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As part of the Peter Lang Pride Month celebrations, volume editor Flora Roussel continues the conversation.
In times of conservative politics and discourse, the edited volume Embodied Realities offers an overview of recent queer, feminist, and intersectional debates across literature, film, performing arts, and the history of ideas. The book provides insights in how literature, film, and art can serve as sites of resistance that challenge normative conceptions of the body and reality.
Contributors offer cutting-edge analyses of the artistic power as well as reflections on activist life experiences. Following in the footsteps of Black, feminist, and queer activists who have striven to rethink resistance by giving a voice to those who have been silenced, the volume presents various “othered” realities that defy the expected reality defined by the hegemonic powers in place. It also refocuses attention on “embodiment” by showcasing strategies of reappropriation, disruptions of stereotypes, as well as alternative constructions of community and solidarity.
For instance, Chapter 1 features testimony by Katharina Oguntoye, who recounts how she transformed the racist, sexist, and anti-queer reality she lived in into an embodied activism to create spaces of growth. Further, Chapter 5 interrogates marginalization, queerness, and the body in contemporary performances by tracing other (art) histories through the use of queer techniques (freak, crip, etc.).
Embodied Realities is a unique collaboration among activists, authors, and scholars, highlighting the importance of positionality in relation to identity, gender, class, and sexuality.
Read more and purchase the book, here. Embodied Realities is Volume 24 in the book series Women, Gender and Sexuality in German Literature and Culture, edited by Helen Finch and Katherine Stone.
Use code ER30 at checkout to receive a 30% discount on Embodied Realities, or contact orders@peterlang.com to order directly. Valid until 2 July 2026. Not applicable in countries with fixed book pricing.
Contents
Foreword (Ervin Malakaj)
Introduction: Looking Further, Constantly Growing (Flora Roussel)
1 The One and the Other: Continuing the Work of Audre Lorde in Germany (Katharina Oguntoye)
2 Writing (through) Trauma in Jasmina Kuhnke’s Schwarzes Herz: Voyeuristic Entertainment or a Path to Collective Healing? (Kathrin Spiller)
3 An “Ordinary Grotesque”: Ambiguous Queer Feminist Body Politics in Simone Meier’s Fleisch (Flora Roussel)
4 From Montreal to Berlin: Carrying on the Work of Audre Lorde (Carolyn Gammon)
5 The Micropolitics of Contemporary Queer Feminist Performances in Germanophone Countries (Priscilla Wind)
6 Queer Precarious Lives: Negotiating Diversity in the German Public Broadcasting Web Series Becoming Charlie (Charlotte Kaiser)
7 How I Became a Feminist Writer (Albeit a Bad One) (Melanie Raabe)
8 Feminine Genius on Screen: On Margarethe von Trotta’s Biopics (Francis Tremblay)
Flora Roussel is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at McGill University. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Montreal. Her research interests include feminist, queer, and intersectional considerations of bodies, relationalities, and affects as well as exophony and its potential to transform literary studies.
Throughout June, Peter Lang will mark Pride Month by showcasing a range of publications that explore and celebrate LGBTQ+ experiences across disciplines, from film and literature to sport, history, and public policy. This curated focus reflects our ongoing commitment to amplifying diverse voices and advancing inclusive scholarship, recognising the importance of equitable representation within academic publishing.
We are pleased to highlight the latest reviews for our publications. These reviews reflect the hard work and dedication of our authors and we are pleased to see their titles receiving the professional recognition they deserve.
We invite you to read the reviews and join us in acknowledging our authors’ achievements. Our thanks go out to the reviewers for providing such constructive commentary. All titles are available to purchase from www.peterlang.com.
Review Highlights
Title: The Boom & The Boom: Historical Rupture and Political Economy in Contemporary British and Chinese Science Fiction by Guangzhao Lyu
Review by: Johannes D. Kaminski
“One of the most remarkable aspects of Lyu’s study is his careful selection of congenial texts, including iconic sf such as Liu Cixin’s and Iain M. Banks’s novels, as well as lesser-known texts, in lively cross-cultural dialogues. Aware of the leap of faith required to consider such texts as complementary units, Lyu compares the coexistence of the Chinese and British sf realms to the eerie situation described in China Miéville’s novel The City & the City (2009).”
Featured in: Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 53
Title: Global China and the Global Game in Africa: China–Africa Engagement through the Lens of Football edited by Jonathan Sullivan, Tobias Ross, Angela Lewis
Review by: Alan Bairner
“This is a thought-provoking collection of essays that deserves to be read not only by people with a specific interest in football in China and Africa but also by anyone who simply wants to learn more about the important relationship between these two parts of the world in an era in which the global order is being reconfigured even as I write.”
Featured in: idrottsforum
Link: https://idrottsforum.org/baiala_sullivanetal260507/
Title: Luke Wadding. A Life: Religion, Politics and Culture, 1588–1657 by Benjamin Hazard.
Review by: Simon Ditchfield
“On finishing Hazard’s painstakingly learned and carefully written study one can well believe that Wadding took refuge in scholarship from the Sturm und Drang of Irish politics and its international implications.”
Featured in: Irish Theological Quarterly
Link: https://doi.org.10.3917/rpsf.155.0161
Title: Reading the French Caribbean by Albert James Arnold
Review by: Gaspard Brunet (IRJS – Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) et Myriam Prévot (CERSA – Université Paris Panthéon-Assas)
“The book offers a highly informative socio-historical approach to these literary works, placing the texts in their contexts and illuminating important elements of Caribbean society, such as gender dynamics and linguistic hierarchies between French and Creole.”
