Books published by Manchester University Press

Studio Electrophonique tells the story of the Sheffield home studio that helped launch the careers of some of the biggest names in British pop: The Human League, Heaven 17, Pulp, ABC and more. -- .

This book is a study of statelessness in the period of the Second World War. It breaks new ground by focusing not on Europe, but on the Asian and Pacific theatres of the conflict. This perspective enables us to go beyond Hannah Arendt's classic account of statelessness in her Origins of Totalitarianism. -- .

This book explores how events within the Gaelic-speaking world of Ireland and the Highlands and Islands of Scotland shaped the affairs of the wider Irish and British Isles during the later medieval and early modern periods. -- .

This book analyses experimental performances by British music ensembles in the twenty-first century. It shows how theatrical approaches to presenting orchestral music can facilitate unique and powerful experiences for audiences, enable new interpretation of repertoire, and connect music-making to contemporary social issues. -- .

This book addresses a universal problem: the transmission of psycho-physiological reactions from one person to another, and illuminates the twofold enigma, that of the trajectory of the term compassio, and that of explaining the phenomenon it denoted. -- .

The first book-length, historical study of invasion-scare and future-war fiction in Britain before and during the First World War in half a century, and the definitive cultural and political history of the genre. -- .

This work explores the censorship of film at local level and charts the chronological development of local film censorship systems, mechanisms and apparatus. Using archival material from a range of different locations across the UK, a more nuanced and complex picture of local film censorship activity is drawn. -- .

This book enterprises a quest to crack open the secrets of diplomatic knowledge production by building and applying the tools to map, assess, and trace the impact of descriptions of international actors that inform policy. -- .

This art book presents the award-winning portrait-based series 'Slaves of Fashion' by British artists The Singh Twins. -- .

James Baldwin Review (JBR) is an annual journal that brings together a wide array of peer-reviewed critical and creative work on the life, writings, and legacy of James Baldwin. This edition brings together all of the articles published in this year's volume.

In a context where digital media are reshaping the futures of conservation, environmentalism, and ecological politics - for better and for worse - Digital ecologies draws together leading scholars in the humanities and social sciences to establish a research agenda for making sense of these transformations. -- .

This ground-breaking history explores the figure of Jacob Harris, a Jewish pedlar who committed a notorious triple-murder in 1734. Tracing Harris's legend through three-hundred years of British history, it offers a new perspective on Jewish life in Britain and beyond. -- .

Ruth's book is part of the My Voice Project, a collection of firsthand accounts of Holocaust survivors and refugees from Nazi persecution who settled in the UK. Ruth Lachs began life in Hamburg in 1936 and went on to live in Manchester and work in healthcare. -- .

Sam's book is part of the My Voice Project, a collection of firsthand accounts of Holocaust survivors and refugees from Nazi persecution who settled in the UK. Sam Laskier experienced terrible ordeals at labour camps and then Auschwitz-Birkenau. He was brought to Windermere in England after WWII for rehabilitation, and later settled in Manchester. -- .

Peter's book is part of the My Voice Project, a collection of firsthand accounts of Holocaust survivors and refugees from Nazi persecution who settled in the UK. Peter Kurer's family were helped by a Quaker couple to gain safe passage to England in 1938. Peter later married and had children, and had a successful career in dentistry. -- .

Marianne's book is part of the My Voice Project, a collection of firsthand accounts of Holocaust survivors and refugees from Nazi persecution who settled in the UK. Marianne Phillips began life in Berlin in 1924, came to England on the Kindertransport, and went on to live in Maidenhead and Manchester, running a dressmaking business and volunteering for many Jewish causes. -- .

Ike Alterman's book is part of the My Voice Project, a collection of firsthand accounts of Holocaust survivors and refugees from Nazi persecution who settled in the UK. Ike was born in Poland in 1928, survived forced labour camps including Auschwitz-Birkenau, and went on to live in Manchester and build a career in the jewellery business. -- .

