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Established in 1940, Vanderbilt University Press is the principal publishing arm of one of the nation’s leading research universities. The Press’s primary mission is to select, produce, market, and disseminate scholarly publications of outstanding quality and originality. In conjunction with the long-term development of its editorial program, the Press draws on and supports the intellectual activities of the university and its faculty. Although its main emphasis falls in the area of scholarly publishing, the Press also publishes books of substance and significance that are of interest to the general public, including regional books. In this regard, the Press also supports Vanderbilt’s service and outreach to the larger local and national community.
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Goya and the Mystery of Reading studies the way Goya’s work heralds the emergence of a new kind of viewer, one who he assumes can and does read, and whose comportment as a skilled interpreter of signs alters the sense of his art, multiplying its potential for meaning. While the reading revolution resulted from and contributed to the momentous social transformations of the late eighteenth and early ninteenth centuries, Goya and the Mystery of Reading explains how this transition can be tracked in the work of Goya, an artist who aimed not to copy the world around him, but to read it.
Luis Martín-Estudillo is a professor of Spanish and Collegiate Scholar at the University of Iowa.
February, 2023
288 pages
History/Social History
Rights: World
June 2023
296 pages
Trans studies / Pop music / AutofictionLatin American Studies / Literary Studies
Rights: World
AMY E. WRIGHT
Serial Mexico ties in two centuries of Mexican serial narratives—striking tales of glory, of fame, of colorful epic characters, grounded in oral folklore—with their subsequent retelling in comics, radio, and television soap operas. Amy Wright’s colorful multidisciplinary volume delves deep into this rich national storytelling tradition for the first time: examining nostalgic tales told and reimagined from popular novelas to radionovelas then telenovelas and onward, examining the enduring foundational figures woven into the very fabric of society, from the country’s beginnings into the twenty-firstcentury. This panoramic view offers a glimpse into how the Mexican people have experienced their stories from the country’s early days until now, showcasing a penchant for protagonists that mock authority, that make light of hierarchy, that embrace the hybridity and mestizaje of Mexico itself. These tales vividly reflect and respond to a variety of crucial cultural concerns such as family, patriarchy, gender roles, racial mixing, urbanization, modernization and political idealism. Serial Mexico shows clearly how serialized storytelling’s mix of melodrama and sensationalism was not devoid of revealing political and cultural messaging. In a detailed yet accessible style, Wright highlights how these stories and concerns have continued to morph, along with changing social media, into current times. Will these tropes and traditions carry on within new and reimagined serial storytelling forms? Only time will tell. Stay tuned for the next surprising episode.
June 2023
296 pages
Latin American Studies / History
Rights: World
Mexican independence was, in a sense, an economic event. It was in the realm of the economic that elites managed to create a common ground with non-elites in their demands against foreign domination. Additionally, throughout the nineteenth century, independence was imagined by the lettered men of Mexico as a feat that nationalized, or could have nationalized, a rich and productive economic apparatus. Mexico, Interrupted investigates the fate of these economic hopes during the difficult decades between 1821, the year of the country’s definite separation from Spain, and 1852, a period of political polarization after the US-Mexico War that would lead the country to the brink of another armed conflict. Drawing on pamphlets, legislation, congressional debates, reports, and newspapers, this book studies the Mexican intelligentsia’s obsessive engagement with the labor and idleness of the citizenry in their attempts to create a wealthy, independent nation. By focusing on figures of work and its opposites in the period between, Mexico, Interrupted reconstructs the period’s “economic imaginaries of independence”: the repertoire of political and cultural discourses that structured the understandings, beliefs, and fantasies about the relationships between “the economy” and the life of an independent polity. All told, by bringing together intellectual history, critical theory, and cultural studies, this project offers a new account of the Mexican nineteenth century and complicates existing histories of the spread of the “spirit of capitalism” through the Americas.
Sergio Gutiérrez Negrón is an associate professor in the Department of Hispanic Studies at Oberlin College.
KOICHI HAGIMOTO
In the early twentieth century, historical imaginings of Japan contributed to the Argentine vision of “transpacific modernity.” Intellectuals such as Eduardo Wilde and Manuel Domecq García celebrated Japanese customs and traditions as important values that could be integrated into Argentine society. But a new generation of Nikkei or Japanese Argentines is rewriting this conventional narrative in the twenty-first century. Nikkei writers such as Maximiliano Matayoshi and Alejandra Kamiya are challenging the earlier, unapologetic view of Japan based on their own immigrant experiences. Compared to the experience of political persecution against Japanese immigrants in Brazil and Peru, the Japanese in Argentina generally lived under a more agreeable sociopolitical climate. In order to understand the “positive” perception of Japan in Argentine history and literature, Samurai in the Land of the Gaucho turns to the current debate on race in Argentina, particularly as it relates to the discourse of whiteness. One of the central arguments is that Argentina’s century-old interest in Japan represents a disguised method of (re)claiming its white, Western identity. Through close readings of diverse genres (travel writing, essay, novel, short story,and film) Samurai in the Land of the Gaucho yields a multilayered analysis in order to underline the role Japan has played in both defining and defying Argentine modernity from the twentieth century to the present.
Koichi Hagimoto is an associate professor of Spanish at Wellesley College.
BEN GERLOFS
Transdisciplinary by design, Monstrous Politics first moves historically through Mexico City’s turbulent twentieth century, driven centrally by the contentious imbrication of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and its capital city. Participant observation, expert interviews, and archival materials demonstrate the shifting strategies and alliances of recent decades, provide the reader with a sense of the texture of contemporary political life in the city during a time of unprecedented change, and locate these dynamics within the history and geography of twentieth-century urbanization and political revolution. Substantive ethnographic chapters trace the emergence and decline of the political language of “the right to the city,” the establishment and contestation of a “postpolitical” governance regime, and the culmination of a century of urban politics in the processes of “political reform” by which Mexico City finally wrested back significant political autonomy and local democracy from the federal state. Drawing on theories of social revolution that embrace complexity, and espousing a methodology that foregrounds the everyday nature of politics, Monstrous Politics develops an understanding of revolutionary urban politics at once contextually nuanced and conceptually expansive, and thus better able to address the realities of politics in the “urban age” even beyond Mexico City..
Ben Gerlofs is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Hong Kong.
July 2023
212 pages
Latin American Studies / Asian Studies
Rights: World
January 2023
276 pages
Urban Studies
Rights: World
September 2023
278 pages
Social Science / Media Studies
Rights: World
From electoral posters to fiction films, documentaries, and internet memes, Performing Populism traces the ways that collective Spanish identities evolved from a period when “the people” seemed to have been willingly subsumed under the apathetic ideation of the middle-class consumer to the moment in 2011 when a crisis of representation forced many into political consciousness. This rude awakening kickstarted the reconstruction of a Spanish “us” that staged exhibitions of popular will on par with and parallel to the Arab Spring, but in a European register that embraced the countercultural through art that disremembered its political past but could not escape the ghostly shadow of its history.
Ruben Perez-Hidalgo is a lecturer of Spanish studies in the Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Sydney.
December 2023
272 pages
History / Europe
Rights: World
The Paradox of Paradise focuses on the trajectory of urban coastal tourism in Spain from the late Franco years to the present through the lens of Spanish cultural production. “Sun-and-fun” destinations like Torremolinos (located in the Costa del Sol) and Benidorm (located in the Costa Blanca) established a model for urban renewal that literally built the coasts to accommodate and expand foreign tourism as the driving force of the so-called Spanish Economic Miracle. In addition to inserting the coasts into the scope of Iberian urban studies (typically dominated by studies of Madrid and Barcelona) this project breaks new ground by bringing to the fore unexplored cultural artifacts vital to the narrative of development along the coasts in Spain: in particular the ubiquitous tourist postcard, which advances not only the post-Franco economic miracle, but does so by highlighting the transformation of the actual Spanish landscape along its coasts.
William J. Nichols is an associate professor of Spanish literature and culture at Georgia State University.
This book explores the complicated and confusing linkages between memory and trauma for individuals caught up in civil war and post-conflict reconciliation in the Peruvian Amazon's Huallaga Valley—an epicenter for leftist rebels and a booming shadow economy based on the extraction and circulation of cocaine. The End of the Future tells the story of the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement's (Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru, MRTA) violent attempts to overthrow the state in the late 1980s and early 1990s from the perspective of the poorest residents of the lower Huallaga's Caynarachi Basin.
Bartholomew Dean is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas.
ROBERTO IGNACIO DÍAZ
Latin America and the Transports of Opera studies a series of episodes in the historical and textual convergence of a hallowed art form and a part of the world often regarded as peripheral. Perhaps unexpectedly, the archives of opera generate new arguments about several issues at the heart of the established discussion about Latin America: the allure of European cultural models; the ambivalence of exoticism; the claims of nationalism and cosmopolitanism; and, ultimately, the place of the region in the global circulation of the arts. Opera’s transports concern literal and imagined journeys as well as the emotions that its stories and sounds trigger as they travel back and forth between Europe—the United States, too—and Latin America..
November 2023
288 pages
Social Science / Anthropology
Rights: World
November 2023
352 pages
Music / Genres & Styles
Rights: World
December 2023
296 pages
Performing Arts / Theater
Rights: World
CHRISTINA BAKER
In Sonic Strategies, author Christina Baker highlights the tactics employed by contemporary performance artists in Mexico in response to the violence surrounding the government’s so-called War on Drugs. Taken together, the case studies in this book illuminate how critiques of the nation’s rising death tolls, governmental corruption, and gendered violence very literally sound, whether in Música de balas, a post-dramatic piece by Hugo Salcedo; the lamentations of the nation’s Antigones; satirical revisions of Mexican Golden Age film in the cabaret piece Nosotras las proles; or the story of transfeminicide in César Enríquez’s La Prietty Guoman by way of US pop music. By paying close attention to both planned and spontaneous sounds within live and textual experiences, Sonic Strategies contends that conscientious listening reveals dynamic practices that reside beyond the linguistic and embodied gesture.
Christina Baker is an assistant professor of Latin/x American theater and performance at Temple University.
CAROLYN FORNOFF
January 2024
288 pages
Literary Criticism Rights: World
Studies indicate that Mexicans are more worried about climate change than any other global issue, more anxious about natural disasters than any other quotidian threat (including crime), and that suicide rates have risen along with temperatures. These fears are grounded in reality: in the last twenty years, Mexico issued more than 2,000 extreme weather warnings linked to hydrometeorological events, and ranked in the top ten countries in terms of absolute economic losses caused by (un)natural disasters. Mexico is also one of the deadliest countries in the world for environmental activists: in 2018 alone, twenty-one defenders of the land were murdered, and many others criminalized or intimidated. Social anxiety in Mexico about ongoing and future climate change is reflected in the outpouring of eco-cultural production over the past decade, a body of work that has yet to be comprehensively studied. The exponential explosion of cultural responses to climate change is not limited to any one genre: Mexican poets like Karen Villeda and Isabel Zapata have thematized extinction, sci-fi writer Alberto Chimal recently published a dystopian young adult climate fiction, and performance artist Naomi Rincón Gallardo has created works that contest extractivism’s murderous tactics. Subjunctive Aesthetics brings together these artists and others to collate a diverse constellation of Mexican cultural responses to climate change that index the multifaceted nature of this crisis.
The University of North Carolina Press, a nonprofit publisher of both scholarly and general-interest books and journals, operates simultaneously in a business environment and in the world of scholarship and ideas. The Press advances the University’s triple mission of teaching, research, and public service by publishing first-rate books and journals for students, scholars, and general readers. The Press has earned a distinguished reputation by publishing excellent work from the nation’s leading scholars, writers, and intellectuals and by presenting that work effectively to wide-ranging audiences.
Established in 1922, unc Press was the first university press in the South and one of the first in the nation. Our regional publishing program—aimed at general readers and offering engaging, authoritative work on all aspects of the region’s history and culture, its natural and built environment, its music, food, literature, geography, plant and animal life—has been widely adopted in other parts of the country. Over the years, Press books have won hundreds of prestigious awards including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and those of many national scholarly societies. Today, the imprint of unc Press is recognized worldwide as a mark of publishing excellence—both for what we publish and for how we publish. uncpress.org
Meditations on Witches, Wives, and Goddesses
SAYANTANI DASGUPTA
This is an essay collection exploring global women's interior lives and how they contrast sharply from their outer lives, irrespective of geography, class, socio-religious status, age, and the color of their skin. It covers urgent and huge subjects such as body image, citizenship, workplace culture, mass shootings, and climate change. But it also includes “quiet,” intimate subjects. Such as women and their relationship with hair; the Biblical heroine Judith; the city of Beaufort, North Carolina, where lies the grave of a six-year-old girl buried in a keg of rum; the chaos of putting together a wedding when the traditions one has grown up with aren’t available. Interspersed are stories of interests in food, religion, mythology, popular culture, women’s history, cinema, art, and travel.
Born in Calcutta and raised in New Delhi, Sayantani Dasgupta is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. She is the author of Women Who Misbehave (Penguin Random House), Fire Girl: Essays on India, America, & the In-Between (Two Sylvias Press) & the chapbook The House of Nails: Memories of a New Delhi Childhood (Red Bird Press).
Spring 2024
200 pages,
Memoir/Essay
Rights: World English
October 2023
272 pages, Asian Studies / Political History / Religion Rights: World
AMY YEE, with a foreword by HIS HOLINESS THE
DALAI LAMAWhen journalist Amy Yee first visited Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama’s exile home in the foothills of India’s Himalayas, she was drawn to the stories of Tibetan exiles who lived there. But she never imagined the 2008 trip would result in a global, fourteen-year journey to document the experiences of Tibetan refugees who make their way in the world far from home. As she explores what it means for people to retain a strong cultural and religious identity in exile, Yee immerses herself in Dharamsala and meets Tibetans from all walks of life: spiritual leaders, exile government politicians, monks and nuns, teachers, students, activists, former political prisoners, Chinese democracy activists, and Tibetans born in India as well as new refugees. She comes to know ordinary people like Thukjee, a monk and unlikely veterinary assistant; Ngawang, a cook and political refugee; and Deckyi and Dhondup, a married couple who fled middle-class lives in Lhasa during the 2008 clashes between Tibetans and the Chinese government. As Yee's new friends seek homes beyond Dharamsala, Yee follows them to other parts of India, and across oceans to Australia, Belgium, and the United States. Weaving reportage and travel narrative, Far from the Rooftop of the World tells these stories and others against the backdrop of milestones and events in Tibet’s recent history—some memorable, too many tragic. The resulting portrait illuminates the humanity, strength, and generosity of a people facing great adversity.
Amy Yee is a journalist with Bloomberg News
Oil, Autocracy, and the Cold War, 1951-1954
DAVID S. PAINTER AND GREGORY BREW
Drawing on years of research in American, British, and Iranian sources, David S. Painter and Gregory Brew provide a concise and accessible account of Cold War competition, Anglo-American imperialism, covert intervention, the political economy of global oil, and Iran's struggle against autocratic government. The Struggle for Iran dispels myths and misconceptions that have hindered understanding this pivotal chapter in the history of the post–World War II world.
David S. Painter is associate professor emeritus of international history at Georgetown University. He is the author of The Cold War: An International History and Oil and the American Century: The Political Economy of U.S. Foreign Oil Policy, 1941–1954 Gregory Brew is a Henry A. Kissinger Postdoctoral Fellow at International Security Studies and the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs at Yale University.
January 2023
324 pages
History/Iran/Cold War Rights: World
How Brazil Embraced the World's Most Caffeine-Rich Plant
SETH GARFIELD
Brazil Winner, 2023 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards—Low or No-Alcohol Drink & Drink History; Food and Indigenous Peoples.
In this sweeping chronicle of guarana—a glossy-leaved Amazonian vine packed with more caffeine than any other plant—Seth Garfield develops a wide-ranging approach to the history of Brazil itself. The story begins with guarana as the pre-Columbian cultivar of the SatereMawe people in the Lower Amazon region, where it figured centrally in the Indigenous nation's origin stories, dietary regimes, and communal ceremonies. During subsequent centuries of Portuguese colonialism and Brazilian rule, guarana was reformulated by settlers, scientists, folklorists, food technologists, and marketers. Whether in search of pleasure, profits, professional distinction, or patriotic markers, promoters imparted new meanings to guarana and found new uses for it. Today, it is the namesake ingredient of a multibillion-dollar soft drink industry and a beloved national symbol. Guarana's journey elucidates human impacts on Amazonian ecosystems; the circulation of knowledge, goods, and power; and the promise of modernity in Latin America's largest nation. For Garfield, the beverage's history reveals not only the structuring of inequalities in Brazil but also the mythmaking and ordering of social practices that constitute so-called traditional and modern societies.
Seth Garfield is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. His most recent book is In Search of the Amazon
REBEKAH E. PITE
Made from a species of holly called Ilex paraguariensis A., yerba mate (also known as maté and ka’a) is one of the most distinctive, stimulating, and widely consumed beverages in South America. Since the 1970s, yerba mate has become increasingly popular in the United States (where it is mixed into energy drinks) and other parts of the world, such as Syria and Lebanon, who import it from Argentina. Like so many foods, yerba mate is far more than an ingestible commodity—it possesses social, cultural, economic, and political meanings that change over time and serves different functions for different consumers. In the modern era, for example, friends and families from a wide variety of socio-economic backgrounds gather in parks to socialize over a round of mate, students sip it while studying, and others consume it during a work break. Many engage in a longstanding ritual by enjoying it communally sharing the same cup and drinking through the same straw. With lively prose and vivid illustrations, Rebekah Pite reveals the plant’s long history as a drink, a key commodity, and a ritual.
Rebekah E. Pite is associate professor of history at Lafayette College.
December 2022
336 pages
History/Brazil
Rights: World
September 2023
296 pages
Latin American & Caribbean Studies / Food Studies
Rights: World
This is a history of precious-metals extractivism as lived in Cerro de San Pedro, a small goldand silver-mining district in Mexico. Chronicling Cerro de San Pedro's operations from the time of the Spanish conquest to the present, Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert transcends standard narratives of boom and bust to envision a multicentury series of mining cycles, first operated under Spanish rule, then by North American industry, and today in the post-NAFTA world of transnational capitalism. The depletion of a mine did not mark the end of its life, it turns out. Studnicki-Gizbert demonstrates how this serial reanimation of a non-renewable resource was catalyzed by capital and supported by state policy and ideology and how each new cycle imposed ever more harmful consequences on both laborers and natural ecologies. At the same time, however, miners and their communities pursued a contending vision—a moral ecology—that defended the healthy reproduction of life and land. This book's breathtakingly long view brings important perspective to environmental justice conflicts around extraction in Latin America today.
Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert is associate professor of history at McGill University and author of A Nation upon the Ocean Sea. January
BOYD COTHRAN AND ADRIAN SHUBERTThe Edwin Fox was an ordinary ship in an extraordinary age. Built in Calcutta in 1853, the vessel was used, sold, recommissioned, and refitted over some sixty years by an increasingly far flung constellati19th Centruyon of national militaries, merchants, and others. Chartered by the British navy as a troop transport during the Crimean War, it subsequently carried indentured laborers from China to Cuba, transported convicts from the United Kingdom and its empire to be settled in western Australia, and carried every imaginable cargo around the world. In 1885, after the ship was well past its prime, it was converted into a floating freezer unit for the emerging trade in frozen lamb between New Zealand and Great Britain. Today it rests in the harbor of a small town in New Zealand's Marlborough region and serves as a public history museum. Using every record they could discover about the history and voyages of the Edwin Fox and placing the ship's story in broad context, Boyd Cothran and Adrian Shubert have produced an engagingly written narrative that presents the history and processes of globalization from the deck and holds of a single vessel.
