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Waddenland Outstanding
History, Landscape and Cultural Heritage of the Wadden Sea Region
Edited by Linde Egberts and Meindert Schroor
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
The Wadden Sea Region is comprised of the embanked coastal marshes and islands in the Wadden Sea near Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands. This area retains an exceptional common history in all its aspects: archaeologically, economically, socially, and culturally. Its settlement history of more than two thousand years is unrivalled and still mirrored in the landscape. Even though it has never constituted a political unity, it still shares a landscape and cultural heritage. For example, the approaches to water management and associated societal organization developed in the region during the last millennium have set significant world standards. This book offers an overview of current research on history, landscape and cultural heritage of the Wadden Sea region.
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Wage Setting, Social Pacts and the Euro
A New Role for the State
Anke Hassel
Amsterdam University Press, 2006
Politicians, economists, and social theorists tend to agree that globalization and neo-liberal economic policy have contributed to the decline of the social compacts underlying traditional European welfare states. Recently, however, social pacts have demonstrated an impressive resurgence, as governments across Europe facing necessary economic policy adjustments have chosen to view trade unions as vital negotiating partners rather than adversaries. Wage Setting, Social Pacts, and the Euro offers a theoretical understanding of the forces that have led to this new understanding, and of the challenges that increasing monetary integration will continue to pose.
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Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Film
Daniel Mourenza
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
Walter Benjamin is today regarded as one of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century. Often captured in pensive pose, his image is now that of a serious intellectual. But Benjamin was also a fan of the comedies of Adolphe Menjou, Mickey Mouse, and Charlie Chaplin. As an antidote to repressive civilization, he developed, through these figures, a theory of laughter. Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Film is the first monograph to thoroughly analyse Benjamin's film writings, contextualizing them within his oeuvre whilst also paying attention to the various films, actors, and directors that sparked his interest. The book situates all these writings with Benjamin's 'anthropological materialism', a concept that analyses the transformations of the human sensorium through technology. Through the term 'innervation', Benjamin thought of film spectatorship as an empowering reception that, through a rush of energy, would form a collective body within the audience, interpenetrating a liberated technology into the distracted spectators. Benjamin's writings on Soviet film and German cinema, Charlie Chaplin, and Mickey Mouse are analysed in relation to this posthuman constellation that Benjamin had started to dream of in the early twenties, long before he started to theorize about films.
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Walter Ruttmann and the Cinema of Multiplicity
Avant-Garde Film - Advertising - Modernity
Michael Cowan
Amsterdam University Press, 2014
A key figure in early avant-garde cinema, Walter Ruttmann was a pioneer of experimental animation and the creative force behind one of the silent era's most celebrated montage films, Berlin: Symphony of a Great City. Yet even as he was making experimental films, Ruttmann had a day job. He worked regularly in advertising -and he would go on to make industrial films, medical films, and even Nazi propaganda films. Michael Cowan offers here the first study of Ruttmann in English, not only shedding light on his commercial, industrial, and propaganda work, but also rethinking his significance in light of recent transformations in film studies. Cowan brilliantly teases out the linkages between the avant-garde and industrial society in the early twentieth century, showing how Ruttmann's films incorporated and enacted strategies for managing the multiplicities of mass society.This book has won the Willy Haas Award 2014 for its outstanding contribution to the study of German cinema.
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Wang Bing's Filmmaking of the China Dream
Narratives, Witnesses and Marginal Spaces
Elena Pollacchi
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
This volume offers an organic discussion of Wang Bing's filmmaking across China's marginal spaces and against the backdrop of the state-sanctioned 'China Dream'. Wang's work has contemporary China as its focus and testifies to the country's contradictions, not dissimilar to those of contemporary societies dealing with issues of inequality, labour, and migration. Without being an activist, Wang Bing gives voice to the subaltern. His internationally awarded documentaries are recognized as world masterpieces. His unique aesthetics bears references to film masters, therefore this investigation goes beyond the divide between Western and non-Western film traditions. Each chapter takes a different articulation of space (spaces of labour, spaces of history, spaces of memory) as its entry point bringing together film and documentary studies, Chinese studies, and studies in globalization issues. This volume benefits from the author's extensive conversation with Wang Bing and from insider's observations of film production and the film festival circuit.
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War of Words
Dutch Pro-Boer Propaganda and the South African War (1899-1902)
Vincent Kuitenbrouwer
Amsterdam University Press, 2012
The Boer War gripped the Dutch public during the turn of the nineteenth century, when the Boer Republics, made up of descendants of seventeenth-century settlers from the Netherlands, were fighting the British Empire in South Africa. War of Words examines the ample Dutch propaganda during this time period, which attempted to counterweigh the British coverage of the war. Vincent Kuitenbrouwer offers a highly readable study of the pro-Boer movement in the Netherlands both during the Boer War and far into the twentieth century, while exploring the representation of South Africans in Dutch-language publications and the several persistent stereotypes that colored the Dutch attitude toward the Boers.
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Warfare and Politics
Cities and Government in Renaissance Tuscany and Venice
Humfrey Butters
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
Warfare and Politics: Cities and Government in Renaissance Tuscany and Venice brings together a group of prominent contributors to consider the topics of government and warfare in Tuscany and Venice in the Renaissance. The essays cover a remarkably broad geographical and topical range as they analyse the economic, military, political, and diplomatic history of Florence, Rome, Venice, and the Italian peninsula in general through the Renaissance and early modern period.
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Warped Minds
Cinema and Psychopathology
Temenuga Trifonova
Amsterdam University Press, 2014
Warped Minds explores the transformation of psychopathologies into cultural phenomena in the wake of the transition from an epistemological to an ontological approach to psychopathology. Trifonova considers several major points in this intellectual history: the development of a dynamic model of the self at the fin de siècle, the role of photography and film in the construction of psychopathology, the influence of psychoanalysis on the transition from static, universalizing psychiatric paradigms to dynamic styles of psychiatry foregrounding the socially constructed nature of madness, and the decline of psychoanalysis and the aestheticization of madness into a trope describing the conditions of knowledge in postmodernity as evidenced by the transformation of multiple personality and paranoia into cultural and aesthetic phenomena.Download the Table of Contents and a sample chapter
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Warplane 04
Brewster Buffalo
Nico Braas
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
One of the lesser-known fighter aircraft of World War II was the Brewster Buffalo, or, using the U.S. Navy designation system, the F2A. By some historians the Buffalo is regarded as an outright failure, but this is a rating this stubby little fighter did not deserve. This book presents an overview of the development and operational use of the Buffalo with many photos including a number not published before.
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Warplane 05
Fokker C.X
Edwin Hoogschagen
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
Designed in 1933, the elegant looking Fokker C.X was outdated from the start. The type was intended as strategic reconnaissance plane but was not suited for this task. More modern, twin-engine types had claimed this specialized role. Instead, the biplane served well as short range scout and light bomber. The C.X is a little-known member of the Dutch Fokker stable. Just like the D.XXI this biplane served in the air forces of two little neutral countries on the eve of World War II. Both fought gallantly in a war of David versus Goliath proportions, and the complete operational history of the type spans a total of 25 years. In retrospect, the C.X was the last fighting biplane type built by Fokker and the company's last pre-war military type to survive.
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Warplane 06
Convair B-58 Hustler
Nico Braas
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
When the B-58 Hustler bomber entered service in 1958 it was a very futuristic looking delta wing bomber, creating a lot of sensation. Intended as a successor of the B-47 Stratojet it could reach twice the speed of sound. However, problems occurred during the development process and costs risings went so out of control that the whole project was almost cancelled a few times. Strategic Air Command was initially against ordering the B-58 for service, not only because of its complexity but also since they saw no advantage of a Mach 2 bomber over other types. Despite this the B-58 entered service at S.A.C. in 1960. It would have a relatively short operational career.
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Warplane 07
Weis WM.21 Sólyom
Edwin Hoogschagen
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
When Hungary got involved in World War II, the WM-21 Sólyom (Falcon) was the only Hungarian designed and manufactured plane in service with the Hungarian Royal Airforce. It was in widespread service as reconnaissance plane starting from 1938 onwards. In June of 1941, the machines failed to make an impression, mainly because of accidents and technical issues. The planes were diverted to the training role and were still used as such by May 1945. The Sólyom story starts in 1927, with the Fokker C.V, of which the Hungarian Royal Airforce had acquired 76, mostly built under license by Manfred Weiss (WM). WM improved the C.V, which resulted in the WM-16, with 18 built in two variants. This WM-16 paved the way for the WM-21, of which 128 examples were built.
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Warplane Plus 01
A17 - The Complete History of the Northrop Attack Planes and Its Export Derivatives
Santiago Rivas
Amsterdam University Press

