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Open Access
My 1980s Gayboy Playlist
(punctum books, 2026-08-11) Ashby, Arved
In this remarkably intimate book, My 1980s Gayboy Playlist, award-winning music writer Arved Ashby muses over pieces that impacted his sexual and musical awakenings as a troubled gay adolescent—pieces by Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Beethoven, Anton Bruckner, Alban Berg, Prince, Kurt Cobain, and Tom Petty. Ashby shares memories both intimate and far-ranging, but My 1980s Gayboy Playlist is not a memoir. Instead of trying to amplify an outwardly uneventful life, the author reengages with and renegotiates eight still-simmering touchpoints—some old musical flames, a few abusive relationships among them. Ashby focuses on desire as it spilled messily across different avenues of expression, seeking connections between erotic experience and musical passion. For Ashby, as a high school student in a small, rural Midwestern town in the early 1980s, choosing Alban Berg records over Van Halen counted as a perversion. When he recognized Tchaikovsky’s melodic fixations and Prince’s and Chopin’s musical fires, he better understood his own kinks. As an inadequate piano student and a shy virgin on tricyclic psych meds, his lack of physical success taught him the limitations of the body but also showed the capaciousness of queer failure. It was music that showed him how queerness insists on misappropriation, mishearing, and reading against the grain. Musicality, like sexual expression, amounts to a kind of role-playing— involving penetration and violation of identity as well as validations of the self. The author’s queer musical loves have shown him the vital beauty of muck, unreason, and noise, and as an imaginative writer, Ashby offers the liquid self-reflexivity of Proust and the auto-theory provocations of Maggie Nelson, Paul Preciado, and McKenzie Wark. His prose is poetic and playful, and now and again chaotic. He outs himself in and through his work, with humor and radical intimacy. My 1980s Gayboy Playlist ultimately illuminates what queer theorist Leo Bersani called the gayboy’s inelegant “apprenticeship in desiring.” Ashby’s closest partners growing up were fantasy, seclusion, and music-dependency, and he found his awkward bliss at the start of the era that witnessed AIDS and the rise of the Moral Majority. In Ashby’s early exurban environment, gayness was a thing feared, because unseen and unfathomed, but his musical intimacies made his personal closet endurable. They also helped him to survive his mis-education, to overcome failures of expression, and to craft a sexual awakening into something more rich and more strange.
Open Access
Applied Psychology in Context: Stories and Lessons from Palestinian Villages
(Open Book Publishers, 2026-08-04) Hakim, Caesar; McLeod, Hamish J; Alkhatib, Mohammad
This book is an innovative, practice-oriented resource that reframes how psychology is applied in complex, real-world settings. Grounded in the lived realities of Palestine, it uses a distinctive ‘village’ framework to guide readers through key domains of psychological practice; including assessment, diagnosis, therapeutic work, and post-crisis intervention. A central contribution of the book is the introduction of the Collapse Restoration Framework, an original approach to understanding psychological collapse and its counter, restoration, in contexts of prolonged conflict, occupation, and systemic instability. Through narrative storytelling, reflective exercises, and culturally responsive theory, the book bridges the gap between standardised psychological models and the demands of working in high-complexity, underserved environments. Rooted in a psychodynamic orientation, it offers a deeply human, relational approach to care while equipping readers with practical tools for professional development and inclusive practice. Designed for trainees, early-career practitioners, and educators, it emphasises ethical practice, critical thinking, and contextual awareness. By centring Palestinian experiences within global mental health, it makes an essential and accessible contribution to contemporary applied psychology.
