Walls, Borders, Boundaries—Spatial and Cultural Practices in Europe

Reflective of the "spatial turn" in the humanities and social sciences, this collection brings together scholars from the fields of anthropology, cultural and religious studies, geography, history, literature, performance art, political science, and sociology to examine spatial and cultural practices of city walls, border zones, and boundaries in Europe. The editors (respectively, professors of German and theatre, cultural geography, and history at the U. of Wisconsin, US; the National U. of Ireland Maynooth; and the U. of Oklahoma, US) present 11 papers examining such topics as the dialectics of urban form in absolutist France, contemporary (b)ordering walls in Europe, border guarding as social practice in the case of Czech communist governance, borders and the European Union's eastern enlargement, Islamic migration and the boundaries of liberal democracy in Switzerland and Germany, generational barriers dividing postwar Albanian migrant communities, and landscapes of memory in the Cyprus demilitarized zone. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Janet Ward is Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma and author of Post-Wall Berlin: Borders, Space and Identity and Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany. Her current work includes a co-edited collection on (trans)nationalism and the German city, and a book project on urban destruction and reconstruction.