This volume is the first English translation of 'Vita di Pietro Giannone scritta da lui medesimo', a powerful autobiographical account penned under the direst conditions—by a man persecuted, imprisoned, and ultimately destroyed by the Inquisition. Written on scraps of paper during his long incarceration, Giannone’s 'Vita' is a masterpiece of Enlightenment literature, detailing the meteoric rise of a most eminent eighteenth-century historian and jurist, and his descent into suffering for his unyielding commitment to reason, justice, and historical truth.

This edition, translated and annotated by Therese Ridley, not only renders the full autobiography accessible to English readers for the first time, but contextualizes it within modern Italian scholarship. Each chapter is enriched with appendices that include critical sources, commentary, and related correspondence, illuminating the people, events, and philosophical struggles that defined Giannone’s world.

Foreshadowing the prison writings of Silvio Pellico and Antonio Gramsci, Giannone’s Vita stands as both a literary achievement and a searing indictment of religious and political repression. This volume is essential reading for anyone interested in the Enlightenment, Italian history, or the enduring power of the written word under persecution.

Oscar Handlin (1915–2011), one of the most influential historians of the twentieth century, reshaped the study of American history with a career spanning more than forty books. Best known for 'The Uprooted' (1951), his groundbreaking work on immigration, Handlin was equally a generalist whose insights reached nearly every corner of the American past.

The collection at hand, Handlin’s classic anthology 'This Was America', first published in 1949, gathers Europeans’ travel accounts and perspectives on America from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Rather than presenting a single narrative, Handlin emphasizes variety: contrasting impressions of liberty and inequality, restlessness and rootedness, optimism and critique by people arriving from diverse European backgrounds. His free translations and selective introductions guide readers subtly but leave interpretation open. Over time, these essays shift meaning depending on context—once read as a celebration of American life, they now invite more critical reflection. This new edition reimagines America not as a singular whole but as an “archipelago”: a collection of diverse experiences, perceptions, and contradictions. The metaphor underscores the interplay between unity and multiplicity in American identity.

Students, historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars alike will find in these essays a vivid, sometimes unsettling, mosaic of how America has been seen from abroad—raising as many questions as answers, and encouraging readers to reflect on the nation’s complexity anew.

Sonic Detection is part sonic noir, part performance document, and part critical investigation of listening at the margins for readers interested in prospecting the boundaries of performance studies, sound studies, and interdisciplinary writing.The book opens with a group of sonic detectives (exact number unknown) who investigate the mystery of an as-yet-unidentified event that leaves traces only in the acoustic atmosphere. This hybrid fiction propels the reader up and down the UK coast and offers overheard fragments from a faded seaside resort, a container shipping port, a former coal-mining town, and the Scottish headquarters for North Sea oil. A heterogeneous collection of texts follows, from creative-critical essays, performance scores, engagement with the archives of earlier sonic detectives (including poet/performance artist Fiona Templeton and the sound art collective Bow Gamelan Ensemble), to a series of dispatches from expert witnesses with their ears to the ground. Sonic Detection is not so much a monograph as a polygraph, tongue-in-cheek associations with questionable forensic technologies firmly in place. The book emerges from a decade-long collaboration between artists Rebecca Collins and Johanna Linsley, who used eavesdropping as an expanded creative methodology. The project began as a series of hyper-local, community-based performance works in coastal locations in the UK (from Bournemouth to Aberdeen) and grew into an international, multi-disciplinary life work devoted to an ongoing, organized curiosity. Sonic detectives hold open a collective sonorous space. They are the embodiment of the phenomenophile, lingering longer in listening.

Before World War II, most anthropological research in Puerto Rico was led by US anthropologists. The most famous project, The People of Puerto Rico, was directed by American anthropologist Julian Steward and launched the career of renowned scholars such as Sidney Mintz and Eric Wolf. Gazing at the Puerto Rican Anthropological Landscape aims to delineate the development of the post-WWII anthropological field in Puerto Rico by Puerto Rican anthropologists, the so-called “native” anthropologists. The contributors to Gazing at the Puerto Rican Anthropological Landscape deploy the term “native” somewhat ironically, but they also know that who they are affects their positionality vis-à-vis their research subjects. Thus, they retain the term to spark a conversation addressing the complicated feelings that such labels still evoke among non-mainstream anthropologists.

Gazing at the Puerto Rican Anthropological Landscape purposely avoids making Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans a problem to study and instead focuses on a wide variety of epistemological and methodological questions related to the study of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans by “native” anthropologists within local, regional, and global spheres. We posit that the Puerto Rican anthropological landscape transcends the confines of the island of Puerto Rico to encompass its connection and engagement with the larger world, and that it is not limited to the inhabitants of the island of Puerto Rico but embraces members of its diaspora, as well as other groups and ethnicities. On that note, this book seeks to reflect critically on how the academic field of anthropology (research and teaching) in Puerto Rico has evolved, post-WWII, in various engagements with the current debates of contemporary anthropology — theoretical, methodological, socio-cultural, political, and otherwise.

Beyond Popular Science is not a popular science book. It is not a textbook. It is not an academic monograph. Instead, it occupies a rare and deliberately unconventional space: a work for readers who enjoy scientific storytelling but are no longer satisfied with simplifications that smooth away the real substance of modern science.

Unlike typical popular science books, this work does not shy away from technical depth. Each chapter begins with clear, accessible explanations, then gradually descends into the rigorous frameworks—mathematical, physical, and conceptual—that underlie our best understanding of the universe. Readers encounter ideas they may have heard before, but rarely explored with this level of honesty: why relativistic time dilation, rather than spatial curvature alone, governs gravity on Earth; how quantum tunneling makes stellar fusion possible; and even how relativistic effects give gold its distinctive yellow hue.

The intended audience is curious, scientifically literate readers—those with undergraduate exposure to mathematics and physics—who wish for in-depth scientific investigations.

Richly illustrated with sophisticated, thought-provoking visuals, Beyond Popular Science rewards both careful reading and contemplative browsing. It is a book to be revisited, puzzled over, and enjoyed—one that treats its readers not as passive consumers, but as capable thinkers eager to engage with science as it truly is: beautiful, demanding, and unfinished.