This year, UBC Arts scholars have published books covering a fascinating range of topics — from a 300-year linguistic cover-up in Austria and the deskilling of immigrant professionals in Canada, to a rescue dog who saves a struggling vet student, the cognitive science of internet memes, and a dystopian world where memory itself is currency.
Tùgûl̈ “Txì xtěn rǎ gǎmy” ‘The celebration of the Day of the Dead: “The day of the souls”’
By: Ana Laura Arrieta-Zamudio, PhD Candidate, Department of Linguistics
What is your book about?
This is the first graphic novel written entirely in San Pablo Güilá Zapotec (Spanish and English versions are also available). It follows Juana (Xwân), José (Sê), and their children Dulce (Nàx) and Pedro (Bêd) as they prepare to celebrate the Day of the Dead in San Pablo Güilá. It also focuses on modals (that is, expressions about notions like possibility and necessity, like English ‘must’, ‘might’) in San Pablo Güilá Zapotec. The Day of the Dead is a major holiday in Mexico, and communities celebrate it in different ways. This book provides insight into how it is celebrated in San Pablo Güilá (a Zapotecan community in Oaxaca, Mexico). It also allows other linguists interested in modals to see how they are expressed in this language.
Why did you write this book?
This book is the result of my PSI grant. It is a community-based collaboration. The co-authors of the story, who are also members of the community and native speakers of San Pablo Güilá Zapotec, are Dulce Rocío Santiago Morales, Ana Mey Maricela Morales Cruz, and Virginia Morales Cruz. The illustrations were made by the Zapotecan artist José Froylan López García and graphic designer Sergio Tamayo Castelar. This book will serve as a useful resource for language documentation and a tool for language revitalization, since printed copies were distributed to local teachers, and the three versions are available to the general public for free in digital form. This book combines community work with material design for linguists interested in modals, while also showcasing an important celebration.
Grounds for Exclusion: Race, Health, and Disability in Argentine Immigration Policy, 1876-1932
By: Dr. Benjamin Bryce, Associate Professor, Department of History
What is this book about?
I stumbled into this project, but the more I dug the more I realized it was an important story that needed to be told. Argentina’s immigration story has mostly focused on community histories of the six million Europeans who arrived between the 1870s and 1930. When I came across a diplomatic row in 1912 between Argentine and British officials about 600 Punjabi immigrants, something felt very off. If that incident could vanish so completely from national memory and the stories that historians and museums tell, I wanted to know what else had been left out. The answer turned out to be a great deal. Once I started looking for the machinery of exclusion, I found it everywhere — in health inspections, in the work of consuls in Europe and Asia, in small clauses in immigration law, in the quiet refusals at ports of departure that never generated the kind of paper trail that arrivals do.
Why did you write this book?
I also wrote it because Argentina’s “nation of immigrants” story isn’t unique. Canada and the United States have built self-images around the arrival of millions of people while saying much less about the mechanisms that decided who counted as desirable and who they excluded. As I argue in the book, the widespread inclusion of millions of people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – in Argentina and other settler societies – was predicated on the exclusion of others.
Sexual Heresies: Religion, Science, and Sexuality in Modern Britain
By: Dr. Joy Dixon, Associate Professor, Department of History
What is your book about?
Sexual Heresies explores the ways that, in Britain at the turn of the last century, the new sexual sciences—from an anthropology that located the roots of religion in ancient fertility cults to psychoanalytic theories that explained religious experience in terms of psychosexual development—characterized religion as closely connected to or as a displacement of the sexual. Those changing understandings of sexuality also transformed what was meant by “religion” and created a new concern with differentiating “normal” from “abnormal” forms of religiosity. The book then goes on to track the impact of and response to that move across multiple sites: in liberal modernist theology in both the Catholic and Anglican churches, in occult or esoteric religions and “sexual magic,” among Anglican evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics, and in secularist free-love and free-thought and “pagan” anti-clericalism. I argue that the increasing concern to police “sexual heresies” led to a narrowing of sexual possibilities inside “orthodox” religion and the association of alternative forms of religion with dissident sexualities that continues to shape both religion and secularism today.
