Faculty Books & Projects

Benjamin L. Alpers: Happy days: images of the pre-sixties past in seventies America

Rutgers University Press

The 1970's are frequently seen as a watershed period, an era from which sources of 21st-century American culture began to flow. But the 1970's are also seen as a particularly backward-looking time, seen by many critics as morbidly nostalgic for times before the wrenching changes that were associated with the 1960's. Happy Days: Images of the Pre-Sixties Past in Seventies America explores the relationship of the 1970's American culture to the pre-Sixties past through four case studies: representations of the 1950's; the emergence of neo-noir films and the reimagination of the mid-20th century figure of the hardboiled private investigator; reflections on the Revolutionary past on the occasion of the Bicentennial; and the legacy of slavery in the works of Alex Haley and Octavia Butler. Far from mere nostalgia, Americans' diverse reimaginings of the past were a significant part of what made the 1970's so culturally foundational for the decades to come.

Elyssa Faison and Alison Fields, Eds.: Resisting the Nuclear

University of Washington Press

From uranium mines on the Navajo Nation to craters caused by nuclear testing on the Bikini and Enewetak Atolls, the production and deployment of nuclear weapon technologies have disproportionately harmed Indigenous lands. Sustained exposure to radiation from nuclear weapons and waste affects many communities from Japan to Oceania to the US West. While antinuclear activism often takes political and legal forms, artistic responses to nuclear regimes also prompt social action and resistance. Resisting the Nuclear is an interdisciplinary edited collection featuring historians, anthropologists, artists, and activists who explore the multifaceted forms of resistance to nuclear regimes. Through a combination of interviews, scholarly essays, and discussions of contemporary art, contributors recenter the victims of nuclear technologies and demonstrate how political and artistic expression can respond to nuclear threats and effect change.

Princeton University Press

In the first comprehensive history of libels in Elizabethan England, Joseph Mansky traces the crime across law, literature, and culture, outlining a viral and often virulent media ecosystem. During the 1590s, a series of crises – simmering xenophobia, years of dearth and hunger, surges of religious persecution – sparked an extraordinary explosion of libeling. The same years also saw the first appearances of libels on London stages. Defamatory, seditious texts were launched into the sky, cast in windows, recited in court, read from pulpits, and seized by informers. Avatars of sedition, libels nonetheless empowered ordinary people to pass judgment on the most controversial issues and persons of the day. They were marked by mobility, swirling across the early modern media and across class, confessional, and geographical lines. Ranging from Shakespearean drama to provincial pageantry, this book charts a public sphere poised between debate and defamation, between free speech and fake news.

Amanda Minks: Indigenous Audibilities

Rutgers University Press

In the middle of the twentieth century, transnational networks sparked a range of cultural projects focused on collecting Indigenous music and folklore in the Americas. Indigenous Audibilities follows the social relations that created these collections in four interconnected case studies linking the U.S., Mexico, Nicaragua, and Chile. Indigenous collections were embedded in political projects that negotiated issues of cultural diplomacy, national canons, and heritage. The case studies recuperate the traces of marginalized voices in archives, paying special attention to women and Indigenous people. Despite the dominant agendas of national and international institutions, the diverse actors and the multi-directional influences often led to unexpected outcomes.
Author Amanda Minks brings together vivid storytelling and theories of collection, voice, and recording to challenge the transparency of archives as a historical source. The book presents a social-historical method of listening, reading, and thinking beyond the referentiality of archived texts, and in the process uncovers neglected genealogies of cultural music research in the Americas.

Farina King: Diné dóó Gáamalii. Navajo Latter-day Saint Experiences in the Twentieth Century

University Press of Kansas

“Navajo Latter-day Saints are Diné dóó Gáamalii,” writes Farina King, in this deeply personal collective biography. “We are Diné who decided to walk a Latter-day Saint pathway, although not always consistently or without reappraising that decision.” Diné dóó Gáamalii is a history of twentieth-century Navajos, including author Farina King and her family, who have converted and joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), becoming Diné dóó Gáamalii—both Diné and LDS. Drawing on Diné stories from the LDS Native American Oral History Project, King illuminates the mutual entanglement of Indigenous identity and religious affiliation, showing how their Diné identity made them outsiders to the LDS Church and, conversely, how belonging to the LDS community made them outsiders to their Native community. The story that King tells shows the complex ways that Diné people engaged with church institutions in the context of settler colonial power structures. The lived experiences of Diné in church programs sometimes diverged from the intentions and expectations of those who designed them. In this empathetic and richly researched study, King explores the impacts of Navajo Latter-day Saints who seek to bridge different traditions, peoples, and communities. She sheds light on the challenges and joys they face in following both the Diné teachings of Si’ąh Naagháì Bik’eh Hózhǫ́—“live to old age in beauty”—and the teachings of the church.