Featured in: New West Indian Guide
Link: NWIG 100-3&4 (2026)
Title: Gesture in French Post-New Wave Cinema by François Giraud
Review by: Douglas Morrey
“Giraud’s book is thoroughly researched and demonstrates excellent knowledge of French film theory and avant-garde film history and practice, and it is scattered throughout with incisive close readings. French syntax occasionally creeps into the English expression, but this is only a very minor complaint about a book that will be of value to any scholar working on this singularly adventurous era of French filmmaking. Indeed, much of the pleasure of reading the book comes from remembering, or reviewing, these films and marvelling at the aesthetic courage and intellectual integrity of this much-lamented generation of filmmakers.”
Featured in: H-France Review Volume 26 (2026)
Link: vol26no15Morrey.pdf
As part of the Peter Lang Pride Month celebrations, volume editors T.J. Jourian and Chase Catalano continue the conversation.
It wasn’t that long ago that we, along with two of our colleagues, decided we would co-edit Envisioning a Critical and Liberatory Approach to Trans and Queer Center(ed) Diversity Work (published in 2025). Yet many of the chapter authors’ professional and personal lives, including our own, feel worlds apart from ‘back then.’ US higher education had just begun sustaining the impacts of a swelling and multi-pronged ‘anti-DEI’ assault. The figurative ink had not yet set on senior administrators’ statements of commitment to justice and equity in response to nationwide protests against police brutality following George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, when the hollowness of those publicly promoted statements led to their quietly private annulment. Call it higher education’s remake of Britney Spears’ 55-hour marriage to Jason Alexander.
These highly bureaucratic institutions often require countless unrelenting advocates and years of taskforces, reports, benchmarking, and assessments to permit basic adjustments to policies and processes that enable marginalized students, staff, and/or faculty to breathe a touch easier. Yet, at the mere whisper of toothless executive orders and funding-cut threats, entire structures and organizational charts were upended. Commitments be damned and endowments untouched. Since then, several chapter authors have lost jobs and titles, left institutions and States for comparatively safer (i.e., less volatile) environments, and ditched careers they sought to or had dedicated their professional lives to. The festering anti-queer and anti-trans rhetoric coupled with institutional moves of capitulation—which are very much present and addressed in the book—have since taken hold more robustly, impacting trans staff and faculty—especially those of color—most significantly.
“Today, students, staff, and faculty are fighting to salvage what (little) resources and initiatives have become institutionalized or at least more available since then, while our visibility is weaponized against us and our young people in every aspect of social and public life.”
The two of us are ‘old enough’ to recall navigating the invisibility of transness in higher education as students and practitioners. A lot of our efforts were focused on alleviating ignorance and misinformation rather than addressing outright malice. To be clear, there was plenty of malice to go around; but it didn’t dominate where we deployed our energy and time. By the time either of us were working on our dissertations (both variably focused on trans men and masculine college students’ understandings of their manhood /masculinity), there were but a few research-driven publications about trans college students (none on staff or faculty), most by cisgender scholars writing with cisgender readership in mind (LOTS of defining terms and cislation of our illegible complexities), and flattening trans students into a one-dimensional aggregate.
Then, trans erasure on most campuses was less active. We were invisible mainly because most people didn’t know about us, not because we were being intentionally eliminated, as we are today. We hadn’t yet been written into the institution, so we created trans-inclusive housing and healthcare policies, replaced binary gender(ed) language with more expansive vocabulary, provided campus colleagues with the tools and skills to support all students, and were visible enough for trans students to find trans adults existing close by. Today, students, staff, and faculty are fighting to salvage what (little) resources and initiatives have become institutionalized or at least more available since then, while our visibility is weaponized against us and our young people in every aspect of social and public life.
That colleges and universities are not bulwarks for liberation and marginalized populations is not new or news to most of us who have engaged in queer center(ed) work for even a moment. What is renewed is the level of fear, anxiety, unsafety, and instability trans people are grappling with today and the open mass coordination of that renewal across social institutions (government, media, religion, education, and the economy) and the populace at large, including within the ‘LGB-without-the-T’ spaces we helped create.
In the book’s concluding chapter, we built on Barbara Love’s (2018) conception of liberatory consciousness and Charlene Carruthers’ (2018) questions for those seeking clarity about their place in resistance work, to offer four questions of our own:
- What do I/we need to know and understand?
- How will we think together?
- What actions and risks am I/we willing to take and able to take?
- How will I/we hold myself and each other in community in support and accountability?
“This Pride Month, […] we call on ourselves, each other, and all who want a future we can all thrive in”
At the time, “we” referred primarily to those undertaking TQ center(ed) diversity work. Today’s realities—plural, because, as always, the permeability of oppression has many fighting multiple, different, and often overlapping but siloed battles—require us to have a more expansive and poignant understanding of who “we” are. So, we (T.J. and Chase) reframe those questions1 to enable inquiry from any vantage point, regardless of identity, professional role, or organizing experience:
- What do we as individuals and as a collective need to illuminate for each other? How do we make room to hear each other’s stories as often as they need to be told in a variety of permutations?
- How can we fortify our analysis to enable us to have a kaleidoscopic and collective lens that leaves no-one out of the picture?
- How do we create a human-centered parable of the choir (an analogy by Celeste Bembry) to sustainably distribute the weight of action and risk taken up by a few, to allow for rest and reflection?
This Pride Month, whatever our individual interpretations and experiences of “Pride” might be, rather than lamenting or railing against the loss of corporate sponsorships that were always contingent on our palatability and profitability, we call on ourselves, each other, and all who want a future we can all thrive in, “to abandon notions of institutional saviorism in favor of saving ourselves” (Hobson & Jourian, 2025, p. 221). It’s what queer and trans people have done throughout history—our ancestors can show us the way!
T.J. Jourian is a freelance writer, independent scholar, and “DEI” consultant and coach. Formerly, he was an assistant professor in higher education leadership at Oakland University and worked in LGBTQ life and campus housing as a student affairs practitioner. Dr. Jourian’s writing, research, and practice center trans and queer people of color’s experiences and worldviews.
