New Books in Art

In this episode of the Books for Better Understanding series from Notre Dame Press, David Carlson hosts Jonathan A. Anderson and James Elkins for a discussion of Anderson's new book, The Invisibility Of Religion In Contemporary Art (U Notre Dame Press, 2025). Order your copy here

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With Art for the White House: A Changing Portrait of America (White House Association, 2026), Leslie Greene Bowman presents a wholly new perspective on the White House fine arts collection, revealing how all two-hundred and fifty years of America’s history can be told through the collection.

Art for the White House begins with the story of how the collection was created—slowly and cautiously—as our young nation was eager to distinguish itself from artwork that could be associated with the patronage and luxuries of European monarchs. The very first work of art authorized by Congress was a painting that remains one of the greatest works of art in any collection of American art, George Washington by leading American portrait artist, Gilbert Stuart. This is the painting Dolley Madison saved in 1814 when the British set the White House afire and this painting has presided on the walls of the State Rooms longer than any other work of art. Bowman explains, “It is a touchstone to America’s violent and aspirational birth and a tribute to the success of its fragile experiment in the face of globally dominant, centuries-old monarchies.”

Despite the symbolism of the first acquisition, the collection that was created and ultimately grew to more than 500 paintings, illustrations, and sculptures, was slow to develop both because the nation was young and trying to define itself and also because of the government’s lack of resources. American art had matured in the 19th century, establishing strengths in landscape, still-life, and genre scenes, but the White House’s collection remained limited. Bowman attributes much of the credit for the growth of the collection to First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy who “made the nation’s history a priority for her expansion of art holdings.” In less than three years, Mrs. Kennedy had transformed the house and art collection. Not only had it doubled in size, it represented the nation’s finest artists and included a variety of subject matter including still lifes, landscapes, history, and genre scenes.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whosebook focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Irina Shevelenko's Russian Archaism: Nationalism and the Quest for a Modernist Aesthetic(Cornell University Press, 2024) discusses the late-19th and early 20th century search for an archaic Russian folk tradition that could ground Russian art in an idiom independent of “The West.” While the [re]discovery of 14th and 15th century icon painting partially achieved this goal, Russian Modernists most often ended up creating art that was entirely new and which owed little to Russian folk tradition; the audience for this art was, after all, that same Western and Westernized elite.

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Understanding the world of art—particularly antiquities and archaeological artifacts—requires tracing how objects are removed from the ground, displaced by conflict or economic hardship, and ultimately reappear in the international art market. The odyssey of an artifact from its excavation site to an auction house, a private collection, or a museum display case raises a host of pressing concerns about the fragility of cultural heritage but also the global mechanisms that sustain its circulation. In recent years, growing awareness of a possible link between the illegal antiquities trade and terrorist financing has brought new scrutiny to regions marked by war and instability, particularly in the Middle East. In such places, archaeological sites are especially vulnerable to looting and illicit excavation, with the profits from these "blood antiquities" sometimes flowing back to fund further violence.

Art for War: Heritage Looting, Blood Antiquities, and the International Fight Against Terrorism Financing(Stanford UP, 2026) by Dr. Costanza Musu examines how this transformation in perception—from an archaeological concern to a matter of international security—reshaped the global response to antiquities trafficking. Viewing the trade through a security lens, the book offers scholars, policymakers, and students of international affairs a new way to understand how the protection of cultural heritage became entangled with the politics of counterterrorism and global security, sparking new debates over art, heritage, and security.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whosebook focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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When Neil Selkirk first saw one of Arbus’s photographs as a young man at someone’s house in London, it almost sent him screaming into the street. Unsettled and shaken, the encounter instead opened his eyes to the uncanny powers of photography. It turned Selkirk into an important photographer and, ultimately, an indispensable collaborator to some of the greatest photographers of all time, including Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, and other greats. In our conversation on great photographers and the art of photography, based on Selkirk’s edited book Why Photographs? (Warbler, 2026) we discuss essential dimensions of photography, including riveting detail, spontaneity, credibility, and the gift of chance, and how they were celebrated by early photographers but soon denounced by an establishment that saw photography as a threat to painting.

