Founded | 1985 |
---|---|
Country of origin | United Kingdom |
Headquarters location | Islington, London |
Distribution | Grantham Book Services (UK) Chicago Distribution Center (The Americas) |
Publication types | Books |
Official website | www |
Reaktion Books is an independent book publisher based in Islington, London, England. It was founded in 1985 in Edinburgh, Scotland, and moved to London in 1987. Reaktion originally focused on the fields of art, architecture, and design. In recent years it has broadened to include more areas and also publishes series of books.
Reaktion originally focused on the fields of art, architecture, and design – its first book was Ian Hamilton Finlay: A Visual Primer [1] [2] by Yves Abrioux. In recent years Reaktion's list has broadened substantially, and now also encompasses animal studies, Asian art and culture, biography, cultural studies, current events, fashion, film, food history, geography, general history, music, philosophy, photography, politics, and sports history. Reaktion now produces around 70 new titles each year and has about 500 titles in print.
Among the monographs released by Reaktion are studies of the Ottoman architect Sinan and the artists Delaroche, Holbein, Tintoretto, Bellini, Malcolm Morley, Leon Golub, and Caspar David Friedrich, the last of which was awarded the 1992 Mitchell Prize for the History of Art. [3]
Reaktion also publishes many series of books, including Animal, [4] short natural and cultural histories of individual animals; Edible, [5] global histories of a particular food, drink, or ingredient; Critical Lives, [6] concise critical biographies of important cultural figures; and Earth, studies of the historical and cultural significance of natural phenomena.
Recent books of note from Reaktion include Twenty Minutes in Manhattan [7] by Michael Sorkin, Travels in the History of Architecture [8] by Robert Harbison, Werner Herzog – Ecstatic Truth and Other Useless Conquests [9] by Kristoffer Hegnsvad, Boxing: A Cultural History [10] by Kasia Boddy, and Owl by Desmond Morris.
Desmond John MorrisFLS hon. caus. is an English zoologist, ethologist and surrealist painter, as well as a popular author in human sociobiology. He is known for his 1967 book The Naked Ape, and for his television programmes such as Zoo Time.
Werner Herzog is a German filmmaker, actor, opera director, and author. Regarded as a pioneer of New German Cinema, his films often feature ambitious protagonists with impossible dreams, people with unusual talents in obscure fields, or individuals in conflict with nature. His style involves avoiding storyboards, emphasizing improvisation, and placing his cast and crew into real situations mirroring those in the film they are working on.
Retro style is imitative or consciously derivative of lifestyles, trends, or art forms from history, including in music, modes, fashions, or attitudes. In popular culture, the "nostalgia cycle" is typically for the two decades that begin 20–30 years ago.
Fitzcarraldo is a 1982 West German epic adventure-drama film written, produced, and directed by Werner Herzog, and starring Klaus Kinski as would-be rubber baron Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, an Irishman known in Peru as Fitzcarraldo, who is determined to transport a steamship over a steep hill to access a rich rubber territory in the Amazon basin. The character was inspired by Peruvian rubber baron Carlos Fitzcarrald, who once transported a disassembled steamboat over the Isthmus of Fitzcarrald.
Michael Corris is an artist, art historian and writer on art. He is professor emeritus of art, Division of Art, Meadows School of the Arts, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, United States. Previously, Corris held the post of Professor of Fine Art at the Art and Design Research Center, Sheffield Hallam University. From 2005-6, he was a Visiting Professor of Art Theory at the Bergen Art Academy.
James Chapman is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Leicester. He has written several books on the history of British popular culture, including work on cinema, television and comics.
Paul Carter is a British academic and writer.
Alan Powers is a British teacher, researcher and writer on twentieth-century architecture and design.
John Dixon Hunt is an English landscape historian whose academic career began with teaching English literature. He became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania in 1994 and served as the department chair of landscape architecture and regional planning until June 2000, now being emeritus. One aspect of his work focuses on the time between the turn of the seventeenth through the end of the 18th centuries in France and England. He is the author of many articles, not only in landscape journals but also Apollo, Lincoln Center Theater Review, and Comparative Criticism, and chapters on topics including T. S. Eliot and modern painting, Utopia in and as garden, and garden as commemoration.
Andreas Constantine Papadakis FLS was a Cypriot-born British academic, entrepreneur and leading figure in the field of architectural publishing. He opened the Academy Bookshop in Holland Street, Kensington, in 1964 and moved into publishing as Academy Editions in 1968. From then until 1990, when he sold the company to VCH Germany he published more than a thousand titles mainly on art, architecture and the decorative arts. He was the first to publish many international architects in the Architectural Monographs series, which included Alvar Aalto, Michael Graves, Edwin Lutyens, John Soane, Terry Farrell, Richard Rogers, Mies van der Rohe, Hassan Fathy, Tadao Ando, Daniel Libeskind, etc.; and Victor Arwas's Art Deco, first published in 1980, remains the standard work on the subject.
Elena Herzog is a Russian-American visual artist and photographer.
Hilda Kean is a British historian who specialises in public and cultural history, and in particular the cultural history of animals. She is former Dean and Director of Public History at Ruskin College, Oxford, and an Honorary Research Fellow there. Kean is a visiting professor of History at the University of Greenwich and an adjunct professor at the Centre for Australian Public History at the University of Technology Sydney.
Ursula Heinzelmann, born in Berlin in 1963, is a freelance German food and wine writer, a sommelière and a gastronome.
DocWest is the name of The Centre for Production and Research of Documentary Film at The University of Westminster, London. Established in 2009, it brings together an interdisciplinary network of researchers, practitioners and students to foster creative conversations about documentary practice. DocWest in Central London hosts screenings, masterclasses, and conferences involving practitioners in today’s documentary world.
Ken Albala is an American food historian, chef, author, and a professor of history at University of the Pacific. He has authored or edited 27 books on food and co-authored "The Lost Art of Real Cooking" and "The Lost Arts of Hearth and Home."
Carnism is a concept used in discussions of humanity's relation to other animals, defined as a prevailing ideology in which people support the use and consumption of animal products, especially meat. Carnism is presented as a dominant belief system supported by a variety of defense mechanisms and mostly unchallenged assumptions. The term carnism was coined by social psychologist and author Melanie Joy in 2001 and popularized by her book Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows (2009).
Although primarily known as a filmmaker, Werner Herzog has also written multiple books and other works.
Papadakis Publisher is an independent art, architecture and natural science book publisher founded in London, United Kingdom, by Andreas Papadakis and his daughter Alexandra Papadakis. Since 1968, Papadakis Publisher and its predecessor Academy Editions have published more than a thousand titles, on art, architecture, science and the decorative arts.
Gülru Necipoğlu is a Turkish American professor of Islamic Art/Architecture. She has been the Aga Khan Professor and Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University since 1993, where she started teaching as Assistant Professor in 1987. She received her Harvard Ph.D. in the Department of History of Art and Architecture (1986), her BA in Art History at Wesleyan, her high school degree in Robert College, Istanbul (1975). She is married to the Ottoman historian and Harvard University professor Cemal Kafadar. Her sister is the historian Nevra Necipoğlu.
Kasia Boddy is a Professor of American Literature at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Fitzwilliam College. She was born in Aberdeen in 1966 and grew up in Glasgow, where she attended Hyndland Secondary School. She did an MA in English and Philosophy at Edinburgh and a PhD on American short fiction at Cambridge. She has also taught at the universities of York, Dundee and University College London.