Why did you write this book?
Histories of religion and sexuality are often written as though they had nothing to do with each other, or as though they are always somehow in opposition to each other (for example, in the idea that religion is inevitably sexually oppressive, and that sexual liberation is inherently secular). I wanted to tell a more complicated story that does justice to the diversity of responses to changing ideas about sexuality from a variety of perspectives and traditions. The book is, in the end, an effort to track the creative ways that people have found to make sense of the relationships between faith (or its absence) and desire in their own lives, and to clarify some of what is at stake in that process.
The Oxford Handbook of Global Realisms
By: Dr. Katherine Bowers, Associate Professor, Department of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies
What is this book about?
Realism is an artistic practice that aims to faithfully represent reality. Historically, it has been practiced across different media, from early pictorial art and epic oral narratives, through literature and visual arts, to film, music, and digital media. By foregrounding diverse theories, practices, and forms of realism, this volume revises the Eurocentric geography of the concept. It offers a broad chronology that overcomes the fixation in studies of realism on the nineteenth century as its starting point and offers, instead, a more flexible timeline of this artistic practice. The handbook presents realism as a transnational, transhistorical, and intermedial global phenomenon.
Why did you write this book?
We wanted to understand why our field’s conceptualization and historicization of realism seemed so different from that of other disciplines. As we began to research this, we were struck by the diversity of realisms across different literatures, cinemas, and art forms, and the lack of resources that attempted to speak to this diversity as a whole. The Oxford Handbook of Global Realisms, co-edited with Dr. Margarita Vaysman (University of Oxford), emerged from this line of inquiry and the conversations we had with colleagues across disciplinary lines.
Divided We Fall
By: Dr. Max Cameron, Professor, Department of Political Science and School of Public Policy and Global Affairs
What is your book about?
This book analyzes the forces driving disunity in Canada and offers Canadians a path forward in rebuilding civic responsibility and finding common ground.
Why did you write this book?
To contribute to the strength and unity of the Canadian civic community in response to the threats to our sovereignty from the United States under Donald Trump.
Mediatic Shakespeare: The Dynamics Of Orality, Script And Print In The Plays And Poems
By: Dr. Richard Cavell, Professor, Department of English Language and Literatures
What is your book about?
My book is about the media shift out of an oral culture into a print culture that was taking place during Shakespeare’s lifetime, and how that shift is dramatised in a number of his works.
Why did you write this book?
Marshall McLuhan once said to me that he derived his media theory from Shakespeare. This was my inspiration to write the book.
The Language of Memes: Patterns of Meaning Emergence Across Image and Text
By: Dr. Barbara Dancygier, Professor, Department of English Language and Literatures
What is this book about?
The book proposes a cognitive linguistic analysis of internet memes. We show how image-plus-text contemporary artifacts instantiate and develop patterns of meaning emergence we have been seeing in language. As we show, memes not only rely on pre-existing linguistic conventions, but also establish new conventions which are well-adjusted to the needs of online communication. Far from being simplistic coinages of image and text, they create new standards of internet discourse.
Why did you write this book?
For a while now, we have been puzzled by the fact that memes use deceptively simple forms to express a variety of interesting and relevant meanings. They are very good at expressing opinions online without lengthy explanations. We also found that memes stand out among other multimodal artifacts (advertisements, campaign materials, posters, etc.) in that they use linguistic forms in specific and well-structured ways. We intended to draw attention to online discourse and its rules by discussing the ways in which language adjusts to the dominance of visual forms of expression.
Austrian German: a 300-year love story [Österreichisches Deutsch: eine 300-jährige Liebesgeschichte]
By: Dr. Stefan Dollinger, Professor, Department of English Language and Literatures, Canadian Word Centre
What is your book about?
