New Publication: Health and Wellness in the 19th Century

health and wellnessDeborah Brunton’s book Health and Wellness in the 19th Century (Greenwood, 2013) has just been published.

The book explores medical ideas and practice in the 19th century around the world, this book showcases the wide range of medical ideas, practices, institutions, and patient experiences, revealing how the exchanges of ideas and therapies between different systems of medicine resulted in patients enjoying a surprising degree of choice. The work provides an introduction to 19th-century medicine and sets the advancement of medicine within the context of wider historical changes. Chapters examine areas of dramatic change, such as the development of surgery, as well as the fundamental continuities in the use of traditional forms of supernatural healing, covering western, Chinese, unani, ayurvedic, and folk medicine-based understandings of the body and disease. Additionally, the book describes how the culture of medicine reflected and responded to the challenges posed by urbanization, industrialization, and global movement. Find out more.

 

New Publication: Anglo-American Connections in Japanese Chemistry

anglo-american connectionsYoshi Kikuchi, a former research student of the Department of History of Science, Technology and Medicine, has published a new book partly based on his PhD thesis on Anglo-Japanese relations in chemistry submitted to the OU in 2006.

Anglo-American Connections in Japanese Chemistry: The Lab as Contact Zone (Palgrave Macmillan) also draws on his postdoctoral research on American-Japanese relations at the Chemical Heritage Foundation (Philadelphia), MIT and Harvard University.

The book analyses the dynamic cross-cultural interplay between British and American chemists and their Japanese students in a variety of “contact zones” in three continents and its consequences for the institutionalization of scientific and technological higher education in Japan in the late nineteenth and twentieth century.  Find out more about this book.

 

New publication: Between Yesterday and Tomorrow

Bailey Book CoverChristian Bailey’s new book Between Yesterday and Tomorrow: German Visions of Europe, 1926-1950 seeks to understand how Germans became such ‘good Europeans’ after 1945. Whereas many histories of European integration tend to largely focus on the diplomatic goings-on between elites, this book focuses on how support for a united Europe was cultivated in civil society. It asks if, and how, incorporating West Germany into an integrated Europe helped to democratize German political culture and to establish the new state as a reliable member of the Western bloc during the Cold War era. Find out more about this book.

 

New Publication: The Cooke Sisters

cookesistersDr Gemma Allen’s new book, The Cooke Sisters: Education, Piety and Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester University Press), has just been published. Part of the select group of Tudor women allowed access to a formal education, the Cooke sisters were also well-connected through their marriages to influential Elizabethan politicians.

Drawing particularly on their own writings, this book reconstructs for the first time the sisters’ humanist education and reveals the extent of their religious and political agency.

 

Publication: Karl Hack’s War Memory and the Making of Modern Malaysia and Singapore

Hack War Memory CoverDr Hack’s War Memory and the Making of Modern Malaysia and Singapore (Singapore: NUS Press, 2012) has just been published.

Further information about this book is available from NUS Press’s website. He presented some of its findings to a public audience of more than 200 at Singapore’s Supreme Court, on 16 February 2012 at an academic conference on The Causes and Impact on the Fall of Singapore.

 

 

 

Publication: Heritage, History and Memory: New Research from East and Southern Africa

african-studies-coverLotte Hughes is the guest editor of African Studies Volume 70 Number 2,  August 2011  Special Issue: Heritage, History and Memory: New Research from East and Southern Africa with Annie E Coombes and Karega-Munene. This is one of two main written outputs from the AHRC-funded research project ‘Managing Heritage, Building Peace: Museums, memorialization and the uses of memory in Kenya’, led by PI Lotte Hughes, that ends on 30 September 2011. It contains articles by the 3 guest editors, and by another member of the research team, Dr Neil Carrier (University of Oxford) who was employed as a field-based consultant.

 

 

Publication: Lotte Hughes appointed reviews editor of African Affairs

Lotte Hughes has been appointed reviews editor of the top-ranked journal in area studies, African Affairs, published by the Royal Africa Society. It is ranked number 1 in the ISI citation index for Area Studies (http://afraf.oxfordjournals.org/), and has a wide and influential readership of politicians, policy-makers and business people as well as academics. To contact Lotte, if you wish to review new titles, please email l.hughes@open.ac.uk.