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Katrin Kogman-Appel is a professor of Medieval Jewish history with research focusing on book culture, readers, and reading practices in medieval Europe and beyond. In The Kennicott Bible: A Masterpiece of Jewish Book Art (Bodleian Library, 2023) she discusses the text of the 24 canonized books of the Bible that is paired with David Kimchi's grammatical treatise “Sefer Miklol”. Katrin discussed the Kennecott Bible, a medieval Hebrew manuscript that contains unique illustrations and Masoretic text annotations. She explained that the manuscript draws inspiration from various sources including the Severa Bible and playing cards from the Rhineland and Netherlands, with some illustrations depicting animals in unusual positions and a political allegory involving hares, wolves, cats, and mice. Katrin described the Masoretic text as a lexical apparatus designed for precision in transmitting the canonical Hebrew text, and emphasized that the Bible served as a status symbol and public art piece for Jewish elites despite having no public art in synagogues.

A collection of reproduced images from the Kennicott Bible, a remarkable artifact from the Middle Ages. The Kennicott Bible is one of the most celebrated Hebrew Bibles that survives today, having delighted readers since its creation in 1476. Originating from La Coruña in northern Spain, it features lavish carpet pages, gold leaf silhouettes, and abundant marginal decorations. This extraordinary manuscript is a treasure trove of history, culture, devotion, art, and cross-cultural collaboration. This book features reproductions of the decorated pages of the stunning manuscript, accompanied by four chapters authored by experts in the fields of Bible study, book history, and medieval Jewish art. The authors discuss the Bible from several perspectives, explaining the Hebrew text of the Bible, the scribe who created the pages, the layout and paleography, and the illuminator who produced the Bible's decoration and its imagery. This volume also includes an analysis of the early medieval commentary on the Old Testament, the Masorah. Richly illustrated throughout, this beautiful book makes a treasure of Jewish art available for a new audience, alongside the latest scholarship on its origins, provenance, and creation.

Analyzing these ancient texts in historical context helps to enrich our understanding of the effects and reactions to historical and cultural events.

Be sure to follow Jewish Tapestry for more on Jewish history and culture.

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This is the first episode in a series that explores the intersections of science and the humanities in university life. In today’s conversation, Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera is joined by artists Yasmín Hernández and Baruch Vergara for a discussion about Herlihy-Mera's article “The humanities should really matter to STEM disciplines.” They explore the relationship that art and the humanities have with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—and consider why that relationship matters more than ever.

The discussion begins with a central question: What can the arts and humanities contribute to STEM education? If art cultivates forms of observation, experimentation, imagination, interpretation, and creative problem-solving that are essential to scientific and technological work, how can educators work within institutions that separate the Humanities from STEM experiences? What might change if scientists used art and visual thinking as approaches to problem solving? How would science change if art became a tool for empirical inquiry? And, looking in the other direction, what can science teach the humanities about the mind, perception and the boundaries of what we know?

These questions become especially urgent in the age of artificial intelligence.

This series asks us to reconsider the boundaries between disciplines. At stake is more than the future of the university. It is what kinds of intelligence we want our universities to cultivate - and also, what kinds of experiences we want students to have as they learn, explore, and make sense of their worlds.

The Instituto Nuevos Horizontes is housed at the Universidad de Puerto Rico-Mayagüez.

Quotes, themes, and ideas from this conversation:

• The STEM-ification of the university, expansion of majors and programs

• Decline and elimination of humanities, arts, and language programs

• When engineering is a model for other disciplines

• “STEAM” initiatives that add Arts to STEM

• Emphasis on technical skills over interpretive faculties

• “Career readiness” over “citizenship” as an institutional objective

• The STEM-ification of the university

“Painting is solving a problem on canvas.” -Yasmín Hernández

“Children are conditioned to make that division (between STEM and the Arts) since elementary school.” -Yasmín Hernández

“Experimentation is what brings curiosity. It is not a precise thing. Art is a new way to look.” -Baruch Vergara

“An image can express a pre-linguistic relationship that we have with the idea.” -Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera

“Play is the first form of experimentation...you free yourself from the expected outcome.” -Yasmín Hernández

“From art comes a new level of awareness, freeing ourselves from the expected outcome to access something that is beyond.” -Yasmín Hernández

“Music is an activity that can access concepts that are beyond consciousness.” -Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera

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The Soviet Union’s rise as a totalitarian state and economic rival to the United States sparked a cultural cold war. The conflict was colored by paranoia and a mindset that pitted the USSR’s state-sponsored Socialist Realism against its so-called opposite: Western art in general and Abstract Expressionism in particular. But can one version of art be the opposite of another?