Chaim's book is part of the My Voice Project, a collection of firsthand accounts of Holocaust survivors and refugees from Nazi persecution who settled in the UK. Chaim Ferster began life in Poland in 1922, survived several labour camps and Auschwitz in World War II, and went on to live in Manchester. -- .

Anne's book is part of the My Voice Project, a collection of firsthand accounts of Holocaust survivors and refugees from Nazi persecution who settled in the UK. Anne Super was born in Warsaw and experienced a traumatic separation from her parents. She was later adopted by an uncle in South Africa, became an optician and moved to Manchester. -- .

The My Voice Project is a unique initiative by The Fed, Manchester's leading social care charity serving the Jewish community. The My Voice Project empowers Holocaust survivors and refugees from Nazi persecution who settled in the UK to share their entire life stories including experiences before, during and after the war years. This project involves a bespoke methodological approach, producing books that preserve their unique voices. The My Voice Project ensures firsthand accounts are remembered and valued for future generations, highlighting the critical role of individual perspectives in ensuring a deeper historical understanding. Adash Bulwa was born in Poland in 1926. After the outbreak of war, he recalls the Germans entering his home city of Piotrków Trybunalsk and the establishment of the Jewish ghetto, which had terrible living conditions. Adash recounts his harrowing ordeals in the concentration camps of Belzec and Buchenwald. Most of his family were killed in Treblinka, and he worked and suffered in factories and labour camps, all while he was still a teenager. Following liberation, Adash returned briefly to Poland and then emigrated to England, eventually settling in Manchester. He made a living as a tailor, married his wife Zena, and they had two daughters. Post-war, Adash searched for his brother David, who had been smuggled out of Poland before the war, and they were reunited in the 1950s. Adash's book is part of the My Voice book collection.

A brilliant new account of John Singer Sargent and his relationship with the Wertheimers, an eminent Jewish family in Edwardian London. -- .

The Happenings that burst on to the late 1950s cultural scene were rapidly declared passe and even 'dead', but this book reveals how an international network of artists continued to develop their premises into the late 1960s and 1970s, transforming the form into an interdisciplinary vehicle for studying interpersonal relations. -- .

This book articulates an analytical framework for understanding how race, nature, and capitalism are co-constituted on a planetary scale. The framework of the 'political ecology of colonial capitalism' elucidates how the co-production of race and the society/nature distinction operates as a foundational structure of capitalism. In order to express the relationship between global inequality and planetary ecological crises, the book applies this framework to a theoretical and historical analysis of the 'global land grab', which refers to the intensification, beginning in the 2010s and continuing into the 2020s, of large scale transnational agricultural land acquisitions in the global South. It orients analytical attention towards how capitalist development has proceeded, over its long history, through a succession of accumulation cycles that rise and fall in correspondence with the racialized construction, and ultimate exhaustion, of frontiers of "unused" natures. At one level, the book foregrounds how colonialism materially opens, through violent dispossession of colonized peoples, frontiers provisioning the necessary cheap inputs for capitalist development. It then proceeds, on a second level, to reveal how the accompanying conceptualization of the frontier as an 'unused' nature distinct from human society is contingent upon a technology of race which re-presents Indigenous sovereign earth-worlds as unused and wasted virgin natures. The book thus demonstrates how the global land grab is driven by a systemic colonial-capitalist logic of racialized frontier re-generation attempting to overcome the crisis context marking the exhaustion of the neoliberal epoch of capitalism.

