New Books by Faculty Merge Disciplines

Books by several Arts and Sciences professors were published during the first half of 2022.

Faculty from nine departments have authored books since January, with most of their work at the intersection of myriad fields—including digital humanities, international politics, cultural anthropology, sound studies, and theology. (The following abstracts from publishers have been condensed and edited.)

Dante's Gluttons: Food and Society from the Convivio to the Comedy (Amsterdam University Press)
Danielle Callegari, Department of French and Italian

Combining medieval history, food studies, and literary criticism, Callegari explores how the medieval Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) expresses the social, political, and cultural values of his time through food.

 

 

 

 

Chains of Love and Beauty: The Diary of Michael Field (Princeton University Press)
Carolyn Dever, Department of English and Creative Writing

The late-Victorian poet Michael Field was well known to be the pseudonym of Katharine Bradley (1846–1914) and her niece, Edith Cooper (1862–1913). Less well known is that the women kept a double diary and produced a 29-volume story of love, life, and art. In this first book about the diary, Dever champions this work as a great unknown "novel" of the 19th century.

Read a Q&A with Dever about Chains of Love and Beauty in Public Books.

 

 

Tales Of Idolized Boys: Male-Male Love In Medieval Japanese Buddhist Narratives (Hawaii University Press) 
Sachi Schmidt-Hori, Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages Program

In medieval Japan elite families often entrusted their young sons to renowned Buddhist priests, who educated them in Buddhist scriptures, poetry, music, and dance. When the boys reached adolescence, some extended their education and became chigo, or Buddhist acolytes. Schmidt-Hori examines this role through the lens of social constructs such as gender, sexuality, age, and agency.

 

 

 

Nationalisms in International Politics (Princeton University Press)
Kathleen Powers, Department of Government

Challenging the received wisdom about nationalism and military aggression, Powers differentiates nationalisms built on unity from those built on equality. Combining innovative U.S. experiments with analyses of European mass and elite survey data, she argues that unity encourages support for external conflict and undermines regional trust and cooperation, whereas equality mitigates militarism and facilitates support for security cooperation.

 

 

 

Embodied Economies: Diaspora and Transcultural Capital in Latinx Caribbean Fiction and Theater (Rutgers University Press)
Israel Reyes, Department of Spanish and Portuguese

In the United States, the discourse of white nationalism compels upwardly mobile immigrants to trade in their ties to ethnic and linguistic communities to assimilate to the dominant culture. For Latinx Caribbean immigrants, exiles, and refugees, this means abandoning Spanish, rejecting forms of communal interdependence, and adopting white, middle-class forms of embodiment. Reyes explores this phenomenon in the contemporary fiction and theater of the Latinx Caribbean diaspora.

 

 

Voices from Beyond: Physiology, Sentience, and the Uncanny in Eighteenth-Century French Literature (University of Virginia Press)
Scott Sanders, Department of French and Italian

Sanders provides an interdisciplinary and transnational study of 18th-century conceptions of the human voice. He examines the diversity of thought about vocal materiality and its roles in philosophical and literary works from the period, uncovering representations of the voice that intertwine physiology with physics, music with moral philosophy, and literary description with performance.

 

 

 

Economy and Modern Christian Thought (Brill)
Devin Singh, Department of Religion 

Singh presents key features of the engagement of Christian theology, ethics, and related disciplines with the market and economic concerns. He contends that economy and Christian thought have long been interconnected, and recounts aspects of this relationship and why it matters for how one might engage the economy ethically and theologically. The book also highlights sites of emerging research including debt, racial capital, and cryptocurrency.

 

 

 

I Do Not Sleep: A Novel by Ihsan Abdel Kouddous, translated by Jonathan Smolin (The American University of Cairo Press)
Jonathan Smolin, translator, Middle Eastern Studies Program

A story of betrayal, desire, and family drama, written by a giant of Egyptian popular fiction who shocked readers in the 1950s when this Lolita-esque novel first appeared and whose work has never before been available in English. Written as a letter, Ihsan Abdel Kouddous' classic novel of revenge and betrayal challenges patriarchal norms with its strong female characters and brazen sexuality, and continues to speak to the complex human condition. 

Read a Q&A with Smolin about the I Do Not Sleep in the ezine Jadaliyya. 

 

Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt  (Stanford University Press)
Andrew Simon, Middle Eastern Studies 

Simon investigates the social life of the cassette tape to offer a multisensory history of modern Egypt. Enabling an unprecedented number of people to participate in the creation of culture and circulation of content, cassette players and tapes informed broader cultural, political, and economic developments and defined "modern" Egyptian households. 

Listen to Simon discuss Media of the Masses in an interview on the New Books Network.

 

 

Holy Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet (Stanford University Press) 
Michelle Warren, Comparative Literature Program 

Warren tells the story of a medieval manuscript—an Arthurian romance with textual origins in 12th-century England, now diffused across the 21st century internet. Situated at the intersections of the digital humanities, library sciences, literary history, and book history, Holy Digital Grail offers new ways to conceptualize authorship, canon formation, and the definition of a "book." 

Listen to a Q&A with Warren about Holy Digital Grail in "The Avid Reader Show" podcast.