This book reflects on Standard Austrian German, the dominant standard variety in Austria, examining its 500-year history alongside 300 years of neglect, suppression, and misunderstanding within German philology, dialectology, and linguistics. It showcases, for readers aged 14 and up, the unexplored biases in linguistics—some of which remain entangled, to this day, with National-Socialist stances that were carried over into the present without ever being critically examined. It tells the story of the hegemonization, and at times weaponization, of “standard German” from Germany, and of the deliberate backgrounding of Standard Austrian and Standard Swiss German for sociopolitical reasons since the 1860s. Large-scale data shows that 94.3% of its speakers (n=70,000) see Standard Austrian German as the “more suitable” standard for Austria.
Why did you write this book?
It’s a question of linguistic justice. I noticed that what is done internationally in sociolinguistics is incompatible with the way German dialectologists and sociolinguists work on what they call “German in Austria.” The name — it used to be “Austrian German” — is itself their program. I had to speak up. I started in 2016 with a methodological paper, then followed up in 2019 with a book. The response was so negative and ad hominem that I decided to dig through the archives instead. What I found was a story worse than I could have imagined: linguists who had acted as Nazi desk perpetrators, then went on to be celebrated after 1945. What counts as “the German language” is an important question, and the answer looks very different in the 2020s — yet the field, by and large, still relies on a definition from the 1820s, straight out of the Grimms’ storybook.
The Goode Girls of Maple Lane
By: Dr. Jacqueline Firkins, Associate Professor, Department of Theatre & Film
What is your book about?
A struggling vet student and a rescue golden retriever save each other in this heartwarming story about second chances, found family, and the wholesome side of the internet.
Why did you write this book?
I wanted to work on something warm and joyful in a world that feels increasingly hard to deal with, but a world that’s a little easier with a beloved dog.
Syncopation
By: Whitney French, Assistant Professor, School of Creative Writing
What is your book about?
In the aftermath of a Memory War, society fragments into strange new cultures, castes, and coalitions. Set against a backdrop of retrofitted food garages, microchip-sorting factories, and hyperloop terminals, this dazzling novel in verse imagines a world where memory is the highest currency and love, like all revolutions, is dangerous, unruly, and singed with hope.
Why did you write this book?
The story came to me through an image and I simply couldn’t shake it. I also have yearned for a narrative speculative work that is poetic and merges technology, nature, and memory.
Nationalism and Royal Women in Early Modern England: The Queen’s Gambit
By: Dr. Elizabeth Hodgson, Department of English Language and Literatures
What is this book about?
This collection, co-edited with Sarah Crover, considers how queens in Renaissance England were complicit in, confronted, complicated, or were sidelined by England’s growing nationalist energies. Tudor, Stuart, French, Scottish, historical, present, and imaginary queens, consorts, princesses and regents all participated in the fractured politics of England-as-concept. In their works, their portrayals, their actions and their fictional correlatives, these ambiguous and ambivalent female power-brokers shaped England, even as they were shaped by it. With fourteen contributors from several countries, this volume asks the question of royal women in their uniquely fraught cultural moment.
Why did you participate in the creation of this book?
It is far too easy either to ignore the political power of royal women or to uncritically celebrate their gendered authority. We sought in this volume to ask the more interesting questions about queens, regents, and consorts and the ways they fashioned and were fashioned by Englishness itself. We wanted to develop a fuller understanding of the political networks, cultural narratives, and historical authority defining and enabling (or dismissing) these women, so that we can in turn develop more interesting and nuanced understandings of these oddly powerless but powerful figures.
The Long Rise of the British Novel, 1660-1800
By: Dr. Nicholas Hudson, Professor Emeritus, Department of English Language and Literatures
What is your book about?
The Long Rise of the British Novel, 1660-1800 presents a new thesis on the rise and development of the modern novel over the entirety of the eighteenth century. It challenges the widely received notion that the rise of capitalism fostered the individualism of realist fiction in the Victorian age characteristic of the novel. I argue instead that the novel evolved as a form typically opposed to capitalist greed and celebrating empathetic social interaction. My book also argues that women writers, particularly Frances Burney and Charlotte Smith, created the first realist fiction in the late eighteenth century. Though largely forgotten in the nineteenth century, these authors shaped the form of realist fiction from the Victorian age to the present day.
Why did you write this book?
I believed that reigning theories on the origins of the novel were mistaken in important respects.