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Warship 1
Cruiser HNLMS Tromp
Jantinus Mulder
Amsterdam University Press

front cover of Warship 10
Warship 10
Type 47B Destroyer Drenthe
Jantinus Mulder
Amsterdam University Press

front cover of Warship 14
Warship 14
Dutch Leander Frigate Van Speijk
Jantinus Mulder
Amsterdam University Press

front cover of Warship 3
Warship 3
Frigate HNLMS Jacob van Heemskerck
Rindert van Zinderen Bakker
Amsterdam University Press

front cover of Warship 4
Warship 4
Frigate USS Clark
Rindert van Zinderen Bakker
Amsterdam University Press

front cover of Warship 5
Warship 5
Protected Cruiser Gelderland
Jantinus Mulder
Amsterdam University Press

front cover of Warship 6
Warship 6
Destroyer HMCS Haida
Rindert van Zinderen Bakker
Amsterdam University Press

front cover of Watch and Learn
Watch and Learn
Rhetorical Devices in Classroom Films after 1940
Eef Masson
Amsterdam University Press, 2012
Instructional films of the twentieth century, used to teach, train, inform, or advertise to their viewers, can provide historians and scholars of cinema studies with a wealth of information about both their creators and intended consumers. Watch and Learn focuses on the rhetoric used in these films, particularly the way in which the films used in the classroom relate to their audience, casting them both as film viewers and students. Providing the outline for a new methodology for interpreting and understanding the scripts and visuals of this peculiar brand of cinema, this book approaches the study of instructional films from a novel and illuminating perspective.
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Water and Cognition in Early Modern English Literature
Nicholas Helms
Amsterdam University Press, 2024
Water and cognition seem unrelated things, the one a physical environment and the other an intellectual process. The essays in this book show how bringing these two modes together revitalizes our understanding of both. Water and especially oceanic spaces have been central to recent trends in the environmental humanities and premodern ecocriticism. Cognition, including ideas about the “extended mind” and distributed cognition, has also been important in early modern literary and cultural studies over the past few decades. This book aims to think “water” and “cognition” as distinct critical modes and also to combine them in what we term “watery thinking.” Water and Cognition brings together cognitive science and ecocriticism to ask how the environment influences how humans think, and how they think about thinking. The collection explores how water — as element, as environment, and as part of our bodies — affects the way early modern and contemporary discourses understand cognition.
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Water in Times of Climate Change
A Values-driven Dialogue
Jan Jorrit Hasselaar
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
This book on water and climate change goes beyond the usual and predictable analyses, by bringing religion and values into a discussion that is often dominated by technocratic solutions. The three case studies of Jakarta, Cape Town, and Amsterdam demonstrate the challenges of water management in urban areas and the role religion can play in addressing them. With representatives from science, politics, economics, and religion, as well as young voices, the book stimulates a values-driven dialogue on issues of water in times of climate change.
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The Webcam as an Emerging Cinematic Medium
Paula Albuquerque
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
All the world’s a stage - literally so, given the ubiquitous presence of webcams recording daily life in cities. This footage, allegedlydocumentary, recreates cities as cinematic environments as people interact with the multitudes of cameras and screens aroundthem. Paula Albuquerque’s original research and experimental films, presented in this groundbreaking book, expose fictionalising elements in archival webcams and explore video surveillance as an urban condition that influences both perceptions of the past and visions of the future.
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Weis WM.21 Sólyom
Edwin Hoogschagen
Amsterdam University Press

