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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.

In The Phonemes, Frances Richard investigates perceptually distinct units of experience, such as sounds, energy surges, and scraps of national and natural history, to create episodes of disruption and dissolution. Organized into sequences that move from seismic notation and wave-form typography to lyric encounters with meteors, snakes, glaciers, and the domestic sublime, the poems break language into its smallest expressive particles and reassemble them at the threshold where sense tips into noise.

Richard’s formal vocabulary is at once scientific and devotional: geological terms collide with fragments of political speech, advertising copy, lullaby, and prayer, while visual scores of nested parentheses, dashes, and radical signs interrupt the page like oscillograph readings of an unstable signal. What emerges is a poetics of phonemic attention, an insistence that a syllable, weather event, or fault line all can carry a full emotional charge and that the task of the poem is to hold open the instant in which raw perception has not yet hardened into meaning.

This title is a second edition, released as part of punctum’s Special Collections project.

This volume examines one of the defining tensions of our era: how to harness the transformative power of artificial intelligence while preserving responsibility, sovereignty, and human judgement.

Bringing together scholars and practitioners, this volume moves beyond hype and alarmism to explore AI across three interconnected levels: global systems, organisational governance, and personal ethics. It addresses digital sovereignty, cybersecurity, sustainability, inclusion, healthcare, education, and accessibility, highlighting both the environmental and social costs of AI and its potential to advance innovation within the Sustainable Development Goals.

Rather than offering easy solutions, the book advocates embracing technological possibility while insisting on transparency, accountability, and public values. At stake is not only how AI functions, but how it reshapes institutions, knowledge, and everyday life.

Balancing lightness with weight, this book invites readers to reflect critically on progress, power, and responsibility in the age of intelligent machines.

This volume examines how openness is designed, governed, contested and lived in contemporary digital knowledge infrastructures. From open source software and internet standards, to citizen science platforms, public sector data systems and alternative computing practices, the book shows that infrastructures are never neutral technical backbones. They are deeply political arrangements that embed values, distribute power and shape whose knowledge counts.

Bringing together scholars from science and technology studies, critical data studies, media studies, organisation studies, arts-based research and political sociology, this edited volume explores openness as an ongoing socio-technical process rather than a fixed ideal. The book moves from the partial openness of early Internet standards and free and open source software, through contested practices of opening government data and public infrastructures, to struggles over inclusion and governance in scholarly and cultural knowledge infrastructures. This is followed by community-driven experiments in care, repair and alternative openness and concludes with forward-looking contributions on how to keep infrastructures open for research, how to fund infrastructures as digital commons and how to mobilise open infrastructures for democratic resilience and economic sovereignty.

The contributions trace how principles such as accessibility, transparency, participation and collective stewardship are enacted in practice—and how they are challenged by commercial capture, asymmetries of expertise, cultural governance and geopolitical inequalities. Across theoretical chapters and rich empirical case studies, the book investigates the governance of open infrastructures, the politics of alternative technological arrangements and struggles for epistemic justice within knowledge systems.

By foregrounding power relations, ethical tensions and questions of responsibility, this book rethinks openness as a site of political negotiation rather than a technical solution. The volume offers critical insights for researchers, policymakers, engineers and civil society actors concerned with digital commons, democratic governance and the future of open knowledge infrastructures in increasingly contested political and technical environments.

A companion website, www.openinfrastructures.net , extends the volume through author interviews, supplementary materials and additional resources that document the making of the book and provide further insights into the debates on governing, sustaining, and contesting open digital knowledge infrastructures.

Colour Matters provides a fresh investigation of colour in the long nineteenth century. Across fourteen richly researched essays, the book explores the materiality, politics, and sensory experience of colour—from synthetic dyes and chrome pigments to the role of colour in medicine, gender, empire, and identity. By weaving together art history, literature, anthropology, science, and conservation, the contributors reveal a dynamic world where chromatic experimentation shaped aesthetics, technology, and social life. Colour Matters offers an essential contribution to colour studies and the humanities’ material turn, showing how pigment and perception illuminate both past and present.

This book will appeal to scholars and students of art history, literature, cultural studies, and the history of science in the long eighteenth-century, as well as curators, conservators, and readers fascinated by the histories of colour and material culture.

