Irish folklore is replete with images of transforming women. The wailing banshee, the alluring mermaid, the unsettling changeling and others recur throughout folktales and have become well-known through contemporary depictions in texts and films. In the wake of recent feminist thinking, online movements, and revelations of gender-based violence in state institutions such as the Magdalene Laundries, Irish women writers have found fresh ways to adapt this folklore, addressing the underlying ...

While humanitarian organizations and media outlets often reduce Syrian refugees to statistics or brief anecdotes, the real story of displacement unfolds in the intimate spaces of family life. Through the interwoven narratives of five middle-aged sisters from Damascus, Lines of Flight, Assemblages of Home reveals how Syrian women navigate war, exile, and the profound transformation of their families and identities.Drawing on extensive interviews conducted between 2015 and 2...

In Crafting Marriages: Palestinian American Women Transforming Gender Boundaries, Enaya Othman draws on three decades of ethnographic research to chart how Palestinian women have reimagined and reshaped marriage practices across generations. Through careful analysis of over sixty personal narratives, family documents, and marriage videos, Othman reveals how these women have become key agents of cultural change, negotiating between traditional expectations and contemporary possibil...

The boundaries between the seven constituent emirates of the United Arab Emirates form one of the most complex territorial landscapes in the Middle East that is marked simultaneously by striking fragmentation on the map and inconspicuousness on the ground. Niklas A. Haller traces how such boundaries were shaped, dismantled, disregarded, and reappeared throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He analyzes how the forces of oil and empire combined in progressively transforming the n...

Fitness for Freedom revises our reading of Ireland’s national story by illuminating the central role of fitness and disability in Irish revivalism and modernism. While notions of disability have been used to justify the denial of citizenship and rights across cultures, Marion Quirici uncovers a history in which an entire nation, Ireland, was characterized as disabled and therefore "not fit for freedom." Beyond symbolism, the Famine and decades of emigration led to a perception tha...

Combining diaspora studies and ethnomusicology, The Sound of Exile examines how Central European Jewish refugees employed music as a means of reconstructing cultural identity amid turmoil and displacement in Shanghai. From orchestral arrangements and cabarets to traditional synagogue liturgy, music served as the common thread weaving together the history of Jewish life, thought, and exile. Navigating a Shanghai that was embroiled in its own complicated history and the intricate po...

While the connection between Ireland and the otherworldly has long been a staple of literature and the arts, it finds its most consistent and compelling expression in the medium of cinema. In the first comprehensive scholarly study of the fantastic in Irish film, Fantastic Spaces explores how the spatial dimensions of supernatural phenomena in Irish cinema interpret and engage with the dynamic changes that have swept across Ireland over the past four decades.Drawing on a w...

In Living Law, Rosemary Admiral provides a groundbreaking history of women's legal engagement in Marinid Morocco between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries that fundamentally challenges contemporary assumptions about women's relationships to Islamic legal traditions. Drawing on a rich collection of fatwas (legal documents) from Fez and surrounding areas, Admiral demonstrates how women—some without formal education—strategically navigated complex legal landscapes to protect the...

At a time when Yemen has been ravaged by a decade of war and subject to myriad political and military interventions, the essays in this collection serve as a timely reminder of the need for grounded anthropological study in even the harshest of circumstances. From tribesmen to refugees, revolutionaries to farmers, state workers to charity workers, intellectuals to the unemployed and the destitute, we learn of the everyday political languages through which people in the country live their l...

In Literary Optics, Maha AbdelMegeed offers a compelling and far-reaching alternative to the traditional mode of analyzing Arabic literature through an encounter between Arabic narrative forms and European ones. Drawing upon close engagements with the works of canonical authors from the period, including Hassan Husni al-Tuwayrani, Muhammad al-Muwaylihi, Ali Mubarak, Francis Marrash, and ‘Abdallah al-Nadim, AbdelMegeed addresses not where these works emanate from but rather how and...

In Paradoxes of Emancipation, Dimitris Soudias traces the formation of political subjectivity in times of crisis by attending to the 2011 occupation of Syntagma Square in Athens—the heart of the Greek anti-austerity movement following the debt crisis. Soudias conceives of the Syntagma Square occupation as a lens through which we can critically engage with broader theoretical and political issues: the crumbling promises of the capitalist imaginary, the epistemic "spirit" of neolibe...

In this book, Philip Arnold utilizes a collaborative method, derived from the "Two-Row Wampum" (1613) and his 40 year relationship with the Haudenosaunee, in exploring the urgent need to understand Indigenous values, support Indigenous Peoples, and to offer a way toward humanity’s survival in the face of ecological and environmental catastrophe. Indigenous values connect human beings with the living natural world through ceremonial exchange practices with non-human beings who co-inhabit th...