Find more information about Envisioning a Critical and Liberatory Approach to Trans and Queer Center(ed) Diversity Work, and purchase the book, here.
Throughout June, Peter Lang will mark Pride Month by showcasing a range of publications that explore and celebrate LGBTQ+ experiences across disciplines, from film and literature to sport, history, and public policy. This curated focus reflects our ongoing commitment to amplifying diverse voices and advancing inclusive scholarship, recognising the importance of equitable representation within academic publishing.
As part of the Peter Lang Pride Month celebrations, we are spotlighting the forthcoming first volume in the new series, Queer Texts.
Last year, Terry Goldie at York University in Canada and Nikolai Endres at Western Kentucky University instigated Peter Lang’s Queer Texts series.
We are pleased to announce that the first book in our series will be a collection of studies of Heated Rivalry, examining both the original novel and the television adaptation.
What a phenomenon! Heated Rivalry is part of the Game Changer series by Rachel Reid, which now comprises six volumes – Game Changer, Heated Rivalry, Tough Guy, Common Goal, Role Model, The Long Game – with a final installment, Unrivaled, promised for next year. Jacob Tierney directed the television series for Crave, starring Hudson Williams as Shane Hollander and Connor Storrie as Ilya Rozanov. HBO subsequently streamed it in the US, with a second season already in production.
Jo Coghlan, Erin Burrell, and Tess Ezzy, the editors of Heated Rivalry: Queer Joy and Intimate Masculinity on Television (Peter Lang, 2026 Forthcoming), begin with a simple premise: “Set in professional ice hockey, Heated Rivalry is propelled by queer characters and the sustained pleasures of their relationship. Its defining contribution is not exposure or transgression, but queer joy: intimacy, desire, humour, trust, and emotional safety enacted within demanding institutional and work settings.”
No subject could be more timely. There are still no openly queer athletes in the National Hockey League, but some former players have talked about what was hidden. And the study ventures still further. Heated Rivalry: Queer Joy goes beyond the ice to consider Ilya’s gay life in Russia, known for President Vladimir Putin’s extreme anti-LGBTQ+ policies. This study arrives at a time when American homophobia is also growing. Heated Rivalry has attracted millions of fans, who want to know more about all aspects. Students and teachers in Queer Studies, Contemporary Television and Streaming Media, Popular Culture, Sports, Sociology, and other fields will benefit. This is television that makes people read books.
The edited volume will cover many topics: hockey culture, homophobia, institutional power, masculinity, fandom, romance, female desire, and more.
The editors:
Dr. Jo Coghlan, Associate Professor in Cultural and Political Sociology at the University of New England, Australia, is author, editor or co-editor of ten books and forty articles and book chapters exploring affective dynamics of power across popular culture, material culture, and political sociology.
Erin K. Burrell, a researcher at the University of New England has published a number of articles and book chapters in which she examines how media and cultural forms mediate social control, with particular emphasis on femininity.
Tess Ezzy is an interdisciplinary sociologist and cultural theorist with a particular interest in technology and inclusion.
Let the puck drop!
Queer Texts is a new Peter Lang series, edited by Terry Goldie (York University) and Nikolai Endres (Western Kentucky University). For more information about the series, or to discuss a proposal, please contact Dr. Philip Dunshea, Senior Acquisitions Editor, at p.dunshea@peterlang.com.
Throughout June, Peter Lang will mark Pride Month by showcasing a range of publications that explore and celebrate LGBTQ+ experiences across disciplines, from film and literature to sport, history, and public policy. This curated focus reflects our ongoing commitment to amplifying diverse voices and advancing inclusive scholarship, recognising the importance of equitable representation within academic publishing.
Discover more titles in Film and Media here:
Embodied Realities
« It’s so queer ! »
Transmedia and Public Representation
Mad Speculations: Anne Carson’s Messiahs and the Canadian Unconscious started out as a project exploring the phenomenon of the messiah in secular culture. As the research took shape, the work came to embody themes central to the Peter Lang series, Reimagining Canada. In this monograph that inaugurates the series, we rp
ead how Carson’s postmodern interpretation of the emancipator signifies the erosion of Canada’s foundational myths; allegiance to Canadian identity is both contested and reinforced by the “nowhere” of the stories driven by the “everyman” protagonists, and points us to envision some imagined future. Does Carson’s work exemplify a Canadian inferiority complex, or does it go beyond it? Do we find in these works an unconscious that speaks of the fragmented nation state? Do we take up Carson’s poetry as a roadmap to saving Canada? In considering these questions and listening to the mad messiahs, Mad Speculations makes some bold claims about the Canadian unconscious.
The Psychotic
In contrast to the neurotypical anxieties of autism that we find in Rainman (1988), Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red (1998) reinvents the autistic story as a queer creative project. Stesichorus’ story about a beast named Geryon murdered by Herakles becomes in Carson’s hands the story of an autistic subject who falls in love with Herakles and then takes authority, literally authorship, over his life through photographs. The narrative ends with Geryon being a saviour figure for his friends. In the context of Carson’s oeuvre, certain texts explore a critical engagement with neurotypical anxieties about psychosis through the messiah. In short, Carson’s postmodernism reimagines the myths of madness and salvation.
The Messiah
Whether consciously or not, I argue, Carson reinvents Frederic Jameson’s “schizophrenic” as a mad messiah which speaks volumes to the Canadian desire for redemption. In the poem, “The Book of Isaiah” (1995), Carson’s prophet-who-becomes-messiah receives the violence of God’s word. It is a text that undermines the grand narratives of psychosis and divine revelation together. Geryon, in Autobiography of Red, is the on-the-psychotic-spectrum protagonist who queers the narrative of salvation. In Red Doc (2013), the saviour is a mosaic of characters struggling with various disorders who escape the dim, ineffective efforts of psychiatric treatment after failing in their messianic mission to heal. Each of these saviour narratives exemplifies how Carson undermines able-minded thinking by embracing fragmented identities that mark a path to a more equitable future.
