Dr Claire Shaw of the Warwick University History Department has been named in Australian Book Review's Books of the Year 2017, recommended by Mark Edele:

"Claire L. Shaw’s Deaf in the USSR: Marginality, community, and Soviet identity, 1917–1991 (Cornell) is a landmark in the history of disability and the Soviet welfare state. A stunning first book, it covers the entire Soviet experience from a thought-provoking perspective."

The full range of monographs and edited collections written or edited by the Warwick University History Department's academic staff is available online.

A labour of love by a Kenilworth historian has won the praise of a former prime minister. Emeritus Reader, Dr Fred Reid, former head of the History Department at Warwick University, has just seen the publication of his book Thomas Hardy and History, which he has been working on for two decades, and ex-prime minister Gordon Brown was quick to send his congratulations to Dr Reid on his achievement.

Read the full story on the Coventry Observer website.

James Poskett reviews Illuminating India at the Science Museum

Read about the Science Museum’s new exhibition, Illuminating India, reviewed by Dr James Poskett (Assistant Professor in the History of Science and Technology).

‘Five millennia of Indian science’, Nature, 18 October 2017

Dr James Poskett celebrates the long history of science in India, from ancient astronomical almanacs to the discovery of the Boson.

The history of luxury – from Roman villas to Russian oligarchs – is explored in a new book written by Peter McNeil and Giorgio Riello. A story of extravagance, excess and indulgence, Luxury: A Rich History considers how opulence has developed from antiquity to the 21st century.

In an article for History Extra, Riello focuses on the history of American wealth, revealing how American fortunes bankrolled the 19th-century British aristocracy. Read the full article on the History Extra website.

Professor J E Smyth's article, A Woman at the Center of Hollywood’s Wars: Screenwriter Mary C. McCall Jr., has been published in the latest issue of the Cineaste Magazine.
 

Dr Howard Chiang of the Warwick University History Department has had his paper, 'Mercurial Matter: Medical Science and the Transformations of Sex in Republican China', shortlisted for the 2016 Young Scholar Award of the European Association for Chinese Studies.
 

This week saw the launch of the Palgrave Macmillan book series, Europe's Asian Centuries. This series investigates the key connector that transformed the early modern world: the long-distance trade between Asia and Europe in material goods and culture. This trade stimulated Europe’s consumer and industrial revolutions, re-orientating the Asian trading world to European priorities. Europe’s pursuit of quality goods turned a pre-modern encounter with precious and exotic ornaments into a modern globally-organized trade in Asian export ware. Europe’s Asian Centuries engages with new historical approaches arising from global history; it develops subject areas grounded in skills and processes of production as well as material culture, and it demonstrates the new depth of research into diverse markets, quality differences and the development of taste. The books are groundbreaking in bringing the study of traded products, material cultures and consumption into economic and global history, and in making economic history relevant to wider cultural history. It has the vision of a history over a long chronology of two and a half centuries and wide European and Asian comparisons and connections.

Luxury: A Rich History is the latest book by Professor of Global History and Culture at the University of Warwick Giorgio Riello. Luxury is a rapidly changing global industry that makes the headlines daily in our newspapers and on the internet.

We live in a world obsessed by luxury. Long-distance airlines compete to offer first-class sleeping experiences and hotels recommend exclusive suites where you are never disturbed.

More than ever, luxury is a pervasive presence in the cultural and economic life of the West – and increasingly too in the emerging super-economies of Asia and Latin America.

Yet luxury is hardly a new phenomenon. Today’s obsession with luxury brands and services is just one of the many manifestations that luxury has assumed. In the middle ages and the Renaissance, for example, luxury was linked to notions of magnificence and courtly splendour. In the eighteenth century luxury was at the centre of philosophical debates over its role in shaping people’s desires and oiling the wheels of commerce. And it continues to morph today, with the growth of the global super-rich and increasing wealth polarization.

From palaces to penthouses, from couture fashion to lavish jewellery, from handbags to red wine, from fast cars to easy money, in Luxury: A Rich History Giorgio Riello and co-author presents the first ever global history of luxury, from the Romans to the twenty-first century: a sparkling and ever-changing story of extravagance, excess, novelty, and indulgence.