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
Urban Liquefaction: Rethinking the Relationship between Land and Sea
(punctum books, 2026-01-28) Simonetti, Cristián; Lussault, Michel; Ingold, Tim
From classical times until today, cities have been conceived in the western imagination as ideally confined to the fixities of the land, a space defined in opposition to the fluxes of the sea. Whereas solid land afforded a durable platform for the establishment of property and citizenship, the fluid sea allowed markets---isolated within the secure boundaries of cities---to be connected across the globe though navigation.
Urban Liquefaction: Rethinking the Relationship between Land and Sea attends to the concurrent tensions between solidity and fluidity, permanence and impermanence, and substance and change that remain at the core of the western intellectual tradition, often dividing what is perceived as social from what is perceived as natural in life. Sea level rise poses unprecedented threats to this oppositional relationship, forcing us to reconsider the tension between solidity and fluidity in the design of the built environment. Nearly ten percent of all major cities are likely to be impacted by sea level rise in the coming decades, compromising the necessary infrastructure on which urban life depends. In reality, urban landscapes have been continually in flux, which becomes dramatically visible to urban dwellers mostly in catastrophic events such as earthquakes, tsunamis, alluvions, sinkholes and, above all, soil liquefaction.
Urban Liquefaction gathers contributions from scholars and practitioners working across continents and fields interested in urban life in (and after) the Anthropocene, including anthropology, archaeology, art, architecture, design, human geography, and science studies, to open up an inquiry into these categorical tensions and to speculate on alternative futures for the built environment.
Heroines of Greek and Roman Myth: An Intermediate Latin Reader
(Open Book Publishers, 2026-01-05) Teitel Paule, Maxwell
This volume offers students a fresh approach to reading Latin through the lens of women’s stories in classical myth. Too often, the myths encountered in Latin classrooms center on men, while women are pushed to the margins or depicted primarily as victims of violence. This reader deliberately shifts focus, presenting narratives of nine heroines without requiring students to navigate accounts of sexual assault—an important consideration when the challenge of mastering Latin syntax is already demanding.
The stories, carefully adapted from ancient sources, progress in grammatical and stylistic difficulty, beginning with accessible prose and gradually building toward the complexity of authentic classical Latin. Drawing on Dickinson College’s Latin Core Vocabulary, the book ensures that learners are practicing the most useful words, while less common terms are glossed in-line to promote fluid reading rather than constant translation.
Designed for students completing an introductory Latin sequence or beginning an intermediate course, the volume reinforces core grammar through repeated exposure while introducing more authentic word order and stylistic patterns in later chapters. Both practical and engaging, this book smooths the transition from textbook Latin to unadapted texts, making the voices of classical heroines central to the learning experience.
Passivisation in Semitic, Iranian, Armenian, and Beyond
(Open Book Publishers, 2026-01-07) Noorlander, Paul M.; Asadpour, Hiwa
This volume brings together research on passive voice constructions in low-resource languages of Western Asia, a region marked by extraordinary linguistic diversity as well as a long history of cultural suppression and marginalisation. The contributions showcase the passive voice in Semitic, Iranian, Armenian, Greek, and Turkic languages, many of which are endangered, understudied, or confined to diaspora communities and disappearing language islands. Education and cultural expression in these languages remained heavily restricted across parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, underscoring the urgent need for documentation and revitalisation.
The chapters explore the rich typological variation of passive voice constructions, examining their typological traits, synchronic microvariation and diachronic developments. Drawing on Siewierska’s definition, the studies investigate processes of agent demotion and patient promotion, reductions in transitivity, and the fuzzy boundaries between passive and other detransitivisation strategies such as middles, anticausatives, statives and light verbs as well as impersonal subjects and agent omission. They also shed light on the impact of text genre, verbal aspect, and language contact on passivisation.
By integrating theoretical, typological, historical, and areal perspectives, the volume discusses the internal stability of detransitivisation strategies, their evolution from earlier source constructions, and their position in voice systems more broadly. It raises fundamental questions about whether cross-linguistic tendencies in passives reflect universal patterns or area-specific historical contingencies.
This collection thus provides an essential resource for scholars of all theoretical persuasions that are interested in voice and valency and/or in Western Asia’s linguistic diversity, while foregrounding the pressing need to support communities whose linguistic heritage is at risk.
Science in the Salon: Atoms and Animals in Madeleine de Scudéry’s 'Conversations' (1680–92): An Essay and Translation
(Open Book Publishers, 2026-01-30) Taylor, Helena
Madeleine de Scudéry (1607–1701) was a celebrated seventeenth-century novelist and essayist, yet her engagement with natural philosophy and the sciences has been largely overlooked. This volume presents the first English translation of 'The Story of Two Chameleons' (1688) and situates it within Scudéry’s broader scientific and philosophical writing. Beyond this seminal text, the book explores her reflections on atomism, natural history, and epistemology, revealing her critical engagement with cutting-edge theories of her time, including a challenge to the Cartesian ‘animal-machine’ hypothesis.
By translating and analyzing key sections from her multi-volume Conversations (1680–1692), including ‘On Uncertainty’, ‘The Story of Prince Ariamène’, which features Democritus, and ‘On Butterflies’, alongside selected manuscript material, this volume demonstrates how Scudéry’s interdisciplinary approach defied rigid intellectual boundaries, activating what Anne-Lise Rey terms ‘epistemic mobility.’ Her work offers a vital perspective on women’s contributions to the history of science and philosophy, and illuminates the ways in which marginalized voices engaged with and shaped knowledge production.
With a critical introduction and extensive commentary, this open access edition makes Scudéry’s work widely available to scholars and students in early modern studies, French literature, philosophy, animal studies, and the environmental humanities. It is a timely contribution to ongoing efforts to recover women’s intellectual history and reassess the intersections of literature, science, and philosophy in early modern Europe.
The Case of California
(punctum books, 2026-01-20) Rickels, Laurence A.
Focusing on the changing image of the West Coast through such varied social and cultural artifacts as bodybuilding, group therapy, suicide cults, Marilyn Monroe, milk-carton images of missing children, orgies, Mickey Mouse, zombies, teenage slang, shock therapy, and surf music, The Case of California offers a dizzying psycho-history of the twentieth century as crystallized in the symbolic configuration and “case” of California, which case is articulated in relation to German modernism, National Socialism, and Freudian psychoanalysis. As Laurence Rickels writes, “on the personalizable level or label, California is a death cult; on the social, outward, happy-face level, it distributes pleasure via sadomasochism, the adolescent group, or friendship.”
Ultimately, The Case of California excavates the places “California” occupies as concept or placeholder within Freudian psychoanalysis and such systems as the Frankfurt School, East Coast psychoanalysis, and deconstruction. To excavate the full range of “California,” one must apply pressure to a series of adjacent (and often equally marginal or missing) concepts, including group and adolescent psychology, female sexuality, the haunting of music and of mass media at large, the charge of child abuse, and a certain convergence of religious and hysterical conversion.
Contact us at support@repository.cam.ac.uk
Follow us on twitter - @CamOpenAccess or @CamOpenData
Read the Unlocking Research blog