Julia Tatiana Bailey teases out the complexity and artificiality of the persistent narrative of US and Soviet artistic otherness. She explores why this notion was introduced and how it shaped the art of both countries. She also analyzes and deconstructs the ideological frameworks that have estranged the art of the USSR in Western art history. In doing so, Bailey reveals the Cold War biases and institutionalized responses that influence the politicized histories of art even today.

Drawing on previously unpublished archival material from Russia and the US, Painting Paranoia: Cold War Art and Anti-Communism (University of Illinois Press, 2026) investigates how the myth of Soviet otherness contributed to America’s postwar artistic identity.

Julia Tatiana Bailey is an art historian and curator and Director of Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague.

Matthis Frickhoeffer is a scholar of critical theory and French thought with a background in literature studies, linguistics and art theory.

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Eminent historian Peter Burke joins Jana Byars to discuss his new book, The Connoisseur: A Cultural History(Reaktion, 2026), considering the art connoisseur from the Renaissance to the present day. Connoisseurs have been an influential, if somewhat mysterious, figure in the history of art, responsible for making or breaking high-profile collections and reputations and influencing taste, the art market, and the field of art history with their pronouncements. But what did it take to become a connoisseur, and how reliable were the great connoisseurs of previous centuries? With the advent of scientific techniques and artificial intelligence, what future is there for expertise based on the trained eye? This book offers the first history of the art connoisseur, from the Renaissance to its professionalization in the nineteenth century and on to the present. Featuring portrayals of many leading connoisseurs, such as Bernard Berenson, Roberto Longhi, and Giovanni Morelli, this is a highly readable history of the extraordinary characters and intellects that have shaped the art world through a mixture of intuition, learning, and chutzpah.

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Strange and Familiar History of Byzantine Ar: Interpretation, Risk, and Empathy (ARC Humanities Press, 2026) represents a risky experiment in art-history writing. It takes objects of Byzantine art—manuscript illustration, frescos, mosaic, sculpture—and reads them through the lenses of disability studies, media studies, and gender studies in order to reveal something about their significance not only in that historical culture, but also in our own. Moreover, it uses lenses of personal history and self-reflection as a way to model an open-ended and faceted art history. Modern works of film, fiction, and art likewise appear frequently so that the Byzantine objects can emerge as both more strange and more familiar, and as both of the past and of our world. Their capacity for holding multiple times, generating multiple meanings, and for multiple subjectivities is fully embraced, and perhaps a different kind of art history emerges, one that eschews argument and mastery for humility, openness, empathy—thinking with, rather than about.

New Books in Late Antiquity is Presented by Ancient Jew Review

Glenn Peers is Emeritus Professor, Art History at University of Texas Austin and Syracuse University

Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston

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Kahlil Joseph has collaborated with musicians FKA twigs, Flying Lotus, Sampha and Shabazz Palaces among many others. He has directed numerous films, music videos and advertisements across Africa, America and Europe. The award-winning filmmaker's disruptive style – which frequently merges visual representations of transcontinental experiences with the countercultural energies of Afrodiasporic music – challenges the Eurocentric biases underpinning Western media. At the same time, his works generate various contradictions and tensions because they are themselves products situated within an economic framework of neoliberal capitalism, at once offering alternative ways of being while, simultaneously, participating in and thereby sustaining the social structures that they otherwise seek to subvert and dismantle.

