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The Panopticon Versus "New South Wales" and Other Writings on Australia
Tim Causer and Philip Schofield
University College London, 2021
Jeremy Bentham’s writings on Australian governance and colonization.
 
Jeremy Bentham conceived the panopticon, in part, as an alternative to criminal transportation to Australia. This latest volume in The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham series draws out these connections by collecting both Bentham’s fragmentary and extended comments on Australian governance and colonization. These writings include a fragment headed “New Wales” (1792) correspondence with William Wilberforce (1802), three letters to Lord Pelham (1802), a “Plea for the Constitution” (1802–3), and “Colonization Company Proposal” (1831)—the majority published here for the first time. Although Bentham’s most famous ideas emerged from his opposition to colonization, these writings demonstrate how the reformer became a vocal advocate for settler colonization near the end of his life.
 
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Paradise from behind the Iron Curtain
Reading, Translating and Staging Milton in Communist Hungary
Miklós Péti
University College London, 2022
The role and reception of Milton’s work in Communist Hungary.

This book provides a detailed survey of the key responses to Milton’s work in Hungarian state socialism. The four decades between 1948 and 1989 saw a radical revision of previous critical and artistic positions and resulted in the emergence of some characteristically Eastern European responses to Milton’s works. Appraisals of Milton’s works in the communist era proved more controversial than receptions of other major Western authors: on the one hand, Milton’s participation in the Civil War earned him the title of a “revolutionary hero,” on the other hand, religious aspects of his works were often disregarded and sometimes proactively suppressed. This book highlights these diverging responses and places them in the wider context of socialist cultural policy. In addition, it presents the full Hungarian script of the 1970 theatrical performance of Milton’s Paradise Lost, the first of its kind since the work’s publication, alongside a parallel English translation, enabling a deeper reflection on Milton’s original theodicy and its possible interpretations in communist Hungary.
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Parliament Buildings
The Architecture of Politics in Europe
Edited by Sophia Psarra, Uta Staiger, and Claudia Sternberg
University College London, 2023
An interdisciplinary study of how the physical space of parliament buildings influences politics.

As political polarization undermines confidence in the shared values and established constitutional orders of many nations, it is imperative that we explore how parliaments are to stay relevant and accessible to the citizens whom they serve. The rise of modern democracies is thought to have found physical expression in the staged unity of the parliamentary seating plan. However, the built forms alone cannot give sufficient testimony to the exercise of power in political life.

Parliament Buildings brings together architecture, history, art history, history of political thought, sociology, behavioral psychology, anthropology, and political science to raise a host of challenging questions. How do parliament buildings give physical form to norms and practices, behaviors, rituals, identities, and imaginaries? How are their spatial forms influenced by the political cultures they accommodate? What kinds of histories, politics, and morphologies do the diverse European parliaments share, and how do their political trajectories intersect?

This volume offers an eclectic exploration of the complex nexus between architecture and politics in Europe. Including contributions from architects who have designed or remodeled four parliament buildings in Europe, it provides the first comparative, multi-disciplinary study of parliament buildings across Europe and across history.
 
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Participatory Planning for Climate Compatible Development in Maputo, Mozambique
Edited by Vanesa Castán Broto, Jonathan Ensor, Emily Boyd, Charlotte Allen, Carlos Seventine, and Domingos Augusto Macucule
University College London, 2015
Participatory Planning for Climate Compatible Development in Maputo, Mozambique is a practitioners’ handbook that builds upon the experience of a pilot project that was awarded the United Nations ‘Lighthouse Activity’ Award. Building upon a long scholarly tradition of participatory planning, this dual-language (English/Portuguese) book addresses crucial questions about the relevance of citizen participation in planning for climate compatible development and argues that citizens have knowledge and access to resources that enable them to develop a sustainable vision for their community. In order to do so, the author proposes a Participatory Action Planning methodology to organise communities, and also advances mechanisms for institutional development through partnerships.
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Passages
Moving beyond Liminality in the Study of Literature and Culture
Edited by Elizabeth Kovach, Jens Kugele, and Ansgar Nünning
University College London, 2022
An interdisciplinary exploration of the concept of passages.

