Year: 2019

Academic Studies Press announces Contemporary Western Rusistika, new book series publishing Russian translations

Academic Studies Press announces Contemporary Western Rusistika, new book series publishing Russian translations

November 4, 2019

Academic Studies Press is pleased to announce the launch of a new book series called Contemporary Western Rusistika («Современная западная русистика»). The series is published in the Russian language and features scholarly monographs and edited collections by prominent Western specialists in various fields of Russian studies, including culture, literature, history, intellectual history, cinema, and more. The series includes both first-ever Russian-language studies and English-language volumes translated into authorized Russian editions. All volumes are presented in Russian for the first time.

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining: An embodied film experience

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining: An embodied film experience

October 31, 2019

This is a guest post by Maarten Coëgnarts, author of Film as Embodied Art: Bodily Meaning in the Cinema of Stanley Kubrick, now available for purchase and Open Access.

When Halloween season comes around, we love to revisit the suspenseful horror classics that we know and love, and for a lot of people that is Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Like many of his other films, The Shining received mixed reviews upon its initial release. Today, four decades later, the film is considered to be one of Kubrick’s finest and one of the greatest horror films ever made.

ASP Open helps democratize research and increase visibility

ASP Open helps democratize research and increase visibility

October 23, 2019

This is a guest post from Matthew Charlton, Sales, Marketing, & Open Access Manager at Academic Studies Press.

Though a relatively small, independent publisher working primarily in the humanities and social sciences, Academic Studies Press touts an impressive open access (OA) program. Since launching in 2016, we have envisioned our dedicated OA initiative, ASP Open, as a way to democratize research and increase the overall visibility of our content.

The Psychology, Geography, and Architecture of Horror: How Places Creep Us Out

The Psychology, Geography, and Architecture of Horror: How Places Creep Us Out

October 7, 2019

This is an Open Access article by Francis T. McAndrew (Knox College), from the forthcoming issue of Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, Vol. 4.1. ESIC 4.1 will be available in 2020.

Why do some types of settings and some combinations of sensory information induce a sense of dread in humans? This article brings empirical evidence from psychological research to bear on the experience of horror, and explains why the tried-and-true horror devices intuitively employed by writers and filmmakers work so well. Natural selection has favored individuals who gravitated toward environments containing the “right” physical and psychological features and avoided those which posed a threat. Places that contain a bad mix of these features induce unpleasant feelings of dread and fear, and therefore have become important ingredients of the settings for horror fiction and films.

Fall Reading List: New Fiction and Memoir

Fall Reading List: New Fiction and Memoir

September 30, 2019

Fall is officially in full swing. The weather is getting cooler and it’s about time to stay inside with a good book! This fall, we’re very pleased to supplement our scholarly publishing program with a strong list of exciting general interest books. Check out our Fall Reading List below, featuring several new and forthcoming books: a rare translation of Uzbek literature into English, a collection of contemporary Russian short stories, a translation of an award-winning memoir, and more.

An Interview with Luba Jurgenson and Meredith Sopher, Author and Translator of Where There Is Danger

An Interview with Luba Jurgenson and Meredith Sopher, Author and Translator of Where There Is Danger

September 20, 2019

In Where There Is Danger (originally published Au lieu du péril, Verdier, 2014), Jurgenson meditates on what it means to live between two languages—in this case, her native Russian and adopted French. Earlier this month, we released a Fall 2019 Literature in Translation Sampler featuring an excerpt from Where There Is Danger (download it here). Today we bring you an interview with Luba Jurgenson and Meredith Sopher exploring the ins and outs of bilingualism, the process of translating the book, and more!

The changing character of antisemitism

The changing character of antisemitism

September 12, 2019

This is a guest post from Lesley Klaff, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism (JCA). This post was published as an editorial introduction to JCA Vol. 2.1, available now.

The changing character of antisemitism and the changing motivations behind it have made it notoriously difficult to define and categorize, although today we have the benefit of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism, which recognizes the continuities between the “old antisemitism” and “contemporary antisemitism” in the form of certain, although not all, criticism of Israel.

National Translation Month 2019: Featured Literature in Translation from Azerbaijan, France, Russia, and Uzbekistan

National Translation Month 2019: Featured Literature in Translation from Azerbaijan, France, Russia, and Uzbekistan

September 6, 2019

Happy National Translation Month! We’re celebrating all month on the blog—earlier this week, we published a guest post from translator Christopher Fort on the legacy of Uzbek writer Abdulhamid Sulaymon o’g’li Cho’lpon and his unfinished dilogy Night and Day.

Today, we’ve put together a sampler full of excerpts from four novels, a memoir, a book of essays, and a collection of short stories, translated from Russian, French, and Uzbek.

Uzbek author Cho’lpon’s Equivocal Legacy and Its Importance in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan

Uzbek author Cho’lpon’s Equivocal Legacy and Its Importance in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan

August 29, 2019

Stalinism undoubtedly robbed the Uzbek people and the world of an incredible talent at a young age—Cho’lpon was most likely 41 when Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD, took his life—but it is because of Stalinism and Cho’lpon’s erasure from Soviet Uzbek life that the author is so interesting and enigmatic a figure today. The absence of information about his life and his oeuvre echoes across history and continues to affect how Uzbek audiences relate to the author. This absence provides opportunities for individuals to offer differentiated and heterogenous interpretations of the author’s biography, his art, and consequently, Uzbekistan’s past, present, and future.