Call for Submission: Book Reviews
Call for Book Reviewers
Aigne, 2027 Issue
Deadline: 10/10/2026
Aigne (“Mind”) is a peer-reviewed online postgraduate journal that falls under the auspices of the Graduate School of the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences at University College Cork, Cork, Ireland. The journal is scheduled to release Issue 12 in Spring of 2027.
As part of the preparation of Issue 12, the Book Review Editors have selected the following books for review. We invite expressions of interest from readers with relevant expertise or interests in the books listed below.
Beck, Joachim. 2022. Horizontal Integration: An Administrative Science Perspective on Cross-Border Cooperation in Europe. [Digital Edition]
Description: The European border regions perform a specific horizontal integration function. From the perspective of public administration theory, this publication lays the foundations for conceptualising the policy area of cross-border cooperation in Europe as a horizontal level of integration. To this end, the volume analyses the integration theory specifics of its genesis, the functional particularities of its governance with regard to the decentralised integration of different political–administrative, legal and cultural systems, as well as the patterns of emergent, transnational territorial institutionalism. Finally, administrative perspectives on the study of cross-border cooperation as a horizontal level of the European Administrative Area are also presented.
Grehan, Glen. 2025. The Saint Thomas, Bodhisattva Archive: A Six-Year Autopsy of the Self and the Digital World. [Digital Edition]
Description: The Saint Thomas, Bodhisattva Archive is a bold, genre-crossing exploration of faith, conflict, transcendence, and the hidden machinery of power that shapes the modern world. Blending theological inquiry with geopolitical urgency, the book follows a world in which ancient spiritual traditions collide with intelligence operations, digital surveillance, and the moral fractures of a global society on the brink. Through deeply reflective writing, vivid narrative moments, and philosophical insight, the archive pieces together a tapestry of visions, dialogues, historical echoes, and meditations. It examines the nature of compassion in times of violence, the cost of awakening, and the tension between spiritual duty and worldly obligation. This is an unconventional narrative. It is a curate record of revelation, struggle, and the search for meaning in a world saturated with technology, war, and ideological decay. Readers will encounter prophetic voices, moral dilemmas, cross-cultural investigations, and the timeless question of what it means to be fully human. At once intimate and global, mystical and political, The Saint Thomas Bodhisattva Archive invites readers into a rare literary experience. One that challenges, unsettles, and ultimately expands the way we understand suffering, liberation, and our shared future.
Neiman, Susan. 2023. Left is Not Woke. Cambridge: Polity Press. [Physical Edition]
Description: 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 confusion arises because woke is fuelled by traditionally leftwing emotions: the wish to stand with the oppressed and marginalized, to address historic crimes. But those emotions are undermined by widespread philosophical assumptions with reactionary sources. As a result, wokeism conflicts 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, the woke will continue to undermine their own goals and drift, inexorably and unintentionally, towards the right. One of the world’s leading philosophical voices, Neiman calls with passion and power for the left to return to the ideals that built the best of the modern world.
Malik, Sarah Alam. 2026. A Brief History of the Universe (and our place in it). Simon & Schuster UK. [Digital Edition]
Description: We have always looked up at the sky and wondered. The desire to explore and understand what lies beyond us is at the heart of scientific discovery. Ever since the ancient Babylonians tracked celestial objects on clay tablets, the search for meaning in an infinitely vast universe has been a profoundly human pursuit. In this spellbinding book, Dr Sarah Alam Malik takes us on a journey through the discoveries that shaped our perception of the cosmos. From the Earth-centred worldview of Aristotle and the Copernican revolution to Isaac Newton unifying the terrestrial and celestial under the law of gravity. Each breakthrough is a testament to humanity’s determination to peek behind the curtain of our world to examine what’s underneath. Our ability to imagine and seek out a much grander and more mysterious reality drives us towards an incredible future. From the fiery deaths of faraway suns to the complexities of the subatomic, this is the story of what we’ve found and how they continue to change us. A Brief History of the Universe (and our place in it) is a fascinating story of discovery and a beautiful celebration of our endless curiosity.
