Call for Book Reviewers
Call for Book Reviewers
Call for Book Reviewers
Aigne, vol. 11
Theme: “Response: Reflection and Action”
Deadline: 20th June, 2025
Our upcoming issue, Aigne vol. 11 seeks to engage with the theme "Response: Reflection and Action" in diverse ways. This has led to the following selection of books for review:
Battell, Sophie E. 2023. On the Threshold: Hospitality in Shakespeare’s Drama. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press [Digital/Physical Edition]
Abstract: In this critical analysis, Sophie E. Battell examines hospitality in Shakespeare’s plays. By drawing on literary theory, modern philosophy, and anthropology as well as early modern scientific and religious texts, the book advances our understanding of Shakespeare as a dramatist concerned with the ethical questions at stake in encounters between guests and hosts of various kinds.
The close readings and scholarly interventions presented here reconceive the plays in terms of a poetics of hospitality while arguing for an expansive, far-reaching vision of what it means to be open to the world and welcoming of others. Moving from the levels of subjectivity, the body, and the senses to architecture, economics, legal discourse, and the natural environment, On the Threshold not only makes important contributions to Shakespeare studies but forges new connections between Renaissance literary scholarship and contemporary debates on the politics of migrants and refugees.
Abstract: The European border regions fulfil a specific horizontal integration function. From an administrative science perspective, the author lays the foundation for conceptualising the policy field of cross-border cooperation in Europe as a horizontal level of integration. To this end, the volume analyses the integration-theoretical specifics of its genesis, the functional characteristics of its governance with regard to the decentralised integration of different political-administrative, legal and cultural systems as well as the patterns of an emergent, transnational territorial institutionalism. Finally, administrative science perspectives on the study of cross-border cooperation as a horizontal level of the European Administrative Area are presented.
Abstract: This volume presents thirteen papers on different aspects of the cult of pillar saints– stylites – and their reception in texts and images. It highlights the ambiguities and disruptive potential of this Syrian hagiographical heritage, an outstanding aspect of Late Antiquity which breaks free of conventional piety and becomes enmeshed with social and political discourses beside the spiritual and religious ones. The two main parts on textual and visual reception – from Theodoret of Cyrrhus to Luis Buñuel – are followed by an anthology of literary and artistic interpretations of stylites, demonstrating how their powerful message has kept fascinating readers and beholders from the Late Ancient to the Modern period.
Drury, Fintan. 2025. Catastrophe: Nakba II. Dublin: Irish Academic Press [Physical Edition]
Abstract: The Nakba or ‘Catastrophe’ occurred between 1947 and 1949 and saw 15,000 Palestinians massacred and more than 700,000 expelled from their homeland by Israel. Today, we’re witnessing a second Nakba – one being played out in front of our eyes. In Catastrophe, Fintan Drury offers an unflinching exploration of Israel’s genocidal campaign. Through extensive research, he argues that the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 was the inevitable result of almost eight decades of violent oppression of indigenous Palestinians. In his view Israel’s response was totally disproportionate and without the active sponsorship of the US and other major Western powers could not have happened. Provocative, eye-opening and unapologetically direct, Catastrophe is a call to understand the unique suffering of the Palestinians.
Fhuartháin, Méabh Ní. 2024. Heading to the Fleadh: Festival, Cultural Revival and Irish Traditional Music 1951-1969. Cork: Cork University Press [Physical Edition]
Abstract: This book is the first comprehensive examination of the history and evolution of Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann (All-Ireland Fleadh Cheoil). As a transformative cultural phenomenon, the Fleadh was central to the revival for Irish traditional music during from 1951 to 1969. Reflecting broader patterns of Irish life and society, this book charts the genesis and development phases of the Fleadh in the 1950s and the challenges of identity which the Fleadh experienced in the 1960s.
House, Julianne and Dániel Z. Kádár. 2025. Language and Politics: A Cross-Cultural Pragmatics Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [Digital Edition]
Abstract: The research and teaching of language and politics has mainly been carried out in the fields of critical discourse analysis and sociolinguistics. This groundbreaking book provides a concise introduction to the field from the perspective of cross-cultural pragmatics. It introduces a strictly language-based, bottom-up and comprehensive model for analysing political data, which allows the reader to examine political and socio-political data without pre-held convictions and prejudices, avoiding many pitfalls that have lurked for a long time in the study of political language use. It is illustrated with a wealth of data and case studies drawn from many linguacultures, including Anglophone ones, China, Japan, Germany and the former Yugoslavia, and from different contexts of political language use, such as diplomacy, activism, public communication and news articles. It includes handy further reading lists, discussion points and a comprehensive glossary, making it ideal for anyone keen to know how language interacts with politics.
