For centuries, the Mosque of Eyüp Sultan has been one of Istanbul’s most important pilgrimage destinations, in large part because of the figure buried in the tomb at its center: Halid bin Zeyd Ebû Eyûb el-Ensârî, a Companion of the Prophet Muhammad. Timur Hammond argues here, however, that making a geography of Islam involves considerably more. Following practices of storytelling and building projects from the final years of the Ottoman Empire to the early 2010s, Placing Islam shows how different individuals and groups articulated connections among people, places, traditions, and histories to make a place that is paradoxically defined by both powerful continuities and dynamic relationships to the city and wider world. This book provides a rich account of urban religion in Istanbul, offering a key opportunity to reconsider how we understand the changing cultures of Islam in Turkey and beyond.

“Timur Hammond’s reimagining of Eyüp is lively and erudite, bringing readers a fresh understanding of the spaces and tempos in Istanbul as a place of Islam. The result is thrilling: a story of Islam and placemaking that is at once intricately grounded and expansively illuminating.” — ANNA J. SECOR, Professor of Geography, Durham University

“An impressive ethnographic and textual work. Hammond provides new insight into the inner workings of a sacred site and pilgrimage center, making this a valuable contribution to the literature on urban anthropology and lived Islam.” — M. BRETT WILSON, Director of the Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies and Associate Professor of History and Public Policy at Central European University

TIMUR HAMMOND is Assistant Professor of Geography and the Environment at Syracuse University.

A Jewish Childhood in the Muslim Mediterranean brings together the fascinating personal stories of Jewish writers, scholars, and intellectuals who came of age in lands where Islam was the dominant religion and everyday life was infused with the politics of the French imperial project. Prompted by novelist Leïla Sebbar to reflect on their childhoods, these writers offer literary portraits that gesture to a universal condition while also shedding light on the exceptional nature of certain experiences. The childhoods captured here are undeniably Jewish, but they are also Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian, Egyptian, Lebanese, and Turkish; each essay thus testifies to the multicultural, multilingual, and multi-faith community into which its author was born. The present translation makes this unique collection available to an English-speaking public for the first time. The original version, published in French in 2012, was awarded the Prix Haïm Zafrani, a prize given by the Elie Wiesel Institute of Jewish Studies to a literary project that valorizes Jewish civilization in the Muslim world.

“Expertly introduced and organized, each essay is as beautiful as the next. This wonderful collection offers a distinctive account of how Jews of different countries in the Middle East and North Africa experienced their place in society.” — JESSICA MARGLIN, Associate Professor of Religion, Law, and History at the University of Southern California

LEÏLA SEBBAR is an Algerian novelist who has edited several collections on childhood and writers in exile, including An Algerian Childhood: A Collection of Autobiographical Narratives, Enfances tunisiennes, and Une enfance outremer.

LIA BROZGAL is Professor of French and Francophone Studies in the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Absent the Archive: Cultural Traces of a Massacre in Paris (17 October 1961). 

REBECCA GLASBERG is a PhD candidate in French and Francophone Studies in the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

At the forefront of the entertainment industries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were singular actors: Sarah Bernhardt, Gabrielle Réjane, and Mistinguett. Talented women with global ambitions, these performers pioneered the use of film and theatrics to gain international renown. Transnational Trailblazers of Early Cinema traces how these women emerged from the Parisian periphery to become world-famous stars. Through intrepid business prowess and the cultivation of celebrity images, these three artists strengthened ties among countries, continents, and cultures during pivotal years of change.

“Victoria Duckett marshals formidable evidence to compare the careers of three legendary actresses who triumphantly crossed from stage to screen. Star studies should never be the same.” — IAN CHRISTIE, author of Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema

“Revealing the innovation and acumen of three turn-of-the-century French actresses in reshaping both theater and cinema, Duckett demonstrates the power of transnational history in all its surprises and contradictions.” — LAURA HORAK, author of Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908–1934

“A major reassessment of a significant moment in transnational culture that casts aside disciplinary boundaries to discover a creative and complicated historical process.” — JOHN STOKES, Professor Emeritus of Modern British Literature, King’s College London

“From Belle Époque Paris and Victorian London to cosmopolitan New York, Transnational Trailblazers of Early Cinema takes us on an exhilarating transatlantic and transdisciplinary voyage—archival, intertextual, and historiographic.” — TAMI WILLIAMS, author of Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations

VICTORIA DUCKETT is Associate Professor of Film at Deakin University and author of Seeing Sarah Bernhardt: Performance and Silent Film.