The study of literature and culture is marked by various distinct understandings of passages—as both phenomena and critical concepts. These include the anthropological notion of rites of passage, the shopping arcades (Passagen) theorized by Walter Benjamin, the Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade, present-day forms of migration and resettlement, and understandings of translation and adaptation. This book explores passages as contexts and processes within which liminal experiences and encounters are situated. Based on the premise that concepts travel through times, contexts, and discursive settings, the volume enables a meaningful exchange regarding passages across disciplinary, national, and linguistic boundaries. Contributions from senior scholars and early-career researchers whose work focuses on areas such as cultural memory, performativity, space, media, (cultural) translation, ecocriticism, gender, and race utilize specific understandings of passages and liminality, reflecting on their value and limits for their research.
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Picturing the Invisible
Exploring Interdisciplinary Synergies from the Arts and the Sciences
Edited by Paul Coldwell and Ruth M. Morgan
University College London, 2022
An interdisciplinary approach to invisibility through the lens of the arts and sciences.

Picturing the Invisible presents different disciplinary approaches to articulating the invisible, that which is not known or not provable. The challenge is how to articulate these concepts, not only to those within a particular academic field but beyond, to other disciplines and society at large. As our understanding of the complexity of the world grows incrementally, so does our realization that issues and problems can rarely be resolved within neat demarcations. Therefore, the authors argue, the importance of finding means of communicating across disciplines and fields must become a priority. This book brings together insights from leading academics from a wide range of disciplines, including art and design, curatorial practice, literature, forensic science, medical science, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, philosophy, astrophysics, and architecture, who share an interest in exploring how in each discipline we strive to find expression for the invisible or unknown and to draw out and articulate some of the explicit and tacit ways of communicating those concepts that transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries.
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Plantation Crisis
Ruptures of Dalit Life in the Indian Tea Belt
Jayaseelan Raj
University College London, 2022
An illuminating and intimate account of the ruptures in life at the bottom of global capitalism and caste hierarchy.

What does the collapse of India’s tea industry mean for Dalit workers who have lived, worked, and died on the plantations since the colonial era? Since the mid-1990s, the colonial era plantation system—and its workforce of more than two million people— has faced a series of ruptures stemming from neoliberal economic globalization. In the South Indian state of Kerala, the Dalit workforce is at the forefront of this crisis and its profound effects on their social identity and economic wellbeing. Plantation Crisis offers a complex understanding of how processes of social and political alienation unfold in moments of economic rupture. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Peermade and Munnar tea belts, the book analyzes the profound, multidimensional sense of crisis felt by those who are at the bottom of global plantation capitalism. Out of the colonial history of racial capitalism and indentured migration, Plantation Crisis opens our eyes to the collapse of the plantation system in India, and the profound impacts this has on the Dalit workers who lived there for generations.
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Poems of Guido Gezelle
A Bilingual Anthology
Edited by Paul Vincent
University College London, 2016
The Bruges-born poet-priest Guido Gezelle(1830–1899) is generally considered one of the masters of 19th-century European lyric poetry. At the end of his life and in the first two decades of the 20th century, Gezellewas hailed by the avant-garde as the founder of modern Flemish poetry. His unique voice was belatedly recognised in the Netherlands and often compared with his English contemporary Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889). In this bilingual anthology, award-winning translator Paul Vincent selects a representative picture of Gezelle’soutput, from devotional through narrative, to celebratory and expressionistic. Gezelle’sfavourite themes are childhood, the Flemish landscape, friendship, nature, religion and the Flemish vernacular, and his apparently simple poems conceal a sophisticated prosody and a dialogue with spiritual and literary tradition. However, an important barrier to wider international recognition of his lyric genius up to now has been the absence of translations that do justice to the vigour and musicality of Gezelle’sWest Flemish idiom. Two of the translations included go some way to redressing the balance: ‘TheWatter-Scriever’ by Scotland’s national poet Edwin Morgan and ‘A Little Leaf . . .’ by Francis Jones. Both translators make brilliant use of their own vernaculars (Glaswegian and North Yorkshire respectively) to bring Gezelleto life for the non-Dutch-speaking reader.
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Poetic Writing and the Vietnam War in West Germany
On fire
Mererid Puw Davies
University College London, 2023
An examination of the largely forgotten anti-war writing from West Germany spurred by the Vietnam War.
 
Though the Vietnam War did not directly involve West Germany, it was nonetheless a decisive catalyst for the era’s wider protest movements in that country, and it gave rise to an ardent anti-war discourse. Poetry and poetic writing were key to anti-war work. Hundreds of poems and related writings about Vietnam circulated in West Germany, yet they are almost entirely forgotten today. Poetic Writing and the Vietnam War in West Germany uncovers and explores some of that rich artistic production in order to present a new history of engaged poetic writing in West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s and to draw out distinctive characteristics of wider protest culture. In doing so, it makes the case for attending to marginal, non-canonical, or neglected literary and cultural forms, and for critical thinking about why they might, over time, have been obscured. The book also offers a case study for reflection on the representation of war, on ways in which German oppositional culture could imagine its others, and on the relationship of poetry to the historical world.
 