Kahlil Joseph and the Audiovisual Atlantic (Bloomsbury, 2024) generates ground-breaking new dialogues between a range of audial and visual theories that are shaped by Paul Gilroy's conceptualisation of The Black Atlantic (1993). The book analyzes Joseph's work through intersections of emergent music video and new media concepts as well as film theories from African, American and European perspectives. Vitally, it argues that such an interdisciplinary and transcontinental approach to film, music and new media scholarship enriches the possibilities of their respective and, simultaneously, entwined branches of knowledge

In the episode, we discuss Joe Jackson's pathway into studying Joseph's scholarship, his work's dialogue with Paul Gilroy (alongside a host of other vital scholars of the audiovisual and race) - and make the case for greater focus on the music video as a distinctive field of study.

Follow this link for a sample of Joseph's work here 

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Panel painters in both the middle ages and the fifteenth century created works that evoke the luster of precious stones, the sheen of polished gold and silver, and the colorful radiance of stained glass. Yet their approaches to rendering these materials were markedly different. In The Varnish and the Glaze: Painting Splendor with Oil, 1100–1500(U Chicago Press, 2023), Dr. Marjolijn Bol explores some of the reasons behind this radical transformation by telling the history of the two oil painting techniques used to depict everything that glistens and glows—varnish and glaze.

For more than a century after his death, the fifteenth-century painter Jan van Eyck was widely credited with inventing varnish and oil paint, on account of his unique visual realism. Once this was revealed to be a myth, the verisimilitude of his work was attributed instead to a new translucent painting technique: the glaze. Today, most theories about how Van Eyck achieved this realism revolve around the idea that he was the first to discover or refine the glazing technique. Bol, however, argues that, rather than being a fifteenth-century refinement, varnishing and glazing began centuries before. Drawing from an extensive body of recipes, Dr. Bol pieces together how varnishes and glazes were first developed as part of the medieval art of material mimesis. Artisans embellished metalwork and wood with varnishes and glazes to imitate gold and gems; infused rock crystal with oil, resin, and colorants to imitate more precious minerals; and oiled parchment to transform it into the appearance of green glass. Likewise, medieval panel painters used varnishes and glazes to create the look of enamel, silk, and more.

The explorations of materials and their optical properties by these artists stimulated natural philosophers to come up with theories about transparent and translucent materials produced by the earth. Natural historians, influenced by medieval artists’ understanding of refraction and reflection, developed theories about gems, their creation, and their optical qualities.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whosebook focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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In a world obsessed with expertise and control, the figure of the idiot illuminates deeper truths about society. In this interview, Morteza Hajizadeh interviews Leonhard Emmerling about his book The Idiots: The History of the Homo Nullus (Seagull Books, 2026)

Dostoevsky and Nietzsche wrote about him; Dadaists and punks idolized him; artists like Warhol and Beuys made him their icon. From holy fool to punk rebel, the idiot—a figure that traces its roots back to the Greek idiotes, a person who was alienated from public life—has always challenged society’s norms from the margins. Far from a simple madman, the idiot is a powerful subversive, a person who disregards norms and finds profound insight in a state of unmediated inspiration. Using a cross-disciplinary approach bridging literature, religion, art, and philosophy, this volume traces a rich journey up to the present, where the idiot reemerges in a dramatic twist: a public figure who inverts social norms, confounds the boundary between private and public, and declares a new, paradoxical view of the world.

Leonhard Emmerling has worked as an art historian in different capacities: as curator and director of art institutions in Germany and New Zealand; as teacher at art academies in Auckland, Düsseldorf, and Munich; and as advisor and director for the Goethe-Institut. His most recent publication is Aesthetics: What For?.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: here

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In this episode Pat speaks with Dr Alex Cain.

Dr Alex Cain researches in the fields of political theory and ethical theory, with a particular focus on the work of Hannah Arendt, among other figures in the history of philosophy. Her work in this field has so far mostly focussed on the topics of friendship, political action, judgement and the role of experience in philosophical inquiry.

They discuss Sidney Nolan’s duty to paint the concentration camps, the hopefulness of Hannah Arendt, and the importance of the banality of evil.

A transcript of this episode will be available on the Concept : Art website here.

Concept : Art is produced on muwinina Country, lutruwita Tasmania. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.

