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
Genetic Narratology: Analysing Narrative across Versions
(Open Book Publishers, 2024-12-17) Van Hulle, Dirk
Genetic Narratology is the first full-length volume to merge genetic criticism with narratology, offering an innovative approach to understanding literature. By examining the creative process behind literary works through drafts, manuscripts and revisions, this book reveals how narratives are shaped in real time.
Through diverse case studies—from Charlotte Brontë to Stephen King—this collection demonstrates how the material processes of writing influence narrative structure, pacing, and even the ‘untold’. By integrating genetic criticism with narratological methods, contributors explore how stories evolve, providing fresh insights into time, space, character, and suspense.
Bridging the gap between the production and reception of texts, this volume makes a compelling case for incorporating genetic methods into broader narratological frameworks, enhancing not only our understanding of the genesis of literary works, ultimately enriching the reading experience, but also our awareness of the ways we narrativise this genesis.
The book will be of interest to students and researchers alike, offering a new set of tools for analysing narrative across different versions.
The Birds That Wouldn’t Sing: Remembering the D-Day Wrens
(Open Book Publishers, 2024-12-19) Smith, Justin
This compelling book offers a unique perspective on D-Day and its aftermath through the personal testimonies of the Wrens who worked for Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay during Operation Overlord. Drawing on public and private archives, it reveals the untold stories of the women serving in the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS), balancing their wartime contributions with the strictures of secrecy and censorship. The narrative is framed by letters from these Wrens, which provide intimate glimpses into both the personal and professional challenges they faced during World War II.
The book captures the atmosphere of war as experienced by British auxiliaries. It highlights the Wrens' vital but often overlooked role in the D-Day planning effort and beyond, revealing the surreal coexistence of the ordinary and extraordinary in wartime. Focusing in particular on the wartime archive of one of the Wrens, Joan Prior, the author brings to life the contribution of these women to the war effort, while also offering insights into British, French, and German morale and culture. This thoughtful and moving account adds depth to the broader historical narrative of World War II, making it a valuable addition for both the general reader and the professional historian.
Investing in the Structural Transformation: 2024 European Public Investment Outlook
(Open Book Publishers, 2024-12-11) Cerniglia, Floriana; Saraceno, Francesco
The fifth volume in the European Public Investment Outlook series explores how Europe can drive structural transformation through strategic public investment. Reflecting on the lessons from the 2008–2020 polycrisis and recent economic challenges, this timely book examines fiscal policy's role in both stabilization and long-term economic development.
Part I, ‘State of the Art’, reviews current public investment and industrial policies in major European economies, including France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. It provides detailed analyses of each country's approach to fostering structural transformation through public investment.
Part II, ‘Challenges’, addresses the diverse obstacles and opportunities facing Europe’s industrial policy. It emphasizes a multidimensional strategy to overcome bottlenecks in key sectors and drive transformation. Topics include the role of industrial policy in the green transition, creating a cohesive strategy for Europe, enhancing economic security, trends in European Union defence spending, sustainable mobility, and financing structural investment beyond 2027.
This volume is essential reading for researchers, economists, and policymakers focused on understanding and implementing effective public policy in Europe, and will further appeal to anyone interested in EU governance and public investment strategies more broadly.
Breaking Images: Iconoclastic Analyses of Mathematics and its Education
(Open Book Publishers, 2024-12-11) Greer, Brian; Kollosche, David; Skovsmose, Ole
Mathematics is an activity—something we do—not just something inert that we study. This rich collection begins from that premise to explore the various social influences, institutional forces and lived realities that shape and mould the study and practice of mathematics, and are moulded by it in turn.
These twenty-one essays explore questions of mathematics as a topic of philosophy, but also the nature and purpose of mathematics education and the role of mathematics in moulding citizens. It challenges the biases and prejudices inherent within uninformed histories of mathematics, including problems of white supremacy, the denial of cultural difference and the global homogenization of teaching methods. In particular, the book contrasts the effectiveness of mathematics and science in modelling physical phenomena and solving technical problems with its ineffectiveness in modelling social phenomena and solving human problems, and urges us to consider how mathematics might better meet the urgent crises of our age.
The book addresses anybody who is interested in reflecting on the role of mathematics in society from different perspectives. It allows mathematicians to ponder about the cultural connections of mathematics and provides new perspectives for philosophical, sociological and cultural studies of mathematics. Because of the book’s emphasis on education in mathematics, it is especially interesting for mathematics teachers and teacher educators to challenge their understanding of the subject.
Cycle of Dreams
(punctum books, 2024-12-15) Weiskott, Eric
An experimental hybrid work, Cycle of Dreams pairs translation and original poetry. The translations, or adaptations, are of William Langland’s strange and wild fourteenth-century dream vision, Piers Plowman, a politically radical English and Latin poem written in the wake of plague and divided into a prologue and twenty passūs or steps. Eric Weiskott transposes the action from London and Worcestershire to New England and Long Island. The translations refashion and modernize Piers Plowman by disarticulating its continuous shape and rearticulating it as a collection of lyrics. The translation appears on the left and original poetry on the right in each page opening, so that the fourteenth and twenty-first centuries speak to one another as in a dream.
Like Piers Plowman itself in manuscript culture, Cycle of Dreams attracts paratexts. Images illustrate the absent presence of Langland’s authorship. A series of glosses or marginal notes grounds the poems in critical theory, etymologies, lyric reminiscences, and statistics reflecting the desperation of our economic moment. An “oneirography” or dreamed bibliography names some of the scholarship that supports study of Piers Plowman today and some other sources for Langlandian fever dreams.
Langland can address us today, not in the voice of a bygone author whose “context” must be arduously rearticulated in the laboratories of scholarly endeavor, but one whose utopian vision is in its broad outlines no less urgent in 2024 than it was in 1381, when English rebels used Langland’s title figure as a rallying cry for insurrection. Cycle of Dreams unearths “buried dreams / of a future adequate to the present tense.”
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