Jennifer J. Davis: Bad Subjects: Libertine Lives in the French Atlantic, 1619-1814

University of Nebraska Press

In a lively account that spans continents, Jennifer J. Davis considers what it meant to be called a libertine in early modern France and its colonies. Davis assess the changing fortunes of the quasi-criminal category of libertinage (generally translated as "debauchery" or "licentiousness") based on hundres of cases drawn from the police and judicial archives of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France and its Atlantic colonies alongside the literature inspired by those proceedings. It was a charge authorities imposed on a startlingly wide array of behavious, including gambling, selling alcohol to Native Americans, and secret marriages. Once invoked by family and state authorities, the charge proved nearly impossible for the accused to contest, for a libertine need not have committed any crimes to be percieved as diregarding authority and thereby threatening families and social insitutions.

Joshua Frydman: Inscribed Objects and the Development of Literature in Early Japan

Brill

The introduction of writing enables new forms of literature, but these can be invisible in works that survive as manuscripts. Through looking at inscriptions of poetry on garbage and as graffiti, we can glimpse how literature spread along with writing. This study uses these lesser-studied sources, including inscriptions on pottery, architecture, and especially wooden tablets known as mokkan, to uncover how poetry, and literature more broadly, was used, shared and thrown away in early Japan. Through looking at these disposable and informal sources, we explore the development of early Japanese literature, and even propose parallels to similar developments in other societies across space and time.

Rafael Jaen and Chris Sadler: Off Headset: Essays on Stage Management Work, Life, and Career

Routledge

Off Headset is a collection of chapters containing essays by a richly diverse group of stage management professionals and educators covering the challenges stage managers face on the job, in their lives, and in their careers.

Intertwining practical advice with personal anecdotes, Off Headset: Essays on Stage Management Work, Life, and Career is the perfect accompaniment to students studying stage management in a university setting and professionals working in the field.

Jake Johnson, ed.: The Possibility Machine

University of Illinois Press

At once a Technicolor wonderland and the embodiment of American mythology, Las Vegas exists at the Ground Zero of a reverence for risk-taking and the transformative power of a winning hand. Jake Johnson edits a collection of short essays and flash ideas that probes how music-making and soundscapes shape the City of Second Chances. Treating topics ranging from Cher to Cirque du Soleil, the contributors delve into how music and musicians factored in the early development of Vegas’s image; the role of local communities of musicians and Strip mainstays in sustaining tensions between belief and disbelief; the ways aging showroom stars provide a sense of timelessness that inoculates visitors against the outside world; the link connecting fantasies of sexual prowess and democracy with the musical values of Liberace and others; considerations of how musicians and establishments gambled with identity and opened the door for audience members to explore Sin City–only versions of themselves; and the echoes and energy generated by the idea of Las Vegas as it travels across the country.

Alan T. Levenson: Maurice Samuel: Life and Letters of a Secular Jewish Contrarian

University of Alabama Press

In this book, Levenson captures the life, works, and milieu of the Romanian-born, English-educated, American belletrist Maurice Samuel. A diaspora intellectual--or a rooted cosmopolitan, as Levenson describes him--Samuel made made an indelible mark on many features of contemporary Jewish thought and culture. A genralist in an age of experts, an independent scholar in an age of rabbis and professors, Samuel was one of the most productive and visible members of the group dubbed the "other" New York Jewish intellectuals.

Joseph Mansky: Libels and Theater in Shakespeare's England: Publics, Politics, Performance

Cambridge University Press

In the first comprehensive history of libels in Elizabethan England, Joseph Mansky traces the crime across law, literature, and culture, outlining a viral and often virulent media ecosystem. During the 1590s, a series of crises – simmering xenophobia, years of dearth and hunger, surges of religious persecution – sparked an extraordinary explosion of libeling. The same years also saw the first appearances of libels on London stages. Defamatory, seditious texts were launched into the sky, cast in windows, recited in court, read from pulpits, and seized by informers. Avatars of sedition, libels nonetheless empowered ordinary people to pass judgment on the most controversial issues and persons of the day. They were marked by mobility, swirling across the early modern media and across class, confessional, and geographical lines. Ranging from Shakespearean drama to provincial pageantry, this book charts a public sphere poised between debate and defamation, between free speech and fake news.

Jennifer Saltzstein: Song, Landscape, & Identity in Medieval Northern France: Toward an Environmental History

Oxford University Press

This book explores how medieval song expressed relationships between people and their environments. Integrating musicology with literary studies, ecocriticism, and environmental history, Jennifer Saltzstein compares the nature imagery that pervades the songs of the trouvéres of northern France to the physical terrain and climate of the lands on which their authors lived. Through close readings of music-text relationships, she reveals how, for many medieval songwriters, identity was tied to place and configured through attachment to specific landscapes.

Susan Wiesinger, Ralph Beliveau: Digital Literacy. A Primer on Media, Identity, and the Evolution of Technology (Second Edition)

Peter Lang Group AG

In a lively account that spans continents, Jennifer J. Davis considers what it meant to be called a libertine in early modern France and its colonies. Davis assess the changing fortunes of the quasi-criminal category of libertinage (generally translated as "debauchery" or "licentiousness") based on hundres of cases drawn from the police and judicial archives of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France and its Atlantic colonies alongside the literature inspired by those proceedings. It was a charge authorities imposed on a startlingly wide array of behavious, including gambling, selling alcohol to Native Americans, and secret marriages. Once invoked by family and state authorities, the charge proved nearly impossible for the accused to contest, for a libertine need not have committed any crimes to be percieved as diregarding authority and thereby threatening families and social insitutions.

