Recent Publications

Published: 14 December 2020

Introducing new books from three members of the Spanish language area, on the Argentine artist Norah Borges, Medievalism and Orientalism in 19th-Century South America, and New Speakers of Irish in the Global Context. Also highlighted are an edited work on another artist, Leonora Carrington, and contributions to The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought.

Dr Eamon McCarthy’s monograph is the first book-length study of the artist Norah Borges (1901-98) to be published in English, and is the first study to explore works from across her oeuvre. Norah Borges is the sister of the celebrated Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. She first began producing art in Switzerland, where her family was trapped during the First World War. She travelled to Spain and then back to her native Argentina, bringing with her new styles of painting. In the 1920s her work was published on the front covers of all the important cultural magazines of the time, but now she is largely forgotten and her works are not on show in any of the major art galleries in Buenos Aires or Madrid. In her works she creates another world full of almost angelic figures. She described this space as a smaller, more perfect world and it is mostly a serene space that is dominated by women. The book explores the ways in which she created that space and developed her own unique style of painting. It studies all the connections she made with the best-known artists and writers around her and challenges people to study her paintings much more closely.

The book launch will take place on Friday 29 January 3pm-4pm. It is part of Seminars in Scottish Hispanisms (SISH) the virtual seminar series Eamon is co-organising with Dr PJ Lennon (St Andrews). The event will be hosted on Zoom: https://uofglasgow.zoom.us/j/3501640870


Professor Bernadette O'Rourke's recent book New Speakers of Irish in the Global Context: New Revival? was launched on 4 December. The event was hosted by the Language & Society research Cluster with almost 100 participants attending the virtual event from all over the world along with policy makers from Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The book was co-authored with Dr John Walsh of the National University of Ireland, Galway and is one in a series of several publications produced as part of the European research network 'New Speakers in a Multilingual Europe' funded under the auspices of EUCOST/Horizon 2020. The event was Chaired by SMLC's Dr Guillem Colom-Montero and launched by Professor Colin Williams of the University of Cardiff. There were also contributions from other experts in minority languages and language policy. including Professor Wilson McLeod of the University of Edinburgh who spoke about Gaelic and Professor Christina Higgins of the University of Hawaii. 

Dr Nadia R. Altschul (Hispanic Studies) published Politics of Temporalization Medievalism and Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century South America in June 2020 (UPen). A  postcolonial study of the conceptualization of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin America as medieval and oriental, the book "traces the mutating ways in which medieval and oriental temporalizations are used by Latin American thinkers from the late eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries to establish hegemonic understandings of their societies, particularly their inequalities and unevennesses." (Barbara Fuchs, University of California).

Dr Alessia Zinnari (Italian) has recently contributed to the edited collection Leonora Carrington: Living Legacies, with a chapter titled ' “I was in another place”: the Liminal Journey in Leonora Carrington’s Down Below'. The celebrations for the centenary of the English born Surrealist artist and writer Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) brought a renewed interest in her work in the UK. Carrington has received much critical acclaim and achieved stellar status in Mexico, where she lived and worked for most of her life, having fled Europe via Spain in tormenting circumstances. Leonora Carrington: Living Legacies brings together a collection of chapters that constitute a range of artistic, scholarly and creative responses to the realm of Carrington emphasizing how her work becomes a medium, a milieu, and a provocation for new thinking, being and imagining in the world. The diversity of contributions from scholars, early career researchers, and artists, include unpublished papers, interviews, creative provocations, and writing from practice-led interventions. Collectively they explore, question, and enable new  ways of thinking with Carrington’s legacy. https://vernonpress.com/book/810

The recent electronic and hardback edition of The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought (OUP, 2020) includes two contributions from researchers in the SMLC, Dr Ramona Fotiade and Dr Andrea Gullotta, who contributed chapters on Lev Shestov and the religious thought and experience in the Soviet prison camps, respectively.
An authoritative reference for students and scholars, The Oxford Handbook for Russian Religious Thought contains cutting-edge scholarship that considers the influence of Russian religious thought in the West and the role of religion in aesthetics, music, poetry, art, film and thenovel. The volume, which includes contributions from two researchers in the SMLC, Dr Ramona Fotiade and Dr Andrea Gullotta, is available in electronic and hard print formats and has been used for online teaching and research during the recent lockdown period. Students from Theology and Religious Studies and the SMLC have used this new publication in their courses. A Zoom launch was organised in the Theology and Religious Studies Research Seminar series on the 10th December 2020 with the participation of the volume editor, Professor George Pattison, and the two authors.


First published: 14 December 2020

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