Secularism
Why would there be a messiah in a secular project? What function would this religious anomaly have in discourse designed to replace religion? As Carson suggests in the interview with Mary Di Michele, worship needs to be accounted for, even in a secular world. But the world of these figures is not just secular. It is, in fact, emblematic of the generic “nowhere” which has been considered a mark of Canadian culture. The nationalism that appears in Carson’s saviours is complicated, a complication that explains the relationship between interpretation and speculation.
Speculation
Interpretation relies on patterns for proposing ways of reading. This project is about proposing ways of reading that are speculative, driven by considering unconscious messages using Freudian/Lacanian methods of interpretation. At the conscious level, Geryon is an autistic queer messianic figure troubling heteronormative hegemony. But Geryon is also personified as this ‘everyman’; buried in his generic features is the white Anglo-Saxon settler so central to Canadian culture. If Geryon’s character is shaped by unconscious Canadian ideology, his messianism is similarly shaped and equally unconscious. The fact is, as my analysis suggests, seeing a connection between Geryon’s representation and two historical figures, namely the first diagnosed schizophrenic, Daniel Paul Schreber as well as the Canadian self-proclaimed messiah, Louis Riél, may be bold but it is worth considering. That is, although these ways of seeing unconscious messaging cannot be substantiated by evidence other than in associative patterns of the text, these ways of seeing push us to look beyond what we think we know about Canada, what we assume is our cultural heritage, what we imagine the messiah is and may come to be.
The Unconscious
Lacan’s way of thinking about the unconscious invites us to imagine a Canadian future deeply buried in Carson’s work. In understanding how the unconscious works, Lacan quotes Freud in this German phrase: Wo Es war, soll Ich werden (where I was, so there shall I be). This is to say that the analysand will find the truth for herself after taking the path her unconscious has laid for her: the unconscious knows before the conscious self can know. In that sense, we can say that at the time of her writing, Carson’s work anticipated our contemporary scholarship that problematizes the neurotypical grand narratives about insanity and divine interventions. Her future is our present. In very provisional ways, then, we might speculate that this analysis of her messiahs, which interrogates the Canadian cultural landscape we know, points us beyond the disability politics Carson grapples with to consider a future in which the Canadian messiah is reinvented for a decolonized tomorrow.
Mad Speculations: Anne Carson’s Messiahs and the Canadian Unconscious gives us a new way of looking at Canadian literature and its unconscious relation to Canadian cultural, political and historical landscapes. Written in accessible language, geared to appeal to undergrad and emeritus alike, it makes intriguing observations and sometimes provocative speculations about what Carson’s mad messiahs can say about the Canadian unconscious.
Concetta Principe teaches English Literature and Creative Writing at Trent University, Durham, Canada. Her current scholarship centers on representations of madness in literature, and how that articulates social traumas.
Mad Speculations: Anne Carson’s Messiahs and the Canadian Unconscious is available now.
by Laima Vincė, author of Vanished Lands: Memory and Postmemory in North American Lithuanian Diaspora Literature, and volume editor of Heritage, Connection, Writing: Conversations with North American Lithuanian Diaspora Writers
I live in a vanished land that reappeared on the world’s map only thirty-six years ago, when Lithuania reinstated its independence—an independence that was painfully lost in 1944, when Soviet Russia illegally occupied Lithuania and incorporated its borders into the Soviet Union, erasing its interwar history of independence and social and cultural progress, rendering its language secondary to Russian, which became the State language, and erasing its cultural memory. Voices that remembered the wounds of World War II, the Holocaust, the Siberian deportations, were silenced. The stories of those whose lives changed forever, and those who were vanished, went underground.
“How does one hold onto so much loss?”
The second Russian occupation came on the heels of a brutal four-year Nazi occupation that caused the murder of ninety-five percent of Lithuania’s prewar Jewish population. Before the Nazis arrived in June 1940 the Red Army and Soviet Russia quickly took control of the country and initiated the deportation of Lithuania’s intellectual and educated class—both Lithuanians and Litvaks (Lithuanian Jews who spoke a dialect of Yiddish called Litvish)—to work camps in Siberia.
Today, here in Lithuania, constantly, every day, we are reminded by the news, by social media, through threats, that Russia intends to vanish Lithuania yet again. These are not empty threats. Every day we hear about Russia’s nightly bombings of Ukraine, of Russian attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure and civilians. Russia is actively destroying and vanishing Ukraine through the ongoing war that Russia initiated in 2014 and which became a full-scale invasion in 2022. The politics of Russia are, and have been for centuries, to vanish the cultures of its neighbors. This is both our cultural memory inheritance and our daily reality.
How does one hold onto so much loss? How does one live with multiple layers of intergenerational historical and cultural and historical trauma? And how can one heal those old wounds when they are constantly torn open and exposed by the events of the present?
These are not strictly academic questions per se, but when writing about the bloodlands (Tymothy Snyder’s term and the title of his book about the Holocaust in this region) these are questions that constantly hover behind the research, the numbers, the history, the archives. For these reasons, my academic monographs, Vanished Lands: Memory and Postmemory in North American Lithuanian Diaspora Literature and Heritage, Connection, Writing: Conversations with North American Lithuanian Diaspora Writers are books about the past and the present all at once. They are books about the shadows, about what lives on in the unconscious behind the glimmer of the present. They are also books that try to make sense of what the future holds for the Baltics and Eastern Europe.
It is the exile, the émigré, the individual pushed out of their own historical, cultural, social, and familial context who must carry their inheritance with them and then make use of it to build a diaspora abroad, in exile. Or else, the exile must relinquish their cultural memory and consciously vanish into a new cultural context. Descendents then come back to pick up the shards and attempt to understand what they have lost through this erasure.