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Wellbeing Economics
How and Why Economics Needs to Change
Nicky Pouw
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
Amidst rising global inequality, migration, climate change, health pandemics, and deepening poverty, it is time to redirect our economy towards more sustainable and socially just processes and outcomes. In Wellbeing Economics Nicky Pouw puts forward a new framework that places human wellbeing at the centre, instead of economic growth. She postulates ten reasons why economics should change to remain a relevant discipline and develops a Wellbeing Economic Matrix (WEM) to implement this approach. In doing so, it is one of the first economics books that 'rethinks the economy' from head to tail.
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Well-Being in Amsterdam's Golden Age
Derek Phillips
Amsterdam University Press, 2008
As human beings, we have an innate disposition to care about our well-being. We all care about staying alive, as well as about avoiding disease, physical pain, bodily harm, disability and assaults on our dignity. Adequate nourishment, water, shelter, security, satisfying work, autonomy, relationships with others and self-esteem are essential to human life and functioning. This illuminating study compares well-being across civic status, economic standing and gender during Amsterdam’s Golden Age. Utilising a multidisciplinary perspective, the author identifies the mechanisms linking people’s positions in these three systems of inequality to the wellness of their being, showing how the socioeconomic and gender hierarchies affectedtheir well-being across the lifespan.
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The West in Early Cinema
After the Beginning
Nanna Verhoeff
Amsterdam University Press, 2006
The Western film is inextricably tied to American culture: untamed landscapes, fiercely independent characters, and an unwavering distinction between good and evil. Yet Westerns began in the early twentieth century as far more fluid works of comedy, adventure, and historical explorations of the frontier landscape. Nanna Verhoeff examines here the earliest films made in the Western genre and proposes the thought-provoking argument that these little-studied films demand new ways of considering Westerns and the history of cinema. 

Verhoeff analyzes the earliest American and European Westerns—made between 1894 and 1915—and finds them to be an international repository for anxieties about modernity and identity, not the instructional morality tales we assume them to be. She draws on an array of archival materials—photography, paintings, Wild West shows, popular ethnographic studies, and pulp literature—to locate these early Westerns more precisely in their original social and cultural contexts. These early films—which coincided with the “closing” of the West and rises in rates of immigration, railroad travel, and urbanization—drove the transformation of film, Verhoeff argues, from just another new technology into the dominant cultural vehicle for dealing with issues of national and personal nostalgia, as well as uncertainty in the face of modernity. From these fragmentary early films Verhoeff extracts a rich historical analysis that radically reorients our view of the first two decades of cinema history in America and provocatively connects the evolution of Westerns to our transition today into a new media culture. 

The West in Early Cinema challenges established history and criticism of the Western film and will be an invaluable resource for the film scholar and John Wayne fan alike.
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W.G. Sebald's Artistic Legacies
Memory, Word and Image
Leonida Kovac
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
When the mind turns more than one would wish towards questions of – as W.G. Sebald puts it – the “natural history of destruction”, comparative consideration by artists and interdisciplinary scholars is directed to the interstices between images, novel, essay, (auto)biography, memorial and travelogue. Artists have been among Sebald’s most prolific interpreters – as they are among the more fearless and holistic researchers on questions concerning what it means never to be able to fix an identity, to tell a migrant’s story, or to know where a historical trauma ends. Sebald has - as this book attests - also given artists and scholars a means to write with images, to embrace ambiguity, and to turn to today’s migrants with empathy and responsibility; as well as to let academic research, creation and institutional engagement blend into or substantially inform one another in order to account for and enable such necessary work in the most diverse contexts.
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What about Asia?
Revisiting Asian Studies
Edited by Josine Stremmelaar and Paul van der Velde
Amsterdam University Press, 2006

As Asia has become more prominent on the international scene in recent decades—economically, politically, and culturally—the scholarly discipline of Asian studies has grown commensurately. But major questions remain about the scope of the discipline and its goals. What about Asia? both surveys the current state of the debate on Asian studies and suggests several fruitful directions for future exploration, especially through the use of multiregional and interdisciplinary approaches.