Between 1850 and 1900, Ratcliffe Highway was the pulse of maritime London. Sailors from every corner of the globe found solace, and sometimes trouble, within its bustling bars, brothels, lodging houses and streets. However, for social investigators, it was perceived as a place of fascination and fear as it harboured 'exotic' and 'heathen' communities. Sailortowns featured in most international ports in the nineteenth century and were situated at the interface between urban and maritime communities. Sailortowns were transient, cosmopolitan and working class in character and they provide us with an insight into class, race and gendered relations within subaltern communities. This book goes beyond conceptualising sailortown as a global economic hub that entangled sailors into vice and exploitation. It will examine how, by the mid-nineteenth century, anxieties relating to urban modernity encouraged Victorians to re-imagine Ratcliffe Highway as a chaotic and dangerous urban abyss. Certainly, the sailortown population was varied and engaged in numerous working-class trades connected with the marine and leisure industries such as dockers, stevedores, sailmakers, sex workers and, international seafarers. Sailortowns were contact zones of heightened interaction where multi-ethnic subaltern cultures met, sometimes negotiated and at other times clashed with one another. However, the book argues that despite these challenges sailortown was a distinctive and functional working-class community that was self-regulating and self-moderating. The book uncovers a robust sailortown community in which an urban-maritime culture shaped a sense of themselves and the traditions and conventions that governed subaltern behaviour in the district.

This book examines human disappearances anthropologically in various contexts, ranging from enforced disappearances under oppressive governments and during armed conflicts to disappearing undocumented migrants and, finally, to people who go missing under more everyday circumstances. It has two focuses that run through the book: the relationship between the state and disappearances, and the consequences of disappearances for the families and communities of missing persons. The book analyses both the circumstances that make some people disappear and the variety of responses that disappearances give rise to; the latter include projects focused on searching for the missing and identifying human remains, as well as political projects that call for accountability for disappearances. The book argues that the disappeared tend to reappear in one form or another - if they do not return alive or as mortal identified remains, they reappear in other forms, such as photographs, artwork, memorials, ghosts and restless spirits. The book provides empirical examples from a variety of places, with Bosnia-Herzegovina, Argentina and the Mediterranean as they key sites, and by expanding from these the book develops an analytic grip on the slippery category of the 'disappeared'. It argues that 'disappearance' is an anthropologically productive concept that brings us face to face with profound questions about human life and death, but also about rituals and mourning, violence and care, liminality and structures, and oppression and power. The book argues for an anthropological approach to human disappearances that is ethnographically sensitive to local idiosyncrasies, and theoretically attuned to similarities across diversity.

Even the leader of the WHO-led global smallpox programme acknowledged the exceptionalism of Nepal's success. Implementing a global health programme: smallpox and Nepal is about why when faced with overwhelming environmental and infrastructural challenges the smallpox programme succeeded in Nepal. Such problems are usually offered as explanations for failure. Why something worked is unusual.The Himalayan region is a novel area for exploration of a global programme. Project leaders in Nepal decentralised the programme's structure, not just on paper but in practice to achieve timely and effective response. The WHO worked with governments of nation states. Nowhere else in the official history in the conclusions drawn from different national programmes is such a decentralised strategy referred to as a reason for success. It is also absent from the wider literature. The book tells multiple and different stories from the local to the global and involves individual, community, state, extra-state, and foreign actors. The devastating disease of smallpox was common in Nepal in the 1960s and the book places people's experiences at the forefront. These influenced ideas and behaviour, including vaccination. Mass vaccination remained important throughout Nepal's smallpox programme but after 1971 was a time-limited annual campaign administered in line with Nepali people's longstanding preference for it being given in winter.Although success with smallpox was more than forty years ago, implementing communicable disease health programmes with their many challenges remains highly topical and relevant today.

In Restoration Ireland the law primarily served the interests of the English state and the Anglo-Protestant community and oppressed the majority Catholic population. Catholics and the law in Restoration Ireland examines how Catholics engaged with and experienced English common law primarily through the accounts of Catholic clerics and Gaelic poets. Analysing the letters of Oliver Plunkett and John Brenan, this book demonstrates the initial success and ultimate failure of their non-confrontational approach to legal and political processes. In contrast, the challenging stances of clerics like Nicholas French and John Lynch offer a new perspective on the wide variety of clerical engagement with the law. Drawing on the considerable corpus of primary sources, the book examines the often overlooked Irish-language literary material and considers the work of Dáibhí Ó Bruadair and his contemporaries to show how Gaelic Ireland deeply resented a hostile legal environment. It also explores Catholic landed families who recovered their estates in the 1663 Court of Claims and evidences the different approaches they adopted despite Protestant hostility, as well as illustrating how Catholic lawyers could survive, and even thrive, for a period. Catholics and the law in Restoration Ireland examines the many ways in which Irish Catholics experienced a legal system that proved fundamentally inimical to their interests.