Recovering Identity examines a critical tension in criminalized women’s identity work. Through in-depth qualitative and photo-elicitation interviews, Cesraéa Rumpf shows how formerly incarcerated women engaged recovery and faith-based discourses to craft rehabilitated identities, defined in opposition to past identities as “criminal-addicts.” While these discourses made it possible for women to carve out spaces of personal protection, growth, and joy, they also promoted individualistic understandings of criminalization and the violence and dehumanization that followed. Honoring criminalized women’s stories of personal transformation, Rumpf nevertheless strongly critiques institutions’ promotion of narratives that impose lifelong moral judgment while detracting attention from the structural forces of racism, sexism, and poverty that contribute to women’s vulnerability to violence.

“A deeply moving account of the indignity that women who are criminalized experience as they fight for their freedom. Cesraéa Rumpf’s sharp critique demands that we see the violence of incarceration and deepen our commitment to justice for criminalized women.” — BETH E. RICHIE, coauthor of Abolition. Feminism. Now.

“Recovering Identity makes a major contribution to the study of gender, race, and culture in the era of mass incarceration. Rumpf’s comprehensive analysis of how women counter the negative effects of the criminal legal system is timely, thoroughly researched, and persuasive.” — KEESHA M. MIDDLEMASS, author of Convicted and Condemned: The Politics and Policies of Prisoner Reentry

“Rumpf persuasively demonstrates how 12-step ideology obscures the structural forces driving mass incarceration. A sensitive, rigorous, and compelling contribution.” — MELISSA THOMPSON, coauthor of Motherhood after Incarceration: Community Reintegration for Mothers in the Criminal Legal System

CESRAÉA RUMPF is Associate Director of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago.

This book examines the significant role that memory failures play in early rabbinic literature. The rabbis who shaped Judaism in late antiquity envisioned the commitment to the Torah and its commandments as governing every aspect of a person’s life. Their vision of a Jewish subject who must keep constant mental track of multiple obligations and teachings led them to be preoccupied with forgetting: forgetting tasks, forgetting facts, forgetting texts, and—most broadly—forgetting the Torah altogether. In Fractured Tablets, Mira Balberg examines the ways in which the early rabbis approached and delineated the possibility of forgetfulness in practice and study and the solutions and responses they conjured for forgetfulness, along with the ways in which they used human fallibility to bolster their vision of Jewish observance and their own roles as religious experts. In the process, Balberg shows that the rabbis’ intense preoccupation with the prospect of forgetfulness was a meaningful ideological choice, with profound implications for our understanding of Judaism in late antiquity.

“Lucidly written, lively, and fun to read, Fractured Tablets offers a new window into the tannaitic mind and the priorities at the foundation of the rabbinic movement from its inception.” — NATALIE B. DOHRMANN, coeditor of Jews, Christians, and the Roman Empire: The Poetics of Power in Late Antiquity

MIRA BALBERG is Professor of History and Endowed Chair in Ancient Jewish Civilization at the University of California, San Diego. She is author of Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature and Blood for Thought: The Reinvention of Sacrifice in Early Rabbinic Literature and coauthor of When Near Becomes Far: Old Age in Rabbinic Literature.

Beyond the Movie Theater excavates the history of non-theatrical cinema before 1920, exploring how moving pictures were used in ways distinct from theatrical cinema. Looking away from the glimmer of the theater screen and stepping outside the light of the marquee, Beyond the Movie Theater reveals that sponsored moving pictures were put to a variety of uses and screened at a host of sites, targeting a surprisingly wide range of audiences. Relying on contemporary print sources and ephemera, Gregory A. Waller charts a heterogeneous, fragmentary, and rich field that cannot be explained in terms of a master narrative concerning origin or institutionalization, progress or decline. Uncovering how and where films were put to use beyond the movie theater, this book complicates and expands our understanding of the history of American cinema, underscoring the myriad roles and everyday presence of moving pictures during the early twentieth century.