Boyd Cothran is associate professor of history at York University. Adrian Shubert is professor emeritus at York University.
The cassette tape holds a strange place in the history of contemporary music. To many audiophiles, the medium falls short of vinyl, CDs, and even streaming. However, it was the first mass-produced music format that was affordable and offered the unprecedented ability to copy and share music. Its popularity boomed in the 70s and 80s. From concert bootlegs to high school mixtapes, the humble cassette held the promise of freedom and self-expression to generations of music lovers. Marc Masters charts the surprising ups and downs of the cassette tape’s journey through international music culture. Masters explores the cultural impact of cassettes on music listening, on music portability, and on music making itself. This includes early hip-hop tape trading, the deeply personal act of making a mixtape, and even contemporary composers who use cassettes to create musique concrète compositions and the current generation of tape-only music labels. Capturing the resilient do-it-yourself spirit of cassettes through conversations with scene-setters, deep explorations into musical history, and engaging prose, this book promises to be the most comprehensive look at how cassettes have changed music while also serving as a vivid tribute to a format that refuses to fade away.
Marc Masters is a music journalist whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, NPR, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, and The Washington City Paper and is the author of No Wave
Acclaimed scholar Bart Elmore uses the histories of five southern firms—Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, Walmart, FedEx, and Bank of America—to investigate the environmental impact of our have-it-now, fly-by-night, buy-on-credit economy. Drawing on exclusive interviews with company executives, corporate archives, and other records, Elmore explores the historical, economic, and ecological conditions that gave rise to these five trailblazing corporations. He then considers what each has become: an essential presence in the daily workings of the global economy and an unmistakable contributor to the reshaping of the world's ecosystems. Even as businesses invest in sustainability initiatives and respond to new calls for corporate responsibility, Elmore shows the limits of their efforts to "green" their operations and offers insights on how governments and activists can push corporations to do better. This book is a must-read for anyone who hopes to create an ecologically sustainable future economy.
Bart Elmore is associate professor of environmental history at The Ohio State University and the 2022 recipient of the Dan David Prize. His previous books include Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism and Seed Money: Monsanto’s Past and Our Food Future
October 2023
224 pages
Music / Popular Culture Rights: World
May 2023
248 pages
Ecology / Environmental Studies / Business & Economic History / History / United States: Southern Rights: World
September 2023
224 pages
Religion / African & African Diaspora Studies
Rights: World
MBAYE LO AND CARL W. ERNST
This work centers on the life and writing of Omar Ibn Said, born in 1770 in a border region between Senegal and Mauritania that played a significant role in Islamic nations. Omar studied for 25 years at an Islamic seminary and was poised to become a leader in the faith, but after being captured by an invading army, he fell into the hands of transatlantic slave traders. He was sold to a plantation owner near Charleston, SC, in 1808, but he escaped two years later and fled as far as Fayetteville, NC. There he was arrested and jailed, but attracted attention from his jailers for strange signs he wrote on the walls—understood to be Arabic. He was soon enslaved again and died in 1863 before he could achieve liberation under the Emancipation Proclamation. What we know of Omar’s life comes largely from a series of brief autobiographical writings and transcriptions, comprising the only known narrative written in Arabic by an enslaved person in North America. Lo and Ernst weave fresh and accurate translations of Omar’s writing together with context and interpretation to provide the fullest possible account of this Islamic scholar’s life and significance.
Mbaye Bashir Lo is associate professor of the Practice of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. Carl Ernst is William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Science, Natural History, and the British Transatlantic Slave Trade KATHLEEN S. MURPHY
October 2023
272 pages
History / African & African Diaspora Studies / Natural History
Rights: World
Basil from Africa’s Gold Coast, butterflies from Sierra Leone, jalap root from Veracruz, Balsam of Tolu from Colombia—in the eighteenth century, these species from faraway corners of the Atlantic were tucked away onboard a British slaving vessel. In looking to the development of British science in the eighteenth century, Kathleen S. Murphy reveals that the era’s explosion of new natural knowledge was deeply connected to the circulation of objects, ideas, and individuals through the networks of the British transatlantic slave trade. Plants, insects, shells, and seeds were gathered by Britons employed on slaving vessels, at British slaving factories in West Africa, in British American ports where captive Africans disembarked, and near the British South Sea Company’s trading factories in Spanish America. Grounded in extensive archival research in museums, libraries, and archives on both sides of the Atlantic, Captivity's Collections mines scientific treatises, slaving companies’ personal records, personal correspondence, and abolitionist literature to recover in rich detail the scope of the slave trade’s collecting operations, the crucial role of collection-holding museums on emerging ideas in natural history—like taxonomy—and even the influence of natural science on the development of the slave trade.
Kathleen S. Murphy is professor of history and associate dean for student success in the College of Liberal Arts at California Polytechnic State University.
Creatures of Fashion explains how the commodification of furs and fibers provoked transformations in Tierra del Fuego and southern Patagonia, including the destruction of indigenous forager and hunting societies and the acceleration of animal exploitation, as the region was integrated into Argentina and Chile in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing on a vast range of sources, Soluri traces the development of human-animal relationships from the nineteenth-century exploits of interloping sea hunters from the North Atlantic, to the violence-inflected rise of sheep ranching and wool production, to new forms of commercial guanaco and fox hunting, and, ultimately, the rise of “nature-based” tourism in the late twentieth century. Both commodity production and even conservation have relied on achieving ever greater control over the reproduction of animals. By following the movements of furs and fibers from the littorals and grasslands of Tierra del Fuego to the tanneries and textile mills in the North Atlantic, this book explores how the animality of fibers, human labor, and changing technologies and fashion tastes created value in capitalist markets.
A lawyer, philosophe, polymath, and enslaver, Médéric-Louis-Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry remains essential to our knowledge of the French Caribbean. His six-volume Loix et Constitutions (1784-1790) and Description de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue (1797-98) continue to provide contemporary scholars with unparalleled insight into legal, social, cultural, and scientific customs of the French Antilles, and his infamous description of the “128 degrees” between black and white racial groups serves as a touchstone for scholars tracing the development of race in the eighteenth-century Americas. But if all roads lead to Moreau, those roads were cut, paved, and maintained by the work of enslaved and free people of color. Their labor amassed wealth that afforded him the leisure to research, think, and write. Their rich intellectual and linguistic cultures were appropriated as fodder for his most applauded works. Treating Moreau as an unreliable center, Sara Johnson surrounds him with the members of his household—French and Afro Caribbean, free and enslaved—that he worked so hard to write out of the public version of his life story. Built out of archival fragments, creative speculation, and audacious intellectual courage, Encyclopédie Noire is a communal biography of the women and men who made Moreau and his world.
Sara E. Johnson is associate professor of Literature of the Americas at the University of California, San Diego. She is also co-director of the Black Studies Project.
December 2023
240 pages
Latin American & Caribbean Studies / Natural History
Rights: World
December 2023
352 pages
Latin American & Caribbean Studies / African & African Diaspora Studies
Rights: World
October 2023
416 pages
Latin American & Caribbean Studies / Political History
Rights: World
In this work, Marlene Daut presents an intellectual history of Saint Domingue, the Haitian Revolution, and early nineteenth-century Haiti. Situating Haitian writers, scholars, and political thinkers within the global history of ideas in an era known as the “Age of Revolution,” Daut argues for the recognition of Haiti’s intellectual impact.Daut’s key intervention is that Haitian historical writing was unique due to the sustained concern with the history of slavery and colonialism at the center of the Haitian independence movement. Both impacted by and influencing the increasing professionalization of history as an academic discipline, Haitian thinkers succeeded in building a more comparative and capacious understanding of global intellectual history. While the modern understanding of freedom and equality is often linked to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man or the US Declaration of Independence, Daut suggests that the more immediate reference is what she calls the 1804 Principle—that no human being should ever again be enslaved, an idea promulgated by the Black Haitians who succeeded against all odds in overturning the French empire on the island.
Marlene Daut is professor of French and African Diaspora Studies at Yale University.
January 2024
352 pages
Jewish Studies / Military History
Rights: World
As the world tried to piece itself back together after World War II, European Jews faced the harrowing task of living with trauma, homelessness, poverty, and other consequences of the Nazi effort to eradicate them. Many Jewish survivors viewed marriage between Jewish brides and Allied military grooms as a way to move forward. Robin Judd, whose grandmother was a concentration camp survivor who married an American soldier after the war, has written the first history of the several hundred European and North African Jewish women who married members of the American, British, and Canadian armed forces following the end of World War II. Drawing on an extensive collection of primary sources including interviews, letters, immigration papers, newspapers, and more, Judd offers an intimate reconstruction of how these unions emerged, developed, and fared, from meeting and courtship to marriage and immigration, and finally to life in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The stories she tells are both restorative and heartbreaking, vividly capturing how the exhilaration of early romance and gratitude of leaving war-torn Europe co-existed, not always smoothly, with survivor guilt, trauma, and the challenges of moving to a new country and into new families.
Combining a historical and religious studies overview with contemporary analysis, this book is designed to serve as a basic, comprehensive, concise introduction to the founder and central figure of the Islamic tradition: the prophet Muhammad. Through Muhammad’s life story, teachings, and daily practices (hadith)—as well as how his teachings are received, viewed, and practiced around the world—Michael Knight offers readers an insightful introduction to the Islamic tradition. In Knight’s analysis, Muhammad is placed as simultaneously one of the most beloved historical figures in the world, and also one of the most contested, challenged, and disparaged. Knight argues that there was never a collective Muslim vision of Muhammad, but always a multiplicity of Muslim imaginaries. While Muslims defend Muhammad’s legacy against Islamophobic polemics, they also challenge each other regarding the proper authorities through which Muhammad’s life and message become comprehensible and applicable in our world.
Michael Knight is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Central Florida.
ERIC D. CARTER
Drawing on vast source materials, Eric D. Carter offers the first comprehensive intellectual and political history of the social medicine movement in Latin America, from the early twentieth century to the present day. While maintaining a consistent focus on health equity, social medicine has evolved with changing conditions, shaping early Latin American welfare states, declining with the dominance of mid-century technocratic health planning, resurging again in the 1970s in solidarity against authoritarian regimes, and later in resistance to neoliberal reforms of the health sector. The book tells the stories of socialist and anarchist doctors, political exiles, brilliant intellectuals, populist leaders, and rebellious technocrats, from Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and other countries to help make sense of Latin American social medicine, how it responds to and shapes a dynamic political environment, and how lessons from this movement might lead to new ways of thinking about how to achieve health equity in the twenty-first century.
November 2023
208 pages
Religion
Rights: World
August 2023
320 pages
Health and Medicine
Rights: World
November 2023
320 pages
Latin American & Caribbean Studies / Health & Medicine
Rights: World
The Roots of Reproductive Injustice in Mexico, 1770–1940
ELIZABETH O’BRIEN
In this history of reproductive surgery in Mexico, Elizabeth O’Brien traces the intersection of religion, reproduction, and obstetric racism. Examining the relationship between medical ideas about surgical operations, Catholic theological debates, and evolving notions of modernity and Mexican identity, O’Brien argues that present-day claims about fetal personhood are rooted in the use of surgical force against marginalized and racialized women. This history illuminates the theological, patriarchal, and epistemological roots of obstetric violence and racism today.
Agriculture and Conflict in Colombia
TIMOTHY LOREK
In November 2017, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) celebrated its fiftieth anniversary at its headquarters outside Palmira, Colombia. As an important research center of the so-called Green Revolution in agricultural science and technologies, CIAT emphasizes its contributions to sustainability, food security, gender equity, inclusive markets, and resilient, climate-smart agriculture. Yet these terms hardly describe the Cauca Valley where CIAT is physically located, a place that has been transformed into an industrial monoculture of sugarcane where thirteen Colombian corporations oversee the vast majority of this valley’s famously fertile soil. This exemplifies the paradox described in Making the Green Revolution. Utilizing archives in Colombia, Puerto Rico, and the United States, Lorek tracks the paradoxical but intertwined twentieth-century processes that produced both CIAT and sugar in the Cauca Valley.
Timothy W. Lorek is associate professor of history the College of St. Scholastica.
May 2023
336 pages, Latin American & Caribbean Studies / Environmental Studies
Rights: World
Established in 1929 by the Regents of the University of New Mexico, the University of New Mexico Press ranks within the top third of publishing houses in the Association of University Presses and is the fourth largest university press west of the Rocky Mountains in publishing new titles. With over 1,200 titles currently in print and as a distributor for local and regional publishers, the Press has been an important element in enhancing the scholarly reputation and worldwide visibility of the university.
The University of New Mexico Press participates in the public mission of the University of New Mexico through a publishing program that seeks to maintain the professional excellence of American university presses in general and to present the finest national and international scholarship in the academic areas in which we publish. We produce scholarly books in the arts, humanities, and natural and social sciences—more specifically, in the areas of fine arts, Western history, Latin American studies, literature, poetry, environmental studies, archaeology, anthropology, and natural history. In recognition of the university’s educational outreach and public role, we also publish books of general interest and significance for our state and our region.
unmpress.com
ALIX CHRISTIE
The year is 1838. A young Scotsman forced from his homeland arrives at Hudson's Bay. Angus McDonald is contracted to British masters to trade for fur. But the world he discovers is beyond even a Highlander's wildest imaginings: raging rivers, buffalo hunts, and the powerful daughter of an ancient and magnificient people. In this epic family saga, the real history of the American West is revealed in all its terror, beauty, and complexity. The Shining Mountains brilliantly limns a world now long forgotten: of blended cultures seeking allies, trading furs for guns and steel, and a way of life in collision with westward colonial expansion.
Alix Christie is the direct descendant of Angus McDonald's brother Duncan. Her debut novel, Guenberg's Apprectice, was published by Harper Books in 2014. For the past thirty years she has reported for newspapers in California and from Europe as a foreign correspondant, including for the Washington Post, the Guardian of London, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Salon.com. She currently reviews books and arts for The Economist. She lives in San Francisco, California.
April 2023
344 pages
Historical Fiction
Rights: World
May 2023
264 pages
Memoir
Rights: World
Improbable Adventures, a Near-Death Experience, and Unexpected Redemption in the New Mexico Desert
DANIEL ASA ROSE
Daniel Asa Rose was a successful novelist, memorist, book critic, and columnist for the New York Times Magazine, Esquire, and others, when the top blew off his domestic life. His wife of sixteen years wanted out. Before he could slip into depression, doubt, and self-loathing, Dan's lifelong friend Tony made an irresistible proposition: go back to the place where, forty years earlier, their college road trip had come to a crashing halt, T-boned by a woman in the decidedly oddball little town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. Dan and Tony return to the scene of the crash in an effort to make sense of that fateful moment. He's certain that if he can locate the woman in whose arms he almost died, he will find the self he lost and make peace with his life choices since. Dan moves into a single-wide trailer four blocks from the crash. Over the next eight months, inexplicable encounters make him fall in love with the New Mexico desert and the wiggy place that embraces him.
Daniel Asa Rose won an O. Henry Prize and two PEN Fiction Awards for the stories in his first collection, Small Family with Rooster. His first novel, Flipping For It, a black comedy about divorce, was a New York Times New and Noteworthy Paperback. His most recent book, Larry's Kidney: Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China with My Black-Sheep Cousin and His Mail-Order Bride, Skirting the Law to Get HIm a Transplant - And Save His Life, was named one of the "Top Books of the Year" by Publishers Weekly. Daniel lives in Connecticut.
DEBORAH BLUMENTHAL AND RALPH BLUMENTHAL
UFOhs! Mysteries in the Sky is the first book to explore the strange, exciting, and unknown world of unidentified aerial phenomena for kids. UFOhs! cuts through speculation and pseduo-science to describe real phenomena as observed and documents by pilots, ship captains, scientist, and ordinary men, women, and children from around the world. Playful, probing, and beautifully illustrated, UFOhs! Mysteries in the Sky prompts kids and their parents to talk about the moon, the stars, the planets, and all the things they see in the sky, and wonder about those we can't yet explain.
April 2023
40 pages
Children's non-fiction
Rights: World
Deborah Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of fifteen picture books for children, including Saving Stella: A Dog's Dramatic Escape from War and The Blue House Dog. She is also the author of numerous YA novels and four adult novels. Ralph Blumenthal was an award-winning reporter for the New York Times. He is the author of several books, including The Believer: Alien Encounters, Hard Science, and the Passion of John Mack (UNM Press). A distinguished lecturer at Baruch College, he lives in New York City.
GRANT FAULKNER
With increased compression, every word, every sentence matters more. A writer must learn how to form narratives around caesuras and crevices instead of strings of connections, to move a story through the symbolic weight of images, to master the power of suggestion. With elegant prose, deep readings of other writers, and scaffolded writing exercises, The Art of Brevity takes the reader on a lyrical exploration of compact storytelling, guiding readers to heighten their awareness of not only what appears on the page but also what doesn't.
Grant Faulkner is the executive director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and the cofounder of 100 Word Story. His work has been widely anthologized in flash-fiction collections, and he is the author of several other books, including All the Comfort Sin Can Provide, Fissures, and Nothing Short of 100: Selected Tales from 100 Word Story
KIRK ELLIS
Ride Lonesome, the fifth film in the "Ranown Cycle", is both the best and most representative of the whole cycle, which has been called "the most remarkable convergence of artistic achievement in the history of low-budget moviemaking." Director Bud Boetticher captures the alienation of loneliness of an America faced with the Cold War and the daily threat of nuclear annihilation. Shot in seventeen days for under a half-million dollars, Ride Lonesome is a masterpiece of cinematic minimalism. Veteran screenwriter Kirk Ellis brilliantly unpacks the themes, narrative, visual language, and editing in this seminal film. In Ride Lonesome, he not only shoes how this one film embodies a turning point for the Western, but he also explores the unique vision and contributions of director Boetticher and his writing partner Burt Kennedy.
Kirk Ellis is a two-time Emmy Award and two-time Humanitas Prize-winning writer/producer who wrote and produced the acclaimed event series John Adams Among his many other credits are the emmy-nominated Into the West and the Emmy Award-winning Anne Frank: The Whole Story. Formerly cogovernor of the writers branch of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and past president of the Western Writers of America, Ellis splits his time between Santa Fe, New Mexico and Palm Springs, California.
February 2023
184 pages
Rights: World
March 2023
184 pages
Rights: World
March 2023
136 pages
Rights: World
ALAN K. RODE
Of the movies that writers and historians call "Noir Westerns," none is more celebrated than 1948's Blood on the Moon. The comingling of the Western genre and the noir style crystalized in this extraordinary film, in turn influencing Westerns in the 1950s to become darker and more psychological. Produced during the height of the post-World War II film noir movement, Blood on the Moon is a classic Western immersed in the film noir nether-world of double crosses, government corruption, shabby barrooms, gun-toting goons, and romantic betrayals. With this volume, biographer and noir expert Alan K. Roder brings the film to life for a new generation of readers and film lovers.
Alan K. Rode is a charter director and the treasurer of the Film Noir Foundation, spearheading the preservation and restoration of America’s noir heritage. A documentarian and producer, he is also the author of Michael Cuniz: A Life in Film and Charles McGraw: Film Noir Tough Guy
MAX EVANS; as told to ROBERT NOTT
Almost as famous for the legendary excesses of his personal life as for his films, Sam Peckinpah (1925-1984) cemented his reputation as one of the great American directors with movies such as The Wild Bunch and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Max Evans, one of Peckinpah's best friends, experienced the director's mercurial character and personal demons firsthand. In this enthralling memoir, we follow Evans and Peckinpah through conversations in bars, family gatherings, binges on drugs and alcohol, struggles with film producers and executives, and Peckinpah's abusive behavior—sometimes directed at Evans himself. Evans's stories—mostly previously unpublished—provide a uniquely intimate look at Peckinpah, their famous friends, and the business of Hollywood in the 1960s and 1970s.