Ishikawa, Tadashi. 2025. Geographies of Gender: Family and Law in Imperial Japan and Colonial Taiwan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [Digital Edition]
Abstract: Tadashi Ishikawa traces perceptions and practices of gender in the Japanese empire on the occasion of Japan's colonisation of Taiwan from 1895 . In the 1910s, metropolitan and colonial authorities attempted social reform in ways which particularly impacted on family traditions and, therefore, gender relations, paving the way for the politics of comparison within and beyond the empire. In Geographies of Gender, Tadashi Ishikawa delves into a variety of diplomatic issues, colonial and anticolonial discourses, and judicial cases, finding marriage gifts, daughter adoption, and premarital sexual relationships to be sites of tension between norms and ideals among both elite and ordinary men and women. He explores how the Japanese empire became a gendered space from the 1910s through the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, arguing that gender norms were both unsettled and reinforced in ways which highlight the instability of metropole-colony relations.
Lindberg, Annika 2022. Deportation limbo: State violence and contestations in the Nordics. Manchester: Manchester University Press [Digital Edition]
Abstract: Deportation limbo offers a political ethnography of deportation enforcement in Denmark and Sweden. It takes place in a time when deportation has emerged as a key priority in Northern European states' migration policy regimes, and when states are stepping up their efforts to address the so-called deportation gap. The book takes the reader inside detention centres, deportation camps and migration offices, and explores how frontline officials deal with their task of pressuring non-deported migrants to leave, and the injurious effects of these efforts. Using the analytical frame of a continuum of state violence, the book details the tension-ridden enforcement of policy measures which, rather than enhancing deportations, render non-deported people stuck in precarious limbo. It brings up questions of the violence endemic to border regimes, and about racism, and bureaucratic exclusion in the Nordic welfare states.
Moore, Chris. 2025. Kincora: Britain’s Shame – Mountbatten, MI5, the Belfast Boys’ Home Sex Abuse Scandal and the British Cover-Up. Dublin: Irish Academic Press [Physical Edition]
Abstract: For over four decades the story of the extraordinary evil that occurred at the Kincora Boys’ Home in East Belfast in the 1970s and the shocking attempts by MI5 to cover it up have haunted our political and social terrain for decades. Award-winning former BBC journalist Chris Moore has been working on the story since it first emerged in 1980, and has uncovered a horrific catalogue of failed opportunities to put an end to the sadistic activities of the men who were running the home, in particular those of prominent Orangeman and MI5 source William McGrath. What has emerged over the course of Moore’s investigation, in which he has gained exclusive access to witnesses, secret documents and whistleblowers within the British intelligence services, is that not only were the boys in Kincora systematically sexually abused, but that some were forced into a countrywide paedophile ring, whose members included Lord Louis Mountbatten. Moore also exposes MI5’s attempts to cover up what actually happened and that the organisation knew as early as the 1970s that the boys in Kincora were being abused. Kincora is a shocking exposé of how the British state failed to protect some of its most vulnerable members.
Neiman, Susan. 2023. Left is Not Woke. Cambridge: Polity Press [Physical Edition]
Abstract: If you're woke, you're left. If you're left, you're woke. We blur the terms, assuming that if you're one you must be the other. That, Susan Neiman argues, is a dangerous mistake.
The intellectual roots and resources of wokeism conflict with ideas that have guided the left for more than 200 years: a commitment to universalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress. Without these ideas, Neiman argues, they will continue to undermine their own goals and drift, inexorably and unintentionally, towards the right. In the long run, they risk becoming what they despise.
One of the world's leading philosophical voices, Neiman makes this case by tracing the malign influence of two titans of twentieth-century thought, Michel Foucault and Carl Schmitt, whose work undermined ideas of justice and progress and portrayed social life as an eternal struggle of us against them. A generation schooled with these voices in their heads, raised in a broader culture shaped by the ruthless ideas of neoliberalism and evolutionary psychology, has set about changing the world. It's time they thought again.
