Next week is Academic Book Week, an event launched in 2015, as an annual, five-day celebration of the diversity, innovation and influence of academic books.  Initiated by staff at UCL as part of the AHRC/ British Library Academic Book of the Future Project, it has since been adopted and run by the Booksellers Association. UCL are proud to be one of the co-sponsors of the week.

From debates, workshops and seminars to exhibitions and competitions, Academic Book Week aims to open up a dialogue between the makers, providers and readers of academic books, and to increase awareness of the academic book, alerting policy-makers to its importance as part of the intellectual ecosystem of the UK. This year’s campaign theme is “Academic Books and the Environment”.

Samantha Rayner Director of the Centre for Publishing at UCL, and the founder of Academic Book Week, spoke of its importance – and increasing relevance:

“There is so much debate about the way academic work should be published and disseminated at present, that having a week of focussed activity exploring how readers and researchers are responding to this is a valuable way to access what communities outside of academia think about it all. Academic Book Week asks us to think about what an academic book is, where it should be available, and in what format: with significant changes to policy around these questions taking place, it has never been more important to understand the contexts in which research is published and disseminated. “

Sam is also speaking at one of the headline Academic Book Week events – a seminar at the London Book Fair on students as book buyers. Find out more.  You can see more about all events planned here.

During the week of the 9^th make sure you follow @AcBookWeek  and #AcademicBookWeek on social media platforms. Of particular relevance to UCL during the week will be:

• @UCLPress – where we will be tweeting a range of content from our authors around the importance of academic bookshops, and other platforms to disseminate research. In addition there will be links to free content from our books with an environmental theme.
• @UCLPublishing – for lots of news from the London Book Fair and debate around academic books and the book trade.

You can find out much more about Academic Book Week here.

February has been a really exciting, and busy, month at UCL Press, we’ve published a brand new online resource, Case Studies in Perioperative Medicine, and 4 more titles – across the built environment, literature, popular culture and heritage studies fields. For more information on all of these publications, and links to their free content, please keep reading.

Case Studies in Perioperative Medicine
Edited by Dr Anas Zyada and Professor David Walker

Case Studies in Perioperative Medicine is hosted on our innovative, open access online content platform, and developed in collaboration leading practitioners at UCL’s Centre for Perioperative Medicine. It explores clinically relevant issues, offers authoritative guidance and provides a wide variety of learning opportunities for both students and practising clinicians in perioperative medicine, by experts and practitioners from all over the world.

Each succinct, peer-reviewed, clinical case study is written in a comprehensible and engaging style and focuses on a single question, prefaced with a brief case history, providing a clinical context to the question being answered. Included within the case studies will be an opportunity for readers to interact with links, images, infographics and short videos, to improve knowledge retention and reader understanding.
Access the case studies and all associated resources for free

Re-Writing Language
How Literary Texts Can Promote Inclusive Language Use
Christiane Luck

Inclusive language remains a hot topic. Despite decades of empirical evidence and revisions of formal language use, many inclusive adaptations of English and German continue to be ignored or contested. But how to convince speakers of the importance of inclusive language? Rewriting Language provides one possible answer: by engaging readers with the issue, literary texts can help to raise awareness and thereby promote wider linguistic change.
Download for free

Comics Beyond the Page in Latin America
Edited by James Scorer

Comics Beyond the Page in Latin America is a cutting-edge study of the expanding worlds of Latin American comics. The book demonstrates the importance of studying how comics circulate in all manner of ways beyond print media. It also reminds us of the need to think about the creative role of comics in societies with less established comics markets than in Europe, the US and Asia.
Download for free

Comparative Approaches to Informal Housing Around the Globe
Edited by Udo Grashoff

Comparative Approaches to Informal Housing Around the Globe brings together historians, anthropologists, political scientists, sociologists, urban planners and political activists to break new ground in the globalisation of knowledge about informal housing. Providing both methodological reflections and practical examples, they compare informal settlements, unauthorised occupation of flats, illegal housing construction and political squatting in different regions of the world. Subjects covered include squatter settlements in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, squatting activism in Brazil and Spain, right-wing squatting in Germany, planning laws and informality across countries in the Global North, and squatting in post-Second World War UK and Australia.
Download for free

