Collections update: University of Chicago Press and University of Pennsylvania Press 2026

I’m pleased to announce that the UL has purchased two more 2026 publisher collections: University of Chicago Press and University of Pennsylvania Press, hosted on the De Gruyter ebooks platform. In both cases, we will have permanent, DRM-free access to the ebooks they publish in 2026, with records being added to iDiscover as the titles are released. We will also have access to their 2000-2013 ebooks (also hosted on De Gruyter) until the end of December 2026.

A selection of some of their recent publications can be seen below (click here to skip to direct links to the books). If you have any questions, please do get in touch with the English Collections team (engcc@lib.cam.ac.uk)

• Abolitionists and the Politics of Correspondence
• The Casual : Downplaying Art Since California Conceptualism
• The Gospel of Work and Money : Industrial Education and Its Global Legacies
• Houses of Correction : Carceral Institutions and Humanist Culture in Early Modern England
• People as Protection : Civilians Countering Terror in Northeast Nigeria
• Religious Change in Post-Mao China : Toward a New Sociology of Religion
• Remembering and Forgetting in Ancient Mesopotamia : Ziggurats, Royal Sculpture, and the Shaping of the Akkadian Legacy During the Ur III Period
• Sensing Qualia : Solving the Hard Problem of Consciousness

Collections update: Cornell University Press 2026 and State University of New York Press 2026 (plus backlist access!)

I’m pleased to announce that the UL has purchased two 2026 publisher collections, hosted on JSTOR: Cornell University Press and State University of New York (SUNY) Press. We know these publishers to be very popular with Cambridge readers–in the 2024-25 academic year, there were 57 Cornell and 79 SUNY titles triggered for purchase by Cambridge users on the UL’s Ebook Central and JSTOR DDA schemes–and with the purchase of these two collections, we will have permanent, DRM-free access to all ebooks (roughly 150 titles in each case) published by both presses during 2026. In addition, we will have access for twelve months to the backlist for both publishers (over 7,000 ebooks across the two) on JSTOR. There won’t be records for all of these books in iDiscover until January, but our access has been switched on, and users can reach the content by going direct to JSTOR.

Records for the 2026 titles will be added as they are released throughout the year. A selection of 2025 titles which we already own in perpetuity via the DDA schemes can be seen below (click here to skip to a list of iDiscover links). If you have any questions about Duke ebooks, please do get in touch with the English Collections team (engcc@lib.cam.ac.uk).

• Communication Against Capital: Red Enlightenment at the Dawn of Indonesia
• The Enduring Enigma of Lev Tikhomirov
• Frustrated Nationalism: Nationalism and National Identity in the Twenty-First Century
• Gender and Authority in the Late Medieval Church: A New History
• Ghosts and Things: The Material Culture of Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism
• Island Ablaze and Other Stories: The US Empire in North and South Korean Literatures
• Political Bodies: Writings on Adriana Cavarero’s Political Thought
• Thoughts That Burned: William Goodell, Human Rights, and the Abolition of American Slavery

JSTOR Path to Open: renewed for 2026

I’m pleased to announce that the UL will be continuing with its support of JSTOR’s Path to Open scheme in 2026 (something we have been doing since the scheme was first launched in 2023). Cambridge users will have DRM-free access to another 300 titles from a variety of publishers on JSTOR which will be published during 2026; after a three-year embargo period (during which time they are exclusively available via Path to Open), these titles will all be made Open Access, and will be freely available to all.

Records will be added to iDiscover as the books are released. Annual lists of titles published since 2023, as well as an initial (incomplete) 2026 title list, can be found here, and a selection of the 2025 books included in the scheme can be seen below (click here to skip to a list of iDiscover links). If you have any questions, please do get in touch with the English Collections team.

• Anti-Colonial Research Praxis: Methods for Knowledge Justice
• Dance and Science in the Long Nineteenth Century: The Articulate Body
• Escaping the End of Times: Dreams in the Late Ming
• Law, Morality and Digital Ethics
• Mother Tongues of the High Andes: Gender, Language, and Indigenous Difference in Peru
• On Black Bandes Dessinées and Transcolonial Power
• Reforming Community: Music, Religious Change, and English Identity in Mid-Tudor London
• The Struggle for Liberation: A History of the Rwandan Civil War, 1990-1994

Collections update: Duke University Press 2026 collection

The UL has purchased Duke University Press’s 2026 ebooks collection (we have acquired their annual frontlist collection every year since 2016). Duke generally publish around 150 titles per year, focusing on a variety of areas, including African studies, anthropology, art and art history, film and TV studies, and gender studies. With the purchase of this collection, Cambridge users will have permanent, unlimited and DRM-free access to Duke’s 2026 publications, as well as getting access to a backlist of more than 3,000 titles for the duration of the year.