This is perhaps the reason why Baltic people cling to their cultural and linguistic identities with such tenacity. We encounter in Heritage, Connection, Writing, North American writers who write in English and continue to write about Lithuania or at the very least to weave Lithuanian fairy tales, names, and symbols into their work, even when their ancestors emigrated over a century ago. The question the books poses is: Why?
We live in an era of shifting borders, migration, uprootedness caused by on-going wars, climate change, political unrest, hunger and the hoarding of wealth and resources by a very small percentage of this planet’s population. That is why the story of what happened in one small country and how its diaspora carried that story forwards matters. We may apply this story to other nations’ stories. Their cultural inheritance in exile may just show us how the microcosm is contained within the macrocosm.
“It is the exile, […] pushed out of their own historical, cultural, social, and familial context who must carry their inheritance with them and then make use of it to build a diaspora abroad”
Since Lithuania’s period of national rebirth in the late 1980s and early 1990s, over a hundred works of literature in the genres of fiction, memoir, literary nonfiction, essays, poetry, and drama have been written in English by North American writers of Lithuanian heritage. They have been published by commercial and university presses in the United States and Canada, and yet thematically these literary works are preoccupied with collective trauma that has affected Lithuania. Topics range from the nineteenth-century efforts of Tsarist Russia to Russify the Lithuanian population, the Soviet Russian occupation (1940-1941, 1944-1991), the Nazi occupation and Holocaust in Lithuania (1941-1944), the postwar armed resistance in Lithuania, and the plight of the World War II displaced persons.
A life lived within two or more cultures and languages becomes second nature to those born into an ethnic diaspora. Children and grandchildren of refugees learn to hold two or three cultural perspectives in balance. They become the keepers of their parents’ lost nations, collective trauma, historical memory. They carry the burden of explaining what the elder generation has endured. They also inherit their parents and grandparents’ survivors’ guilt. They know the toll it takes on the psyche to balance two or more cultural identities.
I explore these themes in my book, Vanished Lands. My second book published with Peter Lang International Academic Publishers, Heritage, Connection, Writing, continues this conversation with writers who were born into or inherited the emotional space of exile. This book presents different perspectives on what it means to retain a Lithuanian or Litvak heritage while living in North America and writing in English. The oldest participant in this book is age 91 and the youngest 40. Within those 51 years lies a vast expanse of history and cultural identity, sometimes lost and later regained. With birth years spanning from 1933 to 1985, the voices presented in this book represent a cross-section of three generations. Memory and postmemory writing are important features in the work of many of these writers. The rite of return journey is key to many of the conversations in this book and is one of the major themes in literature produced by these writers.
Heritage, Connection, Writing is organized into three sections. Part I consists of conversations with writers whose ethnic Lithuanian ancestors immigrated to the United States and Canada during the first wave of migration from Lithuania that took place from 1868 to 1918. This migration was mostly economically motivated, although conscription into the Russian army was a major catalyst for emigration for both Litvak and Lithuanian men. Litvak emigration tended to be permanent, while Christian Lithuanian emigration tended to be cyclical, with family members returning with savings from their earnings to re-establish themselves in Lithuania.
The second section consists of conversations with the descendants of political refugees who fled Lithuania during the first and second Soviet Russian occupations (1940–1 and 1944–91) and is divided into two subsections. The first section features interviews with writers who were displaced out of Lithuania as children and those born in the displaced persons camps in the Allied territories of Germany after World War II. The second subsection focuses on second and third generation American and Canadian born writers who grew up for the most part within the cultural, social, and educative space of the Lithuanian diaspora community created by the displaced persons (D.P.s) after emigrating to the United States and Canada in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Part III is comprised of conversations with three generations of American writers of Litvak heritage, all of whom have chosen to maintain cultural and social ties with the contemporary Republic of Lithuania.
“A life lived within two or more cultures and languages becomes second nature to those born into an ethnic diaspora”
Vanished Lands is about the past. I analyze memoirs that reflect on the historical trauma of the Holocaust in Lithuania during the Nazi occupation. I write about postmemory works of literary nonfiction by descendants of Lithuanian Nazi collaborators who reflect on inherited guilt and intergenerational trauma, about the collective trauma experienced by Lithuanians during the Soviet Russian occupation of Lithuania and the deportations to Siberia. I discuss literary works that reference the Lithuanian Anti-Soviet armed resistance, forced migration, and immigration to North America. Finally, I write about how post-traumatic growth expressed through the communal activities of society, education, and culture enabled Lithuanian displaced persons to construct a cultural memory diaspora.
Heritage, Connection, Writing is about the future. This is a book about the ways that contemporary transnational diaspora writers have integrated their experiences and research into their own unique visions of Lithuania that is expressed in their literary work. In its essence, it is a book of conversations between descendants and ancestors. The Lithuanian word for ancestors is protėviai—elders who came before. The word for homeland is tėvynė—the land where the elders reside. Etymologically, the concepts of homeland and ancestors are linked through language. This connection is deeply embedded in the Lithuanian psyche and continues even in the diaspora. Ultimately, both books are about hope for a shared future that holds the lessons of the past in balance.
Use code LV15 at checkout to receive a 15% discount on Vanished Lands and Heritage, Connection, Writing, or contact orders@peterlang.com to order directly. Valid from 18 May – 15 June 2026. Not applicable in countries with fixed book pricing.
by Graeme D. Eddie, author of Sweden’s Pandemic Story: COVID-19, A Chronology 2020–23. Foolhardy, Exceptional, or Just Principled?
In Spring 2020, pandemic year, many media eyes were on Sweden. Narrated to the rest of Europe was the story of no lockdown, no mask-wearing, children still at school, young people lounging about in cafes and parks, and a working economy instead of one closed down. Harshly critical politicians and scientists in other countries warned of such an unorthodox response to such a cruel virus.