“A monumental triumph. Gregory A. Waller mines untapped historical evidence, revealing a vast and previously obscured area of early twentieth- century cultural activity. This is a fresh, surprising, and highly original contribution to American film history.” — HAIDEE WASSON, author of Everyday Movies: Portable Film Projectors and the Transformation of American Culture

“Outstanding. Waller brings a mastery of archival source work and careful methodological consideration to myriad contemporary periodicals and newspapers—many of which have been overlooked by previous historians of American cinema, until now.” — PATRICK VONDERAU, University of Halle

GREGORY A. WALLER is Provost Professor in Cinema and Media Studies in the Media School at Indiana University and editor of Film History: An International Journal.

In Paraguay’s Chaco region, cattle ranching drives some of the world’s fastest deforestation and most extreme inequality in land tenure, with grave impacts on Indigenous well-being. Disrupting the Patrón traces Enxet and Sanapaná struggles to reclaim their ancestral lands from the cattle ranches where they labored as peons—a decades-long resistance that led to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and back to the frontlines of Paraguay’s ranching frontier. The Indigenous communities at the heart of this story employ a dialectics of disruption by working with and against the law to unsettle enduring racial geographies and rebuild territorial relations, albeit with uncertain outcomes. Joel E. Correia shows that Enxet and Sanapaná peoples enact environmental justice otherwise: moving beyond juridical solutions to harm by maintaining collective lifeways and resistance amid radical social-ecological change. Correia’s ethnography advances debates about environmental racism, ethics of engaged research, and Indigenous resurgence on Latin America’s settler frontiers.

“A crucial and incisive contribution to our understanding of racialized geographies, settler capitalism, and environmental and Indigenous justice.” — Gastón R. Gordillo, author of Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction

“Focusing on the racial and cultural implications of land and labor in Indigenous struggles in Paraguay, Correia expands our focus on environmental concerns to include human rights, cultural rights, and the need for legal and political justice.” — Nancy Postero, author of The Indigenous State: Race, Politics, and Performance in Plurinational Bolivia

”A story of the underrepresented peoples of Paraguay, their endurance under multiple cycles of dispossession, and the various forms that their resistance takes.” — Gabriela Valdivia, coauthor of Oil, Revolution, and Indigenous Citizenship in Ecuadorian Amazonia

Joel E. Correia is Assistant Professor in the Human Dimensions of Natural Resources Department at Colorado State University.

Well into the twenty-first century, achieving gender equality in the economy remains unfinished business. Worldwide, women’s employment, income, and leadership opportunities lag men’s. Building and using a one-of-a-kind database that covers 193 countries, this book systematically analyzes how far we’ve come and how far we have to go in adopting evidence-based solutions to close the gaps. Spanning topics including girls’ education, employment discrimination of all kinds, sexual harassment, and caregiving needs across the life course, the authors bring the findings to life through global maps, stories of laws’ impact in courts and beyond, and case studies of making change. A powerful call to action, Equality within Our Lifetimes reveals how gender equality is both feasible and urgently needed to address some of the greatest challenges of our generation.

“An inspirational title to further the advancement of comprehensive gender equality, which goes beyond formal and protective equality to substantive equality that underpins transformative laws, policies, and, above all, results on the ground.” — VIRGINIA BRAS GOMES, Former Chairperson of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

“This book makes a compelling case, based on both quantitative and qualitative data, for how and why gender equality benefits everyone. Governments would be wise to heed this lesson.” — YASMEEN HASSAN, Global Executive Director, Equality Now

“This book is an essential handbook for those invested in gender equality law and policy.” — CATHERINE FISK, Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley School of Law

JODY HEYMANN is Founding Director of the WORLD Policy Analysis Center; Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles; and an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences. ALETA SPRAGUE is Senior Legal Analyst at WORLD and an attorney with over a decade of experience working on social policy and inequality. AMY RAUB is Principal Research Analyst at WORLD and an economist with two decades of experience working on discrimination and inequality.

