Faculty Bookshelf

Social Voices: The Cultural Politics of Singers Around the Globe
University of Illinois Press, September 2023

Levi Gibbs (editor), Department of Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages

Designed as a textbook for advanced undergraduate students, this collection brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars of anthropology, sociology, literature, music, ethnomusicology, and performance studies to engage with issues of race, gender, ethnicity, and class.

 

 

 

Anti-Racist Community Engagement
Stylus Publishing, August 2023

Roopika Risam (co-editor), Department of Film and Media Studies, Comparative Literature Program

The authors showcase anti-racist community-engaged traditions that BIPOC academics and community members have created through more than a century of collaboration across university and community. 

Arts and Sciences Q&A 
 

 

The Dawn of a Mindful Universe
HarperCollins Publishers, August 2023

Marcelo Gleiser, Department of Physics and Astronomy

Award-winning astronomer and physicist Gleiser issues an urgent call for the recognition of the preciousness of life using reason and curiosity—the foundations of science—to study, nurture, and ultimately preserve humanity as we face the existential crisis of climate change.

Arts and Sciences Q&A

Science Review

 

Families on the Edge
MIT Press, August 2023

Elizabeth Carpenter-Song '01, Department of Anthropology

In this ethnographic portrait of families in rural and small-town New England, Carpenter-Song draws on a decade of research to chart the struggles of a cohort of families she met in a Vermont family shelter in 2009 as they contend with housing insecurity, mental illness, and substance use. 

Vermont Public Interview
 

 

 

Prophetic Leadership and Visionary Hope
University of Pennsylvania Press, May 2023

Barbara Will (editor), Department of English and Creative Writing

This volume of essays by leading scholars of Black studies, religious studies, and social justice history examines Cornel West's classic 1993 book Race Matters and the future of racial understanding and healing in American society today.

 

 

 

The Undertow
W.W. Norton & Company, March 2023

Jeff Sharlet, Department of English and Creative Writing

In this critically acclaimed guide to the religious dimensions of American politics, Sharlet explores how, over the last decade, social division has morphed into distrust, distrust into paranoia, and hatred into fantasies—sometimes realities—of violence.

New York Times Review

 

 

The Shared World
Northwestern University Press, April 2023

Vievee Francis, Department of English and Creative Writing

In her latest poetry collection, Francis imagines the ideas, ideals, and spaces of the Black woman. The book delves into inherited memories and restrictions between families, lovers, and strangers and the perception and inconvenient truth of Black woman as mother—with or without child.

 

 

 

Eli and the Octopus
Harvard University Press, April 2023

Matt Garcia, Department of History

In June of 1970, rabbi-turned-businessman Eli Black took the helm of a multinational agricultural company with hopes to improve the world. Garcia chronicles his tragic quest to merge business with social responsibility. 

Arts and Sciences Q&A

Wall Street Journal Review

 

 

The Birth of Computer Vision
University of Minnesota Press, April 2023

James E. Dobson, Department of English and Creative Writing

What happens when we train computers to see the world, when we know they will be influenced by the biases and assumptions of the people who created them? Dobson takes readers back to the Cold War-era scientists who taught computers how to see.

Arts and Sciences Q&A

 

 

Disturbing Development in the Jim Crow South
University of Georgia Press, March 2023

Mona Domosh, Department of Geography

Domosh documents how Black government employees practiced rural improvement in ways that sustained southern Black farmers' lives and livelihoods in the early decades of the 20th century, resisting the white supremacy that characterized the Jim Crow South.

Arts and Sciences Q&A

 

 

Playing Oppression
MIT Press, March 2023

Mary Flanagan, Department of Film and Media Studies

Flanagan and co-author Mikael Jakobsson apply the incisive frameworks of postcolonial theory to a broad historical survey of board games to show how these seemingly benign entertainments reinforce the logic of imperialism—and why the future of play depends on reckoning with it.

MIT News Story

 

 

#You Know You're Black in France When...
MIT Press, February 2023

Trica Keaton, Departments of African and African American Studies

In everyday life, France is anything but raceblind. In this interdisciplinary study, Keaton illuminates how b/Black (racialized/politicized) French people distinctly expose and refuse what she calls "raceblind republicanism." 

Arts and Sciences Q&A

 

 

Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self (second edition)
Princeton University Press, January 2023

Susan Brison, Department of Philosophy

In this critically acclaimed personal narrative, Brison tells the story of her recovery from a violent assault and offers an illuminating philosophical exploration of trauma. This paperback edition includes a new preface by the author.
 

 

 

 

Institutions Under Siege
Cambridge University Press, December 2022

John Campbell, Department of Sociology

Campbell examines Trump's attack on the "deep state" through the lens of institutional change theory and demonstrates how he capitalized on distinct leadership tactics to inspire, make deals with, and threaten people to get what he wanted. 

Arts and Sciences Q&A

 

 

The Enchanted Boot
Wayne State University Press, November 2022

Nancy Canepa, Department of French and Italian

This comprehensive collection of Italian tales in English encourages a revisitation of the fairy-tale canon in light of some of the most fascinating material that has often been excluded from it.