As we watched the Swedish Coronavirus drama unfold, we noted the principal characters —the state epidemiologist, the director of the public health agency, the prime minister, and the health and finance ministers. It was not immediately apparent though, that other prominent actors in the drama would turn out to be Swedish and Danish mink (read the book!) and the proud and confident fixed link structure joining Sweden with Denmark.
History of the Bridge
Opened in 2000, and spanning the Sound, or Öresund — the narrow channel joining an arm of the North Sea to the Baltic Sea — separating Sweden and Denmark, the Öresund Bridge had become an iconic symbol of Nordic co-operation and engineering innovation1. Institutionally, structurally, and then physically after the opening of the bridge-tunnel fixed link, Sweden was connected to Europe and fellow member-states of the EU, which it had joined in 1995.
The fixed link represented a compromise between bridge and tunnel preferences, transitioning from a cable-stay bridge to an underwater tunnel, and creating a tangible, unified link for road and rail travel, trade, and culture. Indeed, the bridge had starred alongside Sofia Helin (playing Saga Norén, a Swedish police investigator with Asperger Syndrome) in the acclaimed Nordic crime drama, The Bridge, running 2011–18, and broadcast all over the world.
In June 2000 and every summer between 2002 and 2006, and again in 2010 and 2025, the Danish capital Copenhagen, the Öresund Bridge, and the Swedish city of Malmö had co-hosted Broloppet Half Marathon (The Bridge Run). Although only an occasional sporting event, the 2000 run was still listed among the top ten races in the world based on the number of participants and finishers.
In the first couple of years of its life, total traffic2 across the bridge, including commuter-, leisure-, business traffic, and freight (motorcycles, cars, cars with trailers, busses, trucks and vans) amounted to 1.6 million (2000) and 2.9 million (2001). By 2006, bridge traffic had reached 5.7 million, and revenue was perhaps too lucrative, and the structure too busy, to slow right down for an athletic event lasting much of the day. In 2010, traffic was 7 million, and in 2019 it had reached 7.4 million. And then in 2020, Covid-19 arrived in Sweden.
A Pandemic Story
In autumn 2019, reports came to the Swedish Foreign Ministry of a novel coronavirus outbreak that had gripped the Hubei Province of China. Into 2020, the outbreak would become a global pandemic, as Covid-19 swept the globe and arrived in Sweden, bringing the first confirmed case to the city of Jönköping, in late-January. On 11 March, the day that the WHO declared the outbreak to be a global pandemic, Sweden’s first recorded death from Covid-19 occurred at the Karolinska University Hospital in Huddinge, Stockholm. The victim had been over 70 years old with underlying health problems. By mid-March, and with agreement at EU level, non-essential travel into Sweden was banned from all countries except those in the EEA and Switzerland to mitigate the effects of the outbreak and to reduce the spread of the disease. From 14 March 2020, when stricter rules for entry into Denmark had been imposed, the Öresund Bridge had been partially closed, 20 years since its formal opening to traffic. By the end of–March, the EU was in lockdown, though in Sweden less so.
Widely reported on at the time had been Sweden’s unique approach to tackling Covid-19. It had often been described as an ‘experiment’ and ‘maverick’ and had been met with both harsh criticism and some admiration, both at home and abroad. The approach had been described by scientists, politicians, and journalists alike, as risky, brave, and sometimes foolhardy. Sweden was an ‘outrider’, an ‘outlier’. The criticism and admiration – a fascination in a way – had been particularly focussed on the decision to keep nurseries and primary schools open, a lack of national lockdown, and no mask-wearing. As the months had passed however, and into the second year of the pandemic, it came to be realized that while Sweden had suffered many more deaths than its Nordic neighbours, particularly among the elderly in care homes, there had been substantially fewer Swedish deaths overall than in other EU members states of comparable size — in Czechia, Greece, Hungary, and Portugal for example.
But no matter, in the months of the pandemic, after EU member states had adopted a ‘traffic-light’ system to limit the spread of Covid-19 and to maintain free movement within the bloc under safe conditions, and as neighbouring countries began to put in place more relaxed travel measures, Sweden found itself kept out of these. The concentration of Covid-19 in Sweden prevented it from being included. Those wishing to travel to Denmark from Sweden say, had to have a valid reason for doing so, such as living or working there, delivering vital goods, or holding Danish citizenship.
Coronavirus and the devastation in its wake had abruptly closed European borders with the travel restrictions put in place ending ‘free movement of people’, a central pillar of the EU Treaty. The European route E20 via the Öresund Bridge and through Sweden was one of the main road traffic routes from Copenhagen to Helsinki, Finland, and while the bridge had remained open to freight traffic in either direction, as well as to private vehicular travel to Sweden, there were stricter rules for travel into Denmark from Sweden.
As for the Öresund Bridge, in May 2020, the total traffic — motorcycles, cars, vans, and coaches — had been 292,806. This compared with 650,211 in May 2019. As part of travel and free movement under safe conditions, and on a bridge with much less traffic than in a ‘normal’ year, checks still had to be carried out, and queues soon built up. That May, when a six-kilometre-long line of Danish traffic built up, returning from Sweden after the weekend holiday marking Ascension Day (Kristi himmelsfärdsdag), resentment had been fuelled in Sweden over Danes being able to travel freely into the country, while they were barred from travelling to Denmark without good reason. It would not be until August 2020 before Swedes found themselves being included in what had become known as ‘travel bubbles’.