Banqueros e imperio De cómo Wall Street colonizó el Caribe
By: Dr. Peter James Hudson, Associate Professor, Department of Geography
What is your book about?
Banqueros e imperio: De cómo Wall Street colonizó el Caribe is a Spanish translation of my monograph Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean. It is a history of the first-wave of US international financial expansion, told through the stories of its pioneering individuals and institutions.
Why did you write this book?
To understand the relationship between finance, banking, and racism as part of the US imperial history in the Caribbean.
James Bay Memoirs and Other Stories
By: Dr. Isabella Huberman, Assistant Professor, Department of French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies
What is your book about?
I had the pleasure of collaborating with Chisasibi Eeyou poet Margaret Sam-Cromarty to put together this volume of her life works. Born in 1936 on Fort George Island, Margaret began writing in her 50s, after her family was relocated to Chisasibi for the La Grande hydroelectric project. This event informs much of her poetry, which explores family, community life, and her experiences of the land both before and after the move. Thirty years after publishing her first book in 1992, Margaret revisited her poetry and stories to bring them into the hands of a new generation of readers. This book is a testament to her role in keeping Eeyou knowledge alive and is essential reading to understand a Cree woman’s life story and her perspective on political power in James Bay in the late 20th century.
Why did you write this book?
Margaret Sam-Cromarty is the “Poet Laureate of Eeyou Istchee” but is little-known outside of James Bay. Though out of print for years, her books remained in high demand within her community. As an Anglophone First Nations author in Quebec, writing at a time when the province’s literary scene gave little attention to Indigenous voices, her work fell into an in-between and has, until now, been absent from scholarly work on this corpus. We worked with the “First Voices First Texts” series at UMP, which is committed to reconnecting contemporary readers with unjustly neglected classics of Indigenous literature. Without any doubt, Margaret’s poetry and stories make a significant contribution to the field of Indigenous literatures in Quebec and Canada.
Our Fire Survives The Storm: A Cherokee Literary History, Citizenship And Sovereignty Edition
By: Dr. Daniel Justice, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Textual Sovereignties, Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies and the Department of English Language and Literatures
What is your book about?
The twentieth-anniversary update and expanded edition of Our Fire Survives The Storm examines the historical and contemporary relationship between Cherokee nationhood and literary expression, foregrounding the work of writer-citizens of the three federally recognized Cherokee tribal nations.
Why did you write this book?
The first edition of the book included the work of writers whose claims to Cherokee heritage and belonging were unsubstantiated and have since been discredited, and I believe that the first edition did significant harm by conflating personal family folktales about supposed Cherokee heritage with tribally confirmed belonging rooted in Cherokee sovereignty, history, and genuine relations. It was therefore important to me that I undertake a new, reparative edition that focuses specifically on those writers whose connections to Cherokee communities are clear and verified.
Employment and Deskilling: Experiences of Skilled, Racialized Immigrants in the Canadian Labour Market
By: Dr. Karun Karki, Associate Professor, School of Social Work
What is your book about?
This book explores how skilled, racialized immigrants in Canada are often unable to fully use their education and professional experience due to systemic barriers such as racism, sexism, and restrictive credential recognition processes. Focusing on racialized immigrants and immigrant women, it examines the impacts of deskilling on careers, identity, and belonging, while offering policy recommendations to advance equity, inclusion, and fair access to professional opportunities.
Why did you write this book?
I wrote this book to shed light on the often-overlooked challenges skilled, racialized immigrants face in Canada when their qualifications and experience are not fully recognized. Through my research, I saw how systemic barriers disproportionately affect racialized immigrants and immigrant women, limiting their opportunities and sense of belonging. I wanted to contribute to a better understanding of these issues, amplify the experiences behind the statistics, and offer practical recommendations to help build a more equitable and inclusive society.
Brutal Fantasies: Imagining North Korea in the Long Cold War
By: Dr. Christine Kim, Professor, Department of English Language and Literatures
What is your book about?
