Sentient animals, machines, and robots abound in German literature and culture, but there has been surprisingly limited scholarship on non-human life forms in German studies. This volume extends interdisciplinary research in emotion studies to examine non-humans and the affective relationships between humans and non-humans in modern German cultural history. In recent years, fascination with emotions, developments in robotics, and the burgeoning of animal studies in and beyond the academy have given rise to questions about the nature of humanity. Using sources from the life sciences, literature, visual art, poetry, philosophy, and photography, this collection interrogates not animal or machine emotions per se, but rather uses animals and machines as lenses through which to investigate human emotions and the affective entanglements between humans and non-humans. The COVID-19 pandemic made us more keenly aware of the importance of both animals and new technologies in our daily lives, and this volume ultimately sheds light on the centrality of non-humans in the human emotional world and the possibilities that relationships with non-humans offer for enriching that world. Watch our talk with the editors Erika Quinn and Holly Yanacek here: https://youtu.be/RBMwXah_Om8

Keywords for Today takes us deep into the history of the language in order to better understand our contemporary world. From nature to cultural appropriation and from black to terror, the most important words in political and cultural debate have complicated and complex histories. This book sketches these histories in ways that illuminate the political bent and values of our current society. Written by The Keywords Project, a group of independent scholars who have spent more than a decade on this work, the book updates and extends Raymond Williams's classic work, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. First published in 1976, when Williams was the most important socialist thinker in Britain, Keywords had been written twenty years earlier as notes for Culture and Society (1958), one of the founding texts of cultural studies. Keywords for Today updates approximately 40 of Williams's original entries, such as nature, realism, violence, for the twenty-first century, and adds some 85 new entries, ranging from access to youth. The book is both a history of English, documenting important semantic change in the language, and a handbook of current political and ideological debate. Whether it is demonstrating the only recently-acquired religious meaning of fundamentalism or the complicated linguistic history of queer, Keywords for Today will intrigue and enlighten. This is an essential tool for any critical thinker interested in the history of language or politics. From culture to identity, from sexuality to socialism, Keywords for Today provides the crucial contexts and histories of our vocabulary.