Rilla Askew: Prize for the Fire: A Novel

University of Oklahoma Press

Lincolnshire, 1537. Amid England’s religious turmoil, fifteen-year-old Anne Askew is forced to take her dead sister’s place in an arranged marriage. The witty, well-educated gentleman’s daughter is determined to free herself from her abusive husband, harsh in-laws, and the cruel strictures of her married life. But this is the England of Henry VIII, where religion and politics are dangerously entangled. A young woman of Anne’s fierce independence, Reformist faith, uncanny command of plainspoken scripture, and—not least—connections to Queen Katheryn Parr’s court cannot long escape official notice, or censure.

Alan Barenberg, Emily D. Johnson, eds.: Rethinking the Gulag: Identities, Sources, Legacies

Indiana University Press

The Soviet Gulag was one of the largest, most complex, and deadliest systems of incarceration in the 20th century. What lessons can we learn from its network of labor camps and prisons and exile settlements, which stretched across vast geographic expanses, included varied institutions, and brought together inmates from all the Soviet Union's ethnicities, professions, and social classes? Drawing on a massive body of documentary evidence, Rethinking the Gulag: Identities, Sources, Legacies explores the Soviet penal system from various disciplinary perspectives.

Joshua Frydman, Author.: The Japanese Myths: A Guide to Gods, Heroes and Spirits

Thames & Hudson

An illustrated guide to the fantastic world of Japanese myths: retelling the stories and exploring how Japanese mythology has changed over time, as new gods, heroes, and spirits have entered the canon.

While people around the world love Japan’s cultural exports―from manga and anime to Zen―not everyone is familiar with Japan’s unique mythology that shapes these interests, which is enriched by Shinto, Buddhism, and regional folklore. The Japanese Myths is a smart and succinct guide to the rich tradition of Japanese mythology, from the earliest recorded legends of Izanagi and Izanami with their divine offspring and the creation of Japan, to medieval tales of vengeful ghosts, through to the modern-day reincarnation of ancient deities as the heroes of mecha anime.

Dina Hassan, Author.:Bilingual Creativity and Arab Contact Literature: Towards a World Englishes and Translation Studies Framework

Palgrave Macmillan

This book adopts an integrated approach to the study of contact literature through collaboration between theories of World Englishes and translation studies. The author proposes an interactive framework that integrates linguistic and cultural perspectives, through the analysis of selected Anglo-Arab and Arab-American contact literary texts: Samia Serageldine’s The Cairo House (2000), Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage (1999), Leila Aboulela’s The Translator (1999), Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love (2000), and Abdelkebir Khatibi’s Love in Two Languages (1990). The author then discusses the pedagogical implications of bilingual creativity via a language in literature approach.  

Joanna Hearne and Gary D. Rhodes, eds.: ReFocus: The Films of Wallace Fox

Edinburgh University Press

Born in Oklahoma into the Chickasaw Nation, Wallace Fox directed films over the span of four decades. Known primarily for Westerns and mystery films, his output starred such famed actors as Bela Lugosi, Bob Steele, and Lon Chaney. ReFocus: The Films of Wallace Fox includes analysis of some of his best known films, including Wild Beauty, Gun Town, The Corpse Vanishes, Bowery at Midnight, Career Girl and Brenda Starr, Reporter. It reclaims the history and artistry of this major talent.

Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan Concannon, Authors.: Does Scripture Speak for Itself? The Museum of the Bible and the Politics of Interpretation.

Cambridge University Press 

Is the Bible the unembellished Word of God or the product of human agency? There are different answers to that question. And they lie at the heart of this book's powerful exploration of the fraught ways in which money, race and power shape the story of Christianity in American public life. The authors' subject is the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC: arguably the latest example of a long line of white evangelical institutions aiming to amplify and promote a religious, political, and moral agenda of their own. In their careful and compelling investigation, Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan Concannon disclose the ways in which the Museum's exhibits reinforce a particularized and partial interpretation of the Bible's meaning.  

Sherri Irvin, Author.: Immaterial: Rules in Contemporary Art

Oxford University Press

Contemporary art can seem chaotic: it may be made of toilet paper, candies you can eat, or meat that is thrown out after each exhibition. Some works fill a room with obsessively fabricated objects, while others purport to include only concepts, thoughts, or language. Immaterial argues that, despite these unruly appearances, making rules is a key part of what many contemporary artists do when they make their works, and these rules can explain disparate developments in installation art, conceptual art, time-based media art, and participatory art.

Scott Johnson, Michael Penn, Christine Shepardson, and Charles Stang, eds.: Invitation to Syriac Christianity

 University of California Press

Despite their centrality to the history of Christianity in the East, Syriac Christians have generally been excluded from modern accounts of the faith. Originating from Mesopotamia, Syriac Christians quickly spread across Eurasia, from Turkey to China, developing a distinctive and influential form of Christianity that connected empires. These early Christians wrote in the language of Syriac, the lingua franca of the late ancient Middle East, and a dialect of Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Collecting key foundational Syriac texts from the second to the fourteenth centuries, this anthology provides unique access to one of the most intriguing, but least known, branches of the Christian tradition.