War Machine is a speculative sounding of the myriad entanglements of technology, ecology, discourse, politics, and conflict shaping the contemporary environment. Taking the tools of geopolitical competition and control as its formal and conceptual basis—wargame simulations, artificial intelligence, weaponised drones, territorial enclosure, and extractivist economics—War Machine presents a series of digitally simulated conflicts over the most ecologically vulnerable areas of the Earth, using the data gathered to generate hybrid visual poems that stand in for the multitude of political, conceptual, and economic battles that are presently raging across the face of a profoundly endangered planet.A hybrid work of generative criticism and poetry, War Machine depicts the intensive complexities of the present moment through conducting an experimental textual performance, attempting to enfold and perform, rather than simply describe, challenging conjunctions of competing discourses and activities. The resulting stream of outputs and interpretive potentials preclude the ascendency of any “definitive” critical narrative, refusing any straightforward integration with existing canons of worldly diagnosis, but also illustrating opportunities for resistant play and critical-creative possibility within the uncertainty.The consciously unconventional gesture at the heart of War Machine is in attempt at modelling an adventurous, forward-facing approach, in both thought and practice, that refuses inaction when dealing with otherwise devastating scenarios. It is an approach that acknowledges head-on myriad worldly harms, seemingly insurmountable, while still contributing to the aesthetic, affective, and conceptual foundations from which alternative modes of knowing, being, and meaning are developed and justified.

This monograph offers a rich and insightful study of The Sentencing of Jesus, an ancient Jewish polemical narrative describing the trial and execution of Jesus, which is the earliest of all the Toledot Yeshu texts. The volume includes a substantial historical introduction, carefully edited synopses of the Aramaic, Judaeo-Arabic and Hebrew versions, detailed philological and exegetical notes on the text and its transmission history, and an English translation. In his comments, Bohak explores recurring themes in Late Antique literature—such as the apologetic and polemical uses of authentic or forged protocols of trials and executions, envisioning an enemy hanged on an unexpected tree, the humiliation of dragging a corpse through the streets for all to see, and the use of magical handbooks and of spells to heal or harm—shedding new light on the cultural and literary resonances of these motifs. Detailed linguistic analyses trace translations and mistranslations across Aramaic, Hebrew, and Judaeo-Arabic traditions.

By reconstructing an ancient polemical text that has previously been known only in a fragmentary manner, and by situating it both within its Late Antique context and in the context of previous scholarship, this book makes a significant contribution to the study of Judaism, and of Jewish-Christian relations, in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages.

Benjamin Franklin has been hailed as an inventor, scientist, printer, author, philosopher, diplomat, philanthropist and political activist and, especially, a founding father of the United States, but few are aware he was also a phonetician. This book offers a groundbreaking exploration of Franklin’s little-studied linguistic legacy—his Reformed Mode of Spelling (1768/1779). In this short treatise, Franklin outlined a plan for a radical, phonetically-based modernization of the English spelling system that would simultaneously serve as a pronunciation guide for what he envisaged to be 'correct' English as well as a practical scheme allowing the unlettered and foreigners to learn to read and write ‘within a week’. The social and sociolinguistic reasons for its inception as well as what that model entailed linguistically are the focus of this book.

Moreover, while Franklin’s fascination with English orthographic reform is known among specialists, previous studies have rarely taken his reform seriously. This is the first comprehensive linguistic analysis of his phonetic system within the broader historical and sociolinguistic context of early American English, a study which also includes comparative analyses of 17th and 18th century English varieties. Drawing on an impressive array of archival and manuscript sources—some previously unknown—Gary German reconstructs Franklin’s linguistic environment and investigates how his proposed spelling reform functioned as both a phonetic guide as well as a political and cultural statement.

The book employs a robust historical sociolinguistic methodology which, for the first time, distinguishes between Franklin’s native American pronunciation and that proposed in his RMS. The data presented offer a persuasive answer to the question of whether his model was ‘English’ or ‘American’ while also exploring speaker networks and personal correspondence to trace linguistic patterns.

This study is a vital contribution to historical linguistics, American studies, and the growing field of World Englishes. With its detailed analysis and interdisciplinary appeal, it sheds new light on both Franklin’s intellectual world and the complex phonological landscape of early American-English. It is essential reading for linguists, historians, and anyone fascinated by the roots of American English.