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.

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

October sees the publication of 4 titles, all of which are available to download open access from our website.

Outrage

The Rise of Religious Offence in Contemporary South Asia

Edited by Paul Rollier, Kathinka Frøystad, and Arild Engelsen Ruud

Whether spurred by religious images or academic history books, hardly a day goes by in South Asia without an incident or court case occurring as a result of hurt religious feelings. The sharp rise in blasphemy accusations over the past few decades calls for an investigation into why offence politics has become so pronounced, and why it is observable across religious and political differences. This book does just that. Bringing together researchers in Anthropology, Religious Studies, Languages, South Asia Studies and History, each chapter focuses on a recent case or context of alleged blasphemy or desecration in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar.

Find out more and download it for free here.

The Contemporary Medieval in Practice

Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing

Contemporary arts, both practice and methods, offer medieval scholars innovative ways to examine, explore, and reframe the past. This book ‘does’ Medieval Studies differently by bringing it into relation with the field of contemporary arts and by making ‘practice’, in the sense used by contemporary arts and by creative-critical writing, central to it. Intersecting with a number of urgent critical discourses and cultural practices, such as the study of the environment and the ethics of understanding bodies, identities, and histories, this short, accessible book offers medievalists a distinctive voice in multi-disciplinary, trans-chronological, collaborative conversations about the Humanities.

Find out more and download it for free here.
 

Georges Perec’s Geographies

Material, Performative and Textual Spaces

Edited by Charles Forsdick, Andrew Leak, and Richard Phillips

Georges Perec, novelist, filmmaker and essayist, was one of the most inventive and original writers of the twentieth century. Georges Perec’s Geographies is the first book to offer a rounded picture of Perec’s geographical interests. Divided into two parts, Part I, Perec’s Geographies, explores the geographies within his work in film, literature and radio, from descriptions of streets to the spaces of his texts, while Part II, Perecquian Geographies, explores geographies in a range of material and metaphorical forms, including photographic essays, soundscapes, theatre, dance and writing, created by those directly inspired by Perec.

Find out more and download it for free here.

Socialism, Capitalism and Alternatives

Area Studies and Global Theories

Edited by Peter J. S. Duncan and Elisabeth Schimpfössl

Through analysis of post-socialist Russia and Central and Eastern Europe, as well as of the United Kingdom, China and the United States, Socialism, Capitalism and Alternatives confronts the difficulty we face in articulating alternatives to capitalism, socialism and threatening populist regimes. Beginning with accounts of the impact of capitalism on countries left behind by the planned economies, the volume moves on to consider how China has become a beacon of dynamic economic growth, aggressively expanding its global influence. The final section of the volume poses alternatives to the ideological dominance of neoliberalism in the West.

Find out more and download it for free here.

We are delighted to announce the release of volumes 1-5 of the Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham.