Search titles

Displaying results 21 to 30 of 1179.

The Mariana Islands »

People, History and Archaeology

Publication date: 2026
The Mariana Islands: People, History and Archaeology brings together new research about the history of the Mariana Islands through community perspectives, archaeological investigations, and anthropological and historical studies. The colonisation and growth of societies in the Mariana Islands, and of those elsewhere in Micronesia, are often seen as peripheral compared with those of Melanesia and Polynesia that tend to dominate scholarly and public views of Pacific history. The Marianas were the first remote archipelago to be recorded by Europeans with the arrival of Magellan in 1521, and the islands have a long and complicated history with colonial ‘great powers’, which during World War II involved the establishment of the remote Pacific’s sole concentration camp. Initial colonisation over 3,000 years ago was by migrants from East Asia who were related to, but genetically different from, Lapita groups who extended human occupation as far east as Tonga and Samoa. Later population movements to the Marianas, some involving Papuan people, point to a mobile Pacific that was connected to insular Asia, New Guinea and other parts of Oceania. Migration and local development contributed to the formation of a unique and vibrant CHamoru culture. The volume is dedicated to two pioneer archaeologists, Darlene Moore and Roz Hunter-Anderson, who established modern archaeological practice in the Marianas through projects involving community members and elders in the preservation of cultural heritage sites and the creation of new land use histories. ‘The Mariana Islands: People, History and Archaeology brings archaeology into conversation with CHamoru memory, oral history and cultural practice to reconnect with the lives of i Manaotåomo’na, The People of Before. Through diverse topics and approaches, the book illuminates the complexities of ancestral and recent histories, offering a richer understanding of the Mariana Islands and its people.’ —Kelly Marsh-Taitano, Curator of Archaeological Collections, Guam Cultural Repository

Coming soon

Notify me

At the Brink? »

Asia in the Global Economic Order

Publication date: 2026
The global economic order is undergoing a period of profound transformation. Heightened geopolitical rivalry, rapid technological change and growing concerns about economic security are reshaping trade, investment, supply chains and global governance. These developments raise fundamental questions about the future of openness, cooperation and economic growth for Asia and the Pacific region. This volume brings together leading scholars and policy experts from across Asia and the Pacific to examine how the region is navigating an increasingly contested international economic environment. The chapters explore the dynamics of great-power competition, the restructuring of global supply chains, the strategic role of technology and the pressures facing the liberal international economic order. They also consider the prospects for regional cooperation and the policy choices that may allow the region to sustain economic integration and prosperity in a more fragmented world. The book offers nine innovative proposals to buttress the global economic order and respond to current challenges. Based on papers presented at the 41st Pacific Trade and Development (PAFTAD) Conference, At the Brink? offers timely analysis of the evolving global economic landscape and provides insights into how Asia and the wider international community can respond to the challenges of a shifting world economy.

Coming soon

Notify me

Uneven Rewards »

Milestones in Labour Economics

Authored by: Alison L Booth
Publication date: May 2026
Uneven Rewards brings together major studies of workplace relations and behaviour from the distinguished labour economist Alison L Booth. Over more than three decades, Booth has forged a distinctive intellectual path combining a strong interest in the role of gender and culture on labour markets with acute expertise in data collection, and cognate social science fields and methods. With her co-authors, Booth examines the effects on men and women of evolving industrial relations’ rules and contexts. She studies the changing gendered and culturally specific nature of labour markets, and analyses the findings of a set of data-rich social experiments to reveal insights about women’s and men’s behaviour in labour, educational and wider social settings. Finally, Booth shares new conclusions arising from this extensive body of research. She shows how culture and nurture associated with the upbringing of boys and girls can have profound implications for educational and labour market performance and relative outcomes by gender: There is no right or wrong place for young women and men to be. What matters is that they are given the opportunity to go where their talents lead them without being thwarted by cultural pressures. Format: Hardback

Believing on Upside Down Country »

The Changing Faith-scape of Bendigo

Publication date: April 2026
The city of Bendigo and surrounds, in central Victoria, Australia, is described today by its Traditional Owners, the Djaara people, as ‘upside down country’, because since 1851 the sacred earth has been rotated and removed by mining, changing its spiritual ‘faith-scape’. Since the arrival of settlers and sojourners of European and Chinese descent, relations between peoples in this region have been powerfully shaped not only by the quest for gold and subsequent bases of material wealth, but also by developments in this religious and spiritual faith-scape. In this innovative study, the authors examine a range of historically distinctive Bendigo customs, rituals, activities and events, from the famous Easter Fair, saved for posterity by the intervention of a Chinese community figure in the 1870s, and now led each year by Djaara people, to demonstrations associated with the Bendigo mosque controversy of 2014. They find that an understanding of spirituality and belief has often been a strong basis for connecting with and showing humanity towards others. Drawing on both oral sources and the objects and spaces of the material culture of religion and belief, the authors provide a fascinating elucidation of past and present meanings of faith, in and around Bendigo, as a lived dimension of experience.

Australian Journal of Biography and History: No. 11, 2026 »

Special Issue: Writing Tasmanian Lives

Publication date: April 2026
This special issue of the Australian Journal of Biography and History explores what it means to write lives connected to Lutruwita/Tasmania, an island shaped by both isolation and connection. For most of its more than 40 thousand years of human history, Tasmania was a peninsula. Later, it became a node in global networks of Indigenous voyaging, colonial expansion, commerce and incarceration. Writing Tasmanian lives, therefore, requires us to think about islands, archipelagos, and how connections between people and place are rendered in the historical record. This is not only a biographical, but also a geographical, methodological and formal problem. The articles in this issue challenge conventional biographical methods and invite approaches that foreground mobility, relationality and imaginative reconstruction. The authors examine lives that are often fragmentary or eclipsed by dominant narratives. They employ diverse methodologies, including deep mapping, eco-biography, legal life writing, and creative engagements with art and literature, to illuminate the lived experiences of individuals across time and place. They interrogate archives, re-story familiar figures and experiment with interdisciplinary techniques to ask what counts as evidence and how imagination can coexist with rigour. Collectively, these contributions demonstrate that writing Tasmanian lives is not an insular project but an archipelagic one, connecting places, people and ideas across multiple scales. They demonstrate how biography can be a dynamic, relational practice, capable of revealing patterns and possibilities that transcend boundaries of nation, empire and discipline.

Vā Moana »

Space and Relationality in Pacific Thought and Identity

Publication date: April 2026
Vā may be a small word, but it carries expansive meaning. Rooted in Indigenous Pacific knowledges—Samoan vā, Tongan tā-vā, Māori and Hawaiian wā—this concept of relational space binds people, ancestors and cosmologies across time and place. Since the late 1990s, vā has become a powerful framework in academic and cultural contexts, energising conversations across Oceania and beyond. As the world grapples with the rise of hyper-individualism, vā offers an urgent and restorative alternative: one that centres connection, responsibility and collective belonging. This rich collection of individually and collaboratively authored chapters explores how vā, wā, and related Indigenous concepts are lived, theorised and practised today. Drawing from diverse disciplines and grounded in specific cultural contexts, these contributions deepen our understanding of relationality, space and place across the Moana. The AUT Vā Moana Research Centre is dedicated to exploring spatial concepts through Moananui (Pacific) thought. Established in 2012 by Albert L. Refiti and A.-Chr. Engels-Schwarzpaul at Auckland University of Technology’s School of Art and Design, Vā Moana brings together a vibrant international network of scholars. Their work reimagines how space is understood and experienced, both in contemporary and customary Pacific contexts. Format: Hardback

Lilith: A Feminist History Journal: Number 31 »

Publication date: March 2026
The 2025 Lilith presents four research articles focused on gender-based issues and experiences in twentieth-century Australia and Britain. The Australian-focused articles examine Lillie Beirne’s maternal feminism and related campaigns for social credit in the 1930s and 1940s, and how the ‘Citrus Queen’ beauty pageants of South Australia’s Riverina region articulated ideals of Anglo-Australian womanhood while also creating space for migrant women to participate in civic life and assert regional belonging. The third of these articles offers a mother’s intimate oral history of the tensions between the expectations and realities of motherhood when her child struggles with mental health. Turning to 1960s Britain, one article examines arguments for legalising abortion and identifies that while women’s rights and circumstances were important considerations, arguments for maternal health were most successful in achieving abortion rights. The issue also features ten book reviews spanning diverse thematic terrain. These include a memoir of the Australian Women's Liberation movement, Shauna Bostock's white and Aboriginal family history, and biographies of the nineteenth-century novelist Madame Dudevant (George Sand) and of Doris Punshon's life as a queer woman. Reviewed books also cover the role of women in the intellectual history of international relations, the Women's Weekly's influence on Australian food culture, sexism and harassment in the Westminster parliamentary system, Geraldine Fela's oral histories of HIV and AIDS nurses, the roles of sexuality and gender in remaking Australian citizenship, and trans-misogyny as a project of colonial violence. At a time when studies of gender and feminism are under siege, this issue testifies to the continuing vitality of feminist historical scholarship.
Download for free
Not available for purchase

Landslide »

