Results by title

‘Ambitious, sophisticated, timely and downright inspirational.’ – Philip Hayward, University of Technology Sydney, Okinawan Journal of Island Studies

'A must read … a new analytical agenda for the Anthropocene, coherently drawing out the power of thinking with islands.' – Elena Burgos Martinez, Leiden University

‘This is an essential book. [The] analytics they propose … offer both a critical agenda for island studies and compass points through which to navigate the haunting past, troubling present, and precarious future.’ – Craig Santos Perez, University of Hawai’i, Manoa

‘All academic books should be like this: hard to put down. Informative, careful, sometimes devasting, yet absolutely necessary - if you read one book about the Anthropocene let it be this. You will never think of islands in the same way again.’ – Kimberley Peters, University of Oldenburg

‘ … a unique journey into the Anthropocene. Critical, generous and compelling’. — Nigel Clark, Lancaster University

The island has become a key figure of the Anthropocene – an epoch in which human entanglements with nature come increasingly to the fore. For a long time, islands were romanticised or marginalised, seen as lacking modernity’s capacities for progress, vulnerable to the effects of catastrophic climate change and the afterlives of empire and coloniality. Today, however, the island is increasingly important for both policy-oriented and critical imaginaries that seek, more positively, to draw upon the island’s liminal and disruptive capacities, especially the relational entanglements and sensitivities its peoples and modes of life are said to exhibit.

Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds explores the significant and widespread shift to working with islands for the generation of new or alternative approaches to knowledge, critique and policy practices. It explains how contemporary Anthropocene thinking takes a particular interest in islands as ‘entangled worlds’, which break down the human/nature divide of modernity and enable the generation of new or alternative approaches to ways of being (ontology) and knowing (epistemology). The book draws out core analytics which have risen to prominence (Resilience, Patchworks, Correlation and Storiation) as contemporary policy makers, scholars, critical theorists, artists, poets and activists work with islands to move beyond the constraints of modern approaches. In doing so, it argues that engaging with islands has become increasingly important for the generation of some of the core frameworks of contemporary thinking and concludes with a new critical agenda for the Anthropocene.

An exploration of the far-reaching exchanges between ancient Persia, Greece, and Rome, offering a bold new perspective on their interconnected cultural legacy.

For more than a millennium, ancient Persia and the classical Mediterranean were deeply intertwined—not merely through conflict but also through diplomacy, trade, and cultural exchange. From the rise of the Achaemenid Empire in the sixth century BCE to the fall of Rome in 476 CE and the twilight of Sasanian Persia in 651 CE, political, religious, and artistic exchanges shaped—and were shaped by—the dynamic interactions between ancient Persia, Greece, and Rome. These encounters fostered a complex web of cultural connectivity, challenging the notion of antiquity as a series of isolated civilizations and revealing its deep, enduring entanglements.

Bringing the disciplines of classics, Iranian studies, and global history into dialogue, this volume examines how successive Iranian empires—Achaemenid, Seleucid, Arsacid (Parthian), and Sasanian—engaged with their western (and occasionally eastern) neighbors. Essays on diplomacy, religion, art, and intellectual life offer fresh perspectives on ancient historiography, cross-cultural mythmaking, material and visual culture, and the political and religious dynamics of empire. Featuring more than 100 illustrations, Entangled Worlds is a compelling resource for scholars, students, and general readers interested in the shared legacies of the ancient world.