in Multiagent Networks
By Mehran Mesbahi, associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics, University of Washington; and Magnus Egerstedt, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology. Princeton University Press, £41.95. ISBN 9780691140612
This text is intended as an introduction to the analysis and design of dynamic multiagent networks. Focusing on graph theoretic methods, it looks to present a fresh formalism and set of tools for networked systems and covers topics including formation control, coverage, distributed estimation, social networks and games over networks.
LITERARY STUDIES
- Romeo and Juliet
By Edward L. Rocklin, professor of English, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Palgrave, £42.50 and £9.99. ISBN 9781403995049 and 5056
Rocklin presents an introductory guide to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet in performance, providing scene-by-scene commentary and examining varying factors including contextual documents, a brief history of the text and first performances, and annotated further reading.
SOCIAL SCIENCES
- ? Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America
By Erika Doss, professor of American studies, University of Notre Dame. University of Chicago Press, £22.50. ISBN 9780226159386
Doss proposes that the emergence of memorials throughout the US landscape in recent years attests to an underlying obsession with issues of memory and history. Looking at the larger issues behind society's culture of commemoration, she suggests that this desire to memorialise the past disposes itself to the social and political agendas of diverse groups of Americans.
ALSO PUBLISHED THIS WEEK...
GEOGRAPHY AND ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES
- Landscape, Race and Memory: Material Ecologies of Citizenship
By Divya Praful Tolia-Kelly, lecturer in human geography, Durham University
Ashgate, £55.00
ISBN 9780754649571
Drawing on both visual and material culture, Tolia-Kelly examines the value of memory in considering the experience of postcolonial citizenship in Britain. Reflecting on the cultural landscapes of British Asian women, she reveals social-historical narratives about migration, citizenship and belonging and presents a refiguring of race memory as being critical to English heritage and postcolonial politics.
MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION STUDIES
- Advertising and Cultural Politics in Global Times
By Pamela Odih, senior lecturer
in sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London
Ashgate, £60.00
ISBN 9780754677116
Odih draws on the work of Baudrillard, Giroux, Foucault, Castells and Latour to highlight the transgressive convergences between cultural politics and global advertising media. In doing so, she looks to illustrate the manner in which advertising continues to revolutionise the political sphere.
PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY
- Machiavelli’s God
By Maurizio Viroli, professor of politics, Princeton University
Princeton University Press, £30.95
ISBN 9780691124148
In arguing against widely held views of the work of the Italian philosopher as cynically
un-Christian or even anti-Christian, Viroli suggests that Machiavelli, far from opposing Christianity, believed that it was crucial to republican social and political renewal, but first needed to be renewed itself.
POLITICS
- America’s Perceptions of Europe
By Leif Johan Eliasson, assistant professor, East Stroudsburg University
Palgrave, £55.00
ISBN 9780230100046
Eliasson seeks to counter common American views of Europe, addressing himself to ordinary citizens in a jargon-free and readable manner. He considers issues including the prevalent and pervasive distortions and misperceptions about Europe, European policies, societies and people that dominate US media.
SOCIAL SCIENCES
- The Ashgate Research Companion to Multiculturalism
Edited by Duncan Ivison, professor of political philosophy, University of Sydney
Ashgate, £75.00
ISBN 9780754671367
Featuring contributions from scholars including James Bohman, Barbara Arneil and Avigail Eisenberg, this companion aims to offer a comprehensive look at key issues in the field of multiculturalism via critiques that have evolved in recent decades.
- Consumption Challenged: Food in Medialised Everyday Lives
By Bente Halkier, associate professor of sociology, Roskilde University
Ashgate, £55.00
ISBN 9780754674764
Halkier illuminates the challenges facing food consumption, comparing four empirical Danish case studies with other analyses drawn from a wider international context. The text is intended for sociologists in the field of consumption, risk and the environment, as well as policymakers and researchers in geography, communication, media, governance and social psychology.
- Reds, Whites, and Blues: Social Movements, Folk Music, and Race in the United States
By William G. Roy, professor in the department of sociology, University of California, Los Angeles
Princeton University Press, £24.95
ISBN 9780691143637
This text considers the political force of folk music through the activities that make up social movements. Roy examines events such as the People’s Songs movement of the 1930s and 1940s, and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s in order to explore the relationship between cultural forms and social activity.
- Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa after the Cold War
By Charles Piot, professor in the departments of cultural anthropology and of African and African-American Studies, Duke University
University of Chicago Press, £39.00 and £13.00
ISBN 9780226669649 and 9656
Basing his study on fieldwork in Togo, Piot argues that a new form of biopolitics has emerged in Africa. He suggests that the recent development of political and religious phenomena, such as an eviscerated privatised state and a reappearance of accusations of witchcraft, is remaking the face of one of the world’s poorest regions.