April 2023
304 pages
Rights: World
Max Evans was the author of over thirty works of fiction and nonfiction. He was the recipient of the Spur, Wrangler, and Owen Wister awards, and he was the subject of the biography Ol' Max Evans: The First Thousand Years and a documentary film of the same title. Evans made his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for over fifty years. Robert Nott has been a reporter for the Santa Fe New Mexican for more than fifteen years. Among his previous books are The Films of Randolph Scott and He Ran All the Way: The Life of John Garfield.
The University of Nebraska Press extends the University’s mission of teaching, research, and service by promoting, publishing, and disseminating works of intellectual and cultural significance and enduring value.
The University of Nebraska Press, founded in 1941, is the largest university press between Chicago and California. It publishes scholarly and general-interest books (with more than 5,000 titles in print and an additional 150 new titles released each year) and journals (with more than 30 different journals published each year) in topics ranging from anthropology and literary criticism to history and sports. In addition to the Nebraska imprint, the Press also publishes books under Bison Books, The Backwaters Press, and Potomac Books imprints and publishes the books of The Jewish Publication Society. The Journals division produces the publications of Nebraska Extension, a division of the University of Nebraska’s Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources.
nebraskapress.unl.edu
The True Story of a Jewish Virtuoso, Russian Fascists, a French Diplomat and a Japanese Spy in Occupied China
SCOTT D. SELIGMANIn Murder in Manchuria, Scott D. Seligman explores an unsolved murder set amidst the chaos that reigned in China in the run-up to the Second World War. Against the backdrop of a three-country struggle for control of Manchuria – an area some called China’s “Wild East” – and an explosive mixture of nationalities, religions and ideologies, a young Jewish musician is kidnapped, tortured and ultimately murdered by disaffected White anti-Semitic Russians, secretly acting on the orders Japanese military overlords who covet his father’s wealth.
Part cold-case thriller and part social history, the true story of Semyon Kaspé is told in the context of the larger, improbable story of the exodus of the Jews of Harbin, who spooked and terrified by the events recounted in this book, soon departed from this part of the world. And like Midnight in Peking, the book solves a crime that has puzzled historians for decades.
Scott D. Seligman is a writer, historian, and genealogist.
October 2023
312 pages
True Crime
Rights: World English
October 2023
288 pages
Wine/History
Rights: World
This book explores the history and identity of Spanish wine production from the nineteenth century until today. Nineteenth-century infestations of oidium mold and phylloxera aphids devastated French and Italian vineyards but didn’t extend to the Iberian Peninsula, which gave Spanish vintners the opportunity to increase their international sales. Once French and Italian wineries rebounded, however, Spanish wine producers had to up their game. Spain could not simply produce table wine but needed a quality product to compete with the supposedly superior French wines. Following the Spanish Civil War, the totalitarian Franco regime turned its attention to pain’s devastated agricultural sector, but the country’s wine industry rebounded only after World War II. In the postwar years, it rebranded itself to compete in a more integrated European and international marketplace with the creation of a new wine identity. As European integration continued, Spanish wine producers and the tourism industry worked together to promote the uniqueness of Spain and the quality of its wines.¡
Vino! explores the development of Spanish wine in the context of national and global events, tracing how the wine industry fared and ultimately prospered despite the civil war, regional concerns, foreign problems, and changing tastes.
Karl J. Trybus is an associate professor of history at Limestone University in South Carolina.
We Who Walk the Seven Ways is Terra Trevor’s memoir about seeking healing and finding belonging. After she endured a difficult loss, a circle of Native women elders embraced and guided Trevor (Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca, and German) through the seven cycles of life in Indigenous ways. Over three decades, these women lifted her from grief, instructed her in living, and showed her how to age from youth into beauty. With tender honesty, Trevor explores how every end is always a beginning. Her reflections on the deep power of women’s friendship, losing a child, reconciling complicated roots, and finding richness in every stage of life show that being an American Indian with a complex lineage is not about being part something, but about being part of something.
Terra Trevor is a professional writer with forty years of experience. She is a contributor to fifteen books and is the author of numerous essays and articles. Her first memoir is Pushing Up the Sky: A Mother's Story
May 2023
232 pages
Native Studies / Memoir
Rights: World
Baseball: The Turbulent Midcentury Years explores the history of organized baseball during the middle of the twentieth century, examining the sport on and off the field and contextualizing its development as both sport and business within the broader contours of American history. Steven P. Gietschier begins with the Great Depression, looking at how those years of economic turmoil shaped the sport and how baseball responded. Gietschier covers a then-burgeoning group of owners, players, and key figures—among them Branch Rickey, Larry MacPhail, Hank Greenberg, Ford Frick, and several others—whose stories figure prominently in baseball’s past and some of whom are still prominent in its collective consciousness.
Steven P. Gietschier is an archival consultant for The Sporting News. He taught American history, sport history, and the history and culture of baseball at a midwestern university before retiring in 2020, and prior to that he served in several roles for The Sporting News. He is the editor of Replays, Rivalries, and Rumbles: The Most Iconic Moments in American Sports.
At first glance a reader might mistake It's Fun to Be a Person I Don't Know for a juicy Hollywood tell-all, given Chachi D. Hauser's background as the great-granddaughter of Roy Disney, a cofounder with his brother Walt of the Walt Disney Company. And to her credit, Hauser doesn't shy away from confronting painful family memories when considering how the stories, myths, and rumors surrounding this entertainment empire have influenced her own imagination. But family history is only one strand in this intricate and variegated weave that also interlaces the social and environmental history of Hauser's adopted hometown of New Orleans, intimate reflections on love and navigating open relationships, and a searing self-examination that reveals a gender fluidity chafing against social barriers. Hauser's innovative and multifacted narrative navigates a variety of terrains, seeking truth as its final destination. While the family company excels in fantasy, Hauser's story is that of a young documentary filmaker determined to train a sharply focused lens on the reality of her lived experiences.
Chachi D. Hauser is a filmmaker and writer. Her essays have appeared in Hobart, Prairie Schooner, Third Coast, Crazyhorse, and the Writer's Chronicle. She lives in Paris.
July 2023
672 pages, Sports / Baseball
Rights: World
March 2023
200,
Memoir / Women, Gender, and Sexuality Rights: World
March 2023
188 pages
Fiction / Great Plains / Midwest
Rights: World
Out of a Shakespearean-wild Midwest dust storm, a man rises. “Just a glimpse of him,” says his sister; “every inch of him,” says his guilt-filled lover. “Close your eyes,” says his nephew. “What about it?” asks his father. The cupboard is filled with lime Jell-O, and there are aliens, deadly kissing, and a restless, alcoholic mother who carries a gun. “Every family is this normal,” insists the narrator. “Whoever noticed my brother, with a family as normal as this?” the beleaguered sister asks. Against the smoky prairie horizon and despite his seizures, a brother builds a life. Imbued with melancholy cheer, Dog on Fire unfolds around a family’s turmoil, past loves, and a mysterious death.
Terese Svoboda is the award-winning author of twenty books of poetry, prose, memoir, biography, and translation, including the novel Bohemian Girl (Nebraska, 2011), the memoir Black Glasses Like Clark Kent, and a forthcoming novel, Roxy and Coco
Toby Jenkins, the oldest surviving member of her family, has opened a summer residence program in the Nebraska Sandhills for the wounded and broken, misfits and dreamers. Besides her guests—a minister on sabbatical and a woman recovering from cancer treatment—Toby is joined by Anita and Luís, her hired help; Anita’s brother Gabe; and someone Toby least expected, her nearly estranged daughter, Nola Jean. Mother-daughter tensions, age-old prejudices, and generational divides challenge the members of this disparate community as they bump up against each other. Parallel conflicts occur against the backdrop of a changing rural landscape where history clashes with evolving mores. In this thoughtful and moving novel Pamela Carter Joern probes the complications of family relationships, identity, belonging, and the impact of long-held secrets.
Pamela Carter Joern is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, playwright, and teacher of writing. She is the author of The Floor of the Sky (Nebraska, 2006), In Reach (Bison Books, 2014), and The Plain Sense of Things (Nebraska, 2008).
March 2023
252 pages
Fiction / Nebraska / Great Plains / Midwest
Rights: World
Derek Stonorov has spent the better part of fifty years watching brown bears as a research scientist and guide in some of Alaska’s most beautiful wild places. As a dyslexic kid who was more interested in hunting and cars than academics, he managed to collect objective data as well as make observations and insights about what he learned to call “the community of bears.” Watch the Bear takes the reader from the 1960s—when salmon were plentiful, Stonorov’s hair was long, and he could spend an entire summer watching hundreds of bears without seeing another human—to today, when bear guiding companies are ubiquitous and solitude in bear country is a whole lot harder to find. Mixing memoir, anecdotes, and science, Stonorov provides an inquiry into brown bear communication and social behavior as well as advice on living in harmony with bears. Through good science made accessible with stories, Stonorov offers readers an engaging and breath-taking journey into the world of a legendary but often misunderstood species.
Derek Stonorov is a retired wildlife biologist and guide working out of Homer, Alaska. He has educated hundreds of students, photographers, filmmakers, scientists, and tourists about brown bears. Stonorov has written articles for Natural History magazine and produced booklets for Alaska Fish and Game, the Nature Conservancy, Alaska Audubon, the National Park Service, and others. He has also written and directed several films, including the award-winning Way of the Bear
Arizona Territory, 1871. Valeria Obregón and her ambitious husband, Raúl, arrive in the raw frontier town of Tucson hoping to find prosperity. Changing Woman, an Apache spirit who represents the natural order of the world and its cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, welcomes Nest Feather, a twelve-year-old Apache girl, into womanhood in Aravaipa Canyon. Mexican and Anglo settlers have pushed the Apaches from their lands, and the Apaches carry out raids against them. In turn, the settlers, angered by the failure of the U.S. government and the military to protect them, respond with a murderous raid on an Apache encampment under the protection of the U.S. military at Camp Grant, kidnapping Nest Feather and other Apache children. In Tucson, while Valeria finds fulfillment in her work as a seamstress, Raúl struggles to hide from her his role in the bloody attack, and Nest Feather, adopted by a Mexican couple there, tries to hold on to her Apache heritage in a culture that rejects her very being. Against the backdrop of the massacre trial, Valeria and Nest Feather’s lives intersect in the church, as Valeria seeks spiritual guidance for the decision she must make and Nest Feather prepares for a Christian baptism.
Venetia Hobson Lewis worked at several stock brokerages and for almost eighteen years as a corporate paralegal for a motion picture studio. She is the author of several award-winning Western short stories.
March 2023
240 pages
Environment / American West / Natural History Rights: World
June 2023
248 pages
Historical Fiction / Westerns / Native Studies / Apache / Southwestern U.S. Rights: World
May 2023
224 pages, American HIstory / Environment / Midwest / Great Plains Rights: World
In 1955 the small town of Udall, Kansas, was home to oil field workers, homemakers, and teenagers looking ahead to their futures. But on the night of May 25, an F5 tornado struck their town without warning. In three minutes the tornado destroyed most of the buildings, including the new high school. It toppled the water tower. It lifted a pickup truck, stripped off its cab, and hung the frame in a tree. By the time the tornado moved on, it had killed 82 people and injured 270 others, more than half the town’s population of roughly 600 people. It remains the deadliest tornado in the history of Kansas. Jim Minick’s nonfiction account, Without Warning, tells the human story of this disaster, moment by moment, from the perspectives of those who survived. His spellbinding narrative connects this history to our world today. Minick demonstrates that even if we have never experienced a tornado, we are still a people shaped and defined by weather and the events that unfold in our changing climate. Through the tragedy and hope found in this story of destruction, Without Warning tells a larger story of community, survival, and how we might find our way through the challenges of the future.
Jim Minick is the author or editor of seven books, including the award-winning Fire Is Your Water and The Blueberry Years: A Memoir of Farm and Family. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, Poets and Writers, Oxford American, Orion, and Shenandoah
Many myths have grown up around President Harry S. Truman’s decision to use nuclear weapons against Imperial Japan. In destroying these myths, Truman and the Bomb will discomfort both Truman’s critics and his supporters, and force historians to reexamine what they think they know about the end of the Pacific War. Myth: Truman didn’t know of the atomic bomb’s development before he became president. Fact: Truman’s knowledge of the bomb is revealed in his own carefully worded letters to a Senate colleague and correspondence between the army officers assigned to his Senate investigating committee. Myth: The huge casualty estimates cited by Truman and Secretary of War Henry Stimson were a postwar creation devised to hide their guilt for killing thousands of defenseless civilians. Fact: The flagrantly misrepresented “low” numbers are based on narrow slices of highly qualified— and limited—U.S. Army projections printed in a variety of briefing documents and are not from the actual invasion planning against Japan. Myth: Truman wanted to defeat Japan without any assistance from the Soviet Union and to freeze the USSR out of the postwar settlements. Fact: President Franklin D. Roosevelt and President Truman desperately wanted Stalin’s involvement in the bloody endgame of World War II. Using previously unpublished material, D. M. Giangreco busts these myths and more. An award-winning historian and expert on Truman, Giangreco is perfectly situated to debunk the many deep-rooted falsehoods about the roles played by American, Soviet, and Japanese leaders during the end of the World War II in the Pacific. Truman and the Bomb, a concise yet comprehensive study of Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb, will prove to be a classic for studying presidential politics and influence on atomic warfare and its military and diplomatic components. Making this book particularly valuable for professors and students as well as for military, diplomatic, and presidential historians and history buffs are extensive primary source materials, including the planned U.S. naval and air operations in support of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria. These documents support Giangreco’s arguments while enabling the reader to enter the mindsets of Truman and his administration as well as the war’s key Allied participants.
D. M. Giangreco served as an editor of the Military Review for the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College for twenty years and served as the editor and publications director for the Foreign Military Studies Office in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He is the award-winning author or coauthor of fourteen books on military and sociopolitical subjects, including Hell to Pay: Operation Downfall and the Invasion of Japan, 1945–1947 and Eyewitness Pacific Theater: Firsthand Accounts of the War in the Pacific from Pearl Harbor to the Atomic Bombs
August 2023
272 pages, Military History / American History / World War II / Asia / Europe / Russia Rights: World
July 2023
380, pages
Human Rights / Law / Latin American History Rights: World
The Disappeared tells the extraordinary saga of Argentina’s attempt to right the wrongs of an unspeakably dark past. Using a recent human rights trial as his lens, Sam Ferguson addresses two central questions of our age: How is mass atrocity possible, and What should be done in its wake? From 1976 to 1983 thousands of people were the victims of state terrorism during Argentina’s so-called Dirty War. Ferguson recounts a twenty-two-month trial of the most notorious perpetrators of this atrocity, who ran a secret prison from the Naval Mechanics School in Buenos Aires. The navy executed as many as five thousand political “subversives,” most of whom were sedated and thrown alive out of airplanes into the South Atlantic. The victims of these secret death flights and others who went missing during the regime are known as los desaparecidos—“the disappeared.” Ferguson explores Argentina’s novel response to mass atrocity—the country’s remarkable and controversial decision in 2003 to repeal a series of amnesty laws passed in the 1980s and to prosecute anew the perpetrators of the Dirty War a generation after the collapse of its last dictatorship. As of 2022 more than one thousand aging military officers have been indicted for their involvement in the Dirty War, and hundreds of trials have commenced in the country’s civilian courts. Among the many facets of the book, Ferguson takes an in-depth look at allegations that Father Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, was involved in the disappearance of two Jesuit priests under his supervision in 1976. Bergoglio was called to testify in a closed-chambers session. Ferguson reviewed those secret proceedings and uses them as a springboard to explore the Argentine Catholic Church and its broader role in the Dirty War. The lingering but acute trauma of the victims who testified at the trial underscores the moral urgency of accountability: that when a state strips its citizens of all their rights, the only response that approximates reparation is to restore the rule of law and punish the perpetrators. Yet the trial also revealed the limits of using criminal law to respond to mass atrocity. Justice demands a laser-like focus on evidence relevant to a crime, but atrocity begs for social understanding. Can the law ever bring full justice?
Sam Ferguson is an attorney in Berkeley, California and the principal of Ferguson Law PC. He previously served as a law clerk to the Honorable Judge William Fletcher on the Ninth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals. He was a visiting fellow at Yale Law School’s Orville H. Schell Jr. Center for International Human Rights, as well as a Fulbright fellow in Argentina. His articles on Argentina’s Dirty War have appeared in The New Republic, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Boston Review.
Almost from the first days of seafaring, men have used ships for “spying” and intelligence collection. Since early in the twentieth century, with the technological advancements of radio and radar, the U.S. Navy and other government agencies and many other navies have used increasingly specialized ships and submarines to ferret out the secrets of other nations. The United States and the Soviet Union/ Russia have been the leaders in those efforts, especially during the forty-five years of the Cold War. But, as Norman Polmar and Lee J. Mathers reveal, so has China, which has become a major maritime power in the twenty-first century, with special interests in the South China Sea and with increasing hostility toward the United States. Through extensive, meticulous research and through the lens of such notorious spy ship events as the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, the North Korean capture of the USS Pueblo, and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s success in clandestinely salvaging part of a Soviet submarine with the Hughes Glomar Explorer, Spy Ships is a fascinating and valuable resource for understanding maritime intelligence collection and what we have learned from it.
Norman Polmar is an analyst and consultant specializing in the naval, aviation, and intelligence fields. He has been an adviser on naval issues to three U.S. senators, the speaker of the House of Representatives, and three secretaries of the U.S. Navy, as well as to the leadership of Australian, Chinese, and Israeli navies. Polmar is the author or coauthor or more than fifty books, including Cold War Submarines: The Design and Construction of U.S. and Soviet Submarines, 1945–2001 with coauthor K. J. Moore (Potomac, 2005) and The Enola Gay: The B-29 That Dropped the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima (Potomac, 2004). Lee J. Mathers was on active duty with the Navy from 1967 to 1978 as a surface warfare officer with an intelligence subspecialty. He made two deployments to Vietnam, including a one-year in-country tour. He is the coauthor with Norman Polmar of Opening the Great Depths: The Bathyscaph Trieste and Pioneers of Undersea Exploration.
July 2023
344 pages, History
Rights: World
July 20232022
332 pages
Jewish History and Culture / Religion
Rights: World
Open Judaism offers a big-tent welcome to all Jews and Judaism. It is at once an invitation to the spiritually seeking Jew, a clarion call for a deeply pluralistic and inclusive Judaism, and a dynamic exploration of the remarkable array of thought within Judaism today. In honest, engaging language Barry L. Schwartz, a practicing rabbi and writer, presents traditional, secular- humanistic, and liberal Jewish views on nine major topics—God, soul, Torah, halakhah, Jewish identity, inclusion, Israel, ethics, and prayer. Teachings from many of Judaism’s greatest thinkers organically reveal and embellish foundational ideas of Orthodox, Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, Renewal, and Humanistic Judaism. The conclusion sets forth core statements of belief in Judaism for believers, atheists, and agnostics, thereby summarizing the full spectrum of thought and enabling readers to make and act on their own choices.