A Recovery
Well into 2021, following 18 months of disruption and to encourage renewed travel between Sweden and Denmark, the commercial operator of the Öresund Bridge (registered as Øresundsbro Konsortiet) announced the launch of a 3-month discount offer to kickstart use of the bridge again and re-invigorate the Öresund Region concept. This international region, composed of Sweden’s third city of Malmö and the Danish capital Copenhagen, and their regional hinterlands, was supposed to have been a common metropolitan area, but it had undergone division during the pandemic. The hospitality industry had been hit especially hard. The number of overnight stays on either side of the Sound had crashed to a record low during the first half of 2021. In Region Skåne, Sweden’s most southerly, overnight stays in guest or tourist accommodation had decreased by 81 per cent compared with the first half of 2019. In the Capital Region of Denmark and Region Zealand, overnight stays of guests and tourists from Sweden had decreased by 91 per cent.
The launch of a ‘Buy one journey, get one free’ offer available between 1 September and 30 November 2021 was an attempt by the bridge consortium to inject greater optimism and to encourage increased travel on both sides of the Sound. Travellers using the bridge were offered favourable discounts in hotels across the Öresund Region.
Cross-border cooperation to match Danish jobs to Swedish jobseekers, and vice versa, had also gotten underway again by the autumn. One initiative was a collaboration between the Capital Region of Denmark, Malmö and Copenhagen municipalities, the Danish Chamber of Commerce (Dansk Ehrverv), and the Swedish Public Employment Service, aimed at solving a post-pandemic labour crisis on both sides of the Öresund and to fill 53,500 Danish private sector vacancies with 65,000 unemployed people in Skåne. The hotel and restaurant industries on both sides of the cross-border region had been struggling to fill vacancies, with several hotels keeping rooms closed because they had not been able to find staff.
After the 2- to 3-year pandemic blip, the notion of a common metropolitan area of greater Malmö and greater Copenhagen — the Öresund Region concept — would return. While in 2020 and 2021, bridge traffic had dipped to 4.6 million and 4.8 million respectively, back to 2004 levels basically, and affecting revenue and profits, by 2022 traffic had grown to 6.7 million, in 2023 it was 7.2 million, and in 2024 it had reached 7.5 million — back to pre-Covid 19 levels. The region was moving again.
Pandemic closures and reduced traffic had indeed been ‘but a blip’, and the Öresund Region was now recognized as the largest labour market in the Nordic region with a population of 4.2 million, though Malmö was perhaps more of an observer to Copenhagen’s success, being a capital city after all, to Malmö’s third city status in Sweden. Celebrating the 25th anniversary of the opening of the fixed link, another Broloppet Half Marathon was held in June 2025 with 40,000 participants, the first man over the line with quickest time being Daniel Nilsson from Sweden, and the first woman was Sarah Bruun from Denmark — local successes from both countries.
About the parts played by Swedish and Danish mink in this Nordic coronavirus drama, and to discover more, read Sweden’s Pandemic Story: COVID-19, A Chronology 2020–23. Foolhardy, Exceptional, or Just Principled?
1 The construction of the Øresund Bridge was a joint project undertaken by Denmark and Sweden, and the completed bridge is owned and operated by Øresundsbro Konsortiet, jointly owned by the Danish and Swedish states. The formal name of the bridge is Øresundsbron, a Scandinavian ‘hybrid word’ merging the Danish rendering of Øresundsbroen with the Swedish Öresundsbron.
2 Traffic statistics throughout the article are taken from ‘Traffic Statistics’ on the Øresundsbron website: https://www.oresundsbron.com/about-oresundsbron/statistik-och-rapporter/traffic-statistics
View of the Öresund Bridge from the Swedish abutment. Captured by Graeme D. Eddie.
Inspired by BBC Radio’s “Desert Island Discs,” the Peter Lang Group presents ‘Peak Reads & Playlists’.
Join us on a journey to the mountain peaks near our Lausanne headquarters where we speak with our esteemed series editors.
In this interview format, our guests share the books, music, and food that would keep them company if they were whisked away alone to this beautiful mountain setting. They’ll explore the reasons behind their choices, revealing the influence each has had on their lives. Get a glimpse into the hearts and minds of the Peter Lang community.
Name: Dr. Irene Maria F. Blayer
Job Title: Full Professor
Series: Interdisciplinary Studies in Diasporas
Books
> Tell us, which fiction and/or non-fiction books would be on your list?
I will weave the question through three books that have quietly, yet decisively, left an indelible mark: the inner weather of a solitary self in Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet; the drift and disorientation of an uprooted circle in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises; and the urban chorus that hums through Cela’s The Hive. Together, they open conversations about belonging, language, everyday labour, and the inventive forms literature forges to hold a fractured modern society. These readings bind inner life to the social fabric and treat form as an ethical choice, aligning with my ongoing preoccupation with home and diasporic belonging.
Fernando Pessoa, Livro do Desassossego (The Book of Disquiet), a masterclass in voice and self-division that sharpens attention to tone, aphorism, and the porous border between author and persona, asking what ‘home’ means when identity is multiple. Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises., a landmark portrait of the “Lost Generation,” where communal drift, ritual and claims of authenticity collide with modern decadence, unrequited love, desire, exile and aimlessness; a counterpoint to Pessoa’s inward gaze. Camilo José Cela, La colmena (The Hive), a mosaic of micro-scenes that builds a collective self-portrait; contingency―who meets whom, where, and when― powers meaning, and fragmentation mirrors a society frayed yet interdependent.
Music
> The mountain ranges have spectacular acoustics. Which 5 MUSICAL RECORDINGS would you take to enjoy whilst up on the summit and why?
It is never easy to confine a lifetime of listening to a few tracks, but given the space and the opportunity, I would let Pressler’s Chopin Nocturne and Pires’s Clair de lune hush the dawn, then open the day with Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Grieg’s Peer Gynt in bright, wind-swept colour. As shadows lengthen, Miles Davis’s Blue in Green invites quiet reflection, before Aznavour’s La bohème warms the twilight with memory and longing. Finally, Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World sends us down the mountain with a simple, grateful blessing.