Díaz, Vanessa., and Rivera-Rideau, Petra R. 2026. P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance. Duke University Press. [Digital Edition]
Description: “Aquí mataron gente por sacar la bandera / Por eso es que ahora yo la llevo donde quiera.” (Here they killed people for taking out the flag / that’s why I bring it anywhere I want now.)—LA MuDANZA. Global superstar Bad Bunny, born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, like many other Puerto Ricans, has lived a life marked by public crises—blackouts, hurricanes, political corruption and oppression, among others—that have exposed the ongoing impacts of colonialism in Puerto Rico. Offering a portrait of the past and future of Puerto Rican resistance through one of its loudest and proudest voices, P FKN R draws on interviews with musicians, politicians, and journalists as well as ethnographic research to set Bad Bunny and Puerto Rican resistance in a historical, political, and cultural context. Authors Vanessa Díaz and Petra Rivera-Rideau—creators of the “Bad Bunny Syllabus”—demonstrate Bad Bunny’s place in a long tradition of infusing both joy and protest into music and honor the many evolving forms of daily resistance to oppression and colonialism that are part of Puerto Rican life.
Clarke, Michael., Manuel, Garcia-Garcia., and Michael, Joffe. 2026. Smarter Together: How We Think, Feel and Decide with AI. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Digital Edition]
Description: When a chatbot lies about an airline’s bereavement policy, who is to blame? When an AI-generated painting wins a state art competition, what does it mean to be a creator? Smarter Together is your essential guide to the hidden psychology behind the AI revolution. Drawing on insights from neuroscience, behavioral science, and their popular New York University courses, the authors reveal how intelligent systems are designed to mirror our thinking, feeling, and decision-making. Through unforgettable case studies, this book unpacks the new equations of trust, the cognitive biases that shape our choices, and the cultural forces defining AI’s promise and challenge. Moving from theory to practice, it provides a vital toolkit for designing and marketing AI products that augment, rather than replace, human intelligence.
Kissinger, Henry A., Schmidt, Eric., and Mundie, Craig. 2024. Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit. Hachette Audio. [Digital Edition]
Description: As Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes more dynamic and ubiquitous, it is dramatically empowering people in all walks of life while also giving rise to urgent questions about the future of humanity—a historic challenge whose contours and consequences are revealed by three eminent thinkers in Genesis. As it absorbs data, gains agency, and intermediates between humans and reality, AI will help us to address enormous crises, from climate change to geopolitical conflicts to income inequality. It might well solve some of the greatest mysteries of our universe, revolutionize fields as diverse as medicine and architecture, and elevate the human spirit to unimaginable heights. But it will also pose challenges on a scale and of an intensity that we have never seen—usurping our power of independent judgment and action, testing our relationship with the divine, and perhaps even spurring a new phase in human evolution. Whom will we choose to lead our species through this wilderness? Or have we, passively and unwittingly, already chosen? Charting a course between blind faith and unjustified fear, Genesis outlines an effective strategy for navigating the age of AI. The last book of elder statesman Henry Kissinger, written with technologists Eric Schmidt and Craig Mundie, it prepares the decisionmakers of today—that is, all of us—for the choices of tomorrow, and equips us to seize the opportunities presented by AI without falling prey to the darker forces that this revolution has unleashed.
Kather, Cara-Julie. 2026. The Epistemic Violence of Mathematics: Decolonial-Feminist Re-Writings of the “Rational” and the “Human”. Transcript Publishing. [Physical Edition]
Description: What does it mean to know something? What does it mean to prove something? And how are the two connected? Cara-Julie Kather explores Mathematics as a way of thinking and being in the world. She investigates Mathematics in its conceptual relation to Western understandings of the Rational and the Human, and proposes possibilities of subverting Western Mathematics and of forming different mathematical practices. To engage in decolonial-feminist re-writings of the Rational and the Human requires to re-write mathematical practice too. This study seeks to inspire such practices of re-writing thinking and being – in the realm of the mathematical and beyond.
Gallon, Laura. 2026. Migrant Women Writers and the Short Story in North America. Palgrave Macmillan Cham. [Digital Edition]
Description: This book explores short fiction by migrant women writers in Canada and the United States from 1980 to 2020, including Jhumpa Lahiri, Edwidge Danticat, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jamaica Kincaid, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Shani Mootoo, amongst many others. It takes the reader on a rich, revealing journey through the contemporary short story scene, made up of stories by both established authors and lesser-known names. The stories considered display the diverse experiences, literary styles and concerns of migrant short story writers, and their shared cross-cultural concerns with home, belonging and domesticity. Across chapters scrutinising the roles and representations of language, food and dress in the stories, the book introduces a new way of theorising migrant short fiction through the concept of habitability. It explores the authors’ radical re-appropriation of domestic tropes and argues that the short story form is particularly well-suited to the hybridity and fragmentation of the migrant experience. By examining short stories as cultural artifacts, taking publishing contexts into consideration, and incorporating an exclusive bibliographical guide to short story collections published since 1980, this study analyses form alongside theme to offer new insights into migrant women’s contributions to the contemporary short story.
Morawiec, Arkadiusz. 2025. Polish Camp Literature. Routledge. [Digital Edition]
Description: Polish Camp Literature expands the boundaries of Polish camp literature, which has so far been defined too narrowly. This restricted outlook has been determined by politics, ideology, the scarcity of historical knowledge, the lack of literary research, and frequent manipulation concerning terms such as “concentration camp” “forced labor camp”, and “death camp”. Camp literature was initially limited to “Lager” literature (pertaining to Nazi German camps). Over time, gulag literature (pertaining to Soviet camps) came to be included as well. It turns out that Polish camp literature is much more extensive and richer. This volume consists of mini-monographs on Polish literary works concerning either a specific camp or a specific type (system) of camps. The chapters devoted to gulag literature (i.e. texts about the Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp and Lager literature (i.e. texts about Konzentrationslager Buchenwald) expand on established findings, while the following chapters deal with topics previously unexplored, namely, the literature relating to Polish camps, such as the prewar Place of Isolation in Bereza Kartuska and the postwar communist concentration and labor camps in Łambinowice and Jaworzno, the Spanish (Francoist) Campo de Concentración de Miranda de Ebro, and the Japanese Unit 731 and its research center in Pingfang (Manchuria), which included – on top of laboratories and chemical and bacteriological weapons production units – a prison, a gas chamber, and crematoria. This book is intended to provide the impetus not just for further investigation into the unknown and insufficiently recognized areas of Polish camp literature, but also – through embedding the Polish literary output in the context of other national literatures, and by means of their cross-comparison – for charting a map of world camp literature.
To express interest in reviewing one of the books listed above, please email aigne@ucc.ie by 10 October 2026. Please use the subject line “Book Title Review: Surname, Forename” and attach an up-to-date résumé/CV.
Requests to review books not listed above are also welcome and will be considered subject to availability. Please email aigne@ucc.ie by 10 October 2026, using the subject line “Book Review Request: Surname, Forename.” Your email should include an abstract of the book, one or two sentences explaining its relevance to Aigne’s scope, and an up-to-date résumé/CV.
Publishers and authors are invited to contact us at aigne@ucc.ie to arrange the submission of books for review. We welcome books covering topics within the arts, humanities, and social sciences that fall within Aigne’s scope.
Enquiries may be directed to the Book Review Editors—Wei Chen, Matilde Piu, Megan Wilson, Hanke Kelber, and Wei Shu—at aigne@ucc.ie.
