How did well-meaning Victorians try to make sense of the teeming diversity of people in London and across the globe? This thorough, clearly written work of cultural history ranges from literature to art to law to statistics, examining the different habits of mind employed in characterizing humanity in the nineteenth century.

The New Yorker’s Paris studies the cultural impact of Janet Flanner, better known as Genêt, the overseas correspondent of The New Yorker magazine for fifty years (1925-1975). Her witty, wry, well-crafted columns helped her audience understand Parisians and the legacy of her insights reverberates among reporters today.

Music and Noise examines the practice of controversial Protestant parading in present-day Northern Ireland. Refraining from common categorizations of parading as straightforwardly political or apolitically “cultural,” anthropologist Sean French’s ethnographic study instead asks: political in what way?

Hope amid Despair tells the story of life on Lampedusa, a small island in the central Mediterranean and the southernmost frontier of undocumented migration to Europe. Alessandro Corso argues for an understanding of this border zone not as a site of order and control, but as one of existential struggle and moral possibility.