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front cover of What does ‘Tropical Medicine’ stand for today?
What does ‘Tropical Medicine’ stand for today?
Martin Grobusch
Amsterdam University Press, 2011
‘The Tropics’ in geographical and astronomical terms simply refers to the area between the tropics of Capricorn and Cancer; Tropical Medicine as a discipline, however, whose origins date back at least to the age of exploration, remains ill-defined and encompasses a wealth of different medical specialties and scientific areas, forming altogether the highly dynamic field of Medicine in the Tropics. The Tropencentrum within Infectious Diseases, Tropical Medicine and AIDS at the Amsterdam Medical Center contributes together with numerous partners and collaborators worldwide to the broad field of Tropical Medicine and Travel Medicine through a wealth of clinical care, teaching and research activities in Amsterdam, the Netherlands and abroad.
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Why Are Artists Poor?
The Exceptional Economy of the Arts
Hans Abbing
Amsterdam University Press, 2002
Most artists earn very little. Nevertheless, there is no shortage of aspiring young artists. Do they give to the arts willingly or unknowingly? Governments and other institutions also give to the arts, to raise the low incomes. But their support is ineffective: subsidies only increase the artists' poverty.

The economy of the arts is exceptional. Although the arts operate successfully in the marketplace, their natural affinity is with gift-giving, rather than with commercial exchange. People believe that artists are selflessly dedicated to art, that price does not reflect quality, and that the arts are free. But is it true?

This unconventional multidisciplinary analysis explains the exceptional economy of the arts. Insightful illustrations from the practice of a visual artist support the analysis.
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Wicked Philosophy
Philosophy of Science and Vision Development for Complex Problems
Coyan Tromp
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
Wicked Philosophy. Philosophy of Science and Vision Development for Complex Problems provides an overview of the philosophy of the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities, and explores how insights from these three domains can be integrated to help find solutions for the complex, ‘wicked’ problems we are currently facing. The core of a new science-based vision is complexity thinking, offering a meta-position for navigating alternative paradigms and making informed choices of resources for projects involving complex problems. The book also brings design thinking into problem-solving and teaching, fostering construction of an integrative approach that bridges structure and action amplified by transdisciplinary engagement of stakeholders in society.
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Willem Ruys
Arne Zuidhoek
Amsterdam University Press

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Win Win Win
If You Want to Go Far, Go Together
Daniel Bernardus
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
Would you like to build greater trust in your relationships? Discuss this book together. Trusting relationships are key to economics and life: a student wants to win a prestigious business contest with this insight, but must first prevent her team from falling apart. Discover a mirror on our way of dealing with others that is not always comfortable, but inspiring and ultimately very rewarding. Buy this book for yourself or as a gift to help people relate together more effectively.
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The Wise Merchant
Corinna Barlaeus
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
On 9 January 1632, at the inauguration of the Amsterdam Illustrious School - the predecessor of the city's university - Caspar Barlaeus delivered a speech that has continued to arouse the curiosity of researchers and the general public alike: *Mercator sapiens*. This famous oration on the wise merchant is now considered a key text of the Dutch Golden Age. At the same time it is surrounded by misunderstandings regarding Barlaeus himself, the nascent Illustrious School and Amsterdam's merchant culture. This volume presents the first English translation and the first critical edition of the *Mercator sapiens*, preceded by an introduction providing historical context and a fresh interpretation of this intriguing text.
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The Woman and the Dragon in Premodern Art
Sharon Khalifa-Gueta
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
The motif of the woman and the dragon has been prevalent in Western art since antiquity, yet has hitherto remained understudied, and artworks featuring this motif in Western Mediterranean cultures have been examined primarily in relation to the topos of the male dragon-slayer. This book analyzes artistic images of women and dragons over an extensive period, from Classical Greece and Rome (with forays to Egypt and Mesopotamia) to the early modern period in Western Europe. The unique methodology employed in the study of this motif reveals its sacred core, as well as its relationship to rituals of fertility and oracular knowledge, to the liminal realm between life and death, and to the symbolism of Great Mother goddesses. At the same time, the images explored throughout expose stereotypes and biases against women in unusual positions of power, which were embedded in the motif and persisted in Western European art.
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Women and Geography on the Early Modern English Stage
Katja Pilhuj
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
In a late 1590s atlas proof from cartographer John Speed, Queen Elizabeth appears, crowned and brandishing a ruler as the map's scale-of-miles. Not just a map key, the queen™'s depiction here presents her as a powerful arbiter of measurement in her kingdom. For Speed, the queen was a formidable female presence, authoritative, ready to measure any place or person. The atlas, finished during James' reign, later omitted her picture. But this disappearance did not mean Elizabeth vanished entirely; her image and her connection to geography appear in multiple plays and maps. Elizabeth becomes, like the ruler she holds, an instrument applied and adapted. *Women and Geography on the Early Modern English Stage* explores the ways in which mapmakers, playwrights, and audiences in early modern England could, following their queen™'s example, use the ideas of geography, or 'world-writing', to reshape the symbolic import of the female body and territory to create new identities. The book demonstrates how early modern mapmakers and dramatists -- men and women -- conceived of and constructed identities within a discourse of fluid ideas about space and gender.
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Women and Muslim Family Laws in Arab States
A Comparative Overview of Textual Development and Advocacy
Lynn Welchman
Amsterdam University Press, 2007
Muslim family law—and its principles regarding marriage, divorce, personal maintenance, paternity, and child custody—is the one of the most widely applied family law systems in existence today.  A number of states have recently codified Muslim family law for the first time or have issued significant amendments or new laws, spurred in many cases by interventions from women’s rights groups and other advocacy organizations.  Women and Muslim Family Laws in Arab States combines an examination of women’s rights under Muslim family law in Arab states across the Middle East with discussions of the public debates surrounding the issues that have been raised during these processes of codification and amendment. 
 
