Dotawo: A Journal of Nubian Studies offers a platform in which the old meets the new, in which archaeological, papyrological, and philological research into Meroitic, Old Nubian, Coptic, Greek, and Arabic sources confront current investigations in modern anthropology and ethnography, Nilo-Saharan linguistics, and the critical and theoretical approaches of postcolonial and African studies. Dotawo gives a common home to the past, present, and future of one of the richest areas of research in African studies. It offers a crossroads where papyrus can meet the internet, scribes meet critical thinkers, and the promises of growing nations meet the accomplishments of older kingdoms.

The ninth issue of Dotawo takes a long-term perspective on Nubian houses and households to explore the distinctive material, visual, and phenomenological worlds of Nubian homescapes. A “homescape” is an array of features related to the home. It is the socially constructed space of human activity, understood as having spatial, conceptual, and emotional boundaries and delimitations. Contributors to this volume embrace the dichotomy of homescapes, demonstrating how Nubians adapt their homescapes over time and space even while adhering to a core identity. The cross-disciplinary contributions to this volume include sociological, anthropological, archaeological, and linguistic approaches to the topic, as well as photographic essays, artwork, and fiction.

In Dido’s encounter with Aeneas, the Aeneid explores abiding themes of love and loyalty, fate and fortune, the justice of the gods, imperial ambitions and its victims, as well as cross-cultural encounters and the geopolitics of colonial settlement. As Aeneas’ most significant other, Dido also assumes a crucial role in Virgil’s epic aetiology of Roman history and the Augustan principate. She owns the dark plot of Aeneid 4, in which divinely engineered erotic obsession culminates in divinely orchestrated sex that leads to personal and political tragedy: the cave encounter in Carthage entails a world-historical curse that operates in counterpoint to Jupiter’s triumphal destiny. Poetry that has fascinated readers since antiquity is here presented in an innovative, student-friendly edition, with study questions, vocabulary, commentary and visual material designed to facilitate engagement with Virgil’s text. The companion volume Teaching Dido: Critical Perspectives on Aeneid 4 (OBP 2026), also edited by Ingo Gildenhard, brings together interpretative essays and select works of scholarship to further enhance readers’ appreciation of the psychological depth, literary artistry, and thematic complexity of Virgil’s Dido.

At the heart of this book is a story about reading, about reading and pedagogy, about pedagogy’s readers, about readers who listen, listening while reading, about poems and their sonic materials, about the demands that poetic sounds make on writers and readers, about seduction, about echoes and repetition, about the resounding qualities of poetic matter. How might the inarticulate (or inarticulable) communicate in the sounds of poetry? And how might poetry teach us to attend to what is beyond language or even beyond figuration? Reading for the excluded or absent, that which remains after erasure, might be said to be a hermeneutical commandment. But how might we “read” for the faint echoes of words, the shared, phonic resonances that remain and continue to sound afterwards?

In Echo Otherwise, framed as a series of slow, recursive readerly meditations, Saidenberg sets about attending to these questions by bringing together two writers, Lucretius and Ferdinand de Saussure, whose selected works surprisingly disclose a set of interconnected and overlapping concerns with how sound works and in what sounds and resounds in the universe of poems and atoms, and they are also attentive to what sound tells us about poems and atoms. In addition to her readings of Lucretius and de Saussure on sound in the company of other readers — as reading, for Saidenberg, is a collective affair — there are garden walks in Little Sparta with Robert Glück and sustained engagements with m. nourbeSe philip’s Zong!, several works by Saidiya Hartman, and the global pandemic. Ultimately, Echo Otherwise attests to the richness of the encounters that transpire in the process of reading and its transformative effects, encouraging forms of relation that would be receptive to and solicitous of unexpected otherness.

In March 2020, when schools across Ontario, Canada closed and emergency remote teaching and learning (ERTL) began, 160,000 teachers were abruptly separated from their students and from the relational fabric that sustains classroom life. After the Before Times documents how teachers experienced those early months of COVID-19 pandemic pedagogy—and what their stories reveal about the nature of teaching and learning.

Drawing on interviews with fifty primary and secondary school teachers, Sarah Barrett moves beyond questions of technology and technique to explore relationships: with government, school boards, colleagues, parents, students, and self. In the ‘negative space’ of pandemic pedagogy, teachers identified what was hardest to replicate at a distance: trust, community, professional integrity, and care.

Grounded in the African philosophy of Ubuntu, ‘I am because we are’, this book offers a timely reflection on crisis, integrity, and the relational foundations of a good quality education.

What should I do? What is the right thing to do? What do I do when I don’t know what to do?

The difficulty in answering these questions does not come from a lack of knowledge but a deeper problem that requires us to look inward (and outward).

Inner Conflicts is meant to be read in times of upheaval. It traverses jagged terrain, giving voice to the unspoken doubts and contradictions that underlie our dearly held projects. Drawing from psychoanalytic theory, five chapters unpack, process, and – like psychoanalysis – free associate to the fundamental tensions in our lives that refuse resolution. Neither a simple critique nor defense, Inner Conflicts contends that only through acknowledging all parts of the argument within us can we fully attend to the urgencies and particularities of ethical and political life.