Critical Perspectives on Cultural Memory and Heritage
Construction, Transformation and Destruction
Edited by Veysel Apaydin

Critical Perspectives on Cultural Memory and Heritage focuses on the importance of memory and heritage for individual and group identity, and for their sense of belonging. It aims to expose the motives and discourses related to the destruction of memory and heritage during times of war, terror, sectarian conflict and through capitalist policies. It is within these affected spheres of cultural heritage where groups and communities ascribe values, develop memories, and shape their collective identity.
Download for free

UCL Press Journals

We’re pleased to announce that 4 of our journals have been accepted into the DOAJ – Directory of Open Access Journals. This gives our authors even greater exposure and makes it easier for our readers to find all openaccess articles

These journals are now indexed in DOAJ: Architecture_MPS, Radical Americas, Europe and the World: A law review and International Journal of Social Pedagogy (IJSP).

To find out more about the 8 Open Access journals we publish, and to download any of their recent content, take a closer look here.

Happy New Year! We’re really proud to kick off 2020 with an exhibition of some of our recent, and most popular, publications in the UCL main library – you’ll find us in the large display cabinet, halfway up the main staircase! Do take the time to look at our wide range of publications, all of which are available to download directly from this site, just use our search function to locate the book you’re interested in.

In January we also publish another new book in our Fringe series, Re-centring the City.  And we continue to publish into our Europe and the World and the International Journal of Social Pedagogy journal special issues. For more information on all of these publications, and links to their content, please keep reading.

Re-Centring the City
Global Mutations of Socialist Modernity

Edited by Jonathan Bach and Michał Murawski

What is the role of monumentality, verticality and centrality in the twenty-first century? Are palaces, skyscrapers and grand urban ensembles obsolete relics of twentieth-century modernity, inexorably giving way to a more humble and sustainable de-centred urban age? Or do the aesthetics and politics of pomp and grandiosity rather linger and even prosper in the cities of today and tomorrow?

Re-Centring the City zooms in on these questions, taking as its point of departure the experience of Eurasian socialist cities, where twentieth-century high modernity arguably saw its most radical and furthest-reaching realisation. It frames the experience of global high modernity (and its unravelling) through the eyes of the socialist city, rather than the other way around: instead of explaining Warsaw or Moscow through the prism of Paris or New York, it refracts London, Mexico City and Chennai through the lens of Kyiv, Simferopol and the former Polish shtetls. This transdisciplinary volume re-centres the experiences of the ‘Global East’, and thereby our understanding of world urbanism, by shedding light on some of the still-extant (and often disavowed) forms of ‘zombie’ centrality, hierarchy and violence that pervade and shape our contemporary urban experience.

Download for free

Europe and the World

“Considering EU External Relations after Brexit”, is a Special Issue that considers the questions around what the future of EU external relations will look like without the UK.

Read more and access the first articles here.

International Journal of Social Pedagogy

This new Special Issue is entitled "Creativity and Social Pedagogy".  Articles published draw on a wide range of topics from across the social professions to discuss forms of creative activity, including theatre and drama, film, poetry, music, and symbols.

Read more and access the first articles here.

To find out more about the 8 Open Access journals we publish, and to download any of their content, take a look here.

January 21^st 2020

In December we published New Islamic Urbanism. In addition, we published three new Journal Special Issues, one in the London Journal of Canadian Studies, and the other ones starting in Europe and the World and the International Journal of Social Pedagogy. For more information on all of these publications, and links to their content, please keep reading.

New Islamic Urbanism
The Architecture of Public and Private Space in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
Stefan Maneval
Tracing the emergence of ‘New Islamic Urbanism’, this book sheds light on the changing conceptions of public and private space, in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, in the Saudi city of Jeddah. It challenges the widespread assumption that the public sphere is exclusively male in Muslim contexts such as Saudi Arabia, where women’s public visibility is limited by the veil and strict rules of gender segregation. Showing that the rigid segregation regime for which the country is known serves to constrain the movements of men and women alike, Stefan Maneval provides a nuanced account of the negotiation of public and private spaces in Saudi Arabia.
Download for free 

Europe and the World
“Considering EU External Relations after Brexit”, is a Special issue that considers the questions around what the future of EU external relations will look like without the UK.