Michael Lee, Author: Music in the Horror Films of Val Lewton

Edinburgh University Press

Val Lewton’s horror films revolutionized a popular genre through a much-studied and still widely emulated visual style emphasizing shadows and absences. By denying audiences visual confirmation of horror, his reforms placed a fresh burden on the soundtrack of his films. This book offers a fine-grained study of the Lewton unit's transformational sonic style which introduced the first "jump scare," liberal use of pre-musique concrète, and an original orchestral score for every film in the series in violation of "B" movie norms. Their orchestral scores often exceed the conventions of film music as we hear the RKO Music Department ignoring instructions thus freeing their contributions to signpost the path toward each films’ essential themes.

Todd Fuller, Crag Hill, Eds.:Level Land: Poems For and About the I35 Corridor

Lamar University Press

Many folks think of the middle of the country as "flyover country." Level Land: Poetry for and About the I35 Corridor, dispels this myth. Included in this expansive anthology are poems from authors of diverse backgrounds from the southern border of Laredo, Texas up to the Canadian border in Minnesota. You will read poems from folks from all walks of life from college professors to community performers, in a variety of languages, including English, Spanish, and indigenous languages such as Kiowa, about a variety of subjects, all inspired by the cultural and geographic landscape of this unique region of America. Level Land re-defines flyover country, instead, as a creative corridor filled with the vibrancy of life.

Roberto Pesce, and Logan E. Whalen, eds., and trans.: The Story of Attila in Prose: A Critical Edition and Translation of the Estoire d’Atile en prose

Routledge

The Story of Attila in Prose is the first critical edition and translation of the thirteenth-century Franco-Italian prose text the Estoire d’Atile en prose. Preserved in two anonymous and untitled manuscripts composed between the last quarter of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth century, the story recounts the fictional founding of Venice after the invasion of Aquileia by Attila the Hun. The manuscripts, located in Zagreb and Venice, detail Attila’s pagan mother, her union with a dog, and his feral birth, as well as his unusual death during a chess match and the origins of the Holy Grail. This edition and translation are based on the Zagreb manuscript, which was only recently discovered.

Andrew Porwancher, Austin Coffey, Taylor Jipp, Jakes Mazeitis, authors.: The Prophet of Harvard Law: James Bradley Thayer and His Legal Legacy (American Political Thought)

University Press of Kansas

Amid the halls of Harvard Law, a professor of legend, James Bradley Thayer, shaped generations of students from 1874 to 1902. His devoted protégés included future Supreme Court justices, appellate judges, and law school deans. The legal giants of the Progressive Era—Holmes, Brandeis, and Hand, to name only a few—came under Thayer’s tutelage in their formative years.

He imparted to his pupils a novel jurisprudence, attuned to modern realities, that would become known as legal realism. The Prophet of Harvard Law draws from untouched archival sources to reveal the origins of the legal world we inhabit today. It is a story of ideas and people in equal measure.  

Rhona Siedelman: Under Quarantine: Immigrants and Disease at Israel’s Gate

Rutgers University Press

Under Quarantine is the riveting story of Shaar Ha’aliya, a central immigrant processing camp opened shortly after Israel became an independent state. This historic gateway for Jewish migration was surrounded by a controversial barbed wire fence. The camp administrators defended this imposing barrier as a necessary quarantine measure - even as detained immigrants regularly defied it by crawling out of the camp and returning at will. Focusing on the conflicts and complications surrounding the medical quarantine, this book brings the history of this place and the remarkable experiences of the immigrants who went through it to life.  Evocative and bold, Under Quarantine shows that we cannot fully understand Israel until we understand Shaar Ha’aliya. The gate of arrival for nearly half a million immigrants - a space of homecoming, conflict, exclusion, and welcoming - here was the country’s crucible.

Ronald Schleifer: Literary Studies and Well-Being

Bloomsbury Publishing

The literary arts represent and provoke experiences of understanding and emotion, and this open access study examines how the practical pursuit of well-being in healthcare reveals purposes at the core of our engagements with and understanding of literature itself.
During the past twenty years, much admirable work in the “health humanities” has focused upon what studies of literature contribute to the understandings and the practical work-the “worldly work”-of healthcare. Such a project aims at developing healthcare practitioners who bring greater care to those who come to them ailing or in fear or faced with terrible suffering. Literary Studies and Well-Being turns this inside out by examining the intergenerational caretaking of healthcare in a manner which allows us to comprehend the nature and discipline of literary studies in new ways.

Joseph M. Sullivan: German Romance VII: Ulrich Fuetrer, Iban

D.S. Brewer

This is the first-ever English translation, with facing edition, of an important medieval German Arthurian romance. Composed in the 1480s by the Munich painter and writer Ulrich Fuetrer, Iban is the story of a young knight at King Arthur's court, who pursues adventure abroad, wins a land and its lady as his wife, loses both through his immaturity and negligence, and eventually regains his country and his spouse in a series of adventures that teach him to place the welfare of others above his own desires. This book offers an edition of the romance, the first for nearly a quarter of a century, and the first translation into a modern language, of any part of the Book of Adventures.