Open Access
Unvoicing Migraine: A Study of the Failing Voice
(punctum books, 2026-08-21) Broeckmeyer, Mariske
These writings spring from an observation: When migraine arises, the voice fails. It does so on many levels, ranging from a vocal-technical disintegration to migraine-specific symptoms like dysarthria and aphasia, up to the muteness forced upon the sufferer by stigmatization. As a migraine-suffering singer, Mariske Broeckmeyer witnesses and experiences these alterations. Frequently, routinely, and almost faithfully, she retreats to the blackened bedroom when migraine manifests. Lying in silence, she notices how little of her vocal instrument remains intact and how distorted our relations become under these circumstances. Migraine mutes—it occupies the body and leaves muscles, lungs, larynx, and tongue under its command. In the attempt to describe these sufferings, Broeckmeyer has indeed stammered and fallen silent, unable to name the pain. But could it be that this failure holds some sort of potential? What might vocal failure reveal about the nature of the voice? To these questions, Unvoicing Migraine lends an ear. Shuttling between theoretical findings and artistic practice, the book turns to concepts provided by voice theory, disability studies, and queer theory to engage in an artistic research that studies the devocalizing impact of migraine. The book also attempts to redefine the artistic practice of a singer, the author, when her vocal apparatus falters: it questions the singer’s relation to the stage and challenges the boundaries of performance. These aspects of vocality were not merely approached through an autotheoretical discourse, but through the creation of music and sound art that capture the failing voice and amplify it. Ultimately, Unvoicing Migraine looks at what lies beyond migraine, and makes note of its consequences and residues: stains the acid left on the carpet that transform into a woolly eye whose gaze morphs into a mouth that raves in a language we cannot always understand, but which Broeckmeyer transforms into migraine opera.
Open Access
The Doctrine of One: Personal Encounters with Film, Art and Music
(Open Book Publishers, 2026-08-19) Beckerman, Michael
This volume is a bold and original meditation on how we interpret art, music, and culture—and what it means to listen, see, and feel differently from others. Drawing on Czech history and aesthetics, the book moves from filmmaker Hugo Haas’s coded tributes to his murdered brother, to the haunting ex libris designs of Josef Váchal, to the deeply personal resonances of Schubert’s chamber music, Dvořák’s cello concerto, and Gideon Klein’s tragic Terezín Trio. Across these vivid case studies, the author asks whether meaning in art can ever be shared—or whether it always belongs to the individual observer. Rejecting academic rigidity Michael Beckerman celebrates the ‘splitters’—those who honor specificity, subjectivity, and the singular force of a personal response. Written in an engaging and accessible style, the book offers both a philosophical inquiry and a passionate defense of individuality in an age of conformity. It will captivate readers of musicology, cultural studies, and philosophy alike—anyone who has ever wondered what it truly means to interpret a work of art.
Open Access
African Pastoral: Versions of Virgil's Eclogues
(punctum books, 2026-08-28) Whitaker, Richard
African Pastoral: Versions of Virgil’s Eclogues presents a fresh and unexpected version of the ten pastoral poems that comprise the Eclogues of Virgil (70–19 BCE). Although these poems focus on the lives of shepherds and goatherds, Virgil makes their seemingly circumscribed existence a mirror of the wider world, a world that is both his and ours. The Eclogues deal with subjects that remain vital in the twenty-first century: erotic passion of many varieties, transformation and metamorphosis, the torments of unhappy love, and the nature and power of poetry (represented by different kinds of pastoral song). With striking originality, Virgil also allowed contemporary power politics to erupt into the world of his herders and small-scale farmers, as they face confiscation of their grazing lands and fields. South African classicist and translator Richard Whitaker has produced eminently fluent and creative versions of Virgil’s Eclogues. He reimagines the poems in an African landscape and evokes the troubled history of land dispossession in southern Africa, introducing local equivalents for much of Virgil’s Mediterranean flora and fauna and making frequent use of words drawn from indigenous languages that have enriched his country’s variety of English. African Pastoral includes stunning images by South African artist William Kentridge, which interact with the versions of Virgilian pastoral in multiple ways, complementing and illuminating the poems, as well as raising points of contrast and difference between ancient and modern contexts.