Drawing on original legal texts and explanatory statements as well as extensive state-based secondary literature, Welchman places these discussions in a contemporary global context that internationalizes the domestic and regional particularities of Muslim family law.  Accompanied by a full bibliography and an appendix providing translated extracts of the laws under examination Women and Muslim Family Law considers laws from the Gulf States to North Africa in order to illustrate the legal, social, and political dynamics of the current debates.
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Women and Power at the French Court, 1483-1563
Edited by Susan Broomhall
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
Women and Power at the French Court, 1483—1563 explores the ways in which a range of women “ as consorts, regents, mistresses, factional power players, attendants at court, or as objects of courtly patronage “ wielded power in order to advance individual, familial, and factional agendas at the early sixteenth-century French court. Spring-boarding from the burgeoning scholarship of gender, the political, and power in early modern Europe, the collection provides a perspective from the French court, from the reigns of Charles VIII to Henri II, a time when the French court was a renowned center of culture and at which women played important roles. Crossdisciplinary in its perspectives, these essays by historians, art and literary scholars investigate the dynamic operations of gendered power in political acts, recognized status as queens and regents, ritualized behaviors such as gift-giving, educational coteries, and through social networking, literary and artistic patronage, female authorship, and epistolary strategies.
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Women and Temporality in Literature and Cinema
Negotiating with Timelessness
Ila Ahlawat
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
Women and Temporality in Literature and Cinema delves into the subject of literary and cinematic women characters entrapped in temporal spaces and their peculiar communication with visibility, enclosure, space and time in the setup of a sexual and temporal discord. It explores subjects such as youth, ageing, remembering, forgetting, and repeating within the larger realm of gendered temporalities that are essentially a nuanced and affective experience. In its entirety, this book has sought to locate and spell out both the damaging as well as the healing effects of temporality upon women's consciousness.
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Women, Art and Observant Franciscan Piety
Caterina Vigri and the Poor Clares in Early Modern Ferrara
Kathleen Giles Arthur
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
Caterina Vigri (later Saint Catherine of Bologna) was a mystic, writer, teacher and nun-artist. Her first home, Corpus Domini, Ferrara, was a house of semi-religious women that became a Poor Clare convent and model of Franciscan Observant piety. Vigri's intensely spiritual decoration of her breviary, as well as convent altarpieces that formed a visual program of adoration for the Body of Christ, exemplify the Franciscan Observant visual culture. After Vigri's departure, it was transformed by d'Este women patrons, including Isabella da Aragona, Isabella d'Este and Lucrezia Borgia. While still preserving Observant ideals, it became a more elite noblewomen's retreat.Grounded in archival research and extant paintings, drawings, prints and art objects from Corpus Domini, this volume explores the art, visual culture, and social history of an early modern Franciscan women's community.
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Women Artists and Patrons in the Netherlands, 1500-1700
Elizabeth Sutton
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
This essay collection features innovative scholarship on women artists and patrons in the Netherlands 1500-1700. Covering painting, printmaking, and patronage, authors highlight the contributions of women art makers in the Netherlands, showing that women were prominent as creators in their own time and deserve to be recognized as such today.
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Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts of Europe
c. 1450-1700
Tanja L. Jones
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
This volume presents the first collection of essays dedicated to women as producers of visual and material culture in the Early Modern European courts, offering fresh insights into the careers of, among others, Caterina van Hemessen, Sofonisba Anguissola, Luisa Roldán, and Diana Mantuana. Also considered are groups of female makers, such as ladies-in-waiting at the seventeenth-century Medici court. Chapters address works by women who occupied a range of social and economic positions within and around the courts and across media, including paintings, sculpture, prints, and textiles. Both individually and collectively, the texts deepen understanding of the individual artists and courts highlighted and, more broadly, consider the variety of experiences of female makers across traditional geographic and chronological distinctions. The book is also accompanied by the Global Makers: Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts digital humanities project (www.globalmakers.ua.edu), extending and expanding the work begun here.
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Women at the Early Modern Swedish Court
Power, Risk, and Opportunity
Fabian Persson
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
What was it possible for a woman to achieve at an early modern court? By analysing the experiences of a wide range of women at the court of Sweden, this book demonstrates the opportunities open to women who served at, and interacted with, the court; the complexities of women's agency in a court society; and, ultimately, the precariousness of power. In doing so, it provides an institutional context to women's lives at court, charting the full extent of the rewards that they might obtain, alongside the social and institutional constrictions that they faced. Its longue durée approach, moreover, clarifies how certain periods, such as that of the queens regnant, brought new possibilities. Based on an extensive array of Swedish and international primary sources, including correspondence, financial records and diplomatic reports, it also takes into account the materialities used to create hierarchies and ceremonies, such as physical structures and spaces within the court. Comprehensive in its scope, the book is divided into three parts, which focus respectively on outsiders at court, insiders, and members of the royal family.
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Women, Entertainment, and Precursors of the French Salon, 1532-1615
Julie Campbell
