First occurring in the fall of 2009, Open Access Week is celebrated as “an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research.”

Since launching in 2015, Luminos, UC Press’s open access monograph imprint, has successfully published dozens of high-quality scholarly works across disciplines, including Art, Asian Studies, Religion, Sociology, and more. A selection of recent Luminos publications is highlighted below, all available for free, immediate download.

UC Press remains committed to supporting and expanding Open Access initiatives and the free flow of information. To learn more about Open Access Week, visit its official website.

Renaissance Futurities
Science, Art, Invention

edited by Charlene Villaseñor Black and Mari-Tere Álvarez

“This interdisciplinary book is a superb provocation: it asks us to reimagine the Renaissance in both space and time, resituating it at the crossroads of Europe and its early modern empires; art, technology, and science; and alternative pasts and futures. It invites us to rethink teleological narratives of “western civilization” and, ultimately, demands that we chart out a new future as well.”
—Tara Nummedal, author of Anna Zieglerin and the Lion’s Blood: Alchemy and End Times in Reformation Germany

What Is a Family?
Answers from Early Modern Japan

edited by Mary Elizabeth Berry and Marcia Yonemoto

“This volume is full of surprises. Asking fresh questions—and taking up new kinds of evidence—What is a Family? illuminates household dynamics that have simply not come into focus before. Alongside sturdy formulae for success, the authors find marked diversity, improvisation, and change over time. A lively and provocative collection.”
—Kären Wigen, author of A Malleable Map: Geographies of Restoration in Central Japan, 1600–1912

Witness to Marvels
Sufism and Literary Imagination

by Tony K. Stewart

“The tales that are the subject of Tony K. Stewart’s book depict a Bengal that is miraculously hybrid, innocent of the estrangements of the modern era. In these stories beings of all sorts—animal, human, superhuman and divine—are seen to be deeply engaged with each other. This is essential reading for everyone interested in precolonial South Asia.”
—Amitav Ghosh, author of The Great Derangement

Louder and Faster
Pain, Joy, and the Body Politic in Asian American Taiko

by Deborah Wong

“In this deeply moving account of southern California’s taiko scene, Deborah Wong captures the wide-ranging significance of taiko. She reveals what makes taiko so generative for Asian Americans, even as they negotiate its circulation in neoliberal multiculturalism and mediated racial fantasies. Louder and Faster is a revelatory book.”
—Grace Wang, author of Soundtracks of Asian America: Navigating Race through Musical Performance

The Emergence of Modern Hinduism
Religion on the Margins of Colonialism

by Richard S. Weiss

“Offering a brilliant, detailed analysis of an extraordinary Tamil religious figure and intellectual, this book is a landmark intervention that is without a doubt one of the most important studies of Hinduism to be published in recent years.”
—Sascha Ebeling, author of Colonizing the Realm of Words: The Transformation of Tamil Literature in Nineteenth-Century South India

The Social Question in the Twenty-First Century
A Global View

edited by Jan Breman, Kevan Harris, Ching Kwan Lee, and Marcel van der Linden

“The global approach of the collected chapters make this a highly innovative endeavor. The book sheds valuable light on the development of the Social Question.”
— Nicole Mayer-Ahuja, Director, Sociological Research Institute at the University of Göttingen