Open Access
Orienting Public Policy: Ethicists in Democratic Public Reasoning
(Open Book Publishers, 2026-08-14) W.A. Brom, Frans
Moral philosophers and academic ethicists contribute to society in several ways: as members of advisory committees, authors of policy reports, and public intellectuals engaged in policy debates. They do so not merely as citizens, but in their professional capacity as academics participating in democratic public reasoning. But on what grounds? This book develops a philosophical framework to clarify the nature of that role. In pluralist democracies, deep moral disagreement is not a problem to be eliminated but a condition to be navigated. Rather than aiming for consensus or imposing definitive moral conclusions, the book argues that ethicists can best contribute by strengthening the conditions under which disagreement becomes productive, reflective, and mutually intelligible, thereby supporting democratic legitimacy. Drawing on moral and political philosophy, the book presents ethics as a reflective practice and understands professional engagement as a form of ethics advice. While often addressing concrete issues, such advice ultimately serves to cultivate the democratic ethos necessary for open societies under pluralism. The framework highlights three core activities—explicating, engaging, and orienting—through which ethicists can support democratic deliberation. Case studies on climate justice, animal experimentation, and food policy illustrate how ethical analysis can clarify normative assumptions, foster dialogue across differences, and help navigate contested issues without erasing pluralism. In an era of increasing polarization, the book calls for a renewed understanding of ethics as a reflective public practice. It offers guidance for philosophers, policymakers, and advisors seeking to sustain a democratic ethos grounded in equality, dignity, and the rule of law.
Open Access
Jorge Luis Borges: At Play with Mental Models of the World
(punctum books, 2026-08-07) Arata, Luis O.
Jorge Luis Borges: At Play with Mental Models of the World explores mind-world relations through the creative writings and reflections of the iconic Argentine author, along with insights from corresponding findings in the field of cognitive studies. A selection of representative works—stories, poems, and essays—illuminates features of the constructive imagination that Borges sets in motion to personally blend mind and world, a venture to which he dedicated his life to the very end. This book is for readers from a broad range of backgrounds, interested in the interactive workings of mind and world through fiction, the imagination, and embodied cognition. Over the years, Borges playfully created and tinkered with models of the self, time, fiction, reality, history, solitude, and reciprocity, among other cognitive objects. Arata focuses on a selection of representative works of Borges to examine how he modeled and then remodeled, over time, his perceptions of the world and his presence in it. Of particular importance was the onset of blindness halfway through his literary life, which led him to playfully remodel certain aspects of his early views of experiencing the world. There was also his surprising partnership with María Kodama toward the end of his life, when he went from prizing solitude to experiencing a sense of reciprocity hardly felt before. Arata concludes this exploration with a view of Borges’s burial headstone that is in stark contrast to his youthful idea that his death would happen in Buenos Aires, with his vanishing engraved in cold marble. Instead, Borges chose to pass away in Geneva, and was buried next to an earthy, rough headstone engraved simply with what could be seen as his playful final story. Ultimately, Arata’s book asks, to what extent does the mind shape our perception of the world? Through his work, Borges provides us with a personal, passionate example of how fiction and reality blend to create a multiplicity of striking meanings and his writings trace the poignant human quality of a life devoted to conjuring meaning through the interactions of narrative models that emerge from weaving dreams, memories, observations, reflections, and choices.
Open Access
Trespassing: The Subversive Travel of Indonesian Women in Literature and Performance
(Open Book Publishers, 2026-08-27) Goodlander, Jennifer
This volume explores how Indonesian women writers and artists challenge the boundaries of home, nation, and identity through acts of movement, both real and imagined. Moving across novels, films, performance, and lived experience, Jennifer Goodlander introduces ‘trespassing’ as a framework for understanding how women navigate spaces where they are not expected to belong. Organized around modes of travel—by foot, train, boat, and plane—the book reveals how mobility becomes a form of resistance, enabling women to redefine themselves beyond the constraints of tradition, gender roles, and national expectations. From wandering protagonists to globally circulating artists, these stories foreground travel as a site of agency and transformation. Blending literary analysis with ethnography and performance studies, this volume offers a dynamic, interdisciplinary account of Indonesian women’s creativity. It will appeal to scholars and students of gender studies, Southeast Asian studies, literature, and performance, while remaining accessible to general readers interested in global women’s voices and contemporary Indonesian culture.
Open Access
Bourdieu and Literature
(Open Book Publishers, 2026-08-06) Speller, John R.W.