Dustin Tahmahkera: Cinematic Comanches: The Lone Ranger in the Media Borderlands

University of Nebraska Press

For centuries Comanches have captivated imaginations. Yet their story in popular accounts abruptly stops with the so-called fall of the Comanche empire in 1875, when Quanah Parker led Comanches onto the reservation in southwestern Oklahoma. In Cinematic Comanches, the first tribal-specific history of Comanches in film and media, Parker descendant Dustin Tahmahkera examines how Comanches represent themselves and are represented by others in recent media. Telling a story of Comanche family and extended kin and their relations to film, Tahmahkera reframes a distorted and defeated history of Comanches into a vibrant story of cinematic traditions, agency, and cultural continuity.

David R. Vishanoff: Islamic Legal Theory: A Critical Introduction Based on al-Juwayni’s Waraqat fi usul al fiqh 

Indianapolis: Hackett

This thorough and original unpacking of the Sunnī jurist al-Juwaynī’s (1028–1085) Kitāb al-Waraqāt fī uṣūl al-fiqh introduces English-speaking readers to the main concepts, terms, principles, and functions of the classical Islamic discipline of legal theory. The volume offers an ideal entry to the otherwise dense and complex mainstream Sunnī views that dominated Islamic legal thought in al-Juwaynī’s day—and that are still widely accepted today.

Lucas Bessire: Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains

Princeton University Press

The Ogallala aquifer has nourished life on the American Great Plains for millennia. But less than a century of unsustainable irrigation farming has taxed much of the aquifer beyond repair. The imminent depletion of the Ogallala and other aquifers around the world is a defining planetary crisis of our times. Running Out offers a uniquely personal account of aquifer depletion and the deeper layers through which it gains meaning and force.

Kathleen A. Brosnan and Brian Frehner, eds.: The Greater Plains: Rethinking a Region's Environmental Histories

University of Nebraska Press

The Greater Plains tells a new story of a region, stretching from the state of Texas to the province of Alberta, where the environments are as varied as the myriad ways people have inhabited them. These innovative essays document a complicated history of human interactions with a sometimes plentiful and sometimes foreboding landscape, from the Native Americans who first shaped the prairies with fire to twentieth-century oil regimes whose pipelines linked the region to the world.

Alison Fields: Discordant Memories: Atomic Age Narratives and Visual Culture

University of Oklahoma Press

To reveal the layered complexities of nuclear remembrance, Fields analyzes photography, film, and artworks; offers close readings of media and testimonial accounts; traces site visits to atomic museums in New Mexico and Japan; and features artists who give visual form to evolving memories.

Kyle Harper: Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History

Princeton University Press

Panoramic in scope, Plagues upon the Earth traces the role of disease in the transition to farming, the spread of cities, the advance of transportation, and the stupendous increase in human population. Harper offers a new interpretation of humanity’s path to control over infectious disease—one where rising evolutionary threats constantly push back against human progress, and where the devastating effects of modernization contribute to the great divergence between societies.

Sarah Hines:  Water for All: Community, Property, and Revolution in Modern Bolivia

University of California Press

Analyzing a wide variety of sources, from agrarian reform case records to oral history interviews, Hines investigates how water dispossession in the late nineteenth century and reclaimed water access in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries prompted, shaped, and strengthened popular and indigenous social movements.

Karlos Hill: The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: A Photographic History

University of Oklahoma Press

Historian and Black Studies professor Karlos K. Hill presents a range of photographs taken before, during, and after the massacre, mostly by white photographers. Some of the images are published here for the first time. Comparing these photographs to those taken elsewhere in the United States of lynchings, the author makes a powerful case for terming the 1921 outbreak not a riot but a massacre. White civilians, in many cases assisted or condoned by local and state law enforcement, perpetuated a systematic and coordinated attack on Black Tulsans and their property.

Jennifer Holland: Tiny You: A Western History of the Anti-Abortion Movement

University of California Press

Looking at anti-abortion movements in four western states since the 1960s—turning to the fetal pins passed around church services, the graphic images exchanged between friends, and the fetus dolls given to children in school—she argues that activists made fetal life feel personal to many Americans. Pro-life activists persuaded people to see themselves in the pins, images, and dolls they held in their hands and made the fight against abortion the primary bread-and-butter issue for social conservatives.

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers: The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

Harper Collins

The great scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois, once wrote about the Problem of race in America, and what he called “Double Consciousness,” a sensitivity that every African American possesses in order to survive. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois’s words all too well. Bearing the names of two formidable Black Americans—the revered choreographer Alvin Ailey and her great grandmother Pearl, the descendant of enslaved Georgians and tenant farmers—Ailey carries Du Bois’s Problem on her shoulders.

Farina King, Michael P. Taylor, and James R. Swensen, Authors: Returning Home: Dine Creative Works from the Intermountain Indian School

The University of Arizona Press

Returning Home features and contextualizes the creative works of Diné (Navajo) boarding school students at the Intermountain Indian School, which was the largest federal Indian boarding school between 1950 and 1984. Diné student art and poetry reveal ways that boarding school students sustained and contributed to Indigenous cultures and communities despite assimilationist agendas and pressures.  This book works to recover the lived experiences of Native American boarding school students through creative works, student interviews, and scholarly collaboration. It shows the complex agency and ability of Indigenous youth to maintain their Diné culture within the colonial spaces that were designed to alienate them from their communities and customs. Returning Home provides a view into the students’ experiences and their connections to Diné community and land. Despite the initial Intermountain Indian School agenda to send Diné students away and permanently relocate them elsewhere, Diné student artists and writers returned home through their creative works by evoking senses of Diné Bikéyah and the kinship that defined home for them.

Michael Lee, Author: Music in the Horror films of Val Lewton

Edinburgh University Press

Val Lewton’s horror films revolutionized a popular genre through a much-studied and still widely emulated visual style emphasizing shadows and absences. By denying audiences visual confirmation of horror, his reforms placed a fresh burden on the soundtrack of his films. This book offers a fine-grained study of the Lewton unit's transformational sonic style which introduced the first "jump scare," liberal use of pre-musique concrète, and an original orchestral score for every film in the series in violation of "B" movie norms. Their orchestral scores often exceed the conventions of film music as we hear the RKO Music Department ignoring instructions thus freeing their contributions to signpost the path toward each films’ essential themes.

Joshua Nelson: Searching for Sequoyah (Film)

Photo by Karl W. Schmidt

“Searching for Sequoyah” chronicles the life and accomplishments of the legendary 19th century Cherokee visionary, Sequoyah (George Guess), through the oral stories of five modern day Sequoyah descendants. While much is known about Sequoyah's Cherokee writing system or syllabary, very little is known about the man himself. How did this illiterate Cherokee invent a writing system that transformed the future of his people? From Tuskegee, Tennessee to Zaragoza, Mexico, “Searching for Sequoyah” takes viewers on a journey retracing his final quest to reunite his fellow Cherokees in Mexico, the mystery surrounding his death, and the legacy he left behind.

Stephen H. Norwood: Prologue to Annihilation: Ordinary American and British Jews Challenge the Third Reich

Indiana University Press

American and British appeasement of Nazism during the early years of the Third Reich went far beyond territorial concessions. In Prologue to Annihilation: Ordinary American and British Jews Challenge the Third Reich, Stephen H. Norwood examines the numerous ways that the two nations' official position of tacit acceptance of Jewish persecution enabled the policies that ultimately led to the Final Solution and how Nazi annihilationist intentions were clearly discernible even during the earliest years of Hitler's rule.

Andrew Porwancher: The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton

Princeton University Press

This radical reassessment of Hamilton’s religious upbringing gives us a fresh perspective on both his adult years and the country he helped forge. Although he didn’t identify as a Jew in America, Hamilton cultivated a relationship with the Jewish community that made him unique among the founders.

Carolina Rueda: Oklahoma Mon Amour (Film)

Winner of a Special Jury Remi Award at WorldFest Houston 2021.

Oklahoma Mon Amour portrays a ruptured family and the quest for its reunion, the journey of two brothers, the challenges faced by multicultural youth needing to find their true identity and to unveil buried secrets, all of this tinted by the puzzling closeness between Mexico and the U.S.

Filmed in black and white and with a structure that interweaves fiction and real events evoking poetic and reflective art-house films from the sixties and seventies, the film also references current world tensions, and presents an unusual approach to the Mexico/U.S dynamics, also showing a cosmopolitan Mexico City seldom seen in cinema.

Traci Brynne Voyles: The Settler Sea: California's Salton Sea and the Consequences of Colonialism

University of Nebraska Press

The Salton Sea’s very precariousness—the way it sits uncomfortably between worlds, existing always in the interstices of human and natural influences, between desert and wetland, between the skyward pull of the sun and the constant inflow of polluted water—is both a symptom and symbol of the larger precariousness of settler relationships to the environment, in the West and beyond.

Sarah Trabert and Kacy L. Hollenback, eds.: Archaeological Narratives of the North American Great Plains: From Ancient Pasts to Historic Resettlement

Society for American Archaeology Press

Stretching from Canada to Texas and the foothills of the Rockies to the Mississippi River, the North American Great Plains have a complex and ancient history. The region has been home to Native peoples for at least 16,000 years. This volume is a synthesis of what is known about the Great Plains from an archaeological perspective, but it also highlights Indigenous knowledge, viewpoints, and concerns for a more holistic understanding of both ancient and more recent pasts.

Ping Zhu and Hui Faye Xiao, eds.,: Feminisms with Chinese Characteristics

Syracuse University Press

In this timely volume, Zhu and Xiao offer an examination of the ways in which Chinese feminist ideas have developed since the mid-1990s. By juxtaposing the plural “feminisms” with “Chinese characteristics,” they both underline the importance of integrating Chinese culture, history, and tradition in the discussions of Chinese feminisms, and, stress the difference between the plethora of contemporary Chinese feminisms and the singular state feminism.