Rabbi Barry L. Schwartz is the director and editor in chief emeritus of The Jewish Publication Society and the spiritual leader of Congregation Adas Emuno in Leonia, New Jersey. He is the author of books for adults, teens, and children, including Path of the Prophets: The Ethics-Driven Life (JPS, 2018) and Judaism’s Great Debates: Timeless Controversies from Abraham to Herzl (JPS, 2012).
FREDRIC BRANDFON
May 2023
384 pages
Jewish History and Culture / Europe / Italy
Rights: World
The Jewish community of Rome is the oldest Jewish community in Europe. It is also the Jewish community with the longest continuous history, having avoided interruptions, expulsions, and annihilations since 139 BCE. For most of that time, Jewish Romans have lived in close contact with the largest continuously functioning international organization: the Roman Catholic Church. Given the church's origins in Judaism, Jews and Catholics have spent two thousand years negotiating a necessary and paradoxical relationship. With engaging stories that illuminate the history of Jews and Jewish-Catholic relations in Rome, Intimate Strangers investigates the unusual relationship between Jews and Catholics as it has developed from the first century CE to the present in the Eternal City. Fredric Brandfon innovatively frames these relations through an anthropological lens: how the idea and language of family have shaped the self-understanding of both Roman Jews and Catholics. The familial relations are lopsided, the powerful family member often persecuting the weaker one; the church ghettoized the Jews of Rome longer than any other community in Europe. Yet respect and support are also part of the family dynamic—for instance, church members and institutions protected Rome’s Jews during the Nazi occupation—and so the relationship continues. Intimate Strangers takes us on a compelling sweep of two thousand years of history through the present successes and dilemmas of Roman Jews in postwar Europe.
Fredric Brandfon is the former chairman of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Stockton University in New Jersey and founder of the Department of Religious Studies at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. He has published numerous articles on Roman and Italian Jewish history.
Who Are the Jews…? tackles perhaps the most urgent question facing the Jewish people today: Given unprecedented denominational tribalism, how can we Jews speak of ourselves in collective terms? Crucially, the way each of us tell our “shared” story is putting our collective identity at risk, Donniel Hartman argues. We need a new story, built upon Judaism’s foundations and poised to inspire a majority of Jews to listen, discuss, and retell it. This book is that story.
Donniel Hartman (Rabbi, Shalom Hartman Institute, 1984; PhD, Philosophy, Hebrew University, 2005) is president of the Shalom Hartman Institute and holds the Kaufman Family Chair in Jewish Philosophy at the Hartman Institute. He is the author of Putting God Second: How to Save Religion from Itself (Beacon, 2016) and The Boundaries of Judaism (Continuum, 2007), co author of Spheres of Jewish Belonging: Jewish Identity in a Changing World (Israel Ministry of Education, 2008); and co editor of Judaism and the Challenges of Modern Life (Continuum, 2007). He is the founder of some of the most extensive education, training and enrichment programs for scholars, educators, rabbis, and religious and lay leaders in Israel and North America. He is also host of the popular Jewish podcast “For Heaven’s Sake” as well as a prominent essayist, blogger, and lecturer on issues of Israeli politics, policy, Judaism, and the Jewish community.
Hearing Their Voices through New and Ancient Midrash
RABBI MARLA J. FELDMAN
What were biblical women thinking and doing when the men around them received all the attention and glory? How did Leah, Rachel, and their handmaids negotiate the complicated family dynamics of four women vying for Jacob’s affections? What compelled Potiphar’s wife to risk her high station to seduce Joseph, an enslaved foreigner? How did the midwives and Pharoah’s daughter conspire to rescue baby Moses, right under Pharoah’s nose? Biblical Women Speak employs midrash (interpretative techniques) to discover ten biblical women’s stories from a female point of view and provide insights beyond how ancient male scholars viewed them. Each chapter brings alive a different biblical woman, including non-Israelite characters and others who are neglected in classical rabbinic texts, such as Keturah (Abraham’s last wife), Bat Shuah (Judah’s wife), Shelomith (the infamous blasphemer’s mother), and Noah (one of Zelophehad’s brave daughters who demanded inheritance rights). After each featured text we hear a creative retelling of the woman’s story in her own voice, followed by traditional midrash and medieval commentaries and the author’s reflections on how these tales and interpretations are relevant for today. Rabbi Marla J. Feldman’s book is an engaging invitation to enter biblical narratives, challenge conventional wisdom, and recalibrate the stories and lessons through the lens of our own lives.
Rabbi Marla J. Feldman is the executive director of Women of Reform Judaism. She has published numerous articles about the role of women in Jewish life and social justice issues and her modern midrashim have appeared in several collections. She is the author of Reform Movement action manuals, including Speak Truth to Power.
November 2023
250 pages
Religion / BIblical Studies / History and Culture / Inspirational / Judaism
Rights: World
July 2023
264 pages, Jewish History and Culture / Religion / Women, Gender, and Sexuality / Bible Studies
Rights: World
March 2023
288 pages
Cultural Criticism and Theory / History / Political Science / Women, Gender, and Sexuality
Rights: World
Women, Empires, and Body Politics at the United Nations, 1946–1975 tells the story of how women’s bodies were at the center of the international politics of women’s rights in the postwar period. Giusi Russo focuses on the United Nation Commission on the Status of Women and its multiple interactions with the colonial and postcolonial worlds, showing how, depending on the setting and the inquiry, liberal, imperial, and transnational feminisms could coexist. Russo suggests that in the early stages of identifying discriminating agents in women’s lives, UN commissioners overlooked the nation-state and went through a process of fighting discrimination without identifying the discriminator. However, it was the focus on empire that allowed for a clear identification of how gender constructs were instrumental to state politics and the exclusion of women. An emphasis on colonial practices also generated a focus on the body and radically shifted the commission’s politics from formal equality to a gender-based equilibrium of rights that emphasized practice rather than law. Through a multidisciplinary approach, Russo looks at women living under colonial and postcolonial systems as the key actors in defining the politics of women’s rights at the UN.
July 2023
332 pages
Geography / Science Fiction / American Studies / Ethnic Studies
Rights: World
DAVID K. SEITZ
A different kind of Star Trek television series debuted in 1993. Deep Space Nine was set not on a starship but a space station near a postcolonial planet still reeling from a genocidal occupation. The crew was led by a reluctant Black American commander and an extraterrestrial first officer who had until recently been an anticolonial revolutionary. DS9 extended Star Trek’s tradition of critical social commentary but did so by transgressing many of Star Trek’s previous taboos, including religion, money, eugenics, and interpersonal conflict. DS9 imagined a twenty-fourth century that was less a glitzy utopia than a critical mirror of contemporary U.S. racism, capitalism, imperialism, and heteropatriarchy. Thirty years after its premiere, DS9 is beloved by critics and fans but remains marginalized in scholarly studies of science fiction. Drawing on cultural geography, Black studies, and feminist and queer studies, A Different “Trek” is the first scholarly monograph dedicated to a critical interpretation of DS9’s allegorical world-building. If DS9 has been vindicated aesthetically, this book argues that its prophetic, place-based critiques of 1990s U.S. politics, which deepened the foundations of many of our current crises, have been vindicated politically, to a degree most scholars and even many fans have yet to fully appreciate.
David K. Seitz is an assistant professor of cultural geography at Harvey Mudd College. He is the author of A House of Prayer for All People: Contesting Citizenship in a Queer Church.
Begging, thought to be an inherently un-Swedish phenomenon, became a national fixture in the 2010s as homeless Romanian and Bulgarian Roma EU citizens arrived in Sweden seeking economic opportunity. People without shelter were forced to use public spaces as their private space, disturbing aesthetic and normative orders, creating anxiety among Swedish subjects, and resulting in hate crimes and everyday racism. Parallel with Europe’s refugee crisis in the 2010s, the “begging question” peaked. The presence of the media’s so-called EU migrants caused a crisis in Swedish society along political, juridical, moral, and social lines due to the contradiction embodied in the Swedish authorities’ denial of social support to them while simultaneously seeking to maintain the nation’s image as promoting welfare, equality, and anti-racism. In The Begging Question Erik Hansson argues that the material configurations of capitalism and class society are not only racialized but also unconsciously invested with collective anxieties and desires. By focusing on Swedish society’s response to the begging question, Hansson provides insight into the dialectics of racism. He shrewdly deploys Marxian economics and Lacanian psychoanalysis to explain how it became possible to do what once was thought “impossible”: criminalize begging and make fascism politically mainstream, in Sweden. What Hansson reveals is not just an insight into one of the most captivating countries on earth but also a timely glimpse into what it means to be human..
Erik Hansson is a human geographer. He wrote this book during his postdoctoral fellowship at Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He has also been stationed at Uppsala University, University of Gothenburg,and Mid Sweden University.
This book examines post-apocalyptic cinema and the way it uses images from the past and present to depict what it means to preserve “the world,” as well as who is left out of the narrative of rebuilding society. Colebrook redefines “the world” as affluent Western society and “saving the world” as preventing us from becoming the othered them which are viewed in their suffering. Colebrook further challenges the notion that “the world,” built upon foundations of exploitation, is worth saving.
Claire Colebrook (PhD, Edinburgh University, 1993) is a professor of English at Penn State University. She is the author of a number of books, including Deleuze and the Meaning of Life (Continuum, 2010), Gender (Palgrave, 2003), and Irony in the Work of Philosophy (Nebraska, 2003).
March 2023 2023
336372, 107
Disability studies / Anthropology / Environment Rights: World
September 2023
165 pages, Social/Sciences/Media Studies
December 2023
305 pages, History/France
Rights: World
From Near and Far relates the history of modern France from the French Revolution to the present. Noted historian Tyler Stovall considers how the history of France interacts with both the broader history of the world and the local histories of French communities, examining the impacts of Karl Marx, Ho Chi Minh, Paul Gauguin, and Josephine Baker alongside the rise of haute couture and the contemporary role of hip hop.
From Near and Far focuses on the interactions between France and three other parts of the world: Europe, the United States, and the French colonial empire. Taking this transnational approach to the history of modern France, Stovall shows how the theme of universalism, so central to modern French culture, has manifested itself in different ways over the last few centuries. Moreover, it emphasizes the importance of narrative to French history, that historians tell the story of a nation and a people by bringing together a multitude of stories and tales that often go well beyond its boundaries. In telling these stories From Near and Far gives the reader a vision of France both global and local at the same time.
Tyler Stovall (1954–2021) was the dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Fordham University. He was the author or editor of a number of books, including White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea and coeditor of The Black Populations of France: Histories from Metropole to Colony (Nebraska, 2022).
Neighbors, Officials, and North African Migrants in the Suburbs of Paris and Lyon MELISSA K. BYRNES
Melissa K. Byrnes considers the ways that local communities in four French suburbs reacted to the growing presence of North African migrants following the Second World War up to 1974. Making Space details the experiences of French community leaders to establish the wide variety of strategies that developed in the face of rapidly growing populations of North Africans, especially Algerians. In particular, the author investigates the various motivations that brought local actors to involve themselves in debates over migrant rights and welfare, leading to the current tensions in French society and questions about France’s ability—and will—to fulfill the promise of liberty, equality, and fraternity for all of its citizens.
Melissa K. Byrnes (PhD, Georgetown University, 2008) is an associate professor of modern European and world history at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas.
January 2024
250 pages
History/Europe/France
Rights: World
On July 16, 1945, just weeks before the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that brought about the surrender of Japan and the end of World War II, the United States unleashed the world’s first atomic bomb at the Trinity testing site located in the remote Tularosa Valley in south-central New Mexico. Immensely more powerful than any weapon the world had seen, the bomb’s effects on the surrounding and downwind communities of plants, animals, birds, and humans have lasted decades. In The First Atomic Bomb Janet Farrell Brodie explores the history of the Trinity test and those whose contributions have rarely, if ever, been discussed—the men and women who constructed, served, and witnessed the first test—as well as the downwinders who suffered the consequences of the radiation. Concentrating on these ordinary people, laborers, ranchers, and Indigenous peoples who lived in the region and participated in the testing, Brodie corrects the lack of coverage in existing scholarship on the essential details and everyday experiences of this globally significant event. The First Atomic Bomb also covers the environmental preservation of the Trinity test site and compares it with the wide range of atomic sites now preserved independently or as part of the new Manhattan Project National Historical Park. Although the Trinity site became a significant node for testing the new weapons of the postwar United States, it is known today as an officially designated national historic landmark. Brodie presents a timely, important, and innovative study of an explosion that carries special historical weight in American memory.
Janet Farrell Brodie is a professor emerita of history at Claremont Graduate University. She has published articles on atomic secrecy in multiple venues, including the Journal of Social History and the Journal of Diplomatic History and in the edited volume Inevitably Toxic: Historical Perspectives on Contamination, Exposure, and Expertise.
In this entertaining narrative Steve Friesen explores the role of eating and drinking in Buffalo Bill's life, his related experiences and enterprises, and the many meals he had with other celebrities of his day. One is struck by the variety and abundance of foods in all of those meals, from formal banquets he attended to the daily diet of performers in his show.
He lived at a time when there was a burgeoning of food options, many of which had been available only on a limited basis. His era was the dawn of a bountiful consumption that continued into the 20th century. A wide range of foods, and large quantities of them, previously available only to royalty and aristocracy, were now accessible to America's and Europe's middle and upper classes. One newspaper reporter observed that "Colonel Cody displays no more care about anything than the proper feeding of horse and man." His concern for those who worked for him was greater than many bosses of his time and certainly extended to providing fine food, and plenty of it, to them. He also became a "missionary" for western foods in the United States and for American cookery in general as the show traveled overseas.
June 20232023
316,
American History / Western History / World War II
Rights: World
December 2023
180 pages, History/Food
December 2023
285 pages
World War I/ Sports
Rights: World
The Chemical Warfare Service was launched by the U.S. Army within months of Germany's drastic poison gas attack at Ypres in 1915. Among those who served in what would become known as the Hellfire Battalion were chemists and other scientists, architects, and elite athletes—including some of the most famous names in baseball.
The Gas and Flame Men tells how chemical warfare changed the course of World War I— and the future of war in general. It also had lasting effects on baseball, with players such as Ty Cobb and Christy Mathewson suffering lung injuries that changed how they played the game.
December 2023
History/Polar Regions
Rights: World
In Brand Antarctica, Hanne Elliot Fønss Nielsen analyses advertisements and related cultural products in order to identify common framings that have emerged in representations of Antarctica from the late nineteenth century to the present. By providing a historical, social, cultural, and geographic context for understanding the ways the south has been used to sell products, stories, experiences and ideas, Nielsen argues that Antarctica has been “for sale” in various ways ever since the first human interactions with the continent, and that the commercial and advertising history of Antarctica plays an important role in framing how Antarctica is conceptualized today.
Hanne Elliot Fønss Nielsen is a senior lecturer of Antarctic law and governance at the University of Tasmania..
SUZANNE ROBERTS
Suzanne Roberts and two friends make a remarkable Sierra Nevada journey testing the limits of physical endurance and friendship. Candid and funny and, finally, wise, Almost Somewhere is not just the whimsical coming-of-age story of a young woman ill-prepared for a month in the mountains but also the reflection of a distinctly feminine view of nature. This updated edition includes original photographs from the trip and a new afterword where Roberts revisits the trail 29 years later, finding much has changed and reflecting on how the original trip still influences her today.
Suzanne Roberts is the author of Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties (Nebraska, 2022), Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel (Nebraska 2020), and four collections of poetry.
Pacific Brides of World War II
ANGELA WANHALLA
Angela Wanhalla details the intimate relationships forged during wartime between women and U.S. servicemen stationed in the South Pacific, traces the fate of wartime marriages, and addresses consequences for the women and children left behind. Paying particular attention to the experiences of women in New Zealand and in the island Pacific—including Tonga, Fiji, Samoa, and the Cook Islands—Of Love and War aims to illuminate the impact of global war on these women, their families, and on Pacific societies.
October 20232023
288 pages
Nature/Memoir
Rights: World x China
December 2023
278 pages
World War II/ Women
Rights: World
October 2023
205 pages
Social Science/Refugees
Rights: World
A Greek Village's Heroic Response to the Global Refugee Crisis
JOHN WEBBWith no assistance from NGOs, who were very late to this crisis, ordinary residents of Molyvos—restaurant owners, shopkeepers, schoolteachers, and parents—rescued thousands of the refugees, offered them dry clothes and shoes, hot food, shelter, and counseling about where they could travel next in their search for safety and asylum. With the chaotic conditions that impelled these migrations deteriorating, the ranks of the refugees swelled to huge numbers, and the volunteer corps in Molyvos expanded their capacity to help them. Inevitably, as the tourist industry suffered, a backlash began against the migrants and the locals who were helping them, leading to discord in the community. Molyvos chronicles the work of Melinda McRostie and her small group of friends in the harbor of Molyvos and Eric and Philippa Kempson on the beach at Eftalou as they organized and carried out the only refugee relief effort that existed on the north coast between 2014 and 2015, when NGOs began to arrive
John Webb devoted eighteen years in Spring Valley to migrants and refugees—first Haitians, then Vietnamese and Cambodians, and finally Central Americans, all trying to escape starvation and death at home.
September 2023
304 pages
Fiction
Rights: World English
Amy Black, a queer single mother and aspiring artist in love with calligraphy, dreams of a coveted artist’s residency at the world’s largest social media company, Q. One ink-black October night, when the power is out in the Oakland hills and her elderly parents and differently abled brother Michael are sheltering in her house, a stranger asks Amy to hand scribe a love letter for him. When the stranger suddenly disappears, Amy’s search for the letter's recipient leads her straight to Q and the most beautiful, illuminated manuscript she has ever seen, the Codex Argentus, hidden away in Q’s Library of Books That Don’t Exist—and to a group of data privacy vigilantes who want Amy to burn Q to the ground. Westworld + Wonka + Portrait of a Lady On Fire, Forget I Told You This is a witty and touching novel about the desire to be seen by those who matter and the desire to remain anonymous in a world in which our every move is surveilled.
Hilary Zaid is the author of Paper White (Bywater, 2018). Long-listed for the 2019 Northern California Independent Booksellers' Award for Fiction, Paper White was a Foreword Indies silver medalist and the winner of the Independent Publishers' Book Awards (IPPY) in LGBT+ Fiction. Zaid's short fiction has appeared in print and online venues including Ecotone, Day One, The Southwest Review, The Utne Reader, among others. She is a 52-year-old queer/genderqueer writer who lives in Oakland with her wife and sons.
Since its founding in 1938, the primary mission of the University of Georgia Press has been to support and enhance the University’s place as a major research institution by publishing outstanding works of scholarship and literature by scholars and writers throughout the world.
The University of Georgia Press is the oldest and largest book publisher in the state. We currently publish 60–70 new books a year and have a long history of publishing significant scholarship (in fields such as Atlantic World and American history, American literature, African American studies, American studies, Southern studies, environmental studies, geography, urban studies, international affairs, and security studies), creative and literary works in conjunction with major literary competitions and series, and books about the state and the region for general readers.
ugapress.org
With Ecologies of Inequity, Sancha Doxilly Medwinter tells the story of how the racially and ethnically diverse, immigrant, and urban poor disaster survivors lose ground to their White, middleclass-to-affluent and Black middle-class homeowner neighbors during official disaster response. Medwinter presents analyses from 120 conversational and expert interviews with disaster responders and survivors in New York City, beginning as early as twelve days after the November 2012 landfall of Superstorm Sandy. The settings are Carnarsie, Brooklyn, and the Rockaway peninsula, which experienced six to eight feet of flooding.
