Behind the Cover with Indiana University Press

Engineering Global Socialism: Ownership, Non-Alignment, and Corporate Culture in a Bosnian Company (Indiana UP, 2026) chronicles the journey of the Bosnian global corporation Energoinvest and its workers from its Yugoslav socialist ideals through decades of dissolution, reconstruction, and post-socialist transformation. Author Anna Calori provides a company-centric window into the business history...

How did American Jews come to learn about the Holocaust in the immediate aftermath of the war? What kinds of images and representations of Holocaust survivors first circulated in America, when most Jewish survivors were still stuck in European displaced persons camps? Drawing on communal records and previously unexamined cultural materials, Saving Our Survivors: How American Jews Learned about the...

Today we are joined by Pavel Brunssen, a Research Associate and Alfred Landecker Lecturer at the Research Center on Antigypsyism at Heidelberg University and author of The Making of “Jew Clubs”: Performing Jewishness and Antisemitism in European Football and Fan Cultures (Indiana UP, 2025). In our conversation, we discussed the difference between Jewish clubs and “Jew Clubs,” the overlapping of an...

The new book Yiddish in Israel: A History (Indiana UP, 2020) challenges the commonly held view that Yiddish was suppressed or even banned by Israeli authorities for ideological reasons, offering instead a radical new interpretation of the interaction between Yiddish and Israeli Hebrew cultures. Following the Israeli Yiddish scene through the history of the Yiddish press, Yiddish theater, early Is...

In Ghana, much as in other parts of the Global South, postcolonial leaders aimed for industrial growth through the establishment of affordable hydroelectric power. However, in the current rapidly changing climate, many nations face recurring droughts, which hinder electricity production just when demand is on the rise. This situation has led to challenges like load shedding and unplanned power out...

In today’s podcast we talked to Dr. Sandra Greene about her book Slave Owners of West Africa. Decision Making in the Age of Abolition published in 2017 by Indiana University Press. In this book Dr. Greene presents us with the biographies of three individuals who lived in the southeastern corner of what is today the Republic of Ghana between the mid-nineteenth century and the early part of the twen...

Even those who do not know much Yiddish have probably heard the word “shtetl,” but what does that word mean exactly? Can we just say that it was a small town in Eastern Europe with a lot of Jews—and leave it at that? Or was the shtetl that nostalgic world of “tradition” so lovingly celebrated in Fiddler on the Roof? How are we to understand imaginary shtetls like Sholom Aleichem’s Kasrilevke, wher...

The Youngest Yugoslavs: An Oral History of Post-Socialist Memory (Indiana UP, 2025) gathers interviews with members of the last generation to experience a unified Yugoslavia as children. Born between 1971 and 1991, this cohort spent a relatively short period of their childhood in Yugoslavia – yet the Yugoslav experience had a profound and lasting impact on their lives. The eight individuals select...

Deep Cosmopolitanism: Kutiyattam, Dynamic Tradition, and Globalizing Heritage in Kerala, India explores the extraordinary past and present of Kutiyattam Sanskrit theater, the world's oldest continuously performed theater. Recognized as India's first UNESCO intangible cultural heritage of humanity, the matrilineal temple art of Kutiyattam has been performed by men and women in Kerala, India, since...

The landscape of comedy has undergone a seismic shift in recent years with an increasing number of female comedians breaking through to mainstream audiences. Women are claiming high-profile roles as late-night hosts, sketch comedians, television producers, and standup stars. As they disrupt industry norms and transgress cultural boundaries, they have also become lightning rods for controversy, el...

From the 1720s to the 1940s, parents in the kingdom and later colony of Dahomey (now the Republic of Benin) developed and sustained the common practice of girl fostering, or "entrusting." Transferring their daughters at a young age into foster homes, Dahomeans created complex relationships of mutual obligation, kinship, and caregiving that also exploited girls' labor for the economic benefit of th...

From 1945 to 1989, the Yugoslav state connected its claims of progressive politics and gender equality to its support of free healthcare, sex education and contraception, and laws that supported reproductive choice. Yugoslav men and women internalized these messages, proclaiming their homeland's superior care for its citizens in comparison to postwar Europe and the United States. Even as Yugoslav...