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
This study of ludic literary society in sixteenth-century France addresses Italianate practices of philosophical and literary sociability as they took root there. It asserts that entertainment activities of women-led circles illustrate the richly complex precursors of the seventeenth-century salons. Notions from the philosophy of play, such as those developed by Johan Huizinga, Eugen Fink, and Roger Caillois, who argue that play is critically intertwined with the development of society, provide a theoretical path across these periods of women’s engagement in literary culture. The barrister Estienne Pasquier, whose voluminous network of literary and legal connections permitted him entry into the society of such women, acts as an eyewitness to sixteenth-century circles. Ultimately, we see that the ludic activities in such society produced powerful influences that extended beyond the confines of the groups in question to shape ideas, attitudes, and activities—such as those of the salon cultural norms to come.
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Women Filmmakers and the Visual Politics of Transnational China in the #MeToo Era
Gina Marchetti
Amsterdam University Press, 2024
Manoeuvring around mainland China’s censors and pushing back against threats of lawsuits, online harassment, and physical violence, #MeToo activists shed a particularly harsh light on the treatment of women in the cinema and entertainment industries. Focusing on films from the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora, this book considers how female directors shape Chinese visual politics through the depiction of the look, the stare, the leer, the glare, the glimpse, the glance, the queer and the oppositional gaze in fiction and documentary filmmaking. In the years leading up to and following in the wake of #MeToo, these cosmopolitan women filmmakers offer innovative angles on body image, reproduction, romance, family relations, gender identity, generational differences, female sexuality, sexual violence, sex work, labor migration, career options, minority experiences, media access, feminist activism and political rights within the rapidly changing Chinese cultural orbit.
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Women Filmmakers in Sinophone World Cinema
Zhen Zhang
Amsterdam University Press, 2024
Women Filmmakers in Sinophone World Cinema portrays a group of important contemporary women filmmakers working across the Sinophone world including Taiwan, Hong Kong, mainland China, and beyond. The book delineates and conceptualizes their cinematic and trans-media practices within an evolving, multifaceted feminist intimate-public commons. The films by these experienced and emerging filmmakers, including Huang Yu-shan, Yau Ching, Ai Xiaoming, Wen Hui, Huang Ji and others, represent some of the most innovative and socially engaged work in both fictional and non-fictional modes in Chinese-language cinema as well as global women’s cinema. Their narrative, documentary, and experimental film practices from the 1980s to the present, along with their work in sister media such as dance, theater, literature, and contemporary art, their activities as scholars, educators, activists, and film festival organizers or jurors, have significantly reshaped the landscape of Sinophone film culture and expanded the borders of world cinema.
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Women, Food, and Diet in the Middle Ages
Balancing the Humours
Theresa Vaughan
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
What can anthropological and folkloristic approaches to food, gender, and medicine tell us about these topics in the Middle Ages beyond the textual evidence itself? Women, Food, and Diet in the Middle Ages: Balancing the Humours uses these approaches to look at the textual traditions of dietary recommendations for women’s health, placed within the context of the larger cultural concerns of gender roles and Church teachings about women. Women are expected to be nurturers, healers, and the primary locus of food provisioning for families, especially women of the lower social classes, typically overlooked in the written record. This work illuminates what we can know about women, food, medicine, and diet in the Middle Ages, and examines how the written medical tradition interacts with folk medicine and other cultural factors in both understanding women’s bodies and their roles as healers and food providers.
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Women from Traditional Islamic Educational Institutions in Indonesia
Negotiating Public Spaces
Eka Srimulyani
Amsterdam University Press, 2012
In this insightful book, Eka Srimulyani provides a new look at the role of women in Islamic educational institutions in Indonesia. Women at these traditional schools, called pesantren, play a significant role in the shaping of gender relations in the Indonesian Muslim community, and have not, until recently, garnered as much attention in the academic community as they undoubtedly deserve. This deeply informative study offers a new perspective on why Muslim feminism has found a powerful foothold in Indonesia, and it creates a vivid portrait of the lives of pesantren.
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Women in the Silent Cinema
Histories of Fame and Fate
Annette Förster
Amsterdam University Press, 2016
This magisterial book offers comprehensive accounts of the professional itineraries of three women in the silent film in the Netherlands, France and North America. Annette Förster presents a careful assessment of the long career of Dutch stage and film actress Adriënne Solser; an exploration of the stage and screen careers of French actress and filmmaker Musidora and Canadian-born actress and filmmaker Nell Shipman; an analysis of the interaction between the popular stage and the silent cinema from the perspective of women at work in both realms; fresh insights into Dutch stage and screen comedy, the French revue and the American Northwest drama of the 1910s; and much more, all grounded in a wealth of archival research.
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Women in the Work of Woody Allen
Martin Hall
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
Considering the current climate of the treatment of women in Hollywood following the Harvey Weinstein case, many male celebrities have been brought forward on charges of sexual harassment, including Woody Allen, who has once again appeared in the press in relation to historic charges of molestation. Within the context of the #MeToo era, this edited volume brings together researchers to consider how women are represented in the broader sphere of Hollywood cinema, to consider the notion of the male perspective on writing women, and to explore the various approaches to relationships with and between women on screen – all through the lens of the work of Woody Allen. While acknowledging the problematic consideration of the autobiographical nature of filmmaking, this book explores the role and representation of women throughout Allen’s films, plays, stand-up comedy, and other writings. With more recent industrial attention towards the production of his work (notably Amazon Studios refusing to distribute a completed film), the work of Woody Allen remains markedly problematic and demands interrogation, demonstrating the timeliness of this current volume.