This revised and corrected edition offers a wide-ranging, rigorous and accessible introduction to the relationship between Pierre Bourdieu's work and literary studies. It provides a comprehensive overview and critical assessment of his contributions to literary theory and his thinking about authors and literary works. One of the foremost French intellectuals of the post-war era, Bourdieu has become a standard point of reference in the fields of anthropology, linguistics, art history, cultural studies, politics, and sociology, but his longstanding interest in literature has often been overlooked. This study explores the impact of literature on Bourdieu's intellectual itinerary, and how his literary understanding intersected with his sociological theory and thinking about cultural policy. This is the first full-length study of Bourdieu's work on literature in English, and it provides an invaluable resource for students and scholars of literary studies, cultural theory and sociology.
Open Access
The Diaries of Anthony Hewitson, Provincial Journalist, Volume 2: 1891–1912
(Open Book Publishers, 2026-08-17) Hobbs, Andrew
Journalist Anthony Hewitson (1836-1912) worked in one of the largest sectors of the periodical press, provincial newspapers. His diaries, written between 1865 and 1912, reveal the people, processes and networks involved in the creation of Victorian newspapers. They also tell us about fatherhood, old age, antiquarianism and local history, and the culture of Victorian towns and villages. Diaries of nineteenth-century provincial journalists are extremely rare. In this volume, Hewitson records his antiquarian research, his ownership of a Wakefield newspaper, and his retirement in Morecambe. Background notes explain his involvement in a new Conservative paper for Lancaster, and his son’s involvement in a suspicious suicide, life insurance and a New York marriage to a young widow. Andrew Hobbs’s introduction and footnotes provide background and analysis of these valuable documents. This full scholarly edition offers a wealth of new information about local newspaper writing and sub-editing, newspaper ownership and publishing, and illuminates aspects of Victorian periodicals and culture extending far beyond provincial newspapers. The Diaries of a Provincial Journalist are an indispensable research tool for local and regional historians, as well as social and political historians with an interest in Victorian studies and the media. They are also for anyone interested in turn-of-the-century social and cultural history.
Open Access
Malleus Daemonum: The Hammer of Demons
(punctum books, 2026-07-29) Albertino, Alessandro
The Malleus Daemonum provides an exciting introduction into the religious world of early modern Italy. It consists of a series of personal exorcisms which the Italian Observant Franciscan Alessandro Albertino composed and which he claims have proven themselves by experience. It bears witness to the end of a period in which priests could freely compose their own exorcisms as a regular part of their pastoral functions. Albertino’s exorcisms faithfully follow the Passion narrative in the four Gospels designed both to parallel and to empower the Vulgate text. His strategy is to employ the words and instruments used against Christ by his detractors against the demons occupying the possessed individual in order to expel them. Those words and weapons which were once used to torment, harass, and crucify Christ thus become spiritual weapons which the exorcist may use to treat their patient. Albertino introduces each exorcism with an epigram based on Classical mythology followed by litanies, invocations, and prayers, and he also includes a general exorcism to expel demons from specific parts of the body, along with general blessings and prayers to drive out all sorcery and diabolical intervention from particular articles of clothing. This edition comprises a comprehensive historical and theological introduction, a Latin edition, and the first-ever English translation of The Hammer of Demons. The translation, research, and commentary unveil a long-buried gem of the seventeenth century, offering readers an alluring narrative about the evolving face of the ancient convention of exorcism. More than just a book, this introduction, edition, and translation are an essential contribution to the understanding of the intersection of exorcism, history, and religion in early modern Italy.
Open Access
Autotheory and Its Others
(punctum books, 2026-07-22) McLaughlin, Becky; Daffron, Eric; Gil Ulldemolins, Maria; Pint, Kris
Ever since Maggie Nelson’s Argonauts gave the word fresh currency a decade ago, autotheory has infiltrated scholarly, literary, and artistic practices. Autotheory and Its Others contributes to this nascent metacritical conversation. An inclusive discourse, autotheory embraces its uncanny double, allotheory, and, thus, this collection invites to the table a host of uncanny others: psychoanalysis, queer theory, and crip theory as well as art writing, postcriticism, and autofiction, among other genres and discourses. Bringing together four editors and thirteen contributors from both sides of the Atlantic, this collection of critical and creative-critical essays grapples with what it means to couple the personal with the theoretical. The volume’s chapters feature geographical settings as far-flung as New Zealand, Iran, and Mississippi and its wide-ranging topics include anecdotal theory and dialogia–theoria, the bodymind and illness, artificial intelligence and experimentation, accident and fantasy, collages and fragments, unlearning and autopractices, unknowing and the unconscious, uncertainty and art writing, narcissus and trauma, kudzu and pedagogy, memory and legend, autofabulation and religion, and lo-fi critique and academia. Ultimately, Autotheory and Its Others showcases this emergent genre’s diversity while also charting its multivalent future directions.