Records for the 2026 titles will be added as they are released throughout the year. A selection of 2025 titles can be seen below (click here to skip to a list of iDiscover links). If you have any questions about Duke ebooks, please do get in touch with the English Collections team (engcc@lib.cam.ac.uk).

• Acting With the World: Agency in the Anthropocene
• The Archive and the Aural City: Sound, Knowledge, and the Politics of Listening
• Bangkok after Dark: Maurice Rocco, Transnational Nightlife, and the Making of Cold War Intimacies
• Cleansing the Nation: India, the Hindu Modern, and Mediations of Gender
• Geographies of the Ear: The Cultural Politics of Sound in Contemporary Barcelona
• Mediating Modernisms: Indigenous Artists, Modernist Mediators, Global Networks
• Speculative Relations: Indigenous Worlding and Repair
• Total Market American: Race, Data, and Advertising

Collections update: Brill 2026 subject collections

The UL and the Squire Law Library have together recently purchased most of Brill’s 2026 subject collections. This is an annual purchase which started back in 2014, when we decided to replace our many print standing orders for Brill series with the ebook collections. During 2026, we will gain perpetual and DRM-free access to roughly 1,000 titles as they are released, which are included in the following collections (click on the links to see the ebooks which have already been published):

• Asian Studies
• Biblical Studies, Ancient Near East and Early Christianity
• Classical Studies
• Early Modern History and Modern History
• International Law (funded by the Squire Law Library)
• Language and Linguistics
• Late Antiquity and Medieval Studies
• Literature and Cultural Studies
• Middle East and Islamic Studies
• Religious Studies, Theology and Philosophy
• Social Sciences
• Schöningh and Fink: Early Modern and Modern History (funded by the UL German budget)
• Schöningh and Fink: Literature and Culture Studies (funded by the UL German budget)
• Schöningh and Fink: Religious Studies, Theology and Philosophy (funded by the UL German budget)

Access to titles currently available in these collections has been switched on, and records are being added to iDiscover. In general, records for titles in these collections will be added iDiscover every month, and there may sometimes be a short delay between a book being published and it being visible in the catalogue; it’s therefore always worth checking the Brill platform if there’s a brand new title which you can’t find in iDiscover. If you have any questions, please do get in touch with the English Collections team (engcc@lib.cam.ac.uk).

New ebook collections: Berghahn, Boydell & Brewer, Edinburgh University Press, University of Hawai’i Press 2025

I’m very pleased to announce that the UL has purchased the 2025 frontlist collections (i.e. all titles published in the calendar year) of the following publishers:

• Berghahn
• Boydell & Brewer
• Edinburgh University Press
• University of Hawai’i Press

We will have permanent, DRM-free access to 2025 content via the De Gruyter platform; we will also have access to titles published between 2000 and 2013 for each of the four publishers for a period of twelve months (ending on 31st July 2026). Records for these titles are searchable in iDiscover, with more being added as new books are released; however, there can be a delay between a book being uploaded to the platform and its displaying in iDiscover, so if you are looking for a new title, it’s always worth checking the platform (it may already be there).

A selection of recent titles can be seen below (click here to skip to a list of direct links to the ebooks). If you have any questions, please do get in touch with the English Collections team.

• 21st-Century Philosophy of Events : Beyond the Analytic/Continental Divide
• The Ethics of Documentary Film
• Images of Thomas Becket in the Middle Ages and Beyond : The Uses and Reception of a Celebrity Saint
• The Literature of Contemporary Sierra Leone : Trauma, Resilience, and Creativity
• Not the Troubles : Alternative Narratives from Belfast
• Violent Atmospheres : Livelihoods and Landscapes in Crisis in Southeast Asia

JSTOR Path to Open: renewed for 2025

I’m pleased to announce that, following on from supporting the initial two years of JSTOR’s Path to Open scheme, the UL has now signed up for the scheme in 2025. This will mean that Cambridge users will have DRM-free access to 300 titles on JSTOR which will be published over the course of 2025; after a three-year embargo period (during which time they are exclusively available via Path to Open), these titles will all be made Open Access ebooks.

Records will be added to iDiscover as the books are released. A list of titles published in 2023 and 2024, as well as a preview of what is coming in 2025, can be found here, and a selection of the 2024 ebooks can be seen below (click here to skip to a list of iDiscover links). If you have any questions, please do get in touch with the English Collections team.

