By Catherine Riley and Lynne Pearce We were completing the edits on Feminism and Women’s Writing: An Introduction at the end of 2017 when something seismic, something transformational, began to happen. The exposure of Harvey Weinstein’s long history of sexual assault,…
It is a pleasure to see the launch of the first issue of Afghanistan, a journal to showcase the country’s exceptional cultural diversity. It is the first scholarly journal devoted to the country since the demise of Afghan Studies in…
By Ondrej Beranek and Pavel Tupek 1) Over the past years and decades, various parts of the Islamic world – from Iraq, Syria, Mali and Tunisia, to Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Bangladesh – have faced virulent attacks targeting…
I was standing in a library aisle in the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, my neck craning to read titles dropping vertically down the spines of books. A familiar experience for many students, even if it is being…
Welcome to November where, very sadly, we’ve reached the last in our blog series for OLR’s 40th anniversary. To go out with a bang, we have made two articles free to enjoy for a month. Enjoy! First up, we have…
In 1963, Jean-Luc Nancy tackled the subject of generational silence in his article ‘A Certain Silence’ (republished in OLR in 2005). Nancy, a well-known French philosophy and writer, wrote ‘A Certain Silence’ only a year after he graduated in Philosophy…
What’s the artist for in modern Scotland? Curating our accumulated history? Envisioning our possible and impossible futures? Diagnosing the ills of our present and prescribing treatment for the body politic? Showing us who we are, or who we ought to…
Marcel Proust once said, “Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.” Friendship, and the role it plays in life, is an interesting and varied topic explored…
My new book, Viking Law and Order, paints a rather different picture of Viking Age society from the one we are used to. We often hear discussions of violent raids and systematic pillaging by warriors arriving in long ships. It…