The color- and class-blind assumptions of disaster responders and the labyrinthine process of obtaining a FEMA grant combine to exclude and increase the psychological burden of urban poor disaster survivors. Similarly, the locational decisions and volunteer service perimeters uncritically replicate the segregation logics of urban spaces. Part of this story explains how the chronically poor repeatedly get displaced by the machinery of official disaster response. One reason is the introduction of a race- and class-blind disaster “logic of response” that caters to the needs of the newly created class of “disaster victims,” while displacing the “logic of service,” which typically attempts to address the needs of the chronically poor.
Sancha Doxilly Medwinter is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
August 2023
198 pages
History / United States/ State & Local / Middle Atlantic / Social Science / Disasters & Disaster Relief / Social Classes / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies
Rights: World
October 2023
256 pages
Social Science / Human Geography / Agriculture & Food / History / Latin America / Central America / Political Science / World / Caribbean & Latin American
Rights: World x Spanish
The Coup under the Palm Trees interrogates the Honduran present, through an exploration of the country’s spatiotemporal trajectory of agrarian change since the mid-twentieth century. It tells the double history of how the Aguán region went from a set of “empty” lands to the centerpiece of the country’s agrarian reform in the 1980s and a central site for the palm oil industry and drug trade, while militarized process of state formation between the military coups of 1963 and 2009 took place. Rather than a case of failed democratic transition, the book shows how the current Honduran crisis—exemplified by massive outmigration towards the United States, blatant narco-state links and the 2009 coup—is better understood within longer historical processes in which violence, exclusion, and dispossession became the central organizational principles of the state.
Pop Culture, Terror, and War in Sierra Leone
MARC SOMMERS
October 2023
488 pages
Social Science / Popular Culture / Ethnic Studies / African Studies / Children's Studies / History / Military / Wars & Conflicts (Other) / Africa / General / Music / General
Rights: World
We the Young Fighters is at once a history of a nation, a story of a war, and the saga of downtrodden young people and three pop culture superstars. The extraordinary narrative begins centuries ago, with the capture mainly of men by European slavers and the emergence of slave wives across the land that would become Sierra Leone. Soon after it became a colony, British overlords discovered diamonds and empowered Paramount Chiefs to help dig them up. Once in power, President Siaka Stevens took this setup and ran with it, creating a personal diamond empire, keeping the government feeble, managing a brutal state security force, and allowing exclusion and inequality to skyrocket. Accessibly written and thoroughly researched, We the Young Fighters describes how Tupac, Rambo, and, especially, Marley wove their way into the conflict fabric of Sierra Leone, from the pre-war landscape dominated by chiefs, politicians, and emasculated youth; across a war featuring terror, drugs, diamonds, young soldiers, and citizen resilience; and into a post-war era spotlighting the quiet endurance of young people. The book ends by extracting lessons from Sierra Leone that promise to improve current approaches to governance, youth alienation, and terror groups globally.
Marc Sommers is an internationally recognized youth expert with research experience in over twenty war-affected countries. He has provided analysis and technical advice to policy institutes, donor and United Nations agencies, and NGOs. He also is the author of seven previous books, including Stuck: Rwandan Youth and the Struggle for Adulthood (Georgia), which received an Honorable Mention for the African Studies Association’s Bethwell A. Ogot Book Prize, Islands of Education: Schooling, Civil War, and the Southern Sudanese (1983–2004), and Fear in Bongoland: Burundi Refugees in Urban Tanzania, which received the Margaret Mead Award.
Partners in Gatekeeping illuminates a complex, distinctly transnational story that recasts the development of U.S. immigration policies and institutions. Lauren Braun-Strumfels challenges existing ideas about the origins of remote control by paying particular attention to two programs supported by the Italian government in the 1890s: a government outpost on Ellis Island called the Office of Labor Information and Protection for Italians and rural immigrant colonization in the American South—namely a "plantation" in Arkansas called Sunnyside. Through her examination of these distinct locations, Braun-Strumfels argues that we must consider Italian migration as an essential piece in the history of how the United States became a gatekeeping nation. In particular, she details how an asymmetric partnership emerged between the United States and Italy to manage that migration.
Lauren Braun-Strumfels is an associate professor in the history department at Cedar Crest College. She was also a Fulbright Scholar at Universita Roma Tre in 2020.
JODI VARON
Your Eyes Will Be My Window reclaims the two erasures of Esta Plat. Murdered in Ukraine by Nazi troops in 1942, evidence of the life of Esta Plat was preserved in a bundle of her letters until the letters were tossed into a dumpster and destroyed. Haunted by the inheritance of survivors' guilt and shame in a family that kept no Old World keepsakes except her grandmother's one-sentence memory of Esta Plat, Jodi Varon is compelled to sift through records of Europe's genocidal past. The record of unfiltered emotions among Kindertransport survivors in Europe, journalists in Ludwigsburg, and archivists and guides in Jerusalem, Your Eyes Will Be My Window is a defiant exercise in honoring the lost.
Jodi Varon is professor of writing and English at Eastern Oregon University. She directs the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing at EOU and is editor-in-chief of basalt, EOU’s professional literary magazine. She is the author of Drawing to an Inside Straight: The Legacy of an Absent Father and has had her work published in the Northwest Review, the Oregon Encyclopedia, New Letters, and more. She lives in Missoula, Montana.
November 2023
232 pages
Social Science / Emigration & Immigration / Political Science / Public Policy / Immigration / Labor & Industrial Relations / History / Europe / Italy
Rights: World
September 2023
240 pages
Biography & Authobiography / Personal Memoirs / Jewish / Women / Social Science / Jewish Studies
Rights: World
February 20232023
232 pages
Texas Tech University Press (TTU Press) has been the book publishing arm of Texas Tech University since 1971 and a member of the Association of American University Presses since 1987. The mission of TTU Press is to disseminate the fruits of original research by publishing rigorously peer-reviewed works that compel scholarly exchange and that entertain and enlighten the university’s broadest constituency throughout the state, the nation, and the world. TTU Press publishes 15-20 new titles each year and has approximately 450 titles in print. In addition to a diverse list of nonfiction titles focused on the history and culture of Texas, the Great Plains, and the American West, the Press publishes in the areas of natural history, border studies, and peace and conflict studies. Additionally, the Press publishes select titles in literary genres ranging from biography and memoir to young adult and children’s titles. It also publishes the annual winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Competition in Poetry.
As a university press, we make available works of scholarship and literature that might otherwise not be published. We have a large list in topics showcasing and investigating West Texas, a historically underserved region. Our imprint extends the reach of Texas Tech University both nationally and globally. We promote books and literary culture in our Lubbock community through author events and outreach engagement opportunities.
ttupress.com
TOM
HUTTONToward the end of World War II, Hitler’s many health complications became even more pronounced, making an evil man yet more erratic and dangerous. While the subject of Hitler’s health has been catalogued previously, never has it been done so this thoroughly or with this level of up-to-date medical expertise. Tom Hutton’s new neurobehavioral analysis of Adolf Hitler draws from a lifetime of medical research and clinical experience to understand how the dictator’s particular medical history further warped a deformed personality and altered Hitler’s decision making. Dr. Hutton trained under the world-renowned neuropsychologist and father of modern neuropsychological assessment, Dr. Alexander Luria, giving him a uniquely qualified eye to undertake this most difficult assessment.While many books on the subject thumb through the annals of popular psychology to under tand history’s most famous monsters, Dr. Hutton’s latest book uses contemporary clinical knowledge, lucidly synthesizing medical complexities for all audiences. Here Dr. Hutton undertakes a thorough medical history to elucidate a pivotal historical moment, examining how disease impacted Hitler’s destructive life
Tom Hutton, MD, PhD, is an internationally recognized clinical and research neurologist and educator.
Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose, 25th Anniversary Edition
Celebrating the 25th anniversary of its publication, the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network is proud to release a newly updatedversion of Watermark, the seminalanthology of Vietnamese American literature. Contextualized by a new forewordfrom Isabelle Thuy Pelaud and seasoned with new voices, Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose, 25th Anniversary Edition takes its place as a generational work of eclectic and essentialvoices. Edited by Barbara Tran, Monique Truong, and Luu Truong Khoi,this updated edition of Watermark continues to elevate Vietnamese American literature, whose renaissance it ushered in upon its first publication. Again, some of the most innovativecontemporary Vietnamese American writers, such as Linh Dinh, Andrew Lam, BichMinh Nguyen, and Dao Strom, explore thematic and stylistic territory previouslyoverlooked in other collections, which have traditionally focused on war. New voices such as Anvi Hoàng, Vinh Nguyen, and Vi Khi Nao are included in this newedition, raising the number of pieces from forty to fifty-two. Watermark lifts all constraints, leaving the works toreset the boundaries for themselves. And they do—using poetry, fiction, andexperimental forms to venture further into the fringes of the Vietnamese American psyche. A work equal measures foundational and pathbreaking, now availableagain and expanded for a new generation of readers—an essential collection not to be missed.
Barbara Tran's poems have appeared in Conjunctions, Ploughshares,and The Paris Review. Barbara is a co-writer of the short, extended-reality film Madame Pirate: Becoming a Legend, a 2022 selection of SXSW and the Cannes Film Festival's Marché du Film. Her poetry collection is forthcomingfrom Palimpsest Press. She lives in Toronto, Canada. Monique Truong is a novelist, essayist, and librettist. Her award-winning novels are The Sweetest Fruits (Viking Books, 2019), Bitter in the Mouth (RandomHouse, 2010), and the national bestseller The Book of Salt (HoughtonMifflin, 2003). She is based in Brooklyn, New York. Luu Truong Khoi is a writer, editor, test-prep tutor, and admissions consultant. His fiction has appeared in The Vietnam Forum, Van Hoc, and Best New American Voices. He's been in resdence at Yaddo and was educated at Harvard. He lives in New York City.
April 2023
288 pages
Poetry
Rights: World
Over a casual conversation between Chancellor William Tolley and Thomas Watson, the Press was established to publish what would be its first title, IBM’s Precision Measurement in the Metal Working Industry in 1943. Since that time, Syracuse University Press has published groundbreaking works such as Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Ernst Bacon’s Words on Music, Jay Dolmage’s Disability Rhetoric (2015 prose award–winner), Siao-Yu’s Mao Tse-tung and I Were Beggars, and Barry Chevannes’s Rastafari: Roots and Ideology, which was first published in 1991 and remains one of our best-selling books.
As we enter our eighth decade of academic publishing, the Press continues to be committed to serving New York State—as well as the region, nation, and globe—by publishing vital scholarship, sharing ideas, and giving voice to important stories that may not have otherwise been told.
Edited by MOJTABA MAHDAVI
With a Foreward by JOHN L. ESPOSITO
In the past two decades, the consumption of beauty services and cosmetic surgery in Turkey has developed from an elite phenomenon to an increasingly common practice, especially among younger and middle-aged women. Turkey now ranks among the top countries worldwide with the highest number of cosmetic procedures, and with its cultural and economic capital, Istanbul has become a regional center for the beauty and fashion industries. Istanbul Appearances shows the profound effects of this growing market on urban residents’ body images, gendered norms, and practices. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork carried out in beauty salons and clinics in different parts of the city, Liebelt explores how standards of femininity and female desire have shifted since the consolidation of power and authoritarian rule of the conservative, pro-Islamic Justice and Development Party.
April 2023
344 pages, Middle East studies/women's studies/ ethnography
Rights: World
Arguing that the politics of beauty are intricately bound up with the politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality, Liebelt shows that female bodies have become a major site for the negotiation of citizenship. It is in the numerous beauty salons and clinics that the heteronormative ideals and images of gendered bodies become real, embodied in a complex array of emotional desires of who and what is considered not only beautiful but also morally proper.
Claudia Liebelt is assistant professor in social anthropology at the University of Bayreuth in Germany. She is the author of Caring for the "Holy Land": Fillipina Domestic Workers in Israel.
The emergence of Turkish nationalism prior to World War I opened the way for various ethnic, religious, and cultural stereotypes to link the notion of the Other to the concept of national identity. The founding elite took up a massive project of social engineering that now required the amplification of Turkishness as the founding concept of the new nation-state. This concept was shaped by the construction of various Others as a backdrop, and for Turkey in many ways, the Arab in his keffiyeh and traditional garb constituted the ultimate Other. In this nuanced and richly detailed study, Büke Okyar examines the development of Turkish national identity from the 1908 constitutional revolution to the inclusion of Alexandretta in 1939, using the lens of contemporary political cartoons. Büke Okyar brings the everyday production of nationalist discourse into the mainstream political and historical narrative of modern Turkey. In doing so, Büke Okyar shows how the cartoon press became one of the most important agents in the construction, maintenance, and mobilization of Turkish nationalism, reinforcing a perceived image of the Arab that was haunted forever by its ethnic and religious origins.
Ilkim Büke Okyar is assistant professor in political science and International Relations at Yeditepe University
Ruination and Resistance in Lebanon
YASMINE KHAYYAT
War Remains traces the poetics of ruination and resistance in select contemporary Lebanese wartime literature, cultural production, and sites of memory. Drawing upon work from southern Lebanon and Beirut, Khayyat examines how war remains are employed as a resistant trope in the intellectual spaces of war’s aftermath. She focuses on “Southern Counterpublics,” a collective of poets, novelists, activists, artists, and ordinary citizens and their war-inspired creative productions that speak to the ruins’ capacity to be reframed, recycled, and recontested. Khayyat argues that the ruins of war can be thought of as a generative milieu for resistant thought and action. An ambitious and provocative work, War Remains ventures to the so-called margins to archive the texture and substance rendered invisible when studies of memory rely solely on data furnished by official narratives and military accounts of war.
Yasmine Khayyat is assistant professor of Arabic Language and Literature at Rutgets University
April 2023
344 pages
Middle East studies/ History
Rights: World
May 2023
312 pages
Middle East studies / Literary Criticism
Rights: World
October 2023
288 pages
Middle East studies/religion/political science
Rights: World
Righteous Activism and the Egyptian Muslim Brothers SUMITA PAHWA
Despite expectations that the deeply held political and religious organizing principles at the heart of the Muslim Brotherhood would prove incompatible and contentious should the organization ever come to power, the Brotherhood succeeded in maintaining a united identity following the 2011 ousting of Hosni Mubarak and the election of a Brotherhood-majority government. To understand how the movement threaded these disparate missions, Sumita Pahwa examines the movement’s internal debates on preaching, activism, and social reform from the 1980s through the 2000s. In doing so, she finds that the framing of political work as ethical conduct has been critical to the organization’s functioning. Through a comprehensive analysis of texts, speeches, public communications, interviews, and internal training documents, Pahwa shows how Islamic and religious ideals have been folded into the political discourse of the Brotherhood, enabling the leadership to shift the boundaries of justifiable and righteous action.
Sumita Pahwa is associate professor of politics at Scripps College.
In Stateless, Chahinian offers a rich exploration of Western Armenian literary history in the wake of the 1915 genocide that led to the dispersion of Armenians across Europe, North America, and beyond. Chahinian highlights two specific time periods—post-WWI Paris and post-WWII Beirut—to trace the ways in which literature developed in each diaspora community. In Paris, a literary movement known as Menk addressed the horrors Armenians experienced and focused on creating a new literary aesthetic centered on belonging while in exile. In Beirut, Chahinian shows how the literature was nationalized in the absence of state institutions. Over time, Armenian intellectuals constructed a unified and coherent narrative of the diaspora that returned to the pre-1915 literary tradition and excluded the Menk generation. Chahinian argues that the adoption of “national” as the literature’s organizing logic ultimately limited its vitality and longevity as it ignored the diverse composition of diaspora communities.
April 2023
312 pages
Literary Criticism / Armenian LIterature
Rights: World
Talar Chahinian holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA and lectures in the Program for Armenian Studies at UC Irvine, where she is also visiting Faculty in the Department of Comparative Literature. She co-edits Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies and contributes regularly to the Armenian literary magazine Pakin
During its more than ninety years of continuous operation, the University of Oklahoma Press has gained international recognition as an outstanding publisher of scholarly literature. It was the first university press established in the Southwest, and the fourth in the western half of the country.
Building on the foundation laid by our previous directors, OU Press continues its dedication to the publication of outstanding scholarly works. The major goal of the Press is to strengthen its position as a preeminent publisher of books about the American West and Native Americans, while expanding its program in other scholarly disciplines, including classical studies, military history, political science, and natural science.
oupress.com
ROBERT C BRADLEY
Today, Peru is rightly recognized as the number one food destination on the planet. But twenty-five years ago, the world’s culinary critics were focusing their attention elsewhere. Fortunately, wine merchant–turned–archaeologist and art historian Robert C. Bradley was in Peru. This delightful book is the product of twenty-five years of exquisite digressions from what Bradley might call his “real job”—the culmination of decades of personal discoveries about the food of Peru and the history that led to its current culinary florescence.
Bradley’s book is a tour of the most delicious facts and foods revealed to him while he traveled Peru, with several recipes thrown in for good measure. Journeying from coasts to highlands and back, the intrepid author introduces us to the most interesting aspects of Peruvian cuisine that he encounters along the way: How the tomato got to Italy. Why Tabasco sauce is misnamed. What the superfoods of Peru are. Where the potato rose and fell. And of course, when coca leaves gave real meaning to Coca-Cola’s “pause that refreshes.” Bradley sizzles about Peruvian ceviche, pisco and the pisco sour, and the country’s best restaurants, all the while sampling food lore, Andean anthropology, history, linguistics, and the pleasures and perils of travel. He makes a knowledgeable, congenial guide, and his book, a generous companion.
Robert C. Bradley started out as a wine merchant for New York City’s most acclaimed restaurants. A trip to Central America put him on the path to studying Mesoamerican art history and archaeology at Columbia University. He is now an associate professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.
September 2023
296 pages
Latin America/Cookbook Rights: World
September 2023
280 pages
Native American/ US History Rights: World
Imperial and Indigenous Geopolitics in the Trans-Appalachian West, 1670–1774
In Cherokee Power, Kristofer Ray brings long-overdue clarity to the role of the Overhill Cherokees in shaping imperial and Indigenous geopolitics in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America. As Great Britain and France eyed the Illinois country and the Tennessee, Ohio, and Wabash River valleys for their respective empires, the Overhill Cherokees were coalescing and maintaining a conspicuous presence throughout the territory. Contrary to the traditional narrative of westward expansion, the Europeans were not the drivers behind the ensuing contest over the Tennessee corridor. Through the eighteenth century, the British and French struggled to overcome a dissonance between their visions of empire and the reality of Overhill mobility and sovereignty—a struggle that came to play a crucial role in the Anglo-American revolutionary debate that dominated the 1760s and 1770s. By emphasizing Indigenous agency in this rapidly changing world, Cherokee Power challenges long-standing ideas about the power and reach of European empires in eighteenth-century North America.
Kristofer Ray is Visiting Scholar in the History Department at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. He is the author of Middle Tennessee, 1775–1825: Progress and Popular Democracy on the Southwestern Frontier and coeditor of Understanding and Teaching Native American History
October 2022
224 page
Military History
Rights: World
With the invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin’s Russia seems to have stepped out of time, reverting to an imperial era of conquest and expansion. But as Roger Reese points out in this comprehensive new history, Russia’s way of war has changed little from one century to the next, one regime to another, from the army of the tsar to the army of today. Russia’s Army reveals how the Imperial Russian Army and its successors confronted the state’s foreign policy challenges—projecting power and defending the empire—and the domestic challenge of containing internal unrest generated by nationalism, competing ethnic and religious identities, and political discontent. Reese identifies themes that weave their way through this military history: the adoption of a strategy to maintain a defensive posture in the West, an offensive strategy in the Balkans, and an expansionist policy in the East; maintenance of a large standing army; and a consistent unease about the army’s and non-Russian minorities’ loyalty to the state. These themes, he shows, have emerged in times of peace and war from the times of tsarist Russia through the collapse of the Soviet empire, when Putin sought to restore authoritarian rule and hegemony over the former Soviet states of the USSR.
