Books published by Amsterdam University Press

Brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines to analyse the growing presence and place of screens in our lives today.

With thirty years' experience in the Italian judiciary and dozens of influential judicial inquiries to his name, Gherardo Colombo reflects on the culture of justice and the profound meaning of rules.

This book applies theoretical insights from the work of philosophers such as Carl Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben, and Michel Foucault to the Sri Lankan context to examine the conflicting narratives relating to the counter-terrorism laws produced by both sides in the conflict.

This book offers the most up-to-date look yet at what has been discovered, using the newest archaeological techniques, about the civitas Batavorumand its economy, its military importance, and the religious and domestic buildings it held.

This book brings together historians and linguists, who apply their respective analytic tools to offer an interdisciplinary interpretation of the functions of multilingualism in identity-building in 16th-19th century Europe.

This book is the first to take a close look at how French was used outside of France, in personal and private life.

This thoroughly revised edition brings Cybriwsky's account of events and their ramifications fully up to date, offering the clearest picture we've had yet of what has happened - and what is likely still to come - in Ukraine.

The current study is the fruit of some twenty years of research and writing at the interface of film history, media theory and media archaeology by one of the acknowledged pioneers of the 'new film history' and 'media archaeology'.

The first monograph of the work of one of the Netherlands' most prolific filmmakers spanning sixty years of cultural history.

What is music, and what does it mean to humans? How do we process it, and how do we create it? Musician Leo Samama discusses these and many other questions while shaping a vibrant picture of music's importance in human lives both past and present.

Using the example of Amsterdam's Concertgebouw in the nineteenth century, Cressman shows how its design was in part intended to help discipline and educate concert audiences to listen attentively.

Dutch cinema, when discussed, is typically treated only in terms of pre-war films or documentaries, leaving post-war fictional film largely understudied. At the same time, a "e;Hollandse school,"e; a term first coined in the 1980s, has developed through deadpan, ironic films like those of director and actor Alex van Warmerdam. Using seminal theories on humour and comedy, this book explores a number of Dutch films using the notion of categories, such as low-class comedies, neurotic romances, deliberate camp, and grotesque satire. With its original approach, this study makes surprising connections between Dutch films from various decades.

This book details the political history of Timor-Leste, both preceding and following its declaration of independence.

This collection is designed to offer a comparative analysis of street-level protest movements, setting them in international, socio-economic, and cross-cultural perspective in order to help us understand why movements emerge, what they do, how they spread, and how they fit into both local and worldwide historical contexts.

While India has been a popular subject of scholarly analysis in the past decade, the majority of that attention has been focused on its major cities. This volume instead explores contemporary urban life in a smaller city located in India's Northeast borderland at a time of dramatic change, showing how this city has been profoundly affected by armed conflict, militarism, displacement, interethnic tensions, and the expansion of neoliberal capitalism.

A close analysis of the notions of authorship in fanfiction related to Sherlock, Supernatural, and Game of Thrones and the fictions' sites, receptions, and fan rejections.

Lynch offers a close historical analysis of the educational landscape of Lyons, showing how schools and teachers were organised and how they interacted with each other and with ecclesiastical and municipal authorities.

This book traces the transformation of the Baltic Rim in this period through a focus on the self-image of a number of communities: urban and regional, cultic, missionary, legal, and political.

This volume introduces a new concept that boldly breaks through the traditional dichotomy of high and low culture while offering a fresh approach to both: unpopular culture.

This collection surveys recent transformations in Islamic Studies, taking stock of the field and showing new paths forward.

This book uses the potent case study of contemporary Taiwanese queer romance films to address the question of how capitalism in Taiwan has privileged the film industry at the expense of the audience's freedom to choose and respond to culture on its own terms.

Noor offers a close account of the construction of Southeast Asia in the nineteenth century by the forces of capitalism and imperialism.

As this book demonstrates, early medieval 'Romanness' encompassed a sense of belonging to an ethnic group, which allowed Romans in Iberia and Gaul to adopt Gothic or Frankish identities in a more nuanced manner than has been previously acknowledged in the literature.

This book considers the growing awareness in the wake of World War I that culture could play an effective political role in international relations.

This collection brings together a group of historians to show how historical prejudice against Jews continued to resonate throughout the Netherlands in the post-World War II years.

This book is the first to explore depictions of the Second World War in films made a generation later, between 1962 and 1986.

This book presents a new perspective on attempts by the contemporary Chinese government to transform the diverse conditions found in countless rural villages into what the state's social welfare program deems 'socialist new villages'.

This study presents fresh interpretations of the works of Paul the Deacon (c. 720-799), which are vital to understanding the history of Italy and Western Europe in the Middle Ages.

A detailed study of the Nitida saga and its presentation of women and the Icelandic worldview, including questions of identity, gender, female solidarity, and the romance genre itself.

This book combines archaeobotanical and archaeozoological data with information from excavations, field surveys, and ancient written texts to place the relationship between people and landscapes in a broad geographical and chronological framework.