Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies

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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!

2026 - AIAS FELLOWS' BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS

Amy Boulton, 
AIAS-ART Fellow

Siliva Federica, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle


This book has been foundational to my thinking and practice as a contemporary artist and researcher for the past 10+ years. In this collection of essays spanning 1975-2010, Federici outlines the materialist-feminist political position that emerged from (and forms a critique of) the post-war Italian Operaist workers' movement, building on the political centrality of the wage, but redefining their concept of the "social factory" to focus on the home as the central source of all labour power. In 1972 Federici joined the International "Wages for Housework" Campaign, which was both a revolutionary strategy and a political perspective. 
By demanding a wage for reproductive labour that takes place in the private sphere, they aimed to de-naturalise this from being seen as "women's work", and thereby claimed the right to negotiate the terms in which they engaged with it – including the right to refuse it. Of course, this demand was taken too literally, and so in 1975 Federici published her pivotal essay "Wages against Housework" in which the political-economic construct of the wage is explicitly used as a force of social power, aiming to emancipate all workers from capitalism's parasitic dependency on the unrecognised and uncompensated work of producing and reproducing labour power itself.
Feminist analysis of reproductive work was an oversight of Marxist and later Italian Autonomist theory, but Federici makes explicit how fundamental reproductive labour is to advanced capitalist economies. Setting this against a modern backdrop of women's increased economic independence and declining birth rates on the one hand, and counter-movements of "trad-wives" and the popularisation of "AI girlfriends" on the other, shows just how volatile the demand for and contestation of reproductive labour still is.
 

Anja Bechmann, 
Carlsberg Monograph Fellow

Geoffrey Bowkey, Sorting Things Out


A classic that has been very defining in my work with platform technology and infrastructure.

Cameron Hu, 
AIAS-AUFF Fellow

Stanley Cavall, The Claim of Reason


I am still reading this book all the time, a decade after I first encountered it. The Claim of Reason showed me the kind of moral attention a mind could play to its own movement.
 

Elias Götz, 
AIAS-RJ Fellow

Steven Ward, Status and the Challenge of Rising Power


Great book, which outlines how the quest for status in international politics can lead to revisionism and highly assertive foreign policies. What makes this book so intriguing are two things: first, it advances a smart argument about conflict in world politics, which combines both international-level and domestic-level factors; and second, it demonstrate the analytical leverage of this theoretically informed argument on a set of historical and contemporary case studies. The book inspired me to think more thoroughly about status in worlds politics.

Ermias Debie, 
AIAS-AUFF Fellow

Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolution


The structure of Scientific Revolution by Thomas S. Kuhn showed me scientific progress often comes through paradigms that transform how we understand the world.
 

George Salter, 
AIAS-SD Fellow

Susan States, States and Markers


This book was one of the first to make me excited about the topic of International Political Economy (IPE). Susan Strange writes with both refreshing critical depth and accessibility given the ideas on display. 

Isabelle Torrance, 
Carlsberg Monograph Fellow

Ferdia Lennon, Glorious Exploits


This novel by Irish author Ferdia Lennon is a historical fiction inspired by the anecdote that Athenian POWs, imprisoned in the quarries of Sicily, earned food and freedom by reciting verses from the tragedies of Euripides for their captors. Set in Syracuse in 412 BCE, but written in a contemporary Dublin dialect, Lennon uses wit, humour, and Greek tragedy to subvert social hierarchies, to generate empathy between bitter enemies, and to pose hard universal questions about the impact and brutality of war.

Joshua Bergamin, 
AIAS-AUFF Fellow

Andrew Bowie, Music, Philosophy, and Modernity


My scholarly work has focused on the limits of language, and my interest in art stems from how it expresses what words cannot. In this book, Andrew Bowie takes up these questions profoundly and articulately. Rather than trying to translate music’s meaning into (natural) language, Bowie asks how philosophers can engage with music on its own terms, and thus broaden our conception of language, meaning, and the human condition.

Lars Thorup Larsen, 
Carlsberg Monograph Fellow

Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine. The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry


Paul Starr's seminal book shows how most of the attributes that we associate with the medical profession and health care – high status, authority, science-based and always in short supply – are not naturally given, but the product of a very succesful constitution of a health care market and a culturing of the 'legitimate complexity' of medicine. Although theoretically simple, this was an important historical counterfactual for me to question how and why we accept expertise.

Octavio Bramajo, 
AIAS-AUFF Fellow

Emile Durkheim, Suicide


It is one of the greatest books ever in Sociology and Public Health. It's the kind of book that makes you want to have a career out of analyzing data and interpreting it.

Pablo Velasco, 
AIAS-ART Fellow

Noortje Marres, Digital Sociology


This book situates the role of social studies in a digital landscape. Not only as digital tools to be adapted to a field, or vice versa, but as a tandem re-organization of methods and sociological theory. Few books rethink a field in this compelling way. 