In The Celluloid Specimen, Benjamín Schultz‑Figueroa examines rarely seen behaviorist films of animal experiments from the 1930s and 1940s. These laboratory recordings—including Robert Yerkes’s work with North American primate colonies, Yale University’s rat‑based simulations of human society, and B. F. Skinner’s promotions for pigeon‑guided missiles—have long been considered passive records of scientific research. In Schultz‑Figueroa’s incisive analysis, however, they are revealed to be rich historical, political, and aesthetic texts that played a crucial role in American scientific and cultural history—and remain foundational to contemporary conceptions of species, race, identity, and society.

“Essential reading for anyone in behavioral science and media studies.” — LISA CARTWRIGHT, University of California, San Diego

“Remarkable and urgently needed. Benjamín Schultz‑Figueroa disinters an extraordinary lost archive that sheds new light on race, eugenics, species, the science of sex, and biopolitics. A resonant— and stunningly clear—intervention.” — DONOVAN SCHAEFER, author of Wild Experiment: Feeling Science and Secularism after Darwin

“A fertile, sprawling, kaleidoscopic work. No book outlines the multiple functions of the scientific moving image as thoroughly. A brilliant and essential addition to animal studies, cinema and media studies, and the history of science.” — SCOTT CURTIS, author of The Shape of Spectatorship: Art, Science, and Early Cinema in Germany

“Seriously speculative, meticulously researched, and boldly interdisciplinary, The Celluloid Specimen cross‑pollinates nontheatrical film studies and critical animal studies with stunning acumen and gripping analysis.” — YIMAN WANG, University of California, Santa Cruz

BENJAMÍN SCHULTZ‑FIGUEROA is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Seattle University.

Provincializing Empire explores the global history of Japanese expansion through a regional lens. It rethinks the nation-centered geography and chronology of empire by uncovering the pivotal role of expeditionary merchants from Ōmi (present-day Shiga Prefecture) and their modern successors. Tracing their lives from the early modern era, and writing them into the global histories of empire, diaspora, and capitalism, Jun Uchida offers an innovative analysis of expansion through a story previously untold: how the nation’s provincials built on their traditions to create a transpacific diaspora that stretched from Seoul to Vancouver, while helping shape the modern world of transoceanic exchange.

“Provincializing Empire offers a stimulating and persuasive account of the longue durée of Japanese capitalist development, connecting Japanese historiography to important conversations on the history of racial capitalism and geographies of space, place, and scale.” — DAVID AMBARAS, author of Japan’s Imperial Underworlds: Intimate Encounters at the Borders of Empire

“Wide-ranging yet richly documented, Provincializing Empire offers a powerful new transregional history of Japanese capitalism, challenging claims about the developmental state. It tells the fascinating story of a merchant diaspora whose growth was entwined with Japanese imperialism, and of the invented traditions that sustained provincial identity amid global commercial expansion.” — JORDAN SAND, author of Tokyo Vernacular: Common Spaces, Local Histories, Found Objects

"A tour de force! Jun Uchida's lucid narrative illuminates the multidirectional movements of settler-migrant merchants from peripheral Japan that cut across the prescribed borders of empires and nation-states. Empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated, Provincializing Empire calls into question many assumptions about Japanese imperialism and offers a less spatially bounded story of grassroots expansionism." — EIICHIRO AZUMA, author of In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan's Borderless Empire

"Provincializing Empire is a wonderfully creative model for connecting local and global history. Uchida frames her stimulating account of Japanese overseas commercial expansion, colonialism, and diaspora not as the top-down story of state policy but as the local history of a mercantile community." — DAVID L. HOWELL, Robert K. and Dale J. Weary Professor of Japanese History, Harvard University

JUN UCHIDA is Associate Professor of History at Stanford University and author of Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876–1945.