Nic Eoin, Máirín and Mary Shine Thompson (eds.) 2025. Glór ón Sceilg Scríbhinní le Mícheál Ua Ciarmhaic by Mícheál Ua Ciarmhaic. Cork: Cork University Press [Physical Edition]
Abstract: Is éard atá sa leabhar seo ná ábhar próis agus filíochta a roghnaíodh ó ocht gcinn de bhunleabhair Ghaeilge a d’fhoilsigh an t-údar ó Bhaile an Sceilg Mícheál Ua Ciarmhaic (1906-2005) idir 1984 agus 2000. Is é an cuspóir a chuir na díolamóirí rompu ná cnuasach tarraingteach ilghnéitheach a chur ar fáil, a léireodh pearsantacht agus saoltuiscint Uí Chiarmhaic agus a dhíreodh aird léitheoirí ar na ceisteanna cultúir agus comhshaoil a bhí tábhachtach dó.
This book consists of prose and poetry material selected from eight original Irish-language books published between 1984 and 2000 by the author from Baile an Skellig Mícheál Ua Ciarmhaic (1906-2005). The aim of the anthologies was to produce an attractive and diverse collection that would reflect Ó Chiarmhaic's personality and understanding of life and would draw readers' attention to the cultural and environmental issues that were important to him.
Park, Sunyoung (ed.). 2019. Revisiting Minjung: New Perspectives on the Cultural History of 1980s South Korea. Michigan: University of Michigan Press [Digital Edition]
Abstract: An epoch-marking alliance of laborers, students, dissident intellectuals, and ordinary citizens was at the heart of South Korea’s transformation from a dictatorship into a vibrant democracy during the 1980s. Collectively known as the minjung (“the people”), these agents of Korean democratization historically carved out an expanded role for civil society in the country’s politics. In Revisiting Minjung, some of the foremost experts in 1980s Korean history, literature, film, art, and music provide new insights into one of the most crucial decades in South Korean history. Drawing from the theoretical perspectives of transnationalism, post-Marxist studies, intersectional feminism, popular culture studies, and more, the volume demonstrates how an era that is often associated with radical politics was, in effect, the catalyst for the subsequent flourishing of democratic and liberal values in South Korea.
Revisiting Minjung brings new themes, new subjectivities, and new theoretical perspectives to the study of the rich ecosystem of 1980s Korean culture. Treated here is a wide array of topics, including the origins of minjung ideology, its critique by the right wing, minjung art and music, workers’ literary culture, women writers and the resurgence of feminism, erotic cinema, science fiction, transnational political travels, and the representations of race and queerness in 1980s popular culture. The book thus details the origins and development of some of the movements that shape cultural life in South Korea today, and it does so through analyses that engage some of the most pressing debates in current scholarship in Korea and abroad.
Plamper, Jan. 2023. We Are All Migrants: A History of Multicultural Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [Digital Edition]
Abstract: In 2015, Germany agreed to accept a million Syrian refugees. The country had become an epicenter of global migration and one of Europe's most diverse countries. But was this influx of migration new to Germany? In this highly readable volume, Jan Plamper charts the groups and waves of post-1945 mobility to Germany. We Are All Migrants is the first narrative history of multicultural Germany told through life-stories. It explores the experiences of the 12.5 million German expellees from Eastern Europe who arrived at the end of the Second World War; the 14 million 'guest workers' from Italy and Turkey who turned West Germany into an economic powerhouse; the GDR's Vietnamese labor migrants; and the 2.3 million Germans and 230,000 Jews who came from the Soviet Union after 1987. Without minimizing racism, We Are All Migrants shows that immigration is a success story – and that Germany has been, and is, one of the most fascinating laboratories on our planet in which multiple ways of belonging, and ethnic, national, and supranational identities, are hotly debated and messily lived.
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To be considered for the review of one of the above books, send an email stating intent to aigne@ucc.ie by 20th June, 2025. Please title your email “Book Title Review: Surname, Forename” and attach an up-to-date Resume/CV.
Books not listed above may be considered for review. If you have a request, send an email stating intent to aigne@ucc.ie by 13th June, 2025. The statement of intent should include an abstract of the book and a sentence or two detailing its relevance to the theme. Please title your email “Book Review Request: Surname, Forename” and attach an up-to-date Resume/CV.
Selected reviewers will be notified by 27th June, 2025 and will be required to submit a c. 1000-word review by 22nd August, 2025. To be considered for publication, all reviews must adhere to Aigne’s Author Guidelines and be thoroughly proofread prior to submission.
All queries may be directed to Book Review Editors, Vassileios Varelas (Section Manager), Jordan Carolan, Darragh Counihan, Shannon Freegrove, and Tobias Heyduk at aigne@ucc.ie.