In Jón Leifs and the Musical Invention of Iceland (Indiana University Press, 2019), Árni Heimir Ingólfsson provides a striking account of the dramatic career of Iceland's iconic composer. Leifs (1899–1968) was the first Icelander to devote himself fully to composition at a time when a local music scene was only beginning to take form. He was a fervent nationalist in his art, fashioning an idiosyn...

100 Jewish Brides: Stories from Around the World (Indiana UP, 2024), is the result of a collaboration between two sociologists, Professor Shulamit Reinharz and Dr. Barbara Vinick. Both come from backgrounds deeply intertwined with Jewish history and feminism. Prof. Reinharz, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, became a rabbi's daughter after her father settled in the US. Her work often explores t...

Alex J. Kay (senior lecture of History at Potsdam University in Berlin) and David Stahel (senior lecturer in History at the University of New South Wales in Canberra) have edited a groundbreaking series of articles on German mass killing and violence during World War II. Four years in the making, this collection of articles spans the breadth of research on these topics and includes some non-Englis...

How can art shape historical memory and national identity? And how can cultural heritage and historical references be used to enact a vision of a nation? In Staging Tianxia: Dunhuang Expressive Arts and China’s New Cosmopolitan Heritage (Indiana University Press, 2024), Lanlan Kuang explores these questions through the lens of Dunhuang expressive arts — a twentieth-century music and dance performa...

Independent Africa: The First Generation of Nation Builders (Indiana UP, 2023)explores Africa's political economy in the first two full decades of independence through the joint projects of nation-building, economic development, and international relations. Drawing on the political careers of four heads of states: Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Ahmed Sékou Touré of Guinea, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Juli...

In Fantasmic Objects: Art and Sociality from Lebanon, 1920–1950 (Indiana UP, 2022), Kirsten L. Scheid offers a striking study of both modern art in Lebanon and modern Lebanon through art. By focusing on the careers of Moustapha Farrouk and Omar Onsi, forefathers of an iconic national repertoire, and their rebellious student Saloua Raouda Choucair, founder of an antirepresentational, participatory...

Take funny music seriously! Though often dismissed as silly or derivative, funny music, Lily E. Hirsch argues, is incredibly creative and dynamic, serving multiple aims from the celebratory to the rebellious, the entertaining to the mentally uplifting. Music can be a rich site for humor, with so many opportunities that are ripe for a comedic left turn. Taking Funny Music Seriously (Indiana UP, 202...

Every hundred years, as the story goes, two angels wonder out loud whether the bees are still swarming. For as long as the bees are swarming, the angels are reassured, the world holds together. Still, the tale suggests, the angels live in anxious anticipation of the End. Local beekeepers in Bosnia and Herzegovina retell the old tale with growing unease, as their honeybees weather the ground effect...

In Win or Else: Soviet Football in Moscow and Beyond, 1921-1985 (Indiana University Press, 2024), Larry E. Holmes shows us how Soviet football culture regularly disregarded official ideological and political imperatives and skirted the boundaries between socialism and capitalism. In the early 1920s, the Soviet press denounced football as a bourgeois sport that was injurious to both mind and body....

Dr. Aviad Moreno is himself an incarnation of entwined homelands. He is an Israeli whose grandfather moved from Morocco to Venezuela, sent his son back to Morocco to study. The family hailed from Spain before the Exile in 1492 only to maintain much of the Spanish language and character. These migrations create a unique diaspora for the Jews of northern Morocco, one that is Hispanophone and yet ext...

Amid the bloody Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2021 and the escalating tensions across the Taiwan Strait, the geopolitical balance of power has changed significantly in a very short period. If current trends continue, we may be witnessing a tectonic realignment unseen in more than a century. In 1904, Halford Mackinder delivered a seminal lecture entitled "The Geographical Pivot of History" to a pa...

As Muslim American representation becomes more prominent in popular culture, how are they continued to be portrayed?  Rosemary Pennington's new book Pop Islam: Seeing American Muslims in Popular Media (Indiana University Press, 2024) explores the “trap of hypervisibility” faced by Muslims in popular media and the burden of representation that follows them. More representation may not always be gen...

While many live-action films portray disability as a spectacle, "crip animation" (a genre of animated films that celebrates disabled people's lived experiences) uses a variety of techniques like clay animation, puppets, pixilation, and computer-generated animation to represent the inner worlds of people with disabilities. Crip animation has the potential to challenge the ableist gaze and immerse v...