The articles are neatly divided into considering the different dimensions of Brexit, future UK-EU relations and the impact on both parties. Although not all the potential aspects of external relations are covered, the papers cover examples of the main points, including bilateral relations, trade and security. The ‘knock-on’ effects of Brexit with regard to the European Economic Area (EEA) and other international organisations are also considered. There is also a contribution which considers how we might study EU external relations in the light of the themes and issues highlighted throughout the special issue.
Read more and access the first articles here.

International Journal of Social Pedagogy
This new special issue is entitled "Creativity and Social Pedagogy". A key element of social pedagogy is creativity and the co-production of solutions, recognising that the problems faced by people are complex and have unique aspects. They require an equal partnership between professionals and the people with whom they work to understand their lived experience and jointly develop meaningful responses. Creativity plays a crucial part in this dialogical process.

Articles published draw on a wide range of topics from across the social professions to discuss  forms of creative activity, including theatre and drama, film, poetry, music, and symbols. 
Read more and access the first articles here.

London Journal of Canadian Studies
Consisting of nine articles, this 2019 special issue of the London Journal of Canadian Studies considers how the Canadian experience engages with questions of inclusivity and exclusivity.
You can read all of the articles for this latest issue on Science Open or through Discovery.

To find out more about the 8 Open Access journals we publish, and to download any of their content, take a look here.

December 16^th 2019

November sees us publish 3 new titles, including a novel; and to add to the excitement we have gone over the 2.5 million downloads mark across our book content. See here for information on how our books are reaching a global audience.

New titles

Eva - A Novel by Carry van Bruggen

Translated and with a commentary by Jane Fenoulhet

Eva is a coming-of-age story set in an early twentieth-century small harbour town in the Netherlands that takes readers through the eponymous main character’s orthodox Jewish girlhood to marriage, divorce, and, finally, to independence and sexual freedom. Originally published in 1927, Dutch writer Carry van Bruggen (1881–1932) expresses Eva’s dawning sense of self and expanding subjectivity through fluid, stream-of-consciousness prose.  For the first time, Jane Fenoulhet has made this important, modernist novel accessible to English-language readers, her deft translation capturing the rich expressiveness of van Bruggen’s original Dutch. In insightful accompanying commentary, Fenoulhet describes the challenges of translating van Bruggen’s dynamic, intense narrative, which necessitated deep personal engagement with the novel.

Download this free novel

The North American Arctic

Themes in Regional Security

Edited by Dwayne Ryan Menezes and Heather N. Nicol

The North American Arctic addresses the emergence of a new security relationship within the North American North. It focuses on current and emerging security issues that confront the North American Arctic and that shape relationships between and with neighbouring states (Alaska in the US; Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut in Canada; Greenland and Russia). The book provides a framework or lens through which many new developments are assessed in order to understand their impact on a changing circumpolar region at different scales – from the level of community to the broader national and regional scale.

Download for free

Ancient Knowledge Networks

A Social Geography of Cuneiform Scholarship in First-Millennium Assyria and Babylonia

Eleanor Robson

'Eleanor Robson’s Ancient Knowledge Networks offers a fascinating portrait of the social and geographical life of cuneiform scholarship, scribal learning, or ṭupšarrūtu. It examines high cuneiform culture in the terms of the texts' own taxonomies of knowledge, while taking full account of relevant archaeological evidence and employing micro- and macro-geographical analysis. A lucid presentation of new ideas concerning the Assyrian and Babylonian first-millennium intelligentsia and their patrons, Ancient Knowledge Networks is a book for cuneiformists as well as non-specialist readers outside the ancient Middle Eastern fields.' - Francesca Rochberg, University of California, Berkeley

Download for free