Kathleen A. Brosnan, Ann Durkin Keating, William C. Barnett, eds.: City of Lake and Prairie: Chicago’s Environmental History

University of Pittsburgh Press

Known as the Windy City and the Hog Butcher to the World, Chicago has earned a more apt sobriquet—City of Lake and Prairie—with this compelling, innovative, and deeply researched environmental history. Sitting at the southwestern tip of Lake Michigan, one of the largest freshwater bodies in the world, and on the eastern edge of the tallgrass prairies that fill much of the North American interior, early residents in the land that Chicago now occupies enjoyed natural advantages, economic opportunities, and global connections over centuries, from the Native Americans who first inhabited the region to the urban dwellers who built a metropolis in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 

Kathleen A. Brosnan and James R. Akerman, eds.: Mapping Nature Across the America

University of Chicago Press

Illustrated throughout, the essays in this book argue for greater analysis of historical maps in the field of environmental history, and for greater attention within the field of the history of cartography to the cultural constructions of nature contained within maps. This volume thus provides the first in-depth and interdisciplinary investigation of the relationship between maps and environmental knowledge in the Americas—including, for example, stories of indigenous cartography in Mexico, the allegorical presence of palm trees in maps of Argentina, the systemic mapping of US forests, and the scientific platting of Canada’s remote lands.

Samuel Duwe: Tewa Worlds: An Archaeological History of Being and Becoming in the Pueblo Southwest

University of Arizona Press

Anthropologists have long trekked through Tewa country, but the literature remains deeply fractured among the present and the past, nuanced ethnographic description, and a growing body of archaeological research. Samuel Duwe bridges this divide by drawing from contemporary Pueblo philosophical and historical discourse to view the long arc of Tewa history as a continuous journey. The result is a unique history that gives weight to the deep past, colonial encounters, and modern challenges, with the understanding that the same concepts of continuity and change have guided the people in the past and present, and will continue to do so in the future.

Karlos Hill and Dave Dodson: The Murder of Emmett Till

Oxford University Press

Incorporating the latest research, The Murder of Emmett Till is the first text to present this shocking crime--which still powerfully reverberates--in a graphic history format. Historian Karlos Hill and illustrator Dave Dodson provide a riveting narration of the events surrounding the murder of young Emmett Till in a graphic format. Hill's meticulous research provides readers with both the context to place the crime in its wider historical setting and the primary sources to analyze the case in detail. Suggestions for how to effectively use the graphic history in the classroom make The Murder of Emmett Till an ideal text for courses in American and African American history.

Catherine M. Jones, William W. Kibler, and Logan E. Whalen, eds., and trans.: An Old French Trilogy: Texts from the William of Orange Cycle

University Press of Florida

While most English-language readers are familiar with Old French epic poetry, or chansons de geste, through the Song of Roland and its tale of gallant martyrdom, this volume provides a broader and richer view of the tradition by introducing songs devoted to the exploits of a different sort of hero—the brave and blustery William of Orange. An Old French Trilogy provides an updated English translation of three central poems from the twelfth-century Guillaume d’Orange cycle.

Rita Keresztesi: Literary Black Power in the Caribbean: Fiction, Music and Film

Routledge

This volume is groundbreaking in its focus on the creative arts and artists in their evaluations of, and insights on, the relevance of the Black Power message across the region. The author takes a cultural studies approach to bring together the political with the aesthetic, enriching an already fertile debate on the era and the subject of Black Power in the Caribbean region. The chapters discuss various aspects of Black Power in the Caribbean: on the pages of journals and magazines, at contemporary conferences that radicalized academia to join forces with communities, in fiction and essays by writers and intellectuals, in calypso and reggae music, and in the first films produced in the Caribbean.

Waleed Mahdi: Arab Americans in Film: From Hollywood and Egyptian Stereotypes to Self-Representation

Syracuse University Press

In this innovative volume, Mahdi offers a comparative analysis of three cinemas, yielding rich insights on the layers of representation and the ways in which those representations are challenged and disrupted. Hollywood films have fostered reductive imagery of Arab Americans since the 1970s as either a national security threat or a foreign policy concern, while Egyptian filmmakers have used polarizing images of Arab Americans since the 1990s to convey their nationalist critiques of the United States. Both portrayals are rooted in anxieties around globalization, migration, and US-Arab geopolitics. In contrast, Arab American cinema provides a more complex, realistic, and fluid representation of Arab American citizenship and the nuances of a transnational identity.

Afshin Marashi: Exile and the Nation: The Parsi Community of India and the Making of Modern Iran

University of Texas Press

Tracing the cultural and intellectual exchange between Iranian nationalists and the Parsi community during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Exile and the Nation shows how this interchange led to the collective reimagining of Parsi and Iranian national identity—and the influence of antiquity on modern Iranian nationalism, which previously rested solely on European forms of thought. Iranian nationalism, Afshin Marashi argues, was also the byproduct of the complex history resulting from the demise of the early modern Persianate cultural system, as well as one of the many cultural heterodoxies produced within the Indian Ocean world. Crossing the boundaries of numerous fields of study, this book reframes Iranian nationalism within the context of the connected, transnational, and global history of the modern era.