The 2025 Australian Federal Election

Publication date: March 2026
The 2025 Australian federal election saw an unexpected landslide victory for the Labor Party, the Liberal Party’s worst ever result and the continued rise of the non-major-party vote. In this book, Australia’s leading election analysts explore what contributed to this outcome, including the effectiveness of party and third-party campaigns, the changing demography of the electorate and external factors such as the ‘Trump effect’. Baby boomers were outnumbered in 2025 by Gen Z and Millennials, who related to politics in a different way. Those pursuing their votes needed to do so through social media; influencers and podcasts became central to campaigning, as did humour appropriating popular culture with the help of AI. Increased cultural and linguistic diversity was also important, and there were new efforts to mobilise Muslim voters over the war in Gaza. Overshadowing it all was Trump. While populist themes seemed attractive at first, association with Trump quickly became a liability, and contributors here examine the difficulty of changing discourses mid-campaign. This authoritative study is indispensable in understanding the new political landscape: polls and voting behaviour, misinformation, gender issues and competing leadership styles. Richly illustrated, the role of visual politics also receives close scrutiny. Landslide is the nineteenth book in the ANU Press Australian Federal Election series. The series is sponsored by the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.

Peter Marralwanga »

Painter of the Djang of western Arnhem Land

Authored by: Luke Taylor, Ivan Namirrkki
Publication date: March 2026
Peter Marralwanga (1916–1987) was a leading figure in one of the great art practices of the world. He grew up in western Arnhem Land surrounded by artists painting in rock shelters and he learned to paint this way himself. The subjects of his paintings were the Djang who made his country and placed the spirits of people within it. Marralwanga’s story highlights the way bark painting became important as a way of evading assimilation policies rife within Northern Territory towns. Marralwanga established an outstation at Marrkolidjban where he could teach his children how to properly care for Ancestral lands, with part of this care involving a knowledge of how to paint. As a senior person who had travelled widely in his youth, and gained extensive ceremonial knowledge, Marralwanga was highly influential among a broad group of painters. Ivan Namirrkki, a painter of note and Peter Marralwanga’s son, has provided here his own account of his father’s life. This book tracks Marralwanga’s life of learning about country and conveys the religious meaning of numerous major works, offering outsiders a richer understanding and appreciation of Arnhem Land art. It also shows the crucial role of individuals working for the community arts cooperative Maningrida Arts and Culture in facilitating Marralwanga’s rise to recognition as a major Australian and world artist. Extensively illustrated, Peter Marralwanga: Painter of the Djang of western Arnhem Land is a study of unique knowledge and beauty. ‘There are only a handful of studies that give such brilliant, in-depth, serious analysis of an individual Aboriginal Australian artist’s life and work. The combination of genealogical, cultural and thematic analysis is superb.’ —Dr Henry Skerritt, University of Virginia ‘Australia’s foremost expert on the bark art of West Arnhem Land provides an exceptional biography of the complex cultural life and oeuvre of the late Peter Marralwanga. This is at once highly accessible, superbly illustrated, well researched and highly collaborative. It is an important resource for art historians, anthropologists and most importantly regional audiences of Aboriginal (Bininj) people determined to maintain the bark painting tradition that is so central to their livelihood and identity.’ —Emeritus Professor Jon Altman, The Australian National University Format: Hardback

Reshaping the State »

Chinese Political Institutions under Xi Jinping

Authored by: Wen-Hsuan Tsai
Publication date: February 2026
‘Based on extensive fieldwork and impressive analytic skills, Wen-Hsuan Tsai has produced the most detailed and informative account of the evolving political system in Xi Jinping’s China that I have ever read. It is essential reading for everyone seeking to understand the management and deployment of political power in contemporary China. The book convincingly shows that even though Xi Jinping may have centralized power in his own hands, institutions still matter. Indeed, they are holding China together.’ —Kjeld Erik Brødsgaard, Copenhagen Business School ‘This engaging and thought-provoking academic work reflects the scholar’s dedication to enhancing our understanding of Chinese governance. It blends institutional resonance with leadership dynamics, addressing the knowledge gap in the West about the complexities of the Chinese Communist Party’s resilience and institutions. By examining the idiosyncrasies, risks and challenges of contemporary China—both a major global influence and the world’s second-largest economy—it encourages readers to reflect deeply on its governance and implications.’ —Hon S. Chan, City University of Hong Kong ‘As a leading scholar on China’s elite politics, Dr Wen-Hsuan Tsai reveals how Xi Jinping reshaped the party-state to achieve institutional centralization and made and implemented domestic and foreign policy as the supreme leader of China. This book opens the “black box” of Chinese leadership politics, policymaking and implementation. It is a must-read for anyone who wants to gain deep knowledge about political dynamics in contemporary China.’ —Suisheng Zhao, University of Denver Format: Hardback