Category: General and Theory
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Cole, Lucinda, The Fifth Plague: Cattle, Contagion, and the Medical Posthumanities
Lucinda Cole, The Fifth Plague: Cattle, Contagion, and the Medical Posthumanities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) xii, 260 pp. £87.50 ebook £109.99 Hb. ISBN: 978-3031927928 Lucinda Cole’s The Fifth Plague: Cattle, Contagion, and the Medical Posthumanities, published as part of the series, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, takes up the vexing and urgent question of how…
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Foster, Kate and Crozier, Molly (eds), The Human and the Machine in Literature and Culture: Cultures of Automation
Kate Foster and Molly Crozier (eds), The Human and the Machine in Literature and Culture: Cultures of Automation (New York: Routledge, 2026) 216pp. £116.00 Hb. £34.39 e-book. ISBN: 9781032895871 The subtitle of The Human and the Machine in Literature and Culture – Cultures of Automation – is a useful shorthand for what this collection most…
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Joseph-Lester, Jasper, Kahane, Ahuvia, King, Simon and Leslie, Esther (eds), Walking in Cities: Navigating Post-Pandemic Urban Environments
Jaspar Joseph-Lester, Ahuvia Kahane, Simon King and Esther Leslie (eds), Walking in Cities: Navigating Post-Pandemic Urban Environments (New York: Routledge, 2024) 352 pp. $180.00 Hb. $52.99 Pb. $39.74 e-book. ISBN: 978-1-032-41260-3 ‘Walking in Cities’ is perhaps one of the simplest yet most evocative titles one might give to a book about urban life. As a…
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Howick, Jeremy, The Power of Placebos: How the Science of Placebos and Nocebos Can Improve Health Care
Jeremy Howick, The Power of Placebos: How the Science of Placebos and Nocebos Can Improve Health Care (Johns Hopkins University Press: 2023) 320 pp. $32.95 Hb. ISBN: 9781421446387 Can the solution to the opioid crisis—and perhaps even the superbug problem—lie in using less medication, without compromising pain relief or curability? Professor and Director of Empathic…
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Fyfe, Paul, Digital Victorians: From Nineteenth-Century Media to Digital Humanities
Paul Fyfe, Digital Victorians: From Nineteenth-Century Media to Digital Humanities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2024) 294 pp. $60.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781503640948 Paul Fyfe’s Digital Victorians eloquently takes readers on an exploratory journey bringing together the Victorian period’s ‘new media’ moment and our own. Indeed, for Fyfe, contemporary developments in media technologies and communication – and…
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Joseph, May and Varino, Sofia, Aquatopia: Climate Interventions
May Joseph and Sofia Varino, Aquatopia: Climate Interventions (Routledge, 2023) 97pp. £38.39 Hb. ISBN: 9781032326405 In Aquatopia: Climate Interventions, May Joseph and Sofia Varino present a concise yet conceptually ambitious reflection on climate performance, colonial histories and water ecologies. Situated within Routledge’s Critical Climate Studies series, the book documents and theorises the site-specific performances of…
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Durham, Rebecca A., Be Still Mere Molecule
Rebecca A. Durham, Be Still Mere Molecule (Raleigh, NC, USA: Broken Tribe Press, 2025) 120 pp. $14.95 Pb. ISBN: 9781965412107 How does a poet witness the world? How does a scientist? What if a person were to be both at once? Would that experience of the in-betweenness of both worlds aid them in finding, perhaps…
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Berry, Chelsea, Poisoned Relations: Healing, Power, and Contested Knowledge in the Atlantic World
Chelsea Berry, Poisoned Relations: Healing, Power, and Contested Knowledge in the Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025) 273 pp. $49.95 Hb. ISBN: 9781512826494 Chelsea Berry’s work Poisoned Relations: Healing, Power, and Contested Knowledge in the Atlantic World is a deeply interdisciplinary study that reimagines how we understand poison, healing, and power in the context…
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Hayles, N. Katherine, Bacteria to AI: Futures with our Nonhuman Symbionts
N. Katherine Hayles, Bacteria to AI: Futures with our Nonhuman Symbionts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025) 304 pp. $27.50 Pb. ISBN: 9780226837475 As a species, we Homo sapiens often take it for granted that humanity is separate from, and superior to, the rest of existence. It’s a view that has permeated much of our…
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Martin, Meredith, Poetry’s Data: Digital Humanities and the History of Prosody
Meredith Martin, Poetry’s Data: Digital Humanities and the History of Prosody (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025) 224 pp. £84 Hb. £30 Pb. ISBN: 9780691254678 Meredith Martin’s Poetry’s Data is a large-scale attempt to bring together literary studies, linguistics, digital humanities, and critical archives studies. It presents a compelling case on why we should critically examine…