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Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe
Lisa Hopkins
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe examines the lives of women whose gender impeded the exercise of their personal, political, and religious agency, with an emphasis on the conflict that occurred when they crossed the edges society placed on their gender. Many of the women featured in this collection have only been afforded cursory scholarly focus, or the focus has been isolated to a specific, (in)famous event. This collection redresses this imbalance by providing comprehensive discussions of the women’s lives, placing the matter that makes them known to history within the context of their entire life. Focusing on women from different backgrounds“such as Marie Meurdrac, the French chemist; Anna Trapnel, the Fifth Monarchist and prophetess; and Cecilia of Sweden, princess, margravine, countess, and regent“this collection brings together a wide range of scholars from a variety of disciplines to bring attention to these previously overlooked women.
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Women Religious and Epistolary Exchange in the Carmelite Reform
The Disciples of Teresa de Avila
Bárbara Mujica
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
The sixteenth century was a period of crisis in the Catholic Church. Monastic reorganization was a major issue, and women were at the forefront of charting new directions in convent policy. The story of the Carmelite Reform has been told before, but never from the perspective of the women on the front lines. Nearly all accounts of the movement focus on Teresa de Avila, (1515-1582), and end with her death in 1582. Women Religious and Epistolary Exchange in the Carmelite Reform: The Disciples of Teresa de Avila carries the story beyond Teresa’s death, showing how the next generation of Carmelite nuns struggled into the seventeenth century to continue her mission. It is unique in that it draws primarily from female-authored sources, in particular, the letters of three of Teresa’s most dynamic disciples: María de San José, Ana de Jesús and Ana de San Bartolomé.
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Woodcuts as Reading Guides
How Images Shaped Knowledge Transmission in Medical-Astrological Books in Dutch (1500-1550)
Andrea van Leerdam
Amsterdam University Press, 2024
In the first half of the sixteenth century, the Low Countries saw the rise of a lively market for practical and instructive books that targeted non-specialist readers. This study shows how woodcuts in vernacular books on medicine and astrology fulfilled important rhetorical functions in knowledge communication. These images guided readers’ perceptions of the organisation, visualisation, and reliability of knowledge. Andrea van Leerdam uncovers the assumptions and intentions of book producers to which images testify, and shows how actual readers engaged with these illustrated books. Drawing on insights from the field of information design studies, she scrutinises the books’ material characteristics, including their lay-outs and traces of use, to shed light on the habits and interests of early modern readers. She situates these works in a culture where medicine and astrology were closely interwoven in daily life and where both book producers and readers were exploring the potential of images.
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Work and Care under Pressure
Care Arrangements across Europe
Edited by Blanche Le Bihan, Claude Martin, and Trudie Knijn
Amsterdam University Press, 2013
In many European countries tensions have arisen between the demands of the labor market and the caregiving responsibilities workers must fulfill at home. Examining these tensions, Work and Care under Pressure focuses on two groups of people who must juggle work and caregiving: parents of young children who work nonstandard hours and working adults who care for older parents. Based on empirical evidence from six European countries, this volume sheds light on the social effects of national policies and the choices made by caregivers. It is an essential resource for researchers, scholars, and policy makers interested in social policy.
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The Work of Authorship
Edited by Mireille van Eechoud
Amsterdam University Press, 2014
Technological and economic concerns have long been the drivers of debate about copyright. But diverse disciplines in the humanities - including literary studies, aesthetics, film studies, and the philosophy of art - have a great deal to offer if we wish to establish a more nuanced and useful conception of copyright and authorship. This volume brings together scholars from a range of disciplines to explore the challenges inherent in translating aesthetics and creativity studies to concepts of copyright, especially as longstanding approaches are troubled by the rise of the digital.
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The Work of Terrence Malick
Time-Based Ecocinema
Gabriella Blasi
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
The Work of Terrence Malick: Time-Based Ecocinema develops a timely ecocinema approach to film analysis illuminated by Benjamin's notion of the turn of time. Current work on Malick's films emphasizes the spatial dynamics of his cinema, particularly as it pertains, from within a phenomenological framework, to the viewer's experience of films. This book redirects scholarly attention to the way Malick's directorial work shapes time and duration, laying new groundwork for the analysis of how films unsettle nature-culture binaries in modernity. The study performs this intervention through a rigorous engagement with Walter Benjamin's work on time, violence and technologies and the emergent figural approach to aesthetics in film studies. Each of these methods has important precedents in film studies and other fields. The combination of methods performed in this book contributes to understanding the relevance of a time-based approach to Malick's films and the practical implications of a time-based relation to history in contemporary ecocinema discourses.
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Working for Policy
Edited by Hal Colebatch, Robert Hoppe, and Mirko Noordegraaf
Amsterdam University Press, 2011