My book examines how Western cultural representations of North Korea depend on fantasies of the inhuman. I draw on films, fiction, and defectors’ life writings from the last two decades to analyze how these representations construct North Korea as a site of brutality and inhumanity. I recast these stories through Asian American and Global Asian frameworks that move beyond common Cold War binaries to critique how US imperialism persists in global understandings of North Korea.
Why did you write this book?
I wrote this book in order to explore the frames through which we approach North Korea and to try to understand what lies beyond them. For example, I examine how human rights discourses simultaneously instrumentalize and dehumanize North Korea while demonstrating that North Korea is a site of contradiction that complicates Western interpretive constraints. I also explore the Korean diaspora’s complex relationship with North Korea in order to highlight the vulnerability and marginalization of diasporic subjects. In doing this work, my intention is to push back on the prevailing cultural myths that enshroud North Korea and offer alternative ways of understanding its role in global and regional imaginaries.
Oscar Wilde’s Paris: Legends and Legacies
By: Dr. Gregory Mackie, Associate Professor, Department of English Language and Literatures
What is your book about?
Oscar Wilde’s Paris is a collection of ten scholarly essays co-edited with Colette Colligan (Université d’Angers, France). The collection uncovers a new cultural history of the Irish writer—one that is situated in the French capital, but moves across national borders, and one that considers his Parisian self-invention, association, and reception within a wider cultural ecology of urban life, oral and visual culture, and textual culture and performance. In telling the story of Wilde in Paris, this book uncovers the ways in which Wilde became an intergenerational touchstone for transnational Parisian culture.
Why did you write this book?
The scholarly conversations that make up the paired chapters in this volume had originally been intended as a conference to be convened in Paris in April, 2020, but the pandemic forced my co-editor and me to change our plans! The association of Wilde with Paris is a well-known and longstanding one, and this is the first book to address it.
100 Cult Films: The Sequel
By: Dr. Ernest Mathijs, Professor, Department of Theatre and Film
What is your book about?
100 Cult Films: The Sequel is a necessary follow-up to our original 100 Cult Films volume, published in 2011. Besides being an academic work, it is also a richly illustrated guide. We cover the work of filmmakers such as Stanley Kubrick, Paul Verhoeven, Ana Lily Amirpour, Werner Herzog, Sook-Yin Lee and Dario Argento, with movies hailing from Iran to Brazil, South Korea to Sweden, Japan to the USA, and from the high North to the Australian outback. 100 Cult Films: The Sequel presents an alchemy of genres, from science-fiction, romance, horror, musical, vampire, comedy to action movies, and documentary. Through the debates and controversies that surround these films, our book raises issues about identity, home, belonging, exoticism, censorship, and, of course, what it means to be truly ‘weird’.
Why did you write this book?
We wanted this new book to rise above being a collection of 100 cult films, so we considered how the concept of cult cinema has changed over the years. While the first 100 Cult Films celebrated largely uncontested cult classics, new films have since become cult favourites and older works have been rediscovered and re-evaluated. The broader cultural landscape has also changed significantly, shaped by social movements, evolving critical conversations, and new forms of film distribution and audience engagement. Organized through four lenses, the book revisits established classics and controversial works; highlights films and filmmaking from often-overlooked regions and cultures; explores “weird” films and unconventional performances; and foregrounds underrepresented voices, including diaspora cinema, political films, and works addressing addiction, dispossession, and cross-border communities.
Prison Song: Music and Incarceration in the United States
By: Dr. David Metzer, Professor, School of Music
What is your book about?
In Prison Song: Music and Incarceration in the United States, I explore how musicians across genres—hip hop, country, blues, folk, rock, jazz, and classical—have confronted the prison system. They have defied the dehumanization and silence of incarceration by telling the life stories of imprisoned individuals, creating empathetic bonds between listeners and those individuals, and attacking the racial and social inequalities embedded in incarceration. I discuss the defiant songs of incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, and nonincarcerated musicians from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. My book is the first to take a broad view of prison songs, revealing how they and their critiques of incarceration have changed and grown across the 20th and 21st centuries.
Why did you write this book?
