Research

Julie Taddeo is pleased to announce the publication of her latest book,  Writing Australian History On-screen:Television and Film Period Dramas “Down Under”, co-edited with Jo Parnell (University of Newcastle, Australia), published January 2023 by  Rowman and Littlefield. 

The book uses a historical-cultural-sociological-psychological approach in analyzing the various selected productions; the contributors interrogate the intricacies in Australian history as represented in Australian filmic period drama, taken from an Australian perspective. Individually, and together as a body of authors, they highlight past issues that, despite the society’s changing attitudes over time, still have relevance for the Australia of today. 

Paul S. Landau is interviewed about his new book, Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries (Ohio University Press, 2022) on H-Nets New Books Network. The moderator Rabrecus Toles says of the book: "Landau complicates the whitewashed “grandpa” figure so many of us have come to know Mandela to be. He gives us a detailed glimpse into the mind of the revolutionary and oftentimes violent Nelson Mandela that we so anxiously want to know." The book has been praised in many quarters as presenting a vital new view of Mandela's role in the end of apartheid.

Hear the full interview HERE.

Thomas Zeller has published a new book, Consuming Landscapes: What We See When We Drive and Why It Matters with Johns Hopkins University Press. The book is available as  both a printed book and in an open access version, thanks to a grant from the University of Maryland libraries.

Link for the open access version is HERE.

See information about the book from the publisher's website HERE.

Julie Taddeo's most recent book, Diagnosing History: Medicine in Television Period Drama, coedited with Katherine Byrne and James Leggott (Manchester University Press, 2022) will be featured in a virtual book launch on September 23, 2022 at noon EST, 5pm in the UK, The launch is hosted by Moving Image, Popular Media & Culture Research Group at Northumbria University, UK .

From the publisher's website:

"This timely collection examines representations of medicine and medical practices in international period drama television. A preoccupation with medical plots and settings can be found across a range of important historical series, including Outlander, Poldark, The Knick, Call the Midwife, La Peste, and A Place to Call Home. Such shows offer a critique of medical history while demonstrating how contemporary viewers access and understand the past. Topics covered in this collection include the innovations and horrors of surgery; the intersection of gender, class, race, and medicine on the American frontier; psychiatry and the trauma of war; and the connections between past and present pandemics. Featuring original chapters on period television from the UK, the US, Spain, and Australia, Diagnosing History offers an accessible, global and multidisciplinary contribution to both televisual and medical history."

The Cherrick Center for the Study of Zionism, the Yishuv, and the State of Israel have announced that Shay Hazkani's recent book, Dear Palestine: A Social History of the 1948 War (Stanford University Press, 2021), is the recipient of the 2022 Korenblat Book Award in Israel Studies.

From the award letter:

“Dear Palestine marks a paradigm shift in the study of the relations between Jews and Arabs. In an engaging and literary style, Shay Hazkani orchestrates numerous letters and diaries of Jewish and Arab soldiers during the 1948 War, in addition to military journals, pamphlets, and radio broadcasts of the Israel Defense Forces and the Arab League’s volunteer army. This is a microhistory of the ordinary individuals who withstood indoctrination and cooptation, sometime against their best interests. It is a story that quietly defies monolithic and binary perceptions passed down by nationalist histories. In their stead, Hazkani offers a relational account that listens to a more nuanced human network which steers this commendable and unpretentiously radical book.”

The Korenblat Book Award in Israel Studies was established in 2021 by Dr. Phillip Korenblat to promote exceptional scholarly contribution in the field of Israel Studies, and honor each year a book of outstanding merit in either Hebrew or English by scholars at all stages of their career.

The film, The Soldier's Opinion, is based on Shay Hazkani's recent book, Dear Palestine: A Social History of the 1948 War (Stanford University Press, 2021). Shay is credited as a co-creator and script writer for the film. It was directed by Assaf Banitt and was produced for Israel's main cable network, Hot Telecommunication.  The film will air on Israeli TV in late October 2022 and will be screened in the US as well. The film was part of the Jerusalem Film Festival i July 2022 in the Diamond Competition for Israeli Documentary Films.

Photo courtesy of Tom Weintraub Louk

Piotr Kosicki has published an article about Catholicism and the Supreme Court decisions of recent months. Read the article here.

The BAFTSS British Cinema and Television SIG is hosting an online event on Friday 8 July at 4pm (GMT) in celebration of four book projects that have been published within the last two years.

This is in recognition of the fact that our community has produced some fantastic scholarship recently, but the challenges and uncertainty of the global situation has sometimes created challenges for promotion.  As a SIG, we’re committed to providing a space for colleagues to share their work as it is developed and when it is realised, and recognise that opportunities to do this have been reduced since the pandemic began. 

We’re pleased to announce that our event will be in celebration of the following books:

Hannah Andrews, Biographical Television Drama (Palgrave, 2022)
Katherine Byrne and Julie Taddeo, Rape in Period Drama Television (Lexington, 2022) 
Sarah Godfrey, Masculinity in Contemporary British Cinema: Troubled Times 1990-2010 (Edinburgh, 2021)
Jaap Verhuel (ed.), The Cultural Life of James Bond: Specters of 007  (Amsterdam, 2020)
To register for attendance, please sign up here. The event will be on Teams and will last around an hour. All welcome! A link will be sent closer the time.

Colleen Woods' book "Freedom Incorporated: Anticommunism And Philippine Independence In The Age Of Decolonization" demonstrates how anticommunist political projects were critical to the United States' expanding imperial power in the age of decolonization, and how anticommunism was essential to the growing global economy of imperial violence in the Cold War era. 

Richard Bell's book, "Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped Into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home" tells the gripping and true story about five boys who were kidnapped in the North and smuggled into slavery in the Deep South—and their daring attempt to escape and bring their captors to justice.