Books covering subjects from modern Jewish fiction to boundary disputes in Africa and chemical weapons research have been published by Kent academics.
New titles published in June and July 2015 include:
- Aliens & Strangers? The Struggle for Coherence in the Everyday Lives of Evangelicals, Dr Anna Strhan
- Art, Psychoanalysis and Adrian Stokes: A Biography, Professor Janet Sayers
- The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction, Dr Axel Stahler and Professor David Brauner
- International Law and Boundary Disputes in Africa, Dr Gbenga Oduntan
- Latin American and Iberian Perspectives on Literature and Medicine, Dr Patricia Novillo-Corvalan
- Local Space, Global Life: The Everyday Operation of International Law and Development, Dr Luis Eslava
- The Rise of Constitutional Government in the Iberian Atlantic World, Dr Natalia Sobrevilla Perea and Scott Eastman
- Secret Science, Professor Ulf Schmidt
Aliens & Strangers? The Struggle for Coherence in the Everyday Lives of Evangelicals
Dr Anna Strhan, Department of Religious Studies
This book is an ethnographic study of a conservative evangelical church in London, and examines evangelical relational practices and everyday interactions in a global city.
St John’s is a vibrant church, with a congregation of young and middle-aged members, one in which faith is both a comfort and a struggle – a way of questioning the order of things within society and for themselves.
Moving beyond stereotypes of conservative evangelicals as reactionary fundamentalists, the book depicts the everyday realities of how the members of St John’s experience and negotiate anxieties, concerns, vulnerabilities and human frailties that characterize social life more broadly, and how they learn to understand themselves as ‘aliens and strangers in this world.’
Art, Psychoanalysis and Adrian Stokes: A Biography
Professor Janet Sayers, School of Psychology
Illustrated with Barbara Hepworth’s stone carving and with other works of art, Janet Sayers’s latest book tells the story of Adrian Stokes.
She explores his revolutionary emphasis on the materials-led inspiration of the visual arts; his role as catalyst of the transformation of St Ives in Cornwall into an internationally acclaimed centre of modern art; his many years of psychoanalytic treatment by Melanie Klein; his love affairs; and his use of these experiences in highlighting ways the outer world gives form to the inner world of fantasy and imagination.
Some of this will feature in Janet Sayers’s talk at 6.30 pm on Wednesday 28 October at Waterstones, St Margaret’s Street, during this autumn’s Canterbury Festival.
The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction Dr Axel Stahler, School of European Culture and Languages and Professor David Brauner (University of Reading)
This collection of essays presents a new departure for, and a potentially (re)defining moment in, literary Jewish Studies. It is the first volume to bring together essays covering a wide range of American, British, South African, Canadian and Australian Jewish fiction.
The collection is divided into three parts American Jewish Fiction: British Jewish Fiction; and International and Transnational Anglophone Jewish Fiction.
Emphasising the porousness between different national traditions and moving beyond traditional definitions of Jewishness, the collection features both major authors and more marginal figures. It rediscovers forgotten and discovers new work, and in the process remaps the whole terrain.
International Law and Boundary Disputes in Africa
Dr Gbenga Oduntan, Kent Law School
Africa has experienced a number of territorial disputes over land and maritime boundaries, due in part to its colonial and post-colonial history.
This book explores the legal, political, and historical nature of disputes over territory in the African continent, and critiques the content and application of contemporary International law to the resolution of African territorial and border disputes.
Gbenga Oduntan identifies the major principles of law relating to territorial, and boundary disputes, and the inherent dangers of secessionist group activities threatening the geography of many African states. He suggests that understanding and applying multidisciplinary dispute resolution mechanisms and strategies could allow more holistic and effective treatment of boundary disputes.
Latin American and Iberian Perspectives on Literature and Medicine
Dr Patricia Novillo-Corvalan, School of European Culture and Languages
This collection is the first to examine the representation of illness, disability, and cultural pathologies in modern and contemporary Iberian and Latin American literature.
Innovative and interdisciplinary, the collection situates medicine as an important and largely overlooked discourse in these literatures, while also considering the social, political, religious, symbolic, and metaphysical dimensions underpinning illness.
The collection, spanning themes ranging from bioethics to Darwinian evolution and indigenous herbal medicine, shows how much we can still gain from interdisciplinary studies of the humanities and the sciences.
Local Space, Global Life: The Everyday Operation of International Law and Development
Dr Luis Eslava, Kent Law School
Since the mid-1980s, municipalities and cities in emerging nations have become the preferred spaces in which to promote global ideals of human, economic and environmental development.
Through an ethnographic study of Bogotá’s recent development experience and the city’s changing relation to its illegal neighbourhoods, Luis Eslava interrogates this rationale and exposes the contradictions involved in the international turn to the local.
Through his book, he provides an innovative reading of the nature and operation of international law and the development project, and reveals their impact on local spaces and lives at the urban periphery of today’s world order.
The Rise of Constitutional Government in the Iberian Atlantic World
Dr Natalia Sobrevilla Perea, Department of Hispanic Studies and Scott Eastman, Creighton University
This edited collection follows on from the recent bicentenary of the Cadiz Constitution of 1812, the first liberal constitution of the Hispanic world.
The Constitution was extremely influential in and beyond Europe, and the essays within the book explore how its enduring legacy not only shaped the history of state-building, elections, and municipal governance in Iberian America, but also affected national identities and citizenship as well as the development of race and gender in the region.
The collection sheds new light on the early, liberal Hispanic societies and shows how the legacies of those societies shape modern Spain and Latin America. The collection was made possible with a LASA Mellon grant in 2012 which enabled academics to meet and discuss main ideas for the book.
Secret Science
Professor Ulf Schmidt, School of History
Secret Science traces, for the first time, the history of chemical and biological weapons research by the former Allied powers, particularly in Britain, the United States and Canada.
It charts the ethical trajectory and culture of military science, from its initial development in response to Germany’s first use of chemical weapons in 1915 to the ongoing attempts by the international community to ban these types of weapons once and for all. It asks whether Allied and especially British warfare trials were ethical, safe and justified within the prevailing conditions and values of the time.
Secret Science offers a nuanced, non-judgemental analysis of the contributions made by servicemen, scientists and civil servants to military research in Britain and elsewhere, not as passive, helpless victims ‘without voices’, or as perpetrators ‘without a conscience’, but as history’s actors and agents of their own destiny. As such, it also makes an important contribution to the burgeoning literature on the history and culture of memory.
The book has received widespread media coverage and international acclaim since its launch in July 2015.