Over years of listening to Johnny Cash’s At Folsom Prison, Joan Baez’s “Prison Trilogy,” and J. Cole’s “4 Your Eyez Only,” I didn’t realize that I was listening to a particular history, that of songs about incarceration. Nor did I anticipate that I would one day chronicle that history. One reason to write Prison Song: Music and Incarceration in the United States was to be the first to explore such a rich and important historical subject. Scholars rarely get these opportunities. I was also excited to further my studies of how musicians have challenged social and racial inequalities, just as the musicians that I discuss have been doing for more than a hundred years with their prison songs.
Canadian Literatures in English, Second Edition
By: Dr. Laura Moss, Professor, Department of English Language and Literatures
What is this book about?
Canadian Literatures in English is a scholarly anthology that traces the literary history of Canada over the past 400+ years. It reflects a commitment to historical contextualization, cultural inclusion, and a nuanced understanding of critical debates over the long literary and cultural history of what is now Canada. The second edition has been updated throughout to include recent scholarship and fresh literary works. It provides a diverse range of genres, including short fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction, but also legal, government, and policy documents, contemporary art, journalism, and experimental work that crosses genres. The first volume (published in summer 2025) covers the early writing to 1920 and the second volume (published in summer 2026) covers 1920-2025.
Why did you write this book?
Cynthia Sugars and I published the first edition of this anthology in 2009 to reflect the kind of texts and contexts we taught as postcolonial Canadian scholars. We wrote extensive introductions to each section to situate culture in historical context. A lot has changed in Canadian literary studies over the past 17 years so we knew it was time to overhaul the first edition and update everything. Tracking the debates and advances in the field and with the inclusion of work by 36 new authors, the new edition is a wonderful overview of the cultural history of Canada over the centuries. It is also a collection of some of the fantastic literature being produced here and now. Our goal was to create a book for any reader interested in knowing the complex and fraught literary history of Canada.
Black Boys
By: Jonathan Seinen, Assistant Professor, Department of Theatre & Film
What is this script about?
Black Boys is the published script of a play devised collaboratively by Saga Collectif (Virgilia Griffith, Stephen Jackman-Torkoff, Tawiah M’Carthy, Thomas Antony Olajide, and Jonathan Seinen) which uncovers the complex dynamics of the queer Black experience. Text, movement, and design portray the rhythm and vulnerability of three very different Black individuals who seek a deeper understanding of themselves, each other, and of how they encounter the world. As they explore their unique identities, their performances rigorously interrogate and playfully subvert the ways in which gender, sexuality, and race are read and performed.
Why did you publish this script?
Black Boys premiered at Buddies In Bad Times Theatre in Toronto in 2016 and then toured Canada in 2018. Theatrical and intimate, Black Boys weaves together the ensemble’s own personal stories in search of an integrated self and a radical imagination while shining a light on new possibilities for young Black queer people.
Infrastructures of Democracy: Politics and Processes of Road Building in Rural Nepal
By: Dr. Sara Shneiderman, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology and School of Public Policy and Global Affairs
What is this book about?
Infrastructures of Democracy is a vivid and original set of studies showing how Nepal’s rural roads are more than infrastructure—they are contested terrains of politics, power, and everyday life. Sensitive to local voices and vernaculars, the authors rethink development and open new pathways towards imagining the possibilities of a just society.
Why did you participate in the creation of this book?
This book emerges from a decade-long collaborative research project, funded by a SSHRC Insight Grant. It brings together Canada and Nepal-based researchers to consider the relationship between infrastructural development and political transformation in Nepal and beyond.
Art and Feminisms: Histories, Methods, and Legacies
By: Dr. Erin Silver, Associate Professor, Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory
What is your book about?
Through an international cohort of contributors, this book examines the rich and diverse strands of artistic and cultural production from the nineteenth century to the present day that contribute to elastic and ever-expanding histories of feminist art. Foregrounding political and social movements and developments in related fields such as critical race studies, Indigenous studies, trans studies, disability studies, and critical ethnic studies in recent decades, this volume looks beyond the canonical lineage of feminist art history toward an expansive view of feminist art’s pasts, pitfalls, and potentials.