Roger R. Reese is Professor of History at Texas A&M University and has authored numerous articles and books on the Russian military, including Why Stalin’s Soldiers Fought: The Red Army’s Military Effectiveness in World War II.
One of America’s most beloved folk singers, Arlo Guthrie was at the pinnacle of his fame in the late 1960s and early 1970s with his best-selling album Alice’s Restaurant and his iconic appearance at Woodstock. Yet Guthrie’s career as a musician, humorist, and storyteller extends far beyond his years in the celebrity spotlight. this book recounts the veteran musician’s second act, from the early 1980s to the present. Featuring extensive reflections and commentary from Guthrie himself, this book is the only authorized biography of the renowned folk singer. As a modern-day troubadour drawn to experimentation, Arlo Guthrie has also carried forward the traditions inherited from his legendary father, Woody Guthrie. Drawing on substantial research, the author traces Guthrie’s efforts to free himself from corporate oversight of his music and art. This definitive biography invites new appreciation for Arlo Guthrie’s remarkable career as a musician, storyteller, and humanitarian activist.
Hank Reineke has written about folk, blues, and country music for publications such as the Aquarian Arts Weekl y, Soho Arts Weekly, Downtown, East Coast Rocker, Blues Revue, On The Tracks, ISIS, and The Bridge. December 2023
496 pages
Biography/ Music
Rights: World
Duke University Press books have long been known for advancing innovative new scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. In our books, our authors have defined new fields (sound studies, transgender studies, etc.), redefined existing fields (anthropology, cultural studies, Latin American studies, African American and African studies, art history, etc.), and explored the rich spaces between fields to reshape the way we think about the world and our connections to it. We take pride in publishing traditionally underrepresented voices in terms of both authors and areas of study, viewpoints that are critical to understanding the diverse, interconnected societies in which we live. Duke books continue to be an essential part of any humanities and social sciences program.
dukeupress.edu
What is an art of life for what feels like the end of a world? In Raving McKenzie Wark takes readers into the undisclosed locations of New York’s thriving underground queer and trans rave scene. Techno, first and always a Black music, invites fresh sonic and temporal possibilities for this era of diminishing futures. Raving to techno is an art and a technique at which queer and trans bodies might be particularly adept but which is for anyone who lets the beat seduce them. Extending the rave’s sensations, situations, fog, lasers, drugs, and pounding sound systems onto the page, Wark invokes a trans practice of raving as a timely aesthetic for dancing in the ruins of this collapsing capital.
March 2023
136 pages, Trans Studies, Music /Popular Music / Cultural Studies / Affect Theory Rights: World x Spanish, Italian, Portuguese , German
At the outset of Marx for Cats, Leigh Claire La Berge declares that “all history is the history of cat struggle.” Revising the medieval bestiary form to meet Marxist critique, La Berge follows feline footprints through Western economic history to reveal an animality at the heart of Marxism. She draws on a 1200-year arc spanning capitalism’s feudal prehistory, its colonialist and imperialist ages, the Bourgeois Revolutions that supported capitalism and the Communist revolutions that opposed it, to outline how cats have long been understood as creatures of economic critique and liberatory possibility.In this playful and generously illustrated radical bestiary, La Berge demonstrates that class struggle is ultimately an interspecies collaboration.
STEFAN HELMREICH
In A Book of Waves Stefan Helmreich examines ocean waves as forms of media that carry ecological, geopolitical, and climatological news about our planet. Drawing on ethnographic work with oceanographers and coastal engineers in the Netherlands, the United States, Australia, Japan, and Bangladesh, Helmreich details how scientists at sea and in the lab apprehend waves’ materiality through abstractions, seeking to capture in technical language these avatars of nature at once periodic and irreversible, wild and pacific, ephemeral and eternal.
Stefan Helmreich is Professor of Anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond, Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas, and Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World.
December 2023
328 pages
Literature and Literary Studies / Theory and Philosophy / Marxism / Cultural Studies / Animal Studies
Rights: World
August 2023
448 pages
Science and Technology Studies / Anthropology / Cultural Anthropology / Cultural Studies / Ocean Studies
Rights: World
September 2023
160 pages
Music / Popular Music / American Studies / Cultural Studies
Rights: World
ERIC WEISBARD
Most listeners first heard “Hound Dog” when Elvis Presley’s single topped the pop, country, and R&B charts in 1956. But some fans already knew the song for Big Mama Thornton’s earlier original recording, a giant hit but exclusively R&B. In Hound Dog Eric Weisbard examines the racial, commercial, and cultural ramifications of Elvis’s appropriation of a Black woman’s anthem. He rethinks the history and influences of rock music in light of Rolling Stone replacing Presley’s “Hound Dog” with Thornton’s version in its “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” list. Taking readers from Presley and Thornton to Patti Page’s “Doggie in the Window,” the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” and other dog ditties, Weisbard uses “Hound Dog” to reflect on one of rock’s fundamental dilemmas: the whiteness of the wail.
Eric Weisbard is Professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama and author of Songbooks: The Literature of American Popular Music, also published by Duke University Press.
CHRIS MOLANPHY
November 2023
152 pages
Music / Popular Music / American Studies
Rights: World
In Old Town Road, Chris Molanphy considers Lil Nas X’s debut single as pop artifact, chart phenomenon, and cultural watershed. “Old Town Road” was more than a massive hit, with the most weeks at No. 1 in Billboard Hot 100 history. It is also a prism through which to track the evolution of popular music consumption, and the ways race influences how the music industry categorizes songs and artists. By both lionizing and satirizing genre tropes—it’s a country song built from an alternative rock sample, a hip-hop song in which nobody raps, a comical song that transcends novelty, and a queer anthem—Lil Nas X troubles the very idea of genre. Ultimately, Molanphy shows how “Old Town Road” channeled decades of Americana to point the way toward our cultural future.
Chris Molanphy is a columnist for Slate and the host of the Hit Parade podcast. He has written for publications including Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, New York Magazine, NPR Music, The Village Voice, and others. He is author of Kurt Cobain: Voice of a Generation.
The Grateful Dead were one of the most successful live acts of the rock era. Performing over 2300 shows between 1965 and 1995, the Grateful Dead’s reputation as a “live band” was—and continues to be—sustained by thousands of live concert recordings from every era of the group’s long and colorful career. In Live Dead, musicologist John Brackett examines how live recordings—from the group’s official releases to fan-produced tapes, bootlegs to “Betty Boards,” and Dick’s Picks to From the Vault—have shaped the general history and popular mythology of the Grateful Dead for over fifty years. Drawing on a diverse array of materials and documents contained in the Grateful Dead Archive, Live Dead details how live recordings became meaningful among the band and their fans not only as sonic souvenirs of past musical performances but also as expressions of assorted ideals, including notions of “liveness,” authenticity, and the power of recorded sound.
John Brackett is Instructor of Music at Vance-Granville Community College, author of John Zorn: Tradition and Transgression, and coeditor of The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis: Expanding Approaches.
Of all the musical developments of rock in the 1960s, one in particular fundamentally changed the music’s structure and listening experience: the incorporation of extended improvisation into live performances. While many bands—including Cream, Pink Floyd, and the Velvet Underground—stretched out their songs with improvisations, no band was more identified with the practice than the Grateful Dead. In Get Shown the Light Michael Kaler examines how the Dead’s dedication to improvisation stemmed from their belief that playing in this manner enabled them to touch upon transcendence. Drawing on band testimonials and analyses of early recordings, Kaler traces how the Dead developed an approach to playing music that they believed would facilitate their spiritual goals. He focuses on the band’s early years, the significance of playing Ken Kesey’s Acid Test parties, and their evolving exploration of the myriad musical and spiritual possibilities that extended improvisation afforded. Kaler demonstrates that the Grateful Dead developed a radical new way of playing rock music as a means to unleashing the spiritual and transformative potential of their music.
Michael Kaler is Associate Professor, teaching stream, at the Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy at the University of Toronto Mississauga and author of Flora Tells a Story: The Apocalypse of Paul and Its Contexts.
January 2024
240 pages
Rights: World
January 2024
312 pages
General Interest / Music / Popular Music / Religious Studies
Rights: World
October 2023
288 pages
Gender and Sexuality / LGBTQ Studies / Sex and Sexuality / General Interest / Biography / Letters /Memoirs
Rights: World
In this rollicking memoir, award-winning author, sex educator, filmmaker, and podcast host Tristan Taormino shares her coming-of-age story, revealing how her radical sexuality and unconventional career grew out of an extraordinary queer father-daughter relationship. Raised by a hard-working single mother on Long Island, Tristan got her sex ed from the 1980s TV show Solid Gold and The Joy of Sex. She spent summers at drag shows in Provincetown with her father, Bill, who had come out as gay in the mid-1970s. Her sexual identity bloomed during her college years at Wesleyan University, where she discovered her desire for butches and kinky sex. Tristan’s world began to fall apart when her dad was diagnosed with AIDS. After a series of devastating events, she moved to the messy, glorious world of 1990s New York City. In the midst of grief and depression, she helped change queer sexual subculture with her zine Pucker Up, her infamous The Village Voice column, and her editorship of legendary lesbian porn magazine On Our Backs. After the publication of her first book, The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women, Tristan followed her own path that marked the beginning of her work as a trailblazing feminist pornographer.
After a lifetime of outrageous adventures, Tristan reflects on the bonds, loss, and mental health struggles that shaped her. She weaves together history from her father’s unpublished memoir, exploring the surprising ways their personal patterns converge and diverge. Bracingly emotional and erotically charged, A Part of the Heart Can’t Be Eaten reveals the transformative power of queer pleasure and defiance.
Tristan Taormino is a writer, speaker, sex educator, and host of the podcast Sex Out Loud. A former syndicated columnist for The Village Voice, she is the author of numerous books, including Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships, Down and Dirty Sex Secrets, and The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women. She is the founding editor of the annual Best Lesbian Erotica anthologies, editor of The Ultimate Guide to Kink: BDSM, Role Play, and the Erotic Edge, and coeditor of The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure. Taormino has won three Lambda Literary Awards and eight Feminist Porn Awards, among other awards. She lives in Los Angeles.
a fake-punk self-hurt anti-memoir
KAWIKA GUILLERMO
In Nimrods, Kawika Guillermo chronicles the agonizing absurdities of being a newly minted professor (and overtired father) hired to teach in a Social Justice Institute while haunted by the inner ghosts of patriarchy, racial pessimism, and imperial arrogance. Through an often crass, cringey, and raw hybrid prose-poetic style, Guillermo reflects on anger, alcoholism, and suicidal ideation—traits that do not simply vanish after being cast into the treacherous role of fatherhood or the dreaded role of professor. Guillermo’s shameless mixtures of autotheory, queer punk poetry, musical ekphrasis, haibun, academic (mis)quotations, and bad Dad jokes present a bold new take on the autobiography: the fake-punk, self-hurt, anti-memoir.
Kawika Guillermo is the author of Stamped: an anti-travel novel and All Flowers Bloom. Kawika Guillermo is the pseudonym for Christopher B. Patterson, who is Associate Professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia and the author of Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games and Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific
In a time of accelerating sea level rise and increasingly intensifying storms, the world’s sandy beaches and dunes have never been more crucial to protecting coastal environments. Yet, in order to meet the demands of large-scale construction projects, sand mining is stripping beaches and dunes, destroying environments, and exploiting labor in the process. The authors of Vanishing Sands track the devastating impact of legal and illegal sand mining over the past twenty years, ranging from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean to South America and the eastern United States. They show how sand mining has reached crisis levels: beach, dune, and river ecosystems are in danger of being lost forever, while organized crime groups use deadly force to protect their illegal mining operations. Calling for immediate and widespread resistance to sand mining, the authors demonstrate that its cessation is paramount for saving not only beaches, dunes, and associated environments but also lives and tourism economies everywhere.
Orrin H. Pilkey is Emeritus James B. Duke Professor of Earth and Ocean Sciences at Duke University and the author and coauthor of many books.
The Art and Texture of Black Hair
JASMINE NICHOLE COBB
From Frederick Douglass to Angela Davis, “natural hair” has been associated with the Black freedom struggle. In New Growth Jasmine Nichole Cobb traces the history of Afro-textured coiffure, exploring it as a visual material through which to reimagine the sensual experience of Blackness. Through close readings of slave narratives, scrapbooks, travel illustrations, documentary films, and photography as well as collage, craft, and sculpture, from the nineteenth century to the present, Cobb shows how the racial distinctions ascribed to people of African descent become simultaneously visible and tactile. Whether examining Soul Train’s and Ebony’s promotion of the Afro hairstyle alongside styling products or how artists such as Alison Saar and Lorna Simpson underscore the construction of Blackness through the representation of hair, Cobb foregrounds the inseparability of Black hair’s look and feel. Demonstrating that Blackness is palpable through appearance and feeling, Cobb reveals the various ways that people of African descent forge new relationships to the body, public space, and visual culture through the embrace of Black hair.
Jasmine Nichole Cobb is Professor of African and African American Studies and of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University. She is the author of Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century
January 2023
272 pages
General Interest / Reference / Natural Sciences / Environmental Studies
Rights: World
December 2022
216pages
Cultural Studies / African American Studies and Black Diaspora / Art and Visual Culture
Rights: World x Portuguese
January 2023
368 pages
Gender and Sexuality / Queer Theory / Literature and Literary Studies / Literary Theory / Theory and Philosophy
Rights: World
LEE EDELMAN
Long awaited after No Future, and making queer theory controversial again, Lee Edelman’s Bad Education proposes a queerness without positive identity—a queerness understood as a figural name for the void, itself unnamable, around which the social order takes shape. Like Blackness, woman, incest, and sex, queerness, as Edelman explains it, designates the antagonism, the structuring negativity, preventing that order from achieving coherence. By translating the nothing of queerness into the something of “the queer,” the order of meaning defends against the senselessness that undoes it, thus mirroring, Edelman argues, education’s response to queerness: its sublimation of irony into the meaningfulness of a world. Edelman reads works by Shakespeare, Jacobs, Almodóvar, Lemmons, and Haneke, among others, to show why queer theory’s engagement with queerness necessarily results in a bad education that is destined to teach us nothing.
Lee Edelman is Fletcher Professor of English Literature at Tufts University, author of No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, and coauthor, with Lauren Berlant, of Sex, or the Unbearable, both also published by Duke University Press.
In On Paradox literary and legal scholar Elizabeth S. Anker contends that faith in the logic of paradox has been the cornerstone of left intellectualism since the second half of the twentieth century. She attributes the ubiquity of paradox in the humanities to its appeal as an incisive tool for exposing and dismantling hierarchies. Tracing the ascent of paradox in theories of modernity, in rights discourse, in the history of literary criticism and the linguistic turn, and in the transformation of the liberal arts in higher education, Anker suggests that paradox not only generates the very exclusions it critiques but also creates a disempowering haze of indecision. She shows that reasoning through paradox has become deeply problematic: it engrains a startling homogeneity of thought while undercutting the commitment to social justice that remains a guiding imperative of theory. Rather than calling for a wholesale abandonment of such reasoning, Anker argues for an expanded, diversified theory toolkit that can help theorists escape the seductions and traps of paradox.
December 2022
376 pages
Law / Human Rights / Literature and Literary Studies / Literary Theory / Theory and Philosophy / Critical Theory
Rights: World
Elizabeth S. Anker is Professor of Law and Associate Professor of Literatures in English at Cornell University, coeditor of Critique and Postcritique, also published by Duke University Press, and author of Fictions of Dignity: Embodying Human Rights in World Literature She is the author of Guardianship, Gender, and the Nobility in Early Modern Spain and editor of The Formation of the Child in Early Modern Spain
NAMHEE LEE
Namhee Lee explores memory construction and history writing in post-1987 South Korea. The massive neoliberal reconstruction of all aspects of society shifted public discourse from minjung (people) to simin (citizen), from political to cultural, from collective to individual. This shift reconstituted people as Homo economicus, rights-bearing and rights-claiming individuals, even in social movements. Lee explains this shift in the context of simultaneous historical developments: South Korea’s transition to democracy, the end of the Cold War, and neoliberal reconstruction understood as synonymous with democratization. By examining memoirs, biographies, novels, and revisionist conservative historical scholarship, Lee shows how the dominant discourse of a “complete break with the past” erases the critical ethos of previous emancipatory movements foundational to South Korean democracy.
Namhee Lee is Professor of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles, author of The Making of Minjung: Democracy and the Politics of Representation in South Korea, and coeditor of The South Korean Democratization Movement: A Sourcebook
A single image taken from a high-rise building in inner-city Johannesburg uncovers layers of history—from its premise and promise of gold to its current improvisations. It reveals the city as carcass and as crucible, where informal agents and processes spearhead its rapid reshaping and transformation. In Wake Up, This Is Joburg, writer Tanya Zack and photographer Mark Lewis offer a stunning portrait of Johannesburg and personal stories of some of the city’s ordinary, odd, and outrageous residents. Their photos and essays take readers into meat markets where butchers chop cow heads; the eclectic home of an outsider artist that features turrets and full of manikins; long-abandoned gold pits beneath the city, where people continue to mine informally; and lively markets, taxi depots, and residential highrises. Sharing people’s private and work lives and the extraordinary spaces of the metropolis, Zack and Lewis show that Johannesburg’s urban transformation occurs not in a series of dramatic, wide-scale changes but in the everyday lives, actions, and dreams of individuals.
Tanya Zack is an urban planner, writer, and Visiting Researcher at the University of the Witwatersrand. Mark Lewis is a photographer who lives in Johannesburg.
December 2022
232pages
Globalization and Neoliberalism, History > Asian History, Asian Studies > East Asia
Rights: World
January 2023
368 pages
Sociology / Urban Studies / African Studies / Art and Visual Culture / Photography
Rights: World
December 2022
392 pages
Gender and Sexuality / Queer Theory / History / World History / Cultural Studies
Rights: World
The contributors to Turning Archival trace the rise of “the archive” as an object of historical desire and study within queer studies and examine how it fosters historical imagination and knowledge. Highlighting the growing significance of the archival to LGBTQ scholarship, politics, and everyday life, they draw upon accounts of queer archival encounters in institutional, grassroots, and everyday repositories of historical memory. The contributors examine such topics as the everyday life of marginalized queer immigrants in New York City as an archive; secondhand vinyl record collecting and punk bootlegs; the self-archiving practices of grassroots lesbians; and the decolonial potential of absences and gaps in the colonial archives through the life of a suspected hermaphrodite in colonial Guatemala. Engaging with archives from Africa to the Americas to the Arctic, this volume illuminates the allure of the archive, reflects on that which resists archival capture, and outlines the stakes of queer and trans lives in the archival turn.
Daniel Marshall is Associate Professor of Writing, Literature, and Culture at Deakin University. Zeb Tortorici is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at New York University
In Poverty and Wealth in East Africa Rhiannon Stephens offers a conceptual history of how people living in eastern Uganda have sustained and changed their ways of thinking about wealth and poverty over the past two thousand years. This history serves as a powerful reminder that colonialism and capitalism did not introduce economic thought to this region and demonstrates that even in contexts of relative material equality between households, people invested intellectual energy in creating new ways to talk about the poor and the rich. Demonstrating the dynamism of people’s thinking about poverty and wealth in East Africa long before colonial conquest, Stephens challenges much of the received wisdom about the nature and existence of economic and social inequality in the region’s deeper past.
