Book
Recommendations

by Fellows

AIAS fellows are asked to recommend a book that has inspired their work. On this page, you can find their recommendations and motivations for recommending exactly that book. The books are physically on display in the AIAS Lounge and can be on loan.

The books serve as a source for inspiration for critical thinking and offer concrete ideas from researchers from other fields and with different mindsets. Also they relate fellows and spark new conversations among the AIAS community of scholars.

The books are presented during the AIAS Friday Breakfasts.

We hope this virtual display will also inspire you – enjoy!

2024 - AIAS FELLOWS' BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS

Andrei Kalinichev,
AIAS-AUFF Fellow

Jiri Janata, Principles of Chemical Sensors

This book offers a comprehensive overview of the physical and chemical principles behind chemical sensors. A must-read for anyone embarking on a journey in chemical sensor research.

Anna Maria Langmüller,
AIAS-AUFF Fellow

Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh

"She Has Her Mother's Laugh" by Carl Zimmer is probably my favorite popular science book of all time. In this book, Zimmer explores how traits are inherited and offers comprehensive perspectives on the forces that shape the genetic diversity around us. The combination of historical context, cutting-edge science, and personal narratives makes heredity not only a fascinating concept for the lay reader but also rekindled my love for population genetics.

Bharti Arora,
AIAS-AUFF Fellow

Kavita Panjabi, Unclaimed harvest: An Oral History of the Tebhaga Women’s Movement

The book is based on women’s participation in the Tebhaga struggle (peasants' uprising to retain two-thirds of the grain they harvest) led by the undivided Communist Party of India in 1946. Challenging the standard narratives of women as goddesses and mothers of the nation that gained traction under the aegis of anti-colonial and nationalist movements, the book highlights women as historically and socially constituted subjects, emphasising ways in which their affective subjectivities shaped this crucial juncture of collective struggle in history. These women fought alongside peasants, sharecroppers, labourers, Adivasi, and Muslim rural workers, challenging the ascriptive hierarchies and feudal contexts of colonial India. By so doing the book registers the evolution of a new aesthetic based on subjective transformations that were instrumental in forging networks of political solidarity across regions, castes, and ethnicities.

Brad Wray,
Carlsberg Monograph Fellow

Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Why?: Kuhn challenges many common presuppositions about scientific knowledge. Importantly, he also emphasizes the social dimensions of scientific practice, reminding us that scientific communities are tradition-bound, generally working within the bounds of an accepted theory, assuming it is a reliable guide for investigating the world. Despite this fact, the history of science is marked by dramatic changes of theory, where a research community abandons a long-held successful theory for a new theory, one that makes different assumptions about the fundamental structure of reality.

Bruna Freitas,
AIAS-AUFF Fellow

Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to spiritual Enlightenment

The Power of Now" has inspired my research by emphasizing staying present and teachings on detaching from the ego. This has helped me concentrate better without being overwhelmed by deadlines or interruptions, improving my problem-solving skills, critical thinking, and resilience when faced with setbacks. Overall, these principles have fostered a positive and productive mindset beneficial to my research.

Carsten Levisen,
Carlsberg Monograph Fellow

Anna Wierzbicka, Imprisoned in English: The hazards of English as a default language

What happens to international research when it takes place almost exclusively in English? This is Wierzbicka's question to us. How does English frame our research questions and our knowledge production. And how can we think beyond the categories imposed on us by English?

Christian Appendini,
AIAS-AUFF Fellow

Kerry Emanuel, Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hurricanes

This book offers a compelling blend of historical context and scientific analysis focused on one of the most powerful natural phenomena on Earth: hurricanes. Emanuel's book provides a thorough exploration of how these extreme weather events have shaped human history and our understanding of the natural world. As a scientist deeply interested in the extremes of ocean dynamics, this book resonates with my work, particularly in understanding large-scale disturbances like sargassum beaching events. While completely different from hurricanes, sargassum accumulations represent another form of extreme events that significantly impacts humans. Emanuel's insights into the dynamics and impacts of hurricanes enhance my perspective on how extremes shape human development.

Elena-Daniela Ana,
AIAS-AUFF Fellow

Penny McCall Howard, Environment, labour and capitalism at sea

This book on livelihoods on the water has been a great inspiration for my planned research on desertification, offering me a very compelling new way of approaching human-environment relations by combining phenomenology and political economy. It is simply a fascinating ethnography that follows livelihoods at sea and brings rich phenomenological descriptions of interactions with the environment within a broader context of market and power relations.

Elisabetta Ferrari,
AIAS-AUFF Fellow

Vincent Mosco, The Digital Sublime

An extraordinary book that critically explores the utopian discourses that surrounded digital technologies in the crucial period of the 1990s and interrogates the connection between US politics and technology.

Ester Salgralla,
AIAS-AUFF Fellow

W.J.T. Mitchell, Image Science. Iconology, visual culture, and media aesthetics

Can the visual world become an object of scientific investigation? In Mitchell’s view, the answer is yes. Image Science (2015) is a cutting-edge work gathering Mitchell’s most recent essays on media aesthetics, visual culture, and artistic symbolism. In his earlier, pioneering works (Iconology, 1986; Picture Theory, 1994; What Do Pictures Want?, 2005) Mitchell launched the interdisciplinary study of visual media, studying images as objects of investigation in and of themselves, thus advocating a novel approach to visual culture aiming to overcome the traditional dichotomy between natural and human sciences.

Ilya Utekhin,
AIAS-SHAPE Fellow

Gregory Bateson, A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind

Gregory Bateson was one of the most original anthropologists of our time, whose cybernetically informed contribution to the intellectual landscape of the XX century goes far beyond anthropology and is important for the study of human communication, semiotics, psychiatry and psychotherapy, and, ultimately, for the understanding of human meaning making activities. Together with his earlier "Steps to an Ecology of Mind" and his monographic study of a ritual in the culture of the Yatmul of the Sepik river in Papua New Guinea (Naven, 1936, 1958), this book contains a lot of insights that make the readers change the way they think.

Pierre du Plessis,
AIAS-AUFF Fellow

Julie Livingstone, Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa

Livingston's work inspires my attention to the environmental effects of that result from the pursuit of endless growth in Botswana. It shows how the growth economy has begun to eat away at the very conditions on which it depends, and instead imagines a politics responsive to and responsible towards the animated ecologies with which we live.

Samuel Schlaefli,
ERC FRONTIERS Fellow

Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future

This book is a climate fiction novel. I chose it because I find it fascinating how the author develops possible future scenarios that are thoroughly inspired by science. He also combines data and knowledge from the natural and social sciences, thus giving a broader perspective on the social changes needed to avoid climate catastrophe. Although the book contains some horrific descriptions of the suffering caused by the climate crisis, it is a very hopeful book that celebrates human ingenuity and courage.

Revised 28.01.2025

AIAS

Book Recommendations

Andrei Kalinichev, AIAS-AUFF Fellow