Though democratic government calls for well-designed and implemented policy, there is surprisingly little expert guidance available for policy makers and politicians. Working for Policy fills that gap, addressing the nature of policy work and offering necessary guidance. The contributors bring together academic and experiential knowledge in their analysis and evaluation of what modern policy makers do in given situations and of how such actions contribute to the policy process. This unique book demonstrates how scholars can help to ensure that policy makers can acquire the skills and knowledge required in governing complex modern societies. 

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The Works and Times of Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
Writing History in the Age of Collapse
Thor Rydin
Amsterdam University Press, 2024
The lifetime of Johan Huizinga (1872–1945) was marked by dramatic transformations in Europe. Cityscapes, aesthetic codes, social orders, political cultures, international travel and means of warfare developed beyond recognition; entire catalogues of hopes and fears were torn asunder and replaced by new ones during not one but two wars. Amidst all these changes, Huizinga grew to become one of the most famous historians of his time. To this day, his works are treated as monuments in the cultural historical field. This book examines how these transformations and ‘experiences of loss’ affected and informed Huizinga’s historical perspectives. Most centrally, this book contends that Huizinga’s historical works helped to accommodate and give meaning to his own experiences of uncertainty and rupture, thus offering him a way of life in turbulent times. This project offers an original and comprehensive analysis of an iconic historian writing in the age of collapse
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World Building
Transmedia, Fans, Industries
Edited by Marta Boni
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
Thanks to modern technology, we are now living in an age of multiplatform fictional worlds, as television, film, the Internet, graphic novels, toys and more facilitate the creation of diverse yet compact imaginary universes, which are often recognisable as brands and exhibit well-defined identities. This volume, situated at the cutting edge of media theory, explores this phenomenon from both theoretical and practical perspectives, uncovering how the construction of these worlds influences our own determination of values and meaning in contemporary society.
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World Heritage and Urban Politics in Melaka, Malaysia
A Cityscape below the Winds
Pierpaolo De Giosa
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
This book presents a tale of heritage politics in the Malaysian historical city par excellence. Already celebrated as the first Malay sultanate and an important colonial trading port, Melaka has been on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 2008, on the strength of its multi-ethnic and multi-religious urban fabric. Yet, contrary to the expectations of heritage experts and aficionados, the global mission of safeguarding cultural heritage has become a tumultuous issue on the ground in Melaka. World Heritage and Urban Politics in Malaysia analyses how the World Heritage 'label' is being used by different actors- such as international organizations, nation states, and society at large- to generate new economic revenues and to attract investment for large-scale real estate development projects. In doing so, it reveals the complex and often contradictory stories behind heritage designations in urban milieus.
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World of Difference
A Moral Perspective on Social Inequality
Gioia Marini
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
Public debates tend to see social inequality as resulting from individual decisions people make, for instance with respect to their education or lifestyle. Solutions are often sought in supporting individuals to make better choices. This neglects the importance of social groups and communities in determining individual outcomes. A moral perspective on social inequality questions the fairness of insisting on individual responsibilities, when members of some groups systematically receive fewer opportunities than others. The essays in this book have been prepared by experts from different disciplines, ranging from philosophy to engineering, and from economics to epidemiology. On the basis of recent scientific insights, World of Difference examines how group memberships impact on individual outcomes in four key domains: health, education and work, migration, and the environment. This offers a new moral perspective on social inequality, which policy makers tend to neglect.
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Would I Have Sexted Back in the 80s?
A Modern Guide to Parenting Digital Teens, Derived from Lessons of the Past
Allison Ochs
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
Since smartphones have made their debut, a clear sense of frustration can be felt by parents around the globe. Be it social media, bullying, porn, gaming, tv-series or sexting; parents are overwhelmed or insecure as they struggle to keep up with the yet newest app.Drawing on stories from her past, Allison Ochs reminds us of what it was like to be a teen. She makes you smile while making fun of her teen self. Her answers to today's problems are realistic ways to approach your teens who are dealing with the same emotions we had, however, now with their ever-present digital devices in hand. The simplicity of what she suggests will enlighten you as she gently nudges you to think about how you're dealing with the your teens online world.
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Writing History!
A Companion for Historians
Jeanette Kamp, Susan Legêne, Matthias van Rossum and Sebas Rümke
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
Historians not only have knowledge of history, but by writing about it and engaging with other historians from the past and present, they make history themselves. This companion offers young historians clear guidelines for the different phases of historical research; how do you get a good historical question? How do you engage with the literature? How do you work with sources from the past, fromarchives to imagery and objects, art, or landscapes? What is the influence of digitalisation of the historical craft? Broad in scope, Writing History! also addresses historians’ traditional support of policy makers and their activity in fields of public history, such as museums, the media, and the leisure sector, and offers support for developing the necessary skills for this wide range of professions.
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Writing History in Late Antique Iberia
Historiography in Theory and Practice from the 4th to the 7th Century
Purificación Ubric Rabaneda
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
This volume reflects on the motivations underpinning the writing of history in Late Antique Iberia, emphasising its theoretical and practical aspects and outlining the social, political and ideological implications of the constructions and narrations of the past. The volume includes general topics related to the writing of history, such as the historiographical debates on writing history, the praxis of history writing and the role of central and local powers in the construction of the past, the legitimacy of history, the exaltation of Christian history to the detriment of other religious beliefs, and the perception of time in hagiographical texts. Further points of interest in the volume are the specific studies on the historiographical culture. All these issues are analysed from an innovative perspective, which combines traditional subjects with new historiographical topics, such as the configuration of historical discourse through another type of documentation like councils, hagiography or legislation.
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Writing India Anew
Indian-English Fiction 2000-2010
Edited by Krishna Sen and Rituparna Roy
Amsterdam University Press, 2013
An assessment of twenty-first-century Indian-English fiction, Writing India Anew features fifteen essays by some of the most prominent scholars in the field and explores a range of themes, including the remapping of mythology and history, the reassessment of globalized India, and technical experimentation in the epic, science fiction, and the graphic novel. Ultimately, the contributors to this volume contend that the current body of work in Indian-English fiction is so varied and vibrant that it can no longer be dismissed as derivative or dispossessed, or even as mere postcolonial “writing back” or compensatory national allegory. 
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Writing Japan's War in New Guinea
The Diary of Tamura Yoshikazu
Victoria Eaves-Young
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
Tamura Yoshikazu is destined to die on the alien shores of the New Guinea warzone. Devoid of family contact, perplexed by the unfamiliarity of his environment, deprived of even meagre amenities and faced with the spectre of debilitating illness and starvation, this solitary soldier commenced a diary in the early part of 1943. Employed in the hard labour of building airstrips, he is ground down by tedium, disheartened by the now dysfunctional military hierarchy, consumed by grief at the meaningless deaths of comrades, and stripped of any chance of being involved in an aspect of war that he considers heroic and meaningful. Profoundly unsettled by all that appears to be at odds with the *kokutai* ideology, Tamura employs strategies through the vehicle of his diary to enable him to remain committed to the pathway of death on behalf of the Emperor.
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Writing the Liberal Arts and Sciences
Truth, Dialogue, and Historical Consciousness
Mary Bouquet
Amsterdam University Press


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