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The Poetry of John Tyndall
Edited by Roland Jackson, Nicola Jackson, and Daniel Brown
University College London, 2020
John Tyndall (c. 1822–1893), is best known as a leading natural philosopher and trenchant public intellectual of the Victorian age, who spoke and wrote controversially on the relationship between science and religion. Far fewer people know that he also wrote poetry.
 
The Poetry of John Tyndall contains annotated transcriptions of all 76 of Tyndall’s extant poems, the majority of which have not been published before. The poems are complemented by an extended introduction, which explores what the poems can tell us about Tyndall’s self-fashioning, his values and beliefs, and the role of poetry for him and his circle. More broadly, this introduction addresses the relationship between the scientific and poetic imaginations, and wider questions of the purpose of poetry in relation to science and religion in the nineteenth century.
 
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Politics and Poetics of Authenticity
A Cultural Genealogy of Sinhala Nationalism
Harshana Rambukwella
University College London, 2018
What is the role of cultural authenticity in the making of nations? Much scholarly and popular commentary on nationalism dismisses authenticity as a romantic fantasy or, worse, a deliberately constructed mythology used for political manipulation. The Politics and Poetics of Authenticity places authenticity at the heart of Sinhala nationalism in late-nineteenth and twentieth-century Sri Lanka. It argues that the passion for the "real" or the "authentic" has played a significant role in shaping nationalist thinking and argues for an empathetic yet critical engagement with the idea of authenticity.

Through a series of fine-grained and historically grounded analyses of the writings of individual figures central to the making of Sinhala nationalist ideology the book demonstrates authenticity’s rich and varied presence in Sri Lankan public life and its key role in understanding postcolonial nationalism in Sri Lanka and elsewhere in South Asia and the world. It also explores how notions of authenticity shape certain strands of postcolonial criticism and offers a way of questioning the nature of the nation as a unit of analysis but at the same time critically explore the deep imprint of nations and nationalisms on people’s lives.
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Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America
Edward King and Joanna Page
University College London, 2017
Latin America is experiencing a boom in graphic novels that are innovative in their conceptual play and their reworking of the medium. Drawing on a range of sophisticated work, these graphic novels experiment with questions of the representation of urban space, modes of perception and cognition, and new forms of ethics in the post-human world. As the first book-length study of the topic, this book argues that the graphic novel’s emergence in Latin America acts as a uniquely powerful force exploring the nature of twenty-first-century subjectivity, emphasizing the ways that humans are bound to their non-human environment.
 
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Postwar Architecture Between Italy and the UK
Exchanges and Transcultural Influences
Edited by Lorenzo Ciccarelli and Clare Melhuish
University College London, 2021
Explores how cultural exchange after World War II produced twentieth-century British and Italian architecture.
 
In the aftermath of World War II’s devastation, Italy and the United Kingdom reimagined urban space. Post-war Architecture Between Italy and the UK explores how architects, urbanists, and historians in both countries collaborated around the shared need to rebuild. The authors discuss the far-reaching effects of this cultural exchange, including the influence of historic Italian town centers on British public space and the origin of postmodernism in clashes between British critics and Italian architects. Drawing on a wealth of archival materials, this volume offers new insights into architectural history in post-war Europe.
 
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Prosperity in the Twenty-First Century
Concepts, Models and Metrics
Edited by Henrietta L. Moore, Matthew Davies, Nikolay Mintchev, and Saffron Woodcraft
University College London, 2023
A powerful vision for reimagining prosperity for the twenty-first century.

Prosperity in the Twenty-First Century sets out a new vision for prosperity in the twenty-first century and how it can be achieved for all. The volume challenges orthodox understandings of economic models but goes beyond contemporary debates to show how social innovation drives economic value. Drawing on substantive research in the UK, Lebanon, and Kenya, it develops new concepts, frameworks, models, and metrics for prosperity across a wide range of contexts, emphasizing commonalities and differences. Departing from general propositions about post-growth to delineate pathways to prosperity, the volume emphasizes that visions of the good life are diverse and require empirical work co-designed with local communities and stakeholders to drive change. It will be essential reading for policymakers who are stuck, local government officers who need new tools, activists who wonder what is next, academics in need of refreshment, and students and people of all ages who want a way forward.
 
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