Rhiannon Stephens is Associate Professor of History at Columbia University, author of A History of African Motherhood: The Case of Uganda, 700–1900, and coeditor of Doing Conceptual History in Africa
December 2022
312 pages
Linguistics / History / African History / African Studies
Rights: World
THY PHU, ERINA DUGANNE, AND ANDREA NOBLE
Cold War Camera explores the visual mediation of the Cold War and illuminates photography’s role in shaping the ways it was prosecuted and experienced. The contributors show how the camera stretched the parameters of the Cold War beyond dominant East-West and US-USSR binaries and highlight the significance of photography from across the global South. Highlighting the camera’s capacity to envision possible decolonialized futures, establish visual affinities and solidarities, and advance calls for justice to redress violent proxy conflicts, this volume demonstrates that photography was not only crucial to conducting the Cold War, it is central to understanding it.
Thy Phu is Professor of Media Studies at the University of Toronto, Scarborough, and author of Warring Visions: Photography and Vietnam, also published by Duke University Press. Erina Duganne is Professor of Art History at Texas State University and author of The Self in Black and White: Race and Subjectivity in Postwar American Photography. Andrea Noble (1968-2017) was Professor of Latin American Studies at Durham University and author of Mexican National Cinema.
December 2022
432 pages
History / World History / Cultural Studies / Art and Visual Culture / Photography
Rights: World
VEIT ERLMANN
In the aftermath of apartheid, South Africa undertook an ambitious revision of its intellectual property system. In Lion’s Share Veit Erlmann traces the role of copyright law in this process and its impact on the South African music industry. Although the South African government tied the reform to its postapartheid agenda of redistributive justice and a turn to a postindustrial knowledge economy, Erlmann shows how the persistence of structural racism and Euro-modernist conceptions of copyright threaten the viability of the reform project. In case studies ranging from antipiracy police raids and the crafting of legislation to protect indigenous expressive practices to the landmark lawsuit against Disney for its appropriation of Solomon Linda’s song "Mbube" for its hit “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” from The Lion King, Erlmann follows the intricacies of musical copyright through the criminal justice system, parliamentary committees, and the offices of a music licensing and royalty organization. Throughout, he demonstrates how copyright law is inextricably entwined with race, popular music, postcolonial governance, indigenous rights, and the struggle to create a more equitable society.
Veit Erlmann is Professor and Endowed Chair of Music History at the University of Texas, author of Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality and Music, Modernity, and the Global Imagination: South Africa and the West, and editor of Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening, and Modernity.
December 2022
Law / Music / Ethonomusicology / African Studies
Rights: World
January 2023
280 pages
Globalization and Neoliberalism / Anthropology / Asian Studies / East Asia
Rights: World
The contributors to New World Orderings demonstrate that China’s twenty-first-century rise occurs not only through economics and state politics but equally through the mutual entanglements of overlapping social, economic, and cultural worlds in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America. They show how the Chinese state has sought to reconfigure the nation’s position in the world and the centrality of trade, labor, religion, migration, gender, race, and literature to this reconfiguration. Among other topics, the contributors examine China’s post-Bandung cultural diplomacy with African nations, how West African “pastor-entrepreneurs” in China interpreted and preached the prosperity doctrine, the diversity of Chinese-Argentine social relations in the soy supply chain, and the ties between China and India within the complex history of inter-Asian exchange and Chinese migration to Southeast Asia. By examining China’s long historical relationship with the Global South.
Lisa Rofel is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture, also published by Duke University Press. Carlos Rojas is Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University and author of Homesickness: Culture, Contagion, and National Transformation in Modern China.
In Code Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan reconstructs how Progressive Era technocracy as well as crises of industrial democracy and colonialism shaped early accounts of cybernetics and digital media by theorists including Norbert Wiener, Warren Weaver, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Luce Irigaray. His analysis casts light on how media-practical research forged common epistemic cause in programs that stretched from 1930s interwar computing at MIT and eugenics to the proliferation of seminars and laboratories in 1960s Paris. This mobilization ushered forth new fields of study such as structural anthropology, family therapy, and literary semiology while forming enduring intellectual affinities between the humanities and informatics. Code offers a new history of French theory and the digital humanities as transcontinental and political endeavors linking interwar colonial ethnography in Dutch Bali to French sciences in the throes of Cold War-era decolonization and modernization.
January 2023
272 pages
Science and Technology Studies / History of Technology / Theory and Philosophy / Media Studies
Rights: World
Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan is Senior Lecturer in the History and Theory of Digital Media at King’s College London.
ALBERTO MOREIRAS
Alberto Moreiras offers a meditation on intellectual life under the suspension of time and conditions of isolation. Focusing on his personal day-to-day experiences of the “shelterin-place” period during the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, Moreiras engages with the limits and possibilities of critical thought in the realm of the infrapolitical—the conditions of existence that exceed average understandings of politics and philosophy. In each dated entry he works through the process of formulating a life’s worth of thought and writing while attempting to locate the nature of thought once the coordinates of everyday life have changed. Offering nothing less than a phenomenology of thinking, Moreiras shows how thought happens in and out of a life, at a certain crossroads where memories collide, where conversations with interlocutors both living and dead evolve and thinking during a suspended state becomes provisional and uncertain.
Alberto Moreiras is Professor of Hispanic Studies at Texas A&M University and author of The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies, also published by Duke University Press, Against Abstraction: Notes from an Ex-Latin Americanist, and Infrapolitics: A Handbook.
December 2022
208 pages
Literature and Literary Studies / Theory and Philosophy / Critical Theory / Politics / Political Theory
Rights: World
RUMYA SREE PUTCHA
Rumya Sree Putcha theorizes how the Indian classical dancer performs the complex dynamics of transnational Indian womanhood. Putcha argues that the public persona of the Indian dancer has come to represent India in the global imagination—a representation that supports caste hierarchies and Hindu ethnonationalism, as well as white supremacist model minority narratives. Generations of Indian women have been encouraged to embody the archetype of the dancer, popularized through film cultures from the 1930s to the present. Through analyses of films, immigration and marriage laws, histories of caste and race, advertising campaigns, and her own family’s heirlooms, photographs, and memories, Putcha reveals how women’s citizenship is based on separating their voices from their bodies. In listening closely to and for the dancer’s voice, she offers a new way to understand the intersections of body, voice, performance, caste, race, gender, and nation..
Rumya Sree Putcha is Assistant Professor of Music and Women’s Studies at the University of Georgia.
December 2022
208 pages
Gender and Sexuality / Feminism and Women's Studies / Media Studies / Asian Studies / South Asia
Rights: World
August 2023
352 pages
Theory and Philosophy / Feminist Theory / Cultural Studies / Animal Studies / African American Studies and Black Diaspora Rights: World December 2023
288 pages
Literature and Literary Studies / Theory and Philosophy / African American Studies and Black Diaspora Rights: World
In an other, Sharon Patricia Holland offers a new theorization of the human animal divide by shifting focus from distinction toward relation in ways that acknowledge that humans are also animals. Holland centers ethical commitments over ontological concerns to spotlight those moments when Black people ethically relate with animals. Drawing on writers and thinkers ranging from Hortense Spillers, Sara Ahmed, Toni Morrison, and C. E. Morgan to Jane Bennett, Jacques Derrida, and Donna Haraway, Holland decenters the human in Black feminist thought to interrogate Blackness, insurgence, flesh, and femaleness. She examines MOVE’s incarnation as an animal liberation group, uses sovereignty in Morrison’s A Mercy to understand Blackness, Indigeneity and the animal, analyzes Charles Burnett’s films as commentaries on the place of animals in Black life, and shows how equestrian novels address Black and animal life in ways that rehearse the practices of the slavocracy. By focusing on doing rather than being, Holland demonstrates that Black life is not solely likened to animal life; it is relational and world-forming with animal lives.
Sharon Patricia Holland is Townsend Ludington Distinguished Professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and author of The Erotic Life of Racism and Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity, both also published by Duke University Press.
In Fugitive Time, Matthew Omelsky theorizes the embodied experience of time in twentiethand twenty-first-century black artforms from across the world. Through the lens of time, he charts the sensations and coursing thoughts that accompany desires for freedom as they appear in the work of artists as varied as Toni Morrison, Yvonne Vera, Aimé Césaire, and Issa Samb. “Fugitive time” names a distinct utopian desire directed at the anticipated moment when the body and mind have been unburdened of the violence that has consumed black life globally for centuries, bringing with it a new form of being. Omelsky shows how fugitive time is not about attaining this transcendent release, but instead sustaining the idea of it as an ecstatic social gathering. From the desire for ethereal queer worlds in the Black Audio Film Collective’s Twilight City to Sun Ra’s transformation of nineteenth-century scientific racism into an insurgent fugitive aesthetic, Omelsky shows how fugitive time evolves and how it remains a dominant form of imagining freedom in global black cultural expression.
Matthew Omelsky is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Rochester.
JONATHAN LEAL
In Dreams in Double Time Jonathan Leal examines how the musical revolution of bebop opened up new futures for racialized and minoritized communities. Blending lyrical nonfiction with transdisciplinary critique and moving beyond standard Black/white binary narratives of jazz history, Leal focuses on the stories and experiences of three musicians and writers of color: James Araki, a Nisei multi-instrumentalist, soldier-translator, and literature and folklore scholar; Raúl Salinas, a Chicano poet, jazz critic, and longtime activist who endured the US carceral system for over a decade; and Harold Wing, an Afro-Chinese American drummer, pianist, and songwriter who performed with bebop pioneers before working as a public servant. Leal foregrounds that for these men and their collaborators, bebop was an affectively and intellectually powerful force that helped them build community and dream new social possibilities.
Jonathan Leal is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern California and coeditor of Cybermedia: Explorations in Science, Sound, and Vision.
JENNA N. HANCHEY
In The Center Cannot Hold Jenna N. Hanchey examines the decolonial potential emerging from processes of ruination and collapse. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in rural Tanzania at an internationally funded NGO as it underwent dissolution, Hanchey traces the conflicts between local leadership and Western paternalism as well as the unstable subjectivity of Western volunteers—including the author—who are unable to withstand the contradictions of playing the dual roles of decolonializing ally and white savior. She argues that Western institutional and mental structures must be allowed to fall apart to make possible the emergence of decolonial justice. Hanchey shows how, through ruination, privileged subjects come to critical awareness through repeated encounters with their own complicity, providing an opportunity to delink from and oppose epistemologies of coloniality. After things fall apart, Hanchey posits, the creation of decolonial futures depends on the labor required to imagine impossible futures into being.
Jenna N. Hanchey is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Critical/Cultural Studies at Arizona State University.
August 2023
256 pages
Music / Jazz / American Studies / Critical Ethnic Studies
Rights: World
August 2023
248 pages
Postcolonial and Colonial Studies / Anthropology / African Studies
Rights: World
August 2023
208 pages
Gender and Sexuality / Queer Theory / Anthropology / Cultural Studies / Animal Studies
Rights: World
In Indifference, Naisargi N. Davé examines the complex worlds of animalists and animalism in India. Through ethnographic fieldwork with animal healers, animal activists, farmers, laborers, transporters, and animals themselves, and moving across animal shelters and dairy farms to city streets and abattoirs, Davé shows how human-animal relations often manifest through care and violence. More surprisingly, what Davé also finds animating interspecies relationality in India is an ethic of indifference: that is, an orientation of mutual regard rather than curiosity, love, desire, or animus. With indifference, Davé describes both a mode of relationality in the world and a scholarly approach: seeking what is possible when we approach ethico-political concepts with indifference rather than commitment or antagonism. Moments of indifference, Davé contends, offer the promise of otherwise worlds.
Naisargi N. Davé is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto and author of Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics, also published by Duke University Press.
November 2023
264 pages
Native and Indigenous Studies / Science and Technology Studies / Anthropology
Rights: World
Science and Indigeneity in Australia
EMMA KOWAL
This book examines the long history of biological studies of Indigenous Australians, repeatedly used to support racist and evolutionary schemes. Kowal discusses a succession of scientific methods that claimed to describe Indigenous Australians based on hair types or blood groups or physiological measurements, before being disproved and succeeded by the next method. In recent decades Indigenous activism — and wide critiques of racist science — have worked to put the tools of genomics under Indigenous control. Do genomic attempts to describe an Indigenous biology inevitably repeat the racism of the past, or can there be real health benefits for Indigenous people from such studies if the methods are in their own hands? Kowal argues that this is a false binary. There will always be hauntings from the biology of the past, even if there are political and health gains from the research in the present. The project will be of wide interest to scholars in the history of science, social study of science, anthropology, and medical ethics.
Emma Kowal is a Professor of Anthropology at Deakin University
In Artifactual, Elizabeth Anne Davis explores how Cypriot researchers, scientists, activists, and artists process and reckon with civil and state violence that led to the enduring division of the island, using forensic and documentary materials to retell and recontextualize conflicts between and within the Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot communities. Davis follows forensic archaeologists and anthropologists who attempt to locate, identify, and return to relatives the remains of Cypriots killed in those conflicts. She turns to filmmakers who use archival photographs and footage to come to terms with political violence and its legacies. In both forensic science and documentary filmmaking, the dynamics of secrecy and revelation shape how material remains such as bones and archival images are given meaning. Throughout, Davis demonstrates how Cypriots navigate the tension between an ethics of knowledge, which valorizes truth as a prerequisite for recovery and reconciliation, and the politics of knowledge, which renders evidence as irremediably partial and perpetually falsifiable.
Elizabeth Anne Davis is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University and author of Bad Souls: Madness and Responsibility in Modern Greece, also published by Duke University Press.
The Transnational Lives of Korean Chinese Workers
JUNE HEE KWON
In Borderland Dreams June Hee Kwon explores the trajectory of the “Korean dream” that has fueled the massive migration of Korean Chinese workers from the Korean Autonomous Prefecture of Yanbian in northeast China to South Korea since the early 1990s. Charting the interplay of bodies, money, and time, the ethnography reveals how these migrant workers, in the course pursuing their borderland dreams, are transformed into a transnational ethnicized class. Kwon analyzes the persistent desire of Korean Chinese to “leave to live better” at the intersection between the neoliberalizing regimes of post-socialist China and of post–Cold War South Korea. Scrutinizing the tensions and affinities among the Korean Chinese, North and South Koreans, and Han Chinese whose lives intertwine in the borderland, Kwon captures the diverse and multifaceted aspirations of Korean Chinese workers caught between the ascendant Chinese dream and the waning Korean dream.
June Hee Kwon is Associate Professor of Asian Studies at California State University, Sacramento.
August 2023
400 pages
Globalization and Neoliberalism, Anthropology > Cultural Anthropology, Art and Visual Culture
Rights: World
November 2023
248 pages
Sociology, Anthropology / Cultural Anthropology / Asian Studies / East Asia
Rights: World
September 2023
224 pages
Gender and Sexuality / LGBTQ Studies / Anthropology / Cultural Anthropology / Latin American Studies / Brazil
Rights: World
NESSETTE FALU
In Unseen Flesh Nessette Falu explores how Black lesbians in Brazil define and sustain their well-being and self-worth against persistent racial, sexual, class, and gender-based prejudice. Focusing on the trauma caused by interactions with gynecologists, Falu draws on in-depth ethnographic work among the Black lesbian community to reveal their profoundly negative affective experiences within Brazil’s deeply biased medical system. In the face of such entrenched, intersectional intimate violence, Falu’s informants actively pursue well-being in ways that channel their struggle for self-worth toward broader goals of social change, self care, and communal action. Falu rethinks the medicalization of race, sex, and gender in Brazil and elsewhere while offering a new perspective on Black queer life through well-being grounded in relationships, socioeconomic struggles, the erotic, and freedom strivings. Nessette Falu is Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
MICHAEL M. J. FISCHER
In At the Pivot of East and West, Michael M. J. Fischer examines documentary filmmaking and literature from Southeast Asia and Singapore for their para-ethnographic insights into politics, culture, and aesthetics. Women novelists—Lydia Kwa, Laksmi Pamuntjak, Sandi Tan, Jing Jing Lee, and Danielle Lim—renarrate Southeast Asian generational and political worlds as gendered psychodramas, while filmmakers Tan Pin Pin and Daniel Hui use film to probe into what can better be seen beyond textual worlds. Other writers like Daren Goh, Kevin Martens Wong, and Nuraliah Norasid reinvent the detective story for the age of artificial intelligence, use monsters to reimagine the Southeast Asian archipelago, and critique racism and the erasure of ethnic cultural histories. Continuing his project of applying anthropological thinking to the creative arts, Fischer exemplifies how art and fiction trace the ways in which taken-for-granted common sense changes over time, speak to the transnational present, and track signals of the future before they surface in public awareness.
August 2023
368 pages
Anthropology / Cultural Anthropology / Asian Studies / Southeast Asia / Art and Visual Culture
Rights: World
Michael M. J. Fischer is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of numerous books, including Probing Arts and Emergent Forms of Life and Anthropology in the Meantime: Experimental Ethnography, Theory, and Method for the Twenty-First Century, both also published by Duke University Press.
In Brown Saviors and Their Others Arjun Shankar draws from his ethnographic work with an educational NGO to investigate the practices of “brown saviors”—globally mobile, dominant-caste, liberal Indian and Indian diasporic technocrats who drive India’s help economy. Shankar argues that these brown saviors actually reproduce many of the racialized values and ideologies associated with who and how to help that have been passed down from the colonial period while masking other operations of power behind the racial politics of global brownness. In India, these operations of power center largely on the transnational labor politics of caste. Ever attentive to moments of discomfort and complicity, Shankar develops a method of “nervous ethnography” to uncover the global racial hierarchies, graded caste stratifications, urban/rural distinctions, and digital panaceas that shape the politics of help in India. Through nervous critique, Shankar introduces a framework for the study of the global help economies that reckons with the ongoing legacies of racial and caste capitalism.
Arjun Shankar is Assistant Professor of Culture and Politics at Georgetown University and coeditor of Curiosity Studies: A New Ecology of Knowledge
Parsi Endowments in Mumbai and the Horoscope of a City
LEIL AH VEVAINA
Although numbering fewer than 60,000 in a city of over 12 million, Mumbai’s Parsi community is one of the largest private landowners in the city due to its network of public charitable trusts. In Trust Matters Leilah Vevaina explores the dynamics and consequences of this conjunction of religion and capital, as well as the activities of giving, disputing, living, and dying it enables. As she shows, communal trusts are the legal infrastructure behind formal religious giving and ritual in urban India that influences communal life. Vevaina proposes the trusts as a horoscope of the city—a constellation of housing, temples, and other spaces providing possible futures. She explores the charitable trust as a technology of time, originating in the nineteenth century, one that structures intergenerational obligations for Mumbai’s Parsis, connecting past and present, the worldly and the sacred. By approaching Mumbai through the legal mechanism of the trust and the people who live within its bounds as well as those who challenge or support it, Vevaina offers a new pathway into exploring property, religion, and kinship in the urban global South.
