Dr Roberta Bivins of the Warwick History Department has her new publication, Contagious Communities, reviewed in New Scientist.

Dr Anna Hájková of the Warwick University History Department has published an article in the Czech daily iDnes about historical continuities of Czech xenophobia toward refugees, called “Main thing they don’t stay here.”

 
Students and academics from the University of Warwick, working with the Vice-Chancellor’s wife Lynda Thrift, have put together a cookery book as a part of the University’s 50^th anniversary celebrations, Simple Scoff: The Anniversary Edition. The book offers cheap, simple recipes and cooking tips from around the University. It also features illustrations and poems by former students and staff such as BBC media correspondent Torin Douglas.

The cookery book will be given out free to new students joining the University this year as a part of their welcome packs. It is hoped the books will help students to eat healthily whilst living away from home, in some cases for the first time.

The book, put together by Professor Rebecca Earle of the University’s History Department, updates Simple Scoff, an innovative cookbook first published in 1972 by the University of Warwick Student Union and Lady Doris Butterworth, the wife of the University’s first Vice-Chancellor. Simple Scoff consisted of recipes and cooking advice contributed by students and other members of the University community, aimed explicitly at students.

Please see the full press release for more details.

 
Malik Hammad Ahmad, PhD student in the History Department at the University of Warwick, has contributed the chapter 'Quest for Peace and Justice in Pakistan: Lawyers' Nonviolent Resistance' to the edited book Peace and Conflict: The South Asian Experience, Priyankar Upadhyaya and Samrat Schmiem Kumar (editors), (New Delhi, Cambridge University Press 2014), pp.160-176.

 
We are delighted to announce the publication of Healing with Water: English Spas and the Water Cure 1840-1960 (Manchester University Press 2015) by Dr Jane Adams. This is a major research output from the project ‘Healing Cultures, Medicine and the Therapeutic Uses of Water in the English Midlands, 1840-1948’, led by Professor Hilary Marland at the Centre for the History of Medicine and funded by the Wellcome Trust.

The study provides a medical and social history of English spas and hydropathic centres from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. It argues that demand for healing rather than leisure drove the growth of a number of inland resorts which became renowned for expertise and treatment facilities, aspects that were actively marketed to patients and doctors. The book explores ideas about water’s healing potential and the varied ways it was used to maintain good health and treat a variety of illnesses. Water cures were endorsed by both orthodox and unorthodox practitioners and attracted growing numbers of patients into the twentieth century. The book assesses the influence of spas and hydropathic centres on broader patterns of resort development, leisure and sociability in Britain and considers why support for spa treatment from the National Health Service declined from the 1960s.
 

 
In the cover story for the March 2015 edition of History Today, Warwick University History Department PhD student Serena Dyer finds surprising parallels between shopping in the Georgian period and modern consumerism.

For more details, please see http://www.historytoday.com/magazine.

On the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dr Anna Hájková's essay 'How should we remember Auschwitz?' has been published in openDemocracy.

Dr Howard Chiang of the Warwick University History Department has now taken up the co-editorship of the book series Studies for the International Society for Cultural History, published by Pickering & Chatto. Series publications include the following:

Forthcoming

• A Cultural Study of Mary and the Annunciation (2015)

Published

• Breast Cancer in the Eighteenth Century
• Crime and the Fascist State, 1850–1940
• Cultural Histories of Sociabilities, Spaces and Mobilities
• A Cultural History of the Radical Sixties in the San Francisco Bay Area
• A History of Emotions, 1200–1800
• McLuhan's Global Village Today
• Statistics, Public Debate and the State, 1800–1945