‘Books of the month’ spotlights recent releases authored by University of Liverpool staff.
If you’d like your new or recent (2023 or 2024) publication to be featured, please email the details to the Research Communications Team at rescomms@liverpool.ac.uk.
The University of Liverpool Library has curated a reading list for Book of the Month which is publicly available and searchable. The newest titles are added at the top of the list for visibility and further information can be found in the notes area.
Critiquing the Canon: Political Theory (1st edn)
Published: January 2024
Dr Gemma Bird is a Senior Lecturer in Politics, at the University of Liverpool.
Critiquing the Canon: Political Theory draws upon critical scholarship to bring together diverse ways of thinking about and critiquing key thinkers from the canon of political theory. Each chapter is dedicated to a particular thinker and their work, and encourages students to explore the limitations of the canon and ask important questions about whose views might be marginalized, ignored, or sidelined in the construction of ‘canonical’ thought. Dr Emma Spruce has contributed a chapter on Mary Wollstonecraft. Pedagogical features include author tutorial videos and end-of-chapter questions to prompt students to develop their own voice and challenge dominant ideas.
Business News in the Early Modern Atlantic World
Sophie Jones and Siobhan Talbott
Published: January 2024
Dr Sophie Jones is a Post Doctoral Research Associate at the University of Liverpool, working on the AHRC-funded project, ‘Libraries, Reading Communities and Cultural Formation in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic’.
Business News in the Early Modern Atlantic World explores the creation, dissemination, and consumption of a specific type of news, ‘business news’, within early modern commercial news networks. The volume contains eleven case studies, written by scholars from a range of disciplines, which span the breadth of the early modern Atlantic from the first appearance of serial corantos in the seventeenth century to the United States’ Declaration of Independence in the late eighteenth century.
These expert contributions showcase the range of innovative methodological and theoretical approaches which can be used to study business news, including social network analysis, textual analysis, and qualitative methods.
Scale 1:43. Toys, History and Material Culture
Jordana Blejmar, Natalia Fortuny and Martín Legon
Published: 2023
Between 6 August and 6 November 2022, the exhibit Scale 1:43. Toys, History and Material Culture opened at the Parque de la Memoria in Buenos Aires. The exhibition was curated by Jordana Blejmar (University of Liverpool), Natalia Fortuny (University of Buenos Aires) and Martín Legón (Visual artist) and it suggests a dialogue between Argentina’s political history and a selection of toys produced or commercialized in the country in the last century. The exhibition was supported by the University of Liverpool, the research group FoCo (Contemporary Photography, Art and Politics, Instituto Gino Germani, UBA) and it was made possible thanks to a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC, UK).
In 2023, the curators edited a 230-pages bilingual (English/Spanish) photo-book with extended research on the same topic. The book opens with a discussion of building blocks and games from the 1940s and 1950s. This area traces a dialogue between the pedagogical theories of the 19th century, the avant-garde movements of the early 20th century and the toys distributed by Peronism. The book continues with a section dedicated to political violence which includes pieces associated with events that occurred during the 1976-1983 dictatorship, including the 100th anniversary celebration of the so-called “conquest of the desert” and toys sold during the Malvinas/Falklands War in 1982.
The book is being distributed for free to archives, libraries, schools and museums in the UK and Argentina and can be open accessed via this link: Scale 1:43