Routledge Studies in Cultural History
About the Book Series
This series aims to present both case studies and the latest theoretical perspectives on the subject. It is not confined to any particular period or school of thought and seeks to provide a broad range of topics and events from around the world.
Construction Toys and Modern European Culture: Education, Politics, and Technology, 1830 to 1940
1st Edition
By Artemis Yagou
December 15, 2025
This innovative take on construction toys explores the development and use of building-inspired playthings between 1830 and 1940 as they became the educational toys par excellence for industrial and industrialising societies in Europe and elsewhere. Playful and instructive at the same time, and ...
Embodied Labour: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Work's Cultural Heritage in Modern Europe
1st Edition
Edited
By Marta Kurkowska-Budzan, Aleksandra Galasińska
November 26, 2025
In a world where physical labour seems to disappear from dominant public narratives, Embodied Labour offers an in-depth, interdisciplinary analysis of the bodily experiences of work and their significance as elements of European cultural heritage. This collection examines the physical dimension of ...
Czech and Polish Sound Memories of the Second World War: Museums, Literature, Sound Art
1st Edition
By Radmila Švaříčková Slabáková, Marcin Filipowicz, Andrea Hanáčková, Dobrawa Lisak-Gębala, Sławomir Wieczorek
November 03, 2025
This book investigates the crucial yet often overlooked role of sound in shaping the memory of the Second World War. Through an interdisciplinary and transnational approach, this volume addresses a notable gap in memory studies and argues that auditory experiences are central to how war is ...
European Empires on a Plate: c. 1750–Today
1st Edition
Edited
By Ilaria Berti, Stefano Magagnoli, Peter Scholliers, Peter J. Atkins
June 29, 2025
This book uses food to explore the uneven and multifaceted encounters between European imperial societies and their colonies, examining the cultural, social, political and economic forces behind European empires. Food is a key focus of current transdisciplinary and border research, and these ...
Korean Culture in the Global Age: K-Pop, K-Drama, K-Film, and K-Literature
1st Edition
Edited
By Joanne Miyang Cho, Lee M. Roberts
June 29, 2025
Since the late 1990s, South Korean cultural products such as pop music, TV drama, and film have shaped the country’s image around the world. This book explores these three internationally best-known media of the Korean Wave global phenomenon, along with a less commonly featured aspect, K-literature...
Colonial Ambitions and Collecting Anxieties: Aboriginal Objects and Western Australian Frontiers, 1828–1914
1st Edition
By Nicola Froggatt
May 09, 2025
European portrayals of Aboriginal people and their objects have long had political implications. This book explores ‘ethnographic’ objects from Western Australia now in British and Irish museums, and is the first full scholarly treatment of their part in fashioning colonial relationships and ...
Anthropology and Race in Belgium and the Congo (1839-1922)
1st Edition
By Maarten Couttenier
May 05, 2025
This book examines the history of Belgian physical anthropology in the long nineteenth century and discusses how the notion of ‘race’ structured Belgian pasts and presents as well as relations between metropole and empire. In a context of competing European nationalisms, Belgian anthropologists ...
Messianic and Utopian Influences on Imperial Spain: A Comparative Study in the Works of Tommaso Campanella and Pedro Fernández de Quirós
1st Edition
By George M. Roure
April 17, 2025
Roure draws a novel connection between Tommaso Campanella’s utopian ideas for Imperial Spain and Catholicism and Portuguese navigator Pedro Fernández de Quirós’ vision of an idyllic society and a mythical city of New Jerusalem in the antipodes. The book presents newfound evidence suggesting Spain ...
British Representations of the Middle East in the Exhibition Space, 1850–1932: Race, Gender, and Morality
1st Edition
By Holly O'Farrell
April 13, 2025
This volume analyses British exhibitions of Middle Eastern (particularly ancient Egyptian and Persian) artefacts during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – examining how these exhibitions defined British self image in response to the Middle Eastern ‘other’. This study is an original ...
German-Speaking Jewish Refugees in Asia, 1930–1950: Shelter from the Storm?
1st Edition
Edited
By Joanne Miyang Cho, Eric Kurlander, Douglas McGetchin
March 30, 2025
Although most perished, hundreds of thousands of Central European Jews escaped the Holocaust; tens of thousands of these Jewish refugees ended up in East Asia, Southeast Asia, or South Asia. Taking a global and transnational approach, this volume examines the cultural, political, and socioeconomic ...
Homesickness around the Mediterranean, 1492–1923
1st Edition
Edited
By José Alberto Rodrigues da Silva Tavim, João Teles e Cunha
March 30, 2025
This volume analyzes how people of diverse cultural and religious backgrounds living around the “Middle Sea” perceived, felt, and described homesickness, using a multidisciplinary approach which brings new perspectives to known phenomena and their evolving meanings. The sixteen chapters in this ...
Frameworks of Time in Rousseau
1st Edition
Edited
By Jason Neidleman, Masano Yamashita
January 30, 2025
Frameworks of Time in Rousseau explores the ways in which Jean-Jacques Rousseau envisaged time as a diagnostic tool for understanding the state of society and the predicaments of modernity. Central to his conceptualization of both nature and history, time also plays a unique role in Rousseau’s ...