Food
> We couldn’t let our community feed their souls but not their bodies, so which FOOD DISH would you choose to take with you on the mountain retreat?
Some chocolate would suffice, my enduring favourite, inviting slow savouring; nothing that competes, only complements.
Thank you to Dr Irene Maria F. Blayer for joining us up the mountain!
Discover the series here – Interdisciplinary Studies in Diasporas
Inspired by BBC Radio’s “Desert Island Discs,” the Peter Lang Group presents ‘Peak Reads & Playlists’.
Join us on a journey to the mountain peaks near our Lausanne headquarters where we speak with our esteemed series editors.
In this interview format, our guests share the books, music, and food that would keep them company if they were whisked away alone to this beautiful mountain setting. They’ll explore the reasons behind their choices, revealing the influence each has had on their lives. Get a glimpse into the hearts and minds of the Peter Lang community.
Name: Dr Valentina Bold
Job Title: Series Editor
Series: Studies in the History and Culture of Scotland
Books
> Which FICTION title would take the coveted first spot on your list?
James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) is the one fiction title that surprises me on each reading. It is original and startlingly innovative: as relevant today as it was when it was written. The narrators are unreliable and might be insane; characters might not exist (hardly any are likeable); religious values are distorted and destructive. Justified Sinner is set in a world where the natural and supernatural are a shifting continuum, where present and past co-exist. No one can be trusted, least of all the author.
> If you were offered the chance to take a NON-FICTION title, which would you choose?
Jen Stout’s Night Train to Odesa (2024) gripped me from the first page to the last. It is a personal, direct and heartfelt account of conflict and its impact, particularly on women. Through a journalist’s clear vision, this is perceptive, insightful, compassionate writing, from a Shetlander’s perspective, focussed on Ukraine.
> We’re feeling generous so we’ll allow you one more book, your choice of FICTION or NON-FICTION – which one makes the list?
This one has to be poetry: to feed the soul as well as the mind. I would like the ‘O Choille gu Bearradh / From Wood to Ridge’, the Collected Poems of Somhairle MacGill-Eain / Sorley MacLean (1911 – 1996) edited by Christopher Whyte. There is a wealth of experience here that goes beyond the personal, into the political, natural and imaginative, from the Gàidhealtachd into Europe, with consummate ease, anchored in tradition, exploring with imagination and grace.
Music
> The mountain ranges have spectacular acoustics. Which 5 MUSICAL RECORDINGS would you take to enjoy whilst up on the summit and why?
- The McCalmans, ‘The Ettrick Shepherd’
Beautiful settings of James Hogg’s poetry and songs: varied, haunting and entertaining.
2. Sheena Wellington, ‘Hamely Fare’
Great selection of Scottish tradition from one of our finest, and most influential, singers: powerful, important and compassionate.
3. Karine Polwart, ‘This is Karine Polwart’
Fifty songs from a wonderful singer, which would help me remember Scotland in all its diverse moods.
4. Emily Smith, ‘This is Emily Smith’
All three women singers in my list are song-writers as well as outstanding performers; this selection is remarkable for its stylistic range as well as Smith’s superb delivery.
5. Nicola Benedetti, ‘This is Nicola Benedetti’
For when I need instrumental space to contemplate, and to celebrate, there would be nothing better than violinist extraordinaire, in this wide-ranging collection.
Food
> We couldn’t let our community feed their souls but not their bodies, so which FOOD DISH would you choose to take with you on the mountain retreat?
Sweet soul food by choice: shortbread, following a traditional recipe such as these.
Thank you to Dr Valentina Bold for joining us up the mountain!
Discover the series here – Studies in the History and Culture of Scotland
One of the most profound moments for an academic publisher is when we lose one of our authors. Their work is a lasting legacy, a reminder of the career and passion they dedicated their lives to. For us, as their publishers, we become the caretakers of that legacy.
This responsibility becomes even more significant when a project is still in production. Fortunately, we often have the honour of working with the author’s family or co-authors to ensure their work continues to reach the global research community.
This is the case with a forthcoming trio of titles: Hope and Despair, Wounded Nostalgia, and The Madness That Is Also in Us—English translations of works by the renowned psychiatrist Eugenio Borgna.
Eugenio Borgna, who passed away the 4th of December 2024, aged 94, was the most prominent Italian psychiatrist of his time. His works have made mental illness comprehensible to the readership and removed the boundaries created by misconception and fear. In his writing he makes acceptable what the society instinctively rejected as different and dangerous. His written work is a complement to Franco Basaglia’s psychiatric revolution.
We are proud to be able to publish these translated texts and continue to raise awareness of Eugenio Borgna’s work and the difference he made in making mental illness better understood.
Each title will feature a preface and we share a small snippet of these here.
“I write as an editor for the publishing house that is bringing Borgna into English for the first time, with a trilogy composed of Hope and Despair, Wounded Nostalgia, and The Madness That Is Also in Us. Again here, one need only glance at the titles to grasp the author’s aims: as a phenomenologist, opposed to any form of biological reductionism of psychiatric disorders and backed by direct clinical experience, the intention is to make madness understandable, acceptable, “normalize” it, in today’s parlance, by demonstrating readers its proximity to us all.”
Ilaria de Seta
“Of Eugenio Borgna, we appreciate his objectivity and composure, the measure that gives his texts, never caustic or brutal, the hushed tone of quiet reflection. Yet this moderation conceals a great radicalism. If there is such a thing as an intimately relational psychiatry, based on listening, “humanistic” and anti-authoritarian, this is precisely the psychiatry to associate with Borgna”.
Michele Dantini
“Eugenio Borgna is, equally with Franco Basaglia, the most important Italian psychiatrist. If Basaglia gave psychiatric patients back their freedom (with his reform that led to the passage of Law 180 in Italy in 1978), Borgna gave psychiatry back its soul.”
Stefano Redaelli