Open Access
Rethinking Social Justice: Theory and Action in an Age of Transition
(Open Book Publishers, 2026-07-15) Karlberg, Michael; Smith, Derik
This book offers a compelling and original rethinking of social justice at a moment of global uncertainty and transformation. Tracing the emergence and evolution of modern social justice discourse, it addresses two fundamental questions: what ends should we aspire toward, and what means are most effective in pursuing them? Moving beyond familiar critiques of injustice, the authors identify a shared, though often implicit, horizon that diverse traditions of thought all orient toward: contributive justice. This positive vision of social justice centers on the creation of social conditions that enable every individual and group to develop their capacities to contribute meaningfully to collective flourishing. Drawing on a wide range of philosophical, historical, and empirical sources, the book critically examines the strategies that have shaped social justice movements. It argues that, in the current transitional period, contentious and oppositional approaches are reaching a point of diminishing returns. In their place, the authors propose radical constructive agency: purposeful, collective efforts to build new social forms and institutions capable of supplanting anachronistic and unjust ones. Ambitious in scope yet accessible in style, this work brings clarity to complex debates while offering a hopeful and forward-looking framework for change. Its rigorous synthesis of key concepts and traditions, combined with its innovative theoretical contributions, makes it an essential resource for scholars, activists, and anyone seeking new pathways toward a more just and inclusive society.
Open Access
Teaching Dido: Critical Perspectives on Aeneid 4
(Open Book Publishers, 2026-07-03) Ingo Gildenhard
A companion to Virgil, Aeneid 4, with Study Questions, Vocabulary, and Commentary (https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0527) (OBP 2026), Teaching Dido includes five essays that explore aspects of Virgil’s poetry in a student-friendly way. They range from issues in poetics (verse design, allusion) to key themes (‘historiographical Dido’, religion, pietās). Six reprinted scholarly articles follow, allowing students and their teachers to engage directly with some of the research that informs the essays and the commentary and to broaden their appreciation of Dido, the Aeneid, Virgil, and the wider historical context. Topics covered include the ethics of hospitality, the interface of intertextuality and psychology in the construction of character, Carthage and Rome as imperial powers, racecraft in Aeneid 4, Virgil’s authorial self-fashioning and negotiation of the Augustan new normal, the myth of Troy in Rome’s cultural imaginary, and Dido’s place within Virgil’s philosophy of history.
Open Access
Verbal Multi-Word Expressions in Corpus Languages: Data, Methodology, and Analysis
(Open Book Publishers, 2026-07-14) Fendel, Victoria Beatrix
This volume brings together a diverse, interdisciplinary cohort of scholars to shed new light on verbal multi-word expressions in corpus languages such as Greek, Latin, and Egyptian. Addressing in particular corpora related to in-groups, which are often overlooked due to entrenched research traditions or limited accessibility, the volume makes these corpora newly visible and methodologically relevant. Contributions critically examine language-specific descriptive categories derived from comparative concepts used in cross-linguistic comparison and interrogate how corpus languages, with their non-expandable and historically bound data, challenge existing frameworks, language-internally, cross-linguistically, and typologically. Drawing on expertise from linguistics, computer science, papyrology, and Egyptology, Verbal Multi-Word Expressions in Corpus Languages explores both the theoretical and practical dimensions of studying verbal multi-word expressions, including cutting-edge digital solutions. Grounded in original data, the research pushes beyond current boundaries, advancing typological understanding and methodological precision. The volume firmly supports multilingual research practices and challenges the dominance of English in academic discourse. The result is a critical, data-rich resource that advances our understanding of how verbal multi-word expressions function across historically significant but methodologically under-explored corpora. Verbal Multi-Word Expressions in Corpus Languages will be essential reading for historical linguists focused on corpus methods and the syntax-lexicon interface; general linguists studying multi-word expressions comparatively; and digital humanities scholars developing tools for large-scale corpus analysis, as well as those interested in specific, underexplored corpora like those related to Galen and Hippocrates or the Herculaneum papyri.
