8 new introductions to The Squid Cinema from Hell
William Brown and David H Fleming discuss the eight possible other introductions to their book The Squid Cinema from Hell.
Edinburgh University Press
George Strachan of the Mearns: A Historian’s Biography
Biography is a dangerous genre for any historian. Inevitably it has to be set in the history of the subject’s time and place, but it is driven by the obsession engendered in the writer by the subject. This has been…
Five Essentials of Muslim Preaching
To celebrate the release of Muslim Preaching in the Middle East and Beyond: Historical and Contemporary Case Studies, editors Simon Stjernholm and Elisabeth Özdalga take us through five essential things you should know about Muslim preaching. 1. Synchronised sermons When…
Why has the EU been so obsessed with the Israeli–Arab conflict?
The past years have seen many commemorations in the Israeli–Arab conflict: 100 years since the Balfour Declaration (2017), seventy years since Israel was created (2018), fifty years since the 1967 war (2017), thirty years since the first intifada (2017), and…
What Is the Point of Literary Criticism?
Anglophone literary criticism has over the last decade engaged in a searching analysis and critique of its own methods. Perhaps surprisingly, much of that debate has considered *how* one should engage in literary interpretation—whether one should read closely or from a distance, interpret in a paranoid or reparative way, emphasize the work’s surface or depth, engage in “critique” or some other mode of attachment—and rather less *why*. But we might benefit from asking that question more openly: what, after all, is the point of literary criticism? Why does this practice merit the sustained intellectual energy so many scholars have devoted to it?
On translation and exegesis in the Zoroastrian religious tradition
The oldest layers of the surviving Zoroastrian texts are in Avestan language and commonly dated to the middle of the second millennium BCE. Exact dates and circumstances of composition, however, remain uncertain, so that little is known about the socio-political context from which these texts emerged. After two millennia of oral transmission, the texts were finally committed to writing, at a time when the language must have no longer been in active use.
Five Vampire Movies You Might Not Have Seen
A staple in cinema for decades, the vampire movie is a genre that is constantly being rejuvenated with fresh blood. Michael Guarneri looks to Italian cinema to introduce five vintage vampire movies you might not have seen. 1) L’ultima preda…
Children’s lives disrupted: in French history and today
By Siân Reynolds When we were preparing this special issue of Nottingham French Studies (59: 2) which I have guest-edited, we did not know that by the time it appeared the world would be in the grip of the COVID-19…
Introducing Edinburgh Studies in Islamic Scripture and Theology
Series Editor Ramon Harvey introduces our latest Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies series, Edinburgh Studies in Islamic Scripture and Theology. He deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical…
Black Lives Matter and African American literature of the 1950s
Participants in the protests following the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota have emphasised historical continuity in the experience of racist oppression in the United States.