Arts and Sciences Q&A

 

 

 

The Best American Essays
HarperCollins Publishers, November 2022

Alexander Chee (editor), Department of English and Creative Writing

Under Chee's leadership, the iconic essay collection features the most diverse lineup of authors and publications in the history of the series.

Arts and Sciences Q&A

 

 

 

Dante's Gluttons
Amsterdam University Press, November 2022

Danielle Callegari, Department of French and Italian

For medieval Italian poet Dante Alighieri, the consumption of food is not a frivolity, but a crux of life, and gluttony is the abdication of civic and spiritual responsibility and a danger to both the individual body and soul, as well as the greater collective. Callegari explores how Dante expresses the social, political, and cultural values of his time through food. 

 

 

Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad
Penguin Random House, October 2022

Mathew Delmont, Department of History

This acclaimed book about Black Americans' heroism during the war and experience of racism won a 2023 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, a national juried prize for literature that confronts racism.

Arts and Sciences Q&A

New York Times Review

 

Still No Word from You
Catapult, October 2022

Peter Orner, Department of English and Creative Writing

This award-winning nonfiction collection weaves personal memories with reflections on why we read and write. Orner's take on literature alternates with his own true stories of loss, love, despair, and hope.

Arts and Sciences Q&A

New York Times Review

 

 

Gods, Goddesses, and the Women Who Serve Them
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., September 2022

Susan Ackerman, Department of Religion

Drawing on three decades researching underexamined aspects of the Hebrew Bible pertaining to women, Ackerman describes the worship of goddesses in ancient Israel, the roles women played as priests and prophets, the cultic significance of queen mothers, and the Hebrew Bible's accounts of women's religious lives.

 

 

 

Passion Plays
University of North Carolina Press, September 2022

Randall Balmer, Department of Religion

From baseball to basketball and football to ice hockey, Balmer explores the origins and histories of big-time sports from the late 19th century to the present, with anecdotes and insights into their ties to religious life. 

Arts and Sciences Q&A

The Guardian Review

 

A Dream Defaulted
Harvard Education Press, August 2022

Jason Houle, Department of Sociology

Co-authors Houle and Fenaba Addo explore how the student loan crisis disproportionately affects Black borrowers and why rising student debt is both a cause and consequence of social inequality in the United States.

Arts and Sciences Q&A

 

 

Embodied Economies
Rutgers University Press, May 2022

Israel Reyes, Department of Spanish and Portuguese

In the neoliberal economy of the United States, the discourse of white nationalism compels upwardly mobile Latinx Caribbean immigrants to trade in their ties to ethnic and linguistic communities to assimilate to the dominant culture. Reyes terms this phenomenon "transcultural capital" and explores this process in the contemporary fiction and theater of the Latinx Caribbean diaspora.

 

 

 

Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media
University of Illinois Press, April 2022

Reighan Gillam, Department of Latin American, Latino & Caribbean Studies

Gillam examines the alternative and activist Black media and the people creating it in today's Brazil. She looks at a cross-section of media to show the ways Afro-Brazilians artists contribute to the fight to change how Brazilian media depicts Black people.

 

 

Women and the Religion of Ancient Israel
Yale University Press, April 2022

Susan Ackerman, Department of Religion

In this comprehensive account of ancient Israelite women's religious lives and experiences, Ackerman examines their household shrines, regional sanctuaries, national temples, rituals, and their special roles in religious settings.

 

 

 

Chains of Love and Beauty
Princeton University Press, April 2022

Carolyn Dever, Department of English and Creative Writing

Dever makes the case that a monumental diary by an aunt and niece who published poetry together as "Michael Field"—and who were prolific writers as well as partners for decades—is one of the great unknown works of late-Victorian and early modernist literature.

London Review of Books Review

 

 

Voices From Beyond
University of Virginia Press, April 2022

Scott Sanders, Department of French and Italian

In the early 18th century, how voice related to body became a major subject of scientific and cultural interest. This interdisciplinary and transnational study examines the diversity of thought about vocal materialtiy and its roles in philosophical and literary works from that period.

 

 

 

Media of the Masses
Stanford University Press, April 2022

Andrew Simon, Department of History

Audiocassette technology gave ordinary individuals an opening to challenge state-controlled Egyptian media. At the intersection of social history, cultural anthropology, and media and sound studies, the book ultimately shows how the most ordinary things may yield the most surprising insights.

Los Angeles Review of Books Review

 

 

Economy and Modern Christian Thought
Brill, March 2022

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. The book contends that economy and Christian thought have long been interconnected and recounts why this matters for engaging the economy ethically and theologically. 

 

 

 

 

Holy Digital Grail
Stanford University Press, March 2022

Michelle Warren, Comparative Literature Program

Medieval books have been through a lot: singed by fire, mottled by mold, eaten by insects, annotated by readers, cut into fragments, or damaged through well-intentioned preservation efforts. This is the story of one such manuscript—an Arthurian romance with textual origins in 12-century England now diffused across the 21st-century internet. 

 

 

Nationalisms in International Politics
Princeton University Press, February 2022

Kathleen Powers, Department of Government

With nationalism on the rise around the world, many worry that nationalistic attitudes could lead to a surge in deadly conflict. Powers examines how different forms of nationalism shape foreign policy attitudes and raises important questions about whether transnational identities increase support for cooperation or undermine it.