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.

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

Hear author Sophia Psarra discuss her new book The Venice Variations: Tracing the Architectural Imagination.

Date: Wed 2 May 2018
Time: 18:30 – 20:00
Location: 6.02 The Bartlett School of Architecture, 22 Gordon Street, London, WC1H 0QB

Register your attendance

Join UCL Press and the FRINGE Centre for the launch of the two-volume Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, which marks the first publication in the FRINGE Series.

Date: Thursday 22nd March 2018
Time: 16:00 – 20:00
Location: IAS Common Ground, Wilkins Building, UCL

Alena Ledeneva invites you on a voyage of discovery, to explore society’s open secrets, unwritten rules and know-how practices. Broadly defined as ‘ways of getting things done’, these invisible yet powerful informal practices tend to escape articulation in official discourse. They include emotion-driven exchanges of gifts or favours and tributes for services, interest-driven know-how (from informal welfare to informal employment and entrepreneurship), identity-driven practices of solidarity, and power-driven forms of co-optation and control. The paradox, or not, of the invisibility of these informal practices is their ubiquity. Expertly practised by insiders but often hidden from outsiders, informal practices are, as this book shows, deeply rooted all over the world, yet underestimated in policy. Entries from the five continents presented in this volume are samples of the truly global and ever-growing collection, made possible by a remarkable collaboration of over 200 scholars across disciplines and area studies.

An open access edition of both volumes of the book is available to download free from UCL Press, in addition hardback and paperback editions.