Literate Workers and the Production of Early Christian Literature
By: Dr. Isaac Soon, Assistant Professor of Early Christianity, Department of Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies
What is your book about?
My book gives a broad overview of the embodied nature of enslaved early Christian secretaries and stenographers in late antiquity. In this short volume, I recover biographical snapshots from the lives of enslaved literate workers, who they were, what they looked like, their dreams, aspirations, and uses in early Christianity.
Why did you write this book?
Recently, there has been a lot of important work on enslaved literate workers and their role in constructing early Christian literature like the New Testament (see for example the work of Candida Moss and Chance Bonar). I wanted to push this scholarship further by experimenting with how much we can know about the contributions of such workers to ancient translations, theological documents, and early Christian culture. These enslaved workers were not just the instruments by which enslaving Christians produced Christian texts. They should be considered authors and intellectuals in their own right, their voices relatively accessible from our sources. At the same time, I wanted to highlight the ways in which literate work was also disabling, taking a physical toll on these ancient persons.
Introduction to the Nepali Language
By: Dr. Mark Turin, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology and Critical Indigenous Studies
What is this book about?
Introduction to the Nepali Language is a free, open-access textbook for learners, educators, community organizations, and heritage speakers interested in studying Nepali. Developed at the University of British Columbia with support from the OER Affordability Grant Program, the resource offers a structured introduction to Devanāgarī script, pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, and everyday communication. Organized into 17 chapters, it supports the development of speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills through exercises, audio-supported learning, interactive activities, and cultural insights.
Why did you write this book?
Because there is no open access free textbook for Nepali! This resource reflects the combined expertise and experiences of its three co-authors. It draws on Binod Shrestha’s decades-long experience in Nepali language education and applied language work in North America; on UBC Associate Professor Dr. Mark Turin’s three decades of scholarship in language documentation and revitalization in Nepal and the Himalayan region; and on the cultural knowledge and community-informed perspectives of Salina Dolmo Lama, a Nepali graduate student at UBC. The textbook has been designed as an accessible and adaptable resource for educators, community organizations, independent learners, and language programs wherever they may be. It is free to access through Pressbooks.
Racial Virtuality: Information Capitalism and the Suggestive Materiality of Asianness
By: Dr. Danielle Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of English Language and Literatures
What is your book about?
Racial Virtuality examines everyday experiences and experiments with virtuality in the information age that can feel pleasurable, humorous, therapeutic, or even tedious. Specifically, the book theorizes Asianness as nonrepresentational processes of new media—interfaces, gestures, calibrations, calculations—and as forms and aesthetic practices that illuminate how Asianness is a specific mode of informational capital, and also a mode of relation and critique. The book broadens our understanding of racialization in the digital age and challenges traditional notions of cultural production and subject formation. In doing so, it demonstrates how Asianness circulates as a new media form in a digital marketplace of commodified affects, senses, gestures, and tastes.
Why did you write this book?
This book extends theories of race to consider Asian racialization as not only occurring through media representation and other forms of figuration, but also through our interactions with media technologies and their unseen operations. The racialization of Asians, who appeared to embody the model minority success story in the first decade of social media, is now implicated more in the racial logics of algorithms, interfaces, gestures, circulations, and affects, rather than individual representations of racialized subjects. The book reveals the ways in which “Asianness” moves beyond a politics of recuperation and recognition to yield modes of fugitivity, illicit knowledge, and critique, all of which threaten existing relationships between capital, labor and information.
Italian Dumplings and Chinese Pizzas: Transcultural Food Mobilities
By: Dr. Gaoheng Zhang, Associate Professor, Department of French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies
What is your book about?
This book designs a novel analytical framework to approach transcultural food mobilities, a culinary phenomenon that has been with us for decades as a result of colonialism and globalization.
Fashion Communications between Italy and China: Unfolding a Sartorial Relationship
By: Dr. Gaoheng Zhang, Associate Professor, Department of French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies
What is your book about?
In this in-depth study, I analyzed the relationship between the Italian ready-to-wear fashion industry and the Chinese fast fashion industry, focussing on the 2000s and 2010s.
