Thoth Archiving Network Pilot at Cambridge
Cambridge University Library (CUL) is piloting participation in the Thoth Archiving Network, which will allow small presses to use a simple deposit option to archive their publications in multiple repository locations, creating the opportunity to safeguard against the complete loss of their open books catalogue, should they cease to operate.
This is a pilot repository site hosting open access books by a range of publishers depositing content in Thoth. This site is maintained and managed by the Open Research Systems Team at Cambridge University Library (CUL).
More information about this pilot and the Open Book Futures Project is available at this page.
Open Book Futures
Recent Submissions
Hylo Narrans: Echoes of Material Marronage
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-10-22) Toksöz Fairbairn, Kevin
This book explores the acoustic agency of brass as a vital medium through which histories of extraction, resistance, and collective creativity resonate. Blending metalwork, experimental instrument-building, and philosophical inquiry, the book listens closely to brass not just as material, but as storyteller—what the author calls hylo narrans, echoing Sylvia Wynter’s invocation of homo narrans. Grounded in their practice spanning artisanal craftsmanship and industrial labor, the author examines how materials respond, resist, and reshape meaning within the workshop, the concert hall, and the broader social fabric. By introducing chimeracords—hybrid sound objects forged from factory detritus—and their affordance for sonic experimentation, 'Hylo Narrans' challenges Western narratives of purity, utility, and control, inviting readers to consider alternative storylines posed by materials-in-flight.
Weaving theories of marronage through situated acoustic knowledge, this book is essential reading for those working at the intersection of sound, matter, and community. It speaks to experimental musicians, sound artists, artistic researchers, and theorists interested in how sonic materiality relates to social space, cultural memory, and communal wellbeing. With a deep commitment to sonic collectivity and intermaterial dialogue, this volume reimagines the workshop as a site of resistance, resonance, and relational creativity.
Crossings: Migrant Knowledges, Migrant Forms
(punctum books, 2025-10-03) Mukherji, Subha; Din-Kariuki, Natalya; Williams, Rowan
Crossings: Migrant Knowledges, Migrant Forms brings together activists, artists, scholars, and migrants with diverse histories to explore what the experience of migration does with, and to, knowledge, and how its own ways of knowing find expressive form. As the volume’s authors think about physical and imaginative crossings, and the traversals and transactions of knowledge they entail, the book itself crosses and complicates disciplinary and formal boundaries and the barriers between critical and creative intervention. Crucially, it brings together voices and forms emerging out of the experience of dislocation with responses to the encounters it generates.
The volume’s discussions begin in the early modern world, and move freely across periods to dwell on the urgent experience of migrancy in our own times, while also responding to an urgent need to connect the local with the global experience of migrant knowledge and migrant aesthetics. Crossings stakes the claim that creative art, backed by humanities-based thinking, can meet the imaginative and ethical demands that the unknowable reality of mass displacement places on us, in a way that governments, institutions, and public discourse have calamitously failed to do. But aesthetic practice itself needs to be re-positioned if it is to rise to these political and human challenges, negotiating the points of friction between its own predilections and the matter of migration.
Crossings offers “migrant forms” – art about migration, objects from migrant life shaped into artifacts, and migrant self-expressions – as the means of this imaginative re-orientation, and a tool for activating a radical alternative to economic models of social benefit. Crossings takes its place in an emergent ecology of migrant forms, both speaking to and participating in that ecology.
Grammar of Etulo: A Niger-Congo (Idomoid) Language
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-10-20) Ezenwafor-Afuecheta, Chikelu I.
This work provides the first detailed linguistic description of the grammar of Etulo, a language spoken in Nigeria by a minority group in Benue and Taraba states. This description establishes Etulo as a tone language characterised by a predominant SVO word order, non-inflectional morphology, prominent aspectual values, obligatory complement verbs and verb serialization, among other features. This grammar also serves as a foundation for further description of the Etulo grammar and for the development of pedagogical materials needed in Etulo language teaching.
Within the Benue-Congo sub group of languages, Etulo is classified as an Idomoid language alongside seven other languages with which it shares striking linguistic similarities. These include Idoma, Igede, Yatye, Alago, Akweya, Akpa, and Eloyi, none of which has yet received a robust linguistic description in the form of a grammar. This work therefore serves as a reference work not only for Etulo, but also for other Idomoid languages yet to be described.
This volume will be of interest to researchers of African linguistics in general and Idomoid languages in particular, as well as Africanists, comparative linguists and language typologists more generally.
Ontohackers: Radical Movement Philosophy in the Age of Extinctions and Algorithms, Part III: Metahistories of Movement: Philosophies in Becoming
(punctum books, 2025-10-24) del Val, Jaym*/Jaime
Part III provides is a critical history of (movement) philosophies, exposing the rise of the mechanistic vision as dominant anomaly emerging from a variety of other older proposals which have continued to exist in the background, returning more strongly since the 19th century, while exposing the limitations of recent attempts to free movement from the metaphysical tradition, which the book associates to the rise of human supremacism and its associated mass extinction cycle. The book proposes that movement is the core hidden motif of philosophy and diagnoses philosophies following a metaphilosophical and metaformative methodology that considers the perceptual–kinetic frames and biases underlying them. It is both a sketch for future expansion and an appendix to the previous two volumes, which grounds RMP in a critical revision of the literature, exposing the differences, while undoing some errors, and rescuing philosophies like that of many Presocratics from the misreading stemming from Aristotle. Hereby a shift from philosophia to philokinesia is proposed, toward a thinking of the body in motion, reversing philosophy from a tool of human supremacism to an undoing of it and a regeneration of movement diversification – and with it life – in the Biosphere.
Performance Research Methods: Interdisciplinary Methods for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-10-24) Groot Nibbelink, Liesbeth; Karreman, Laura
'Performance Research Methods' is the first comprehensive guide to contemporary methodologies in performance studies, offering a clear and structured overview of the tools currently shaping research in theatre, dance, and performance. While many volumes focus on individual methods, this book uniquely surveys a range of approaches, presenting their historical background, analytical potential, practical application, and interdisciplinary relevance.
Designed with clarity and usability in mind, each chapter follows a consistent structure: introduction, contextual framing, practical application, case study demonstration, interdisciplinary expansion, and suggestions for further reading. This format enables readers to compare methods with ease and understand how each can be adapted to real-world research.
Developed by scholars actively teaching these methods in graduate and undergraduate programs, this hands-on volume addresses a key gap in the field: the lack of explicit, accessible discussions of performance research methods. Responding to the societal, technological, and ecological contexts of contemporary performance, the book makes visible the knowledge practices that often remain confined to the classroom.
Accessible to students, researchers, and arts professionals alike, this volume provides an essential resource for anyone looking to engage critically and creatively with performance in the twenty-first century.
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