Open Access
The Khan’s Pifferi: Reading about the Musics of Asia in Late Fifteenth-Century Italy
(Open Book Publishers, 2026-07-27) Shephard, Tim; Xiao, Chenxi
This volume explores what Italian readers of the 1480s and 1490s could learn about Asian music through the expanding medium of print. Drawing on ten travel books printed in Italy before 1501, reporting the experiences of pilgrims, merchants, diplomats, adventurers, and an enslaved individual, the authors examine how musical practices in the Levant, Turkey, Persia, India, and China were described for late fifteenth-century audiences. Through close textual analysis, the book reveals how references to singing, instruments, religious ritual, and courtly patronage shaped an emerging Italian understanding of Asian sound worlds. These printed accounts are situated within Italy’s dense networks of pilgrimage, trade, diplomacy, and migration across the Eastern Mediterranean, demonstrating that Italian musical culture was inflected by global connections reaching far beyond Catholic Europe. Interdisciplinary in approach, The Khan’s Pifferi will be of particular interest to musicologists, Renaissance scholars, historians of travel and intercultural encounter, and researchers in global and pre-modern studies. It offers a fresh perspective on how musical knowledge circulated and how Renaissance Italy engaged imaginatively with cultures beyond Europe.
Open Access
The Specter of AIDS
(punctum books, 2026-07-24) Perlongher, Néstor
The Specter of AIDS is a transdisciplinary text originally written in 1980s Brasil in a time of pandemic emergency. It situates how HIV/AIDS reconfigured intimacy, sexuality, and power while also providing a minoritarian theory of desire lived by dissident sexualities in 1980s Latin America. Perlongher’s paper exposes a new barometer of life undergirded by medico-scientific reason, religious ideology, and morality — in other words, a re-actualization and intensification of normative reason. In nuanced prose combined with wit, rigorous scholarship, political alertness, and poetics, Perlongher delineates how HIV/AIDS serves as a blueprint for how viral threats shed light on the inequitable unevenness of this world. Written in Portuguese in 1987 and then published in Spanish in 1988, this translation offers an un/timely reading for the 21st century as it shows how new contaminants threaten national public health’s paradigms of gendered and racialized structures: their borders, bodies, and good comportment.
Open Access
The Philosophy of Julia Wedgwood: Imperfect Antithesis
(Open Book Publishers, 2026-07-16) Stone, Alison
Julia Wedgwood (1833–1913) was a major intellectual presence in the Victorian period, yet her philosophical work has long remained overlooked. This book offers the first sustained study of her philosophy, recovering a distinctive and original framework centred on what she called the ‘law of imperfect antithesis’. Drawing on both published texts and newly attributed anonymous essays, it reconstructs the unity of her thought across ethics, metaphysics, religion, and history. Wedgwood argues that human life is structured by oppositions, between pleasure and pain, self and others, freedom and necessity, nature and the supernatural, but that these oppositions are never symmetrical. Instead, they are uneven, unstable, and rooted in lived experience. By resisting the simplifying tendencies of abstract logic, she develops a phenomenologically sensitive account of moral life. She emphasises self-sacrifice, aspiration, and the plurality of moral ideals, and criticises rival theories such as utilitarianism.The book further shows how Wedgwood extends this framework into a philosophy of history, interpreting civilisations as developing through asymmetrical ‘recoils’ from earlier forms of life. Situating her in dialogue with figures such as Aristotle, Darwin, and Hegel, it demonstrates both her intellectual range and her independence.Combining philosophical analysis with innovative digital methods for recovering lost texts, this study restores Wedgwood as a major nineteenth-century philosopher and offers a compelling new lens on moral and historical experience.
Open Access
Dotawo: A Journal of Nubian Studies 9: Nubian Homescapes
(punctum books, 2026-06-27) Boozer, Anna Lucille; Jennings, Anne M.
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.
Open Access
Virgil, Aeneid 4, with Study Questions, Vocabulary, and Commentary
(Open Book Publishers, 2026-06-17) Gildenhard, Ingo
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.