Sayeh Khaniha 
AIAS-AUFF Fellow

Roman Vershynin, High-Dimensional Probability: An Introduction with Applications in Data Science


This book has greatly influenced my research by providing a rigorous probabilistic perspective on high-dimensional data and random structures. I particularly appreciate how it connects modern probability theory with data science and machine learning, making it a valuable reference for both theoretical understanding and practical applications.

Rachele Pierini, 
AIAS-SD Fellow

Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture


Elevating. At its finest, research expands fields, grows knowledge, and makes the impossible possible. It pushes the boundaries of knowledge and, often, those of the researcher first. Collaboration, engagement, and dialogue are the strands that the pioneer researcher brings together to turn vision into reality. Yet this journey does not have to be undertaken in isolation. Building the infrastructures that sustain and amplify such growth is the next step. This is the kind of research culture I wish to help build at AIAS. Elevating through Making.

2025 - PAST AIAS FELLOWS' BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS

  • Alison Gerber, AIAS-RJ Fellow, recommends ‘Seeing like a Rover’ by Janet Vertesi.
  • Anneke Kampman, AIAS-ART Fellow, recommends ‘Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital’ by Marina Vishmidt.
  • Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen, Carlsberg Monograph Fellow, recommends ‘Critical Terms for Media Studies’ by W. J. T. Mitchell.
  • Casper Andersen, AIAS-SD Fellow, recommends ‘The Education of a British-Protected Child’ by Chinua Achebe.
  • Dario Campisi, AIAS-AUFF Fellow, recommends ‘Molecular Astrophysics’ by A.G.G.M. Tielens.
  • Emily Cockayne, AIAS-AUFF Fellow, recommends ‘Synthetic Worlds - Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry’ by Esther Leslie.
  • Federica Cavaletti, AIAS-AUFF Fellow, recommends ‘Lived Time. Phenomenological and Psychopathological Studies’ by Eugène Minkowski.
  • Malene Friis Hansen, AIAS-AUFF Fellow, recommends ‘Monkeys on the Edge’ by Michael D. Gumert.
  • Maria Rentetzi, AIAS-SD Fellow, recommends ‘The Science Studies Reader’ by Mario Biagoli.
  • Mathias Clasen, Carlsberg Monograph Fellow, recommends ‘Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature’  by Joseph Carroll.
  • Matteo De Donà, AIAS-SD Fellow, recommends ‘Designs on nature: Science and democracy in Europe and the United States’ by Sheila Jasanoff.
  • Nazik Ogretmen, AIAS-AUFF Fellow, recommends ‘Sir Charles Lyell's Scientific Journals on the Species Question’ by Charles Lyell.
  • Susanne Ravn, Carlsberg Monograph Fellow, recommends ‘(toward) a Phenomenology of acting’ by Phillip Zarrilli.

2024 - PAST AIAS FELLOWS' BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS

  • Andrei Kalinichev, AIAS-AUFF Fellow, recommends ‘Principles of Chemical Sensors’ by Jiri Janata.
  • Anna Maria Langmüller, AIAS-AUFF Fellow, recommends ‘She Has Her Mother’s Laugh’ by Carl Zimmer.
  • Bharti Arora, AIAS-AUFF Fellow, recommends ‘Unclaimed harvest: An Oral History of the Tebhaga Women’s Movement’ by Kavita Panjabi.
  • Brad Wray, Carlsberg Monograph Fellow, recommends ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ by Thomas S. Kuhn.
  • Bruna Neves de Freitas, AIAS-AUFF Fellow, recommends ‘The Power of Now: A Guide to spiritual Enlightenment’ by Eckhart Tolle.
  • Carsten Levisen, Carlsberg Monograph Fellow, recommends ‘Imprisoned in English: The hazards of English as a default language’ by Anna Wierzbicka.
  • Christian Mario Appendini, AIAS-AUFF Fellow, recommends ‘Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hurricanes’ by Kerry Emanuel.
  • Elena-Daniela Ana, AIAS-AUFF Fellow, recommends ‘Environment, labour and capitalism at sea’ by Penny McCall Howard.
  • Elisabetta Ferrari, AIAS-AUFF Fellow, recommends ‘The Digital Sublime’ by Vincent Mosco.
  • Ester Salgarella, AIAS-AUFF Fellow, recommends ‘Image Science. Iconology, visual culture, and media aesthetics’ by W.J.T. Mitchell.
  • Ilya Utekhin, AIAS-SHAPE Fellow, recommends ‘A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind’ by Gregory Bateson.
  • Pierre Louis du Plessis, AIAS-AUFF Fellow, recommends ‘Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa’ by Julie Livingstone.
  • Samuel Schlaefli, ERC FRONTIERS Fellow, recommends ‘The Ministry for the Future’ by Kim Stanley Robinson.
Revised 16.09.2026
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