Women and madness in the early Romantic novel returns madness to a central role in feminist literary criticism by offering a close look at the novels of five early Romantic-period women authors. In an updated exploration of hysteria, melancholia, and love-madness, Weiss maintains that Mary Wollstonecraft, Eliza Fenwick, and Mary Hays created novels that exposed how medical models for mental disease and the popular sentimental figure of the love-mad maid (the woman who loses her mind when she loses her man) made it possible for men to hide their culpability for injuring women. Weiss demonstrates that in their novels, patriarchal structures of control are responsible for the protagonists' bouts of hysteria and their dangerous melancholia. Making careful and important distinctions between authors, Weiss shows how the popular and more mainstream authors such as Maria Edgeworth and Amelia Opie explored less gendered and less victimised models of causality, such as the shock of traumatic experience on the human psyche, misplaced passions, erroneous associations, and remorse. Taken as a whole, the book demonstrates that these authors' treatment of female madness played a key role in the development of the psychologically complex female heroine of the nineteenth-century novel. In so doing, Weiss makes a powerful case for focusing on women's mental health in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century literary criticism.

Critical Theory and Independent Living explores intersections between contemporary critical theory and disabled people's struggle for self-determination. The book sheds new light on the Independent Living movement - an influential yet undertheorised and misrepresented new social movement. The analysis highlights the affinities between the insights of Independent Living advocates and prominent studies of epistemic injustice, biopower, and psychopower. This helps uncover the contributions of Independent Living activism to contemporary critical theorising. Specifically, the book explores the engagement of Independent Living thinking and practice with critiques of welfare-state paternalism, neoliberal marketisation, and familialism. Thus, it develops a comprehensive assessment of the three organising principles of social welfare - the state, the market, and the family - in view of their impact on disabled people's self-determination. On this basis, the analysis highlights the successes and failures of the Independent Living movement in various welfare regimes - liberal, social-democratic, conservative, and post/socialist. The result is a pioneering cross-regime comparison grounded in Independent Living activism. Critical Theory and Independent Living substantiates its analyses by drawing on the work of the European Network on Independent Living (ENIL) - a Europe-wide advocacy organisation led and controlled by disabled people since its founding in 1989. Case studies of ENIL's struggles for epistemic justice, campaigning for deinstitutionalisation, and advocacy for personal assistance evidence the critical-theoretical contributions of Independent Living. It is argued that these efforts help rethink independence as a form of interdependence - a reframing that is pivotal for critical theorising in contemporary society.

Circuses and their grand arenas shaped the entertainment industry between the wars and excited both small-town and big-city audiences. Worlds of the Ring makes an original and significant contribution to the history of popular culture by highlighting the correlation between the modern circus's evolution and modes of imperialism and nationalism. Through the cases of the German Sarrasani and the British Bertram W. Mills' circuses this study examines how these enterprises animated both the nation and its others for popular audiences. Circuses and performers constructed different worlds for their audiences and for themselves and the book looks at this cultural history of European circuses between 1918 and 1945 from a transnational perspective. The interwar era's interrelated international and national forces shaped the modern circus, which the book recovers through the lives of different people involved in this industry. Through the concept of Orientalism, it probes the mechanisms at play in depicting foreign and exotic worlds in the circus. It is based on a variety of sources including newspapers, legal documents, advertisements, economic correspondence, photographs, and performers' archives. Worlds of the Ring offers a new understanding of circus as a form of interwar popular culture, its globalisation, and anchoring in European imperialism at the beginning of the twentieth century.