• Black Speculative Feminisms: Memory and Liberated Futures in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction
• Female Agency in the Ancient Mediterranean World
• Form Follows Fever : Malaria and the Construction of Hong Kong, 1841–1849
• Hindu Mission, Christian Mission : Soundings in Comparative Theology
• Mad Scholars : Reclaiming and Reimagining the Neurodiverse Academy
• The Politics of Unemployment Policy in Britain : Class Struggle, Labour Market Restructuring and Welfare Reform
• Ujamaa’s Army : The Creation and Evolution of the Tanzania People’s Defence Force, 1964–1979
• Women, Art, Freedom : Artists and Street Politics in Iran

Collections update: Brill 2025 subject collections

I’m pleased to say that the UL and the Squire Law Library have together recently purchased many of Brill’s annual subject collections for 2025. We first started doing this back in 2014, replacing our many print standing orders by buying most of these ebook collections instead. Over the course of the next year we will gradually gain perpetual and DRM-free access to just over 1,000 titles as they are released, in the following collections:

• Asian Studies
• Biblical Studies, Ancient Near East and Early Christianity
• Classical Studies
• Early Modern History and Modern History
• Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (funded by the Squire Law Library)
• International Law (funded by the Squire Law Library)
• Language and Linguistics
• Late Antiquity and Medieval Studies
• Literature and Cultural Studies
• Middle East and Islamic Studies
• Religious Studies, Theology and Philosophy
• Social Sciences
• Schöningh and Fink: Early Modern and Modern History (funded by the UL German budget)
• Schöningh and Fink: Literature and Culture Studies (funded by the UL German budget)
• Schöningh and Fink: Religious Studies, Theology and Philosophy (funded by the UL German budget)

Access to titles already published in these collections has already been switched on, and records for these are being added to iDiscover. In general, records for titles in these collections will be added iDiscover every month, so there will sometimes be a short delay between a book being published and it being visible in the catalogue, so it’s always worth checking the Brill platform if there’s a brand new title which you can’t find in iDiscover. If you have any questions, please do get in touch with the English Collections team (engcc@lib.cam.ac.uk).

Collections update: Duke University Press 2025 collection

I’m pleased to report that the UL has purchased Duke University Press’s 2025 ebooks collection. Duke generally publish around 150 titles per year, and specialise in subjects such as African studies, anthropology, art and art history, film and TV studies, and gender studies. With the purchase of this collection, Cambridge users will have permanent, unlimited and DRM-free access to Duke’s 2025 publications, as well as getting access to a backlist of more than 3,000 titles for the duration of the year.

Records for the 2025 titles will be added as they are released throughout the year. To give you a flavour of what to expect, a selection of recently published Duke titles can be seen below (click here to skip to a list of iDiscover links). If you have any questions about Duke ebooks, please do get in touch with the English Collections team (engcc@lib.cam.ac.uk).

• Biennial Boom : Making Contemporary Art Global
• Closures : Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom
• The Cybernetic Border : Drones, Technology, and Intrusion
• Disability Worlds
• Excited Delirium : Race, Police Violence, and the Invention of a Disease
• How the Earth Feels : Geological Fantasy in the Nineteenth-Century United States
• Millennial Style : The Politics of Experiment in Contemporary African Diasporic Culture
• The Ocean on Fire : Pacific Stories from Nuclear Survivors and Climate Activists

Collections update: Stanford University Press 2024 collection

For the past couple of years, the UL’s Collections and Academic Liaison English-language budget has purchased Stanford University Press’s annual frontlist collection, hosted on the De Gruyter platform. We have now purchased their 2024 collection, meaning that we will have permanent, DRM-free (i.e. unlimited) access to titles published by Stanford during the course of the next year; we will also continue to have access to their 2000-2013 backlist (a collection of c. 1500 titles). Records for new titles will be added as they are published, with titles for the backlist collection already available in iDiscover.

Stanford describes itself thus: “Founded in 1892, Stanford University Press publishes 130 books a year across the humanities, social sciences, law, and business. Our books inform scholarly debate, generate global and cross-cultural discussion, and bring timely, peer-reviewed scholarship to the wider reading public … SUP is a publisher of ideas that matter, books that endure.” A selection of some of the recently published titles in the 2023 collection can be seen below (click here to skip to a list of iDiscover links). Please do get in touch with the English Collections team (engcc@lib.cam.ac.uk) if you have any questions.

• Anteaesthetics : Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form
• Birth of the Geopolitical Age : Global Frontiers and the Making of Modern China
• Boats in a Storm : Law, Migration, and Decolonization in South and Southeast Asia, 1942–1962
• GoFailMe : The Unfulfilled Promise of Digital Crowdfunding
• The Invention of Terrorism in France, 1904-1939
• The Russian Way of Deterrence : Strategic Culture, Coercion, and War
• States of Cultivation : Imperial Transition and Scientific Agriculture in the Eastern Mediterranean
• Who Wrote This? : How AI and the Lure of Efficiency Threaten Human Writing