Suzanne M. Moon and Peter S. Soppelsa: The History of Technology: Critical Readings

Bloomsbury

Drawing on material from the mid-1970s to the present day that examines diverse cultures and time periods, Suzanne M. Moon and Peter S. Soppelsa enable interested readers to explore key thematic divisions that structure research in the field and read influential works that bring the major concerns, methods, and insights of the history of technology to life. With 50 articles included across the set as a whole, the volumes are broken down into four crucial thematic areas: Building, Creating, Designing, Maintaining; Technology, Power, and Sociopolitical Order; Technology, Nature and Environment; and Circulations and Connections.

Karin Schutjer: Goethe und das Judentum. Translated by Ulrike Bischoff

Wallstein Press

Karin Schutjer examines Goethe's ambivalent confrontation with Judaism from the observation that it profoundly influenced his equally ambivalent concept of modernity. Her study contextualizes Goethe's reception of the Jewish scriptural tradition and questions the traces that the Pentateuch, the Kabbalah and Spinoza as well as anti-Jewish figures of thought such as the Wandering Jew left in his work.

Rienk Vermij: Thinking on Earthquakes in Early Modern Europe: Firm Beliefs on Shaky Ground

Routledge

Thinking on Earthquakes investigates both scholarly theories and views that were propagated among the early modern European population. Through a chronological approach, Vermij reveals that in contrast to the Ancient and medieval philosophers who suggested rational explanations for earthquakes, supernatural ideas made a powerful comeback in the sixteenth century. By analysing a variety of sources such as pamphlets, sermons, and treatises, this study shows how changes in the ideas on earthquakes were a result of social and political demands as well as from improvements in the means of communication, rather than from scientific methods.

Stephen Weldon: The Scientific Spirit of American Humanism

Johns Hopkins University Press

Examining the development of an increasingly antagonistic engagement between religious conservatives and the secular culture of the academy, Weldon explains how this conflict has shaped the discussion of science and religion in American culture. He also uncovers a less known—but equally influential—story about the conflict within humanism itself between two very different visions of science: an aspirational, democratic outlook held by the followers of John Dewey on the one hand, and a skeptical, combative view influenced by logical positivism on the other.

Man Fung Yip and Poshek Fu: The Cold War and Asian Cinemas

Routledge

This volume makes a major contribution to constructing a cultural and popular cinema history of the global Cold War. Its geographical focus is set on East Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia. In adopting such an inclusive approach, it draws attention to the different manifestations and meanings of the connections between the Cold War and cinema across Asian borders. Many essays in the volume have a transnational and cross-regional focus, one that sheds light on Cold War-influenced networks and on the efforts of American agencies to establish a transregional infrastructure of "free cinema" to contain the communist influences in Asia.

James L. Zainaldin: Gargilius Martialis : The Agricultural Fragments

Cambridge University Press

In the third century CE, the North African polymath, soldier, and provincial official Q. Gargilius Martialis (died 260) wrote a treatise on the cultivation and medical use of fruits, vegetables, and herbs. The agricultural part of this work survives in a fragmentary state in a single manuscript. The fragments will be valuable for those interested in ancient agriculture, in Greco-Roman authorship on the technai or artes, and in the history and sociolinguistics of Latin. This volume offers a new edition and the first English translation of Gargilius' agricultural fragments as well as an introduction and full-scale commentary.

Bill Endres: Digitizing Medieval Manuscripts: The St. Chad Gospels, Materiality, Recoveries, and Representation in 2D & 3D

Amsterdam University Press

What does it mean to digitize a medieval manuscript? This book examines this question by exploring a range of advanced imaging technologies. The author focuses on the relationship between digital technologies and the complex materiality of manuscripts and the human bodies that engage them. The chapters explore imaging technologies, interfaces to present digital surrogates, and limitations to and enhancements through the digital, plus historical photographs. Essential reading for all those involved in manuscript digitization projects in both scholarly and cultural heritage contexts

Caroline T. Schroeder: Children and Family in Late Antique Egyptian Monasticism

Cambridge University Press

This is the first book-length study of children in one of the birthplaces of early Christian monasticism, Egypt. Although comprised of men and women who had renounced sex and family, the monasteries of late antiquity raised children, educated them, and expected them to carry on their monastic lineage and legacies into the future. Children within monasteries existed in a liminal space, simultaneously vulnerable to the whims and abuses of adults and also cherished as potential future monastic prodigies. Caroline T. Schroeder examines diverse sources - letters, rules, saints' lives, art, and documentary evidence - to probe these paradoxes. In doing so, she demonstrates how early Egyptian monasteries provided an intergenerational continuity of social, cultural, and economic capital while also contesting the traditional family's claims to these forms of social continuity.

Kathryn Schumaker: Troublemakers

NYU Press

In the late 1960s, protests led by students roiled high schools across the country. As school desegregation finally took place on a wide scale, students of color were particularly vocal in contesting the racial discrimination they saw in school policies and practices. And yet, these young people had no legal right to express dissent at school. It was not until 1969 that the Supreme Court would recognize the First Amendment rights of students in the landmark Tinker v. Des Moines case. A series of students’ rights lawsuits in the desegregation era challenged everything from school curricula to disciplinary policies. But in casting students as “troublemakers” or as “culturally deficient,” school authorities and other experts persuaded the courts to set limits on rights protections that made students of color disproportionately vulnerable to suspension and expulsion.