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This is Dr. Swati Joshi's inaugural episode on the New Books Network. In this episode, she interviews Dr. Lucy Jeffery about her monograph, Transdisciplinary Beckett: Visual Arts, Music, and the Creative Process (ibidem Press, 2021). She is also co-editor and author of Replaying Communism: Trauma and Nostalgia in European Cultural Production, published by CEU Press and AUP in 2026. She is co-founder of the Replaying Communism project, which received funding from the AHRC SWW-DTP (2023) and the Visegrad Fund (2024). Dr. Jeffery's published research is on Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Ezra Pound, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Magda Szabó. Her monograph—Transdisciplinary Beckett: Visual Arts, Music, and the Creative Process—was published by Ibidem in 2021, and, in 2022, she co-edited a special issue for Green Letters, entitled ‘A New Poetics of Space’.

This episode weaves together Beckett's transdisciplinary creative process with Dr. Jeffery's journey of research, and cogitation over challenges to preserve integrity and creativity of the author's works in the wake of rapidly developing AI tools. Furthermore, the colour blue occupies an integral role in Dr. Jeffery's monograph, so this episode entails analytical segments on pigments used in Beckett's works beyond the black, white, and grey. Dr. Jeffery and I also briefly discuss our ongoing special issue, "A Writer's Palette: Colour in Late Modernist Literature," for Textual Practice. Colleagues interested in sharing their proposal until 12th December, can write to us on latemodernists@gmail.com, for more details.

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Cultural studies of the nineteenth century often categorize their subjects as being motivated by one of two opposing notions: a wholehearted embrace of progress or an antimodernist nostalgia. A Perfectionist Impulse: The Art of Stopping Time in the Nineteenth Century (U Minnesota Press, 2026) centers a different kind of response to the period’s newly intensified awareness of temporality and history: an obsession with preserving perfection. Engaging a diverse set of case studies, Dr. Ellery E. Foutch explores the era’s desire to forestall the march of time and immortalize the fleeting moment through art and technology.

Beginning with an investigation of artist and naturalist Titian Peale’s butterfly illustrations and specimen boxes, Dr. Foutch assesses the implications of attempts to fix animal life in the “perfect state.” She then turns to Harvard’s Ware Collection of Glass Flowers, botanical models meticulously crafted to serve as instructional tools but most famous internationally as a spectacle for tourists. Finally, she scrutinizes the period’s preoccupation with the fragility of the human body, examining artistic representations of the legendary bodybuilder Eugen Sandow, widely known during his time as the “Perfect Man.” Highlighting the paradoxical way in which these attempts at preservation ultimately sap the vitality from the organic processes they seek to arrest, Dr. Foutch uses these curious objects to unpack a deep set of cultural anxieties around decay and death.

By analyzing objects of mass culture and natural history using methods typically reserved for works of art, A Perfectionist Impulse provides a unique window into how nineteenth-century scientists, technologists, artists, and entertainers rendered a common desire for perfection and immortality. Itself a wondrous collection of attempts to capture the idealized moment, this extensively illustrated book serves as a shining example of our enduring fascination with the ephemeral.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whosebook focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

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Naturalism's Imaginary Museum, French Art, and the Eclectic Nineteenth Century (University of Toronto Press, 2024) examines one of the most revered art historical narratives of Western art: the famous turning point for painting and sculpture usually emblematized by the works of Édouard Manet and then the Impressionists. Instead of the usual revaluation of this turning point, Sara Pappas argues for the importance of the failure to find a cohesive story for the art world in the period itself, a difficulty that carries forward to galleries today. In order to demonstrate the importance of incongruity and disorder, Pappas brings together two worlds that may seem incompatible: nineteenth-century literary writers involved in naturalism and the organization of permanent collections of later nineteenth-century French art in today's museums. Drawing on the art novels and art criticism of these writers, the book provides optimal access to the questions that continue to haunt the categorization and display of nineteenth-century art.

Guest Sara Pappas is Associate Professor of French and Visual Culture at the University of Richmond. In addition to this volume, she has published articles on topics from 19th century art criticism by literary figures such as Baudelaire and Zola to the Expositions universelles to contemporary artist Kehinde Wiley’s influence on French art, as well as co-curating an exhibit of Nineteenth Century French and Russian Art at the Harnett Museum of Art.

Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript under review on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement.

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Following Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1798 campaign in Egypt, new possibilities of travel and improvements in printing technology saw an emergence of publishing ventures in France and Britain dedicated to the production of albums and travel accounts featuring images of Muslim Egypt and Islamic architecture and catering to a growing European fascination with the East. In her debut book, Visualizing Egypt: European Travel, Book Publishing, and the Commercialization of the Middle East in the Nineteenth Century (American University in Cairo Press, 2025) Paulina Banas analyzes the context and process of production of these highly illustrated publications, from their conceptualization to the finished product and its afterlife, from marketing to the sales of these books, and from circulation to their reception by nineteenth-century audiences. By tracing the long, arduous, and often risky publishing journeys of the makers of these books, including publishers, writers, and artists, such as the Frenchman Émile Prisse d’Avennes, Banas reveals a complex terrain of changing market demands, collaborations, and conflicting views, and the unsettled authorship of these works, prompting us to think more profoundly about artistic and intellectual exchange in the world of nineteenth-century Orientalist book production. Visualizing Egypt considers nineteenth-century book illustrations on Egypt and the “Orient” not merely as expressions of enduring ideology and colonial propaganda, but as representations shaped by the often-overlooked commercial exigencies of the growing publishing industry and the reckless competition within it.

Paulina Banas is an Assistant Professor of Art History at The University of Alabama at Birmingham, where she teaches course on Islamic world arts, 19th century European visual culture, and cross-cultural encounters between Europe and the Middle East.

Saman Nasser holds an M.A. in history from James Madison University, where he currently works as an educational staff.

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City of the Gallows: Art and Execution in Eighteenth-Century London(Yale UP, 2026) uncovers the complex and often unexpected connections between eighteenth-century London’s sites of punishment and its spaces of art-making, instruction, and display. Drawing together a wide range of images, objects, and texts – from popular woodcuts and anatomical sculptures to moral tracts and dictionaries of slang – it offers new readings of works by major artists, such as William Hogarth, Johan Zoffany, and Joseph Wright of Derby, and shines a light on others that traditional accounts of the period have overlooked or ignored. In doing so, this book shows how state violence shaped the art and visual culture of this era, whose legacies persist to this day.

Kelsey Brosnan is an art historian specializing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French art. Her book on the still-life painter Anne Vallayer-Costerwas published by Lund Humphries and Getty Publications in 2026. kb2348@gmail.com

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Life in Spite of Everything: Tales from the Ukrainian East (Daunt Books Publishing, 2025) is a unique reflection on the much-mythologised Donetsk and Luhansk regions of the Ukrainian east, the old and recent history of the region as seen by an esteemed academic multi-disciplinary scholar Victoria Donovan in her numerous travels to the region prior to the full-scale invasion. Seen through a deeply empathetic lens of conversations with local curators, historians, museum workers, and artists, the region is shown in its complexity, with the uniqueness of its landscapes, endangered biodiversity, entangled colonialisms of its past and a threatened future.

Since start of Russia’s war against Ukraine in 2014, its eastern region—Donbas—has been synonymous with conflict. With the escalation of that war in 2022, its, cities such as Bakhmut and Lysychansk have become familiar to us through the images and reports of brutal devastation. Victoria Donovan excavates a rich, multicultural history of this area, and paints a radically different picture.

Travelling from the dramatic, jagged peaks of Bilokuzmynivka to the marshland of Mariupol, from a warehouse rave to an abandoned gypsum mine, the physical world and its importance to this region’s identity is brought to vivid life. But above all else, by speaking to those whose lives are embedded there now—curators, artists, railway workers, young people who have grown up amidst instability and destruction—Donovan amplifies local voices and reveals the intensely personal lived reality of Putin’s war.

Victoria Donovan is Professor of Ukrainian and East European Studies and Director of the Centre for Global (Post)socialisms, Southeast, Central and East European Studies at the University of St Andrews.

Viktoriia Grivina is an independent anthropologist and writer, author of Kharkiv, a War City (Ibidem, 2025), and Kharkiv is a Dream: Public Art and Activism, 2013–2023 (Ibidem, 2025).

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