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
Corporeal Aesth/ethics: The Body in Bracha L. Ettinger's Theory and Art
(punctum books, 2026-02-03) Kisiel, Anna
Can we think of an ethics that originates in corporeality, and not in codified or symbolic systems? In Corporeal Aesth/ethics, the body resurfaces as a central category of Bracha L. Ettinger’s theory and art, as well as an interpretive key that allows us to assume ethical responsibility for an Other who is not abstract, or distant, or total. Ettinger’s matrixial theory, a deeply feminist psychoanalytical system, ventures beyond the models of subjectivity based on separation and lack, and thus it helps us rethink togetherness and our own humanity.
Corporeal Aesth/ethics explores how we become subjects not through a series of cuts, but through an encounter with radical openness, modeled upon the intrauterine/pregnancy period. Even though the theorized encounter relies on caring, carrying, and sharing, it is far from pleasant and safe, as we might assume. Indeed, some of the knowledge communicated in this phase of subjectivity-becoming may turn out to be painful, even traumatic. It is this profoundly corporeal encounter, Kisiel contends, that makes it possible to conceive of the body as a site and source of ethics. Envisioned through the lens of the matrixial, a subject (never alone, always in severality) reaches new modes of intimacy and hospitality, occasioned by our universally shared, originary experience of becoming with-in the maternal body.
A psychoanalyst, theoretician, and feminist, Ettinger is also an artist. Sharing Ettinger’s conviction that “painting and theory are not different aspects that attest to the same thing, but are rather differentiated levels of working-through,” Kisiel maps the entanglements of the (feminine/motherly) body in both dimensions of Ettinger’s work. In five chapters, this book delineates the project of Ettinger’s corporeal aesth/ethics. It contextualizes the matrixial body, analyzes its humanizing potential, and proposes dialogues of Ettinger’s work with feminism, theology, and Holocaust studies.
Neomania: How Our Obsession With Innovation is Failing Science, and How to Restore Trust
(Open Book Publishers, 2026-02-06) Vaesen, Krist
Contemporary science faces a profound poly-crisis: replication failures, weak theories, poor generalizability, and declining public trust. Neomania contends that these symptoms stem not merely from flawed practices or institutional pressures, but from a deeper cultural pathology—our collective obsession with innovation. This valorization of the new for its own sake has reshaped the scientific enterprise, privileging novelty over reliability and fragmentation over coordination.
Drawing on metascience as well as the philosophy and sociology of science, Neomania offers a critical analysis of how this ethos has permeated the norms and institutions of modern science. The book traces its historical emergence, diagnoses its systemic consequences, and articulates a reform agenda centered on coordination, shared research programs, and epistemic integrity—an agenda that goes well beyond the principles of Open Science.
Neomania advances a constructive vision for rebuilding science as a coherent and truth-oriented system. Combining philosophical depth with institutional analysis, it addresses students, scholars, policymakers, and practitioners concerned with the organization of knowledge production in an era of epistemic crisis. It is both a critique of contemporary scientific culture and a normative proposal for its renewal.
al-Dānī's al-Taysīr fī al-qirāʾāt al-sabʿ: A Translation with Linguistic Commentary
(Open Book Publishers, 2026-02-04) van Putten, Marijn
Al-Taysīr fī al-Qirāʾāt al-Sabʿ by the 11th century Andalusian scholar ʾAbū ʿAmr al-Dānī is one of the most influential descriptions of the seven reading traditions of the Qurʾān. It is the work on which the later didactic poem by al-Šāṭibī was based, which still stands as the basis for the teaching of the reading traditions among Muslim specialists. This book makes the highly technical genre of the Qurʾānic reading traditions accessible through a rigorous translation of al-Dānī’s work with extensive elucidating footnotes. Besides a full translation of the text, the book also includes an in-depth introduction, which lays out the history of the reading traditions, details of their transmission, the technical terminology of the Qirāʾāt genre, and summarises the linguistic principles of the reading traditions using modern linguistic terminology and illustrative tables.
Africa in Russian Imperial Culture: Race, Empire, and Representation (1850-1917)
(Open Book Publishers, 2026-02-19) Frison, Anita
This volume uncovers how Sub-Saharan Africa was imagined in Russian culture from 1850 to 1917. Drawing on travelogues, ethnographic studies, fiction, and museum collections, Anita Frison reveals how Russia—though lacking formal colonies in Africa—nonetheless engaged deeply with Western colonial discourse.
Organized around themes of Strangers, Lands, Bodies, Collectors, and Disguises, the book explores how Russians represented African peoples, landscapes, and artifacts to negotiate questions of race, empire, and national identity. Challenging the notion of Russian ‘exceptionalism’, this book demonstrates that imperial attitudes toward Africa often prefigured Soviet anticolonial rhetoric, whilst simultaneously relying on the colonial paradigm.
Richly documented and interdisciplinary, this study offers fresh insights for scholars of history, literature, and postcolonial studies, while remaining accessible to curious general readers.
Desire: Subject, Sexuation, and Love
(punctum books, 2026-02-27) Munar, Ana María
Have you ever wondered what makes you wake up in the morning? Why not just lay down, stay, and eventually disappear? What is the wanting, the energy, and the grace of liveliness? Desire is at the core of liveliness, and this book explains why it is so. Desire is much more than a mere appendix to love, sex, or our craving to have the latest fashion item. It is what allows the most personal and unique expression of each of us.
Desire: Subject, Sexuation, and Love is a work of gratitude to the Lacanian tradition and feminist philosophy. It creatively uses the story of “The Little Mermaid” by H.C. Andersen, as well as art and popular culture to explain the complex landscape of desire and its relation to love and sexuation. Much of the criticism of psychoanalysis from gender studies and poststructuralism is based on a superficial reading of Jacques Lacan, and Munar corrects this, providing in the first half of the book a rigorous and clear analysis of Lacanian subjectification and sexuation, elucidating their relationship to the nature of desire and love, in order to modify overly simplistic and erroneous interpretations of his thinking on desire.
Desire is essayistic and poetic philosophy, drawing upon and playing with psychoanalysis, philosophy, literature, biography, poetry, and art. As the reader enters the second part of the book, the focus on Lacanian theory recedes, opening a space that is more paradoxical and multiple where Munar engages in creative form as an expression of critique, transforming our understandings of desire and love, which always elude us while also always being present.
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