Leilah Vevaina is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
August 2023
360 pages
Anthropology / Cultural Anthropology / Asian Studies / South Asia / Critical Ethnic Studies
Rights: World
January 2024
224 pages
Sociology / Urban Studies / Anthropology / Cultural Anthropology / Asian Studies / South Asia
Rights: World
September 2023
248 pages
Middle East Studies / Art and Visual Culture / Environmental Studies
Rights: World
SALAR MAMENI
In Terracene Salar Mameni historicizes the popularization of the scientific notion of the Anthropocene alongside the emergence of the global war on terror. Mameni theorizes the Terracene as an epoch marked by a convergence of racialized militarism and environmental destruction. Both Anthropocene and the war on terror centered the antagonist figures of the Anthropos and the Terrorist as responsible for epochal changes in the new geological and geopolitical world orders. In response, Mameni shows how the Terracene requires radically new engagements with Terra (the earth), whose intelligence resides in matters such as oil and phenomena like earthquakes and fires. Drawing on the work of artists whose practices interrogate histories of settler colonial and imperial interests in land and resources in Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Kuwait, Syria, Palestine and other regions most effected by the war on terror, Mameni offers speculative paths into the aesthetics of the Terracene.
Salar Mameni is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
Portrait of a Renaissance City
September 2023
304 pages
Art history
Rights: World
KRISTIN LOVE HUFFMAN
Jacopo de’ Barbari’s woodcut View of Venice, first printed in the year 1500, presents a bird’seye perspective of Renaissance Venice as a mystical city built on water, full of ornate buildings and bridges reachable only by boat. This book brings together a range of scholars—with expertise in art history, architectural and urban history,musicology—to contextualize and offer new insight into de’ Barbari’s print. The contributors consider the View in its artistic and political context, including the image as part of a network of political communication that asserted Venice’s strength in the face of war and economic competition; the View as a tool for mapping the print industry in Venice and its international connections; and the material objects and skilled labor that would have been necessary to actually print the image in 1500. The contributors then explore how this representation illuminates the cartographies of lives lived in Venice, including monasteries and convents as complexes that connected to each other and the outside world; the demonstrable wealth of jeweler Domenico di Piero; and how the Venetian government both welcomed and contained those viewed as foreign, like Jewish residents.
Kristin Love Huffman is a Lecturing Fellow in the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University.
In Beyond the Sovereign Self Grant H. Kester continues the critique of aesthetic autonomy begun in The Sovereign Self, showing how socially engaged art provides an alternative aesthetic with greater possibilities for critical practice. Instead of grounding art in its distance from the social, Kester shows how socially engaged art, developed in conjunction with forms of social or political resistance, encourages the creative capacity required for collective political transformation. Among others, Kester analyzes the work of conceptual artist Adrian Piper, experimental practices associated with the escrache tradition in Argentina, and indigenous Canadian artists such as Nadia Myer and Michèle Taïna Audette, showing how socially engaged art catalyzes forms of resistance that operate beyond the institutional art world. From the Americas and Europe to Iran and South Africa, Kester presents a historical genealogy of recent engaged art practices rooted in a deep history of cultural production, beginning with nineteenth-century political struggles and continuing into contemporary anticolonial resistance and other social movements.
Grant H. Kester is Professor of Art History at the University of California, San Diego, author of The Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Enlightenment to the Avant-Garde and The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context, and coeditor of Collective Situations: Readings in Contemporary Latin American Art, 1995–2010, all also published by Duke University Press.
In Ruderal City Bettina Stoetzer develops the notion of the ruderal—originally an ecological designation for the unruly life that inhabits inhospitable environments such as rubble, roadsides, train tracks, and sidewalk cracks—to theorize Berlin as a “ruderal city.” Stoetzer explores sites in and around Berlin that have figured in German national imaginaries—gardens, forests, parks, and rubble fields—to show how racial, class, and gender inequalities shape contestations over today’s uses and knowledges of urban nature. Drawing on fieldwork with gardeners, botanists, migrant workers, refugees, public officials, and nature enthusiasts while charting human and more-than-human worlds, Stoetzer offers a wide-ranging ethnographic portrait of Berlin’s postwar ecologies that reveals emergent futures in the margins of European cities. Brimming with stories that break down divides between environmental perspectives and the study of migration and racial politics, Berlin’s ruderal worlds help us rethink the space of nature and culture and the categories through which we make sense of urban life in inhospitable times.
Bettina Stoetzer is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and coeditor of Shock and Awe: War on Words.
January 2024
288 pages
Theory and Philosophy / Art and Visual Culture / Art Criticism and Theory
Rights: World x Chinese (s)
December 2022
Geography / Science and Technology Studies / Anthropology
Rights: World x Chinese (s)
September 2023
368 pages
Globalization and Neoliberalism / Anthropology / Cultural Anthropology / Art and Visual Culture / Photography
Rights: World
The Camera and the Political Imagination
CHRISTOPHER PINNEY, PHOTODEMOS COLLECTIVE, NALUWEMBE
Citizens of Photography explores how photography offers access to forms of citizenship beyond those available through ordinary politics. Through contemporary ethnographic investigations of photographic practice in Nicaragua, Nigeria, Greece, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Cambodia, the PhotoDemos Collective traces the resonances between political representation and photographic representation. The authors emphasize photography as lived practice and how photography’s performative, transformative, and transgressive possibilities facilitate the articulation of new identities. They analyze photography ranging from family albums to social media to state and public archives, showing how it points to unknown futures and destinations in the context of social movements, the aftermath of atrocity and civil war, and the legacies of past injustices.
Christopher Pinney is Professor of Anthropology and Visual Culture at University College London and author of The Waterless Sea: A Curious History of Mirages. Naluwembe Binaisa researches mobilities, belonging, and citizenship within Africa. Vindhya Buthpitiya is Associate Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. Konstantinos Kalantzis is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Thessaly. Ileana L. Selejan is Lecturer in Art History, Culture, and Society at the University of Edinburgh. Sokphea Young is an honorary Research Fellow at the University College London.
August 2023
176 pages
Gender and Sexuality / Queer Theory / History / Asian Studies / South Asia
Rights: World
ANJALI ARONDEKAR
In Abundance, Anjali Arondekar Arondekar theorizes the radical abundance of sexuality through the archives of the Gomantak Maratha Samaj—a caste-oppressed Devadasi collective in South Asia—that are plentiful and quotidian, imaginative and ordinary. For Arondekar, abundance is inextricably linked to the histories of subordinated groups in ways that challenge narratives of their constant devaluation. Summoning abundance over loss upends settled genealogies of historical recuperation and representation and works against the imperative to fix sexuality within wider structures of vulnerability, damage, and precarity. Multigeneric and multilingual, transregional and historically supple, Abundance centers sexuality within area, post/colonial, and anti/caste histories.
Anjali Arondekar is Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India, also published by Duke University Press.
RUCHI CHATURVEDI
Ruchi Chaturvedi tracks the rise of India’s divisive politics through close examination of decades-long confrontations in Kerala between members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and supporters of the Hindu nationalist, Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh and Bharatiya Janata Party. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and extensive archival research, Chaturvedi investigates the unique character of the conflict between the party left and Hindu right. This conflict, she shows, defies explanations centering religious, caste, or ideological differences. It offers instead new ways of understanding how quotidian political competition can produce antagonistic majoritarian communities. Rival political parties mobilize practices of disbursing care and aggressive masculinity in their struggle for electoral and popular power, a process intensified by a criminal justice system that reproduces violence rather than mitigating it.
Ruchi Chaturvedi is Senior Lecturer of Sociology at the University of Cape Town.
JAYA KEANEY
Feminist scholar Jaya Keaney explores the multiracial politics of queer family making, using reproduction as a key site for reformulating intimate citizenship. Working in dialogue with scholarship in queer theory, critical race theory, and feminist studies of reproduction, Keaney argues that the queer and multiracial are coconstituting, pointing out uses of mixedness as a form of queer capital. The text draws on interviews with parents and children in Sydney and Melbourne, sequentially following the journey of queer family making through assisted reproduction. Woven throughout the book are themes of choice, restriction, biology, and love, each of which play an important role in the queer family making process. Through examples of assisted reproduction technologies and examination of the biosocial construction of racial inheritance, Keaney extends current critical race approaches and contributes to feminist scholarship on reproduction and the fertility industry.
Jaya Keany is Lecturer in Gender Studies at the University of Melbourne.
August 2023
280 pages, Postcolonial and Colonial Studies / Anthropology / Asian Studies / South Asia
Rights: World
November 2023
240 pages
Gender and Sexuality > Queer Theory, Science and Technology Studies > Feminist Science Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies
Rights: World
August 2023
314 pages
Gender and Sexuality / LGBTQ Studies / Music / Ethnomusicology / Cultural Studies / Affect Theory
Rights: World
In Together, Somehow, Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta examines how people find ways to get along and share a dancefloor, a vibe, and a sound. Drawing on time spent in the minimal techno and house music sub-scenes in Chicago, Paris, and Berlin as the first decade of the new millennium came to a close, Garcia-Mispireta explains this bonding in terms of what he calls stranger-intimacy: the kind of warmth, sharing, and vulnerability between people that happens surprisingly often at popular electronic dance music parties. He shows how affect lubricates the connections between music and the dancers. Intense shared senses of sound and touch help support a feeling of belonging to a larger social world. However, as Garcia-Mispireta points out, this sense of belonging can be vague, fluid, and may hide exclusions and injustices. By showing how sharing a dancefloor involves feeling, touch, sound, sexuality, and subculture, Garcia-Mispireta rethinks intimacy and belonging through dancing crowds and the utopic vision of throbbing dancefloors.
Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta is Associate Professor in Ethnomusicology and Popular Music Studies at the University of Birmingham.
MAH
September 2023
240 pages
Sociology / Activism /Environmental Studies
Rights: World
In Petrochemical Planet Alice Mah examines the changing nature of the petrochemical industry as it faces the existential threats of climate change and environmental activism. Drawing on research from high-level industry meetings, petrochemical plant tours, and polluted communities, Mah juxtaposes the petrochemical industry’s destructive corporate worldviews with environmental justice struggles in the United States, China, and Europe. She argues that amid intensifying public pressures, a profound planetary industrial transformation is under way that is challenging the reigning age of plastics and fossil fuels. This challenge comes from what Mah calls multiscalar activism—a form of collective resistance that spans local, regional, national, and planetary sites and scales and addresses the interconnected issues of environmental justice, climate, pollution, health, extraction, land rights, workers’ rights, systemic racism, and toxic colonialism.
Alice Mah is Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick and author of Plastic Unlimited: How Corporations Are Fuelling the Ecological Crisis and What We Can Do About It.
NADERA SHALHOUBKEVORKIAN, EDITORS
This book focuses on how a visionary feminist project has folded itself into contemporary world affairs. Combating violence against women and gender-based violence constitutes a highly visible and powerful agenda enshrined in international governance and law and embedded in state violence and global securitization. Case studies on Palestine, Bangladesh, Iran, India, Pakistan, Israel, and Turkey as well as on UN and US policies trace the silences and omissions, as well as the experiences of those subjected to violence, to question the rhetoric that claims the agenda as a “feminist success story.” Because religion and racialized ethnicity, particularly “the Muslim question,” run so deeply through the institutional structures of the agenda, the contributions explore ways it may be affirming or enabling rationales and systems of power, including civilizational hierarchies, that harm the very people it seeks to protect.
Lila Abu-Lughod is Buttenwieser Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies, Columbia University. Rema Hammami is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Institute of Women's Studies, Birzeit University. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian is Professor of Criminology and Social Work at The Hebrew University and Chair in Global Law at Queen Mary University.
An Intimate History of Browness MOON CHARANIA
This is an exploration of dispossession and the brown diaspora through a reflection on the life of the author's mother. Drawing on her mother’s memories and stories of migration, violence, sexuality, queerness, domesticity, and the intimate economies of everyday life, Charania conceptualizes her mother’s tongue as an object of theory and an archive of brown intimate life. By presenting a mode of storytelling that is sensual and melancholic, piercing and sharp, Charania recovers otherwise silenced modes of brown mothers’ survival, disobedience and meaning-making that are often only lived out in invisible, intimate spaces, and too often disappear into them. In narrating her mother’s tongue as both metaphor for and material reservoir of other ways of knowing, Charania gestures to the afflictions, limits, and failures of feminist, queer and postcolonial scholarly interrogations and the consequences of closing the archive of the brown mother.
Moon Charania is Associate Professor of International Studies and Comparative Women Studies at Spelman College and author of Will the Real Pakistani Woman Please Stand Up?: Empire, Visual Culture, and the Brown Female Body
August 2023
480 pages
Gender and Sexuality / Feminism and Women's Studies / Law / Human Rights / Anthropology / Cultural Anthropology
Rights: World
August 2023
192 pages
Gender and Sexuality / Feminism and Women's Studies / Queer Theory / Postcolonial and Colonial Studies
Rights: WorldWorld
August 2023
248 pages
Geography / Asian Studies / Southeast Asia / Environmental Studies
Rights: World
In The Pulse of the Earth Adam Bobbette tells the story of how modern theories of the earth emerged from the slopes of Indonesia’s volcanoes. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, scientists became concerned with protecting the colonial plantation economy from the unpredictable bursts and shudders of volcanoes. Bobbette follows Javanese knowledge traditions, colonial geologists, volcanologists, mystics, Theosophists, orientalists, and revolutionaries, to show how the earth sciences originate from a fusion of Western and non-Western cosmology, theology, anthropology, and geology. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and fieldwork on Javanese volcanoes and in scientific observatories, he explores how Indonesian Islam shaped the theory of plate tectonics, how Dutch colonial volcanologists learned to see the earth in new ways from Javanese spiritual traditions, and how new scientific technologies radically recast notions of the human body, distance, and the earth. In this way, Bobbette decenters the significance of Western scientists to expand our understanding of the evolution of planetary thought and rethinks the politics of geological knowledge.
December 2023
224 pages
Medicine and Health / Public Health and Health Policy / Politics / History / U.S. History
Rights: World
Since the early twentieth century, the United States has led a global prohibition effort against certain drugs in which production restriction and criminalization are emphasized over prevention and treatment as means to reduce problematic drug usage. This “war on drugs” is widely seen to have failed, and periodically de-criminalization and legalization movements arise. Debates continue over whether the problems of addiction and crime associated with illicit drug use stem from their illicit status or the nature of the drugs themselves. In The Long War on Drugs Anne L. Foster explores the origin of the punitive approach to drugs and its continued appeal, despite its obvious flaws.
Anne L. Foster is Associate Professor of History at Indiana State University, author of Projections of Power: The United States and Europe in Colonial Southeast Asia, 1919–1941, and coeditor of The American Colonial State in the Philippines: Global Perspectives, both also published by Duke University Press.
In How Things Fall Apart Elizabeth Dore reveals the decay of the Cuban political system through the lives of seven ordinary Cuban citizens. Born in the 1970s and 1980s, they recount how their lives changed over a tumultuous stretch of thirty-five years: first when Fidel Castro opened the country to tourism following the fall of the Soviet bloc; then when Raúl Castro allowed market forces to operate; and finally when President Trump’s tightening of the US embargo combined with the COVID-19 pandemic caused economic collapse. With warmth and humanity, they describe learning to survive in an environment where a tiny minority has grown rich, the great majority has been left behind, and inequality has destroyed the very things that used to give meaning to Cubans’ lives. In this book, everyday Cubans illuminate their own stories and the slow and agonizing decline of the Cuban Revolution.
Elizabeth Dore (1946–2022) was Professor Emeritus of Latin American History at the University of Southampton, author of Myths of Modernity: Peonage and Patriarchy in Nicaragua, and coeditor of Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Latin America, both also published by Duke University Press.
Bringing into dialogue the fields of social history, Andean ethnography, and postcolonial theory, The Lettered Indian maps the moral dilemmas and political stakes involved in the protracted struggle over Indian literacy and schooling in the Bolivian Andes. Brooke Larson traces Bolivia’s major state efforts to educate its unruly Indigenous masses at key junctures in the twentieth century. While much scholarship has focused on “the Indian boarding school” and other Western schemes of racial assimilation, Larson interweaves state-centered and imperial episodes of Indigenous education reform with vivid ethnographies of Aymara peasant protagonists and their extraordinary pro-school initiatives. Exploring the field of vernacular literacy practices and peasant political activism, she examines the transformation of the rural “alphabet school” from an instrument of the civilizing state into a tool of Aymara cultural power, collective representation, and rebel activism. From the metaphorical threshold of the rural school, Larson rethinks the politics of race and indigeneity, nation and empire, in postcolonial Bolivia and beyond.
Brooke Larson is Professor Emerita of History at Stony Brook University, author of Cochabamba, 1550-1900: Colonialism and Agrarian Transformation in Bolivia, also published by Duke University Press, and Trials of Nation Making: Liberalism, Race, and Ethnicity in the Andes, 1810–1910, and coeditor of Ethnicity, Markets, and Migration in the Andes: At the Crossroads of History and Anthropology.
August 2023
352 pages
History / Latin American History / Latin American Studies / Caribbean Studies
Rights: World
January 2024
496 pages
Native and Indigenous Studies / History
Rights: World
November 2023
264 pages
Rights: World
In Politics in the Crevices, Sarah El-Kazaz takes readers into the world of urban planning and design practices in Istanbul and Cairo. In this transnational ethnography of neighborhoods undergoing contested rapid transformations, she reveals how the battle for housing has shifted away from traditional political arenas onto private crevices of the city. She outlines how multiple actors—from highly capitalized international NGOs and corporations to city dwellers, bureaucrats, and planning experts—use careful urban design to empower conflicting agendas, whether manipulating property markets to protect affordable housing or corner luxury real estate. El-Kazaz shows that such contemporary politicizations of urban design stem from unresolved struggles at the heart of messy transitions from the welfare state to neoliberalism, which have shifted the politics of redistribution from contested political arenas to design practices operating within market logics, ultimately relocating political struggles onto the city’s most intimate crevices. In so doing, she raises critical questions about the role of market reforms in redistributing resources and challenges readers to rethink neoliberalism and the fundamental ways it shapes cities and politics.
Sarah El-Kazaz is Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS, University of London.
NADIA YAQUB
August 2023
304 pages
Middle East Studies / Postcolonial and Colonial Studies / Media Studies / Film
Rights: World
Gaza’s long association with resistance and humanitarian need has generated a complex and ever shifting range of visual material, including not just news reports and documentaries, but also essay, experimental, and fictional films, militant videos, and solidarity images. Contributors to Gaza on Screen, including scholars and Gazan filmmakers, explore the practice, production, and impact of film and videos from and about the Gaza Strip. Conceptualizing screens—both large and small—as tools for mediation that are laden with power, the volume explores Gazan film and video in relation to humanitarianism and human rights, care, community, environment, mobility and confinement, and decolonization. The volume includes visual material ranging from solidarity broadcasts on Lebanese television, mid-twentieth-century British Pathé newsreels, and fiction films to breaking news, visuals of contemporary militant resistance, documentaries, and found footage films, arguing for visual ecosystem in which differing types of film and video affect and inform each other. Throughout, they demonstrate that screens shape and sustain relationships between Gaza and the world, and help to sustain the possibility of a different future.
Nadia Yaqub is Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, author of Pens, Swords, and the Springs of Art: The Oral Poetry Dueling of Palestinian Weddings in the Galilee and Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution, and coeditor of Bad Girls of the Arab World
In the early 1960s, pianist Horace Tapscott gave up a successful career in Lionel Hampton’s band and returned to his home in Los Angeles to found the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, a community arts group that focused on providing community-oriented jazz and jazz training. Over the course of almost forty years, the Arkestra, together with the related Union of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascension Foundation, were at the forefront of the vital community-based arts movements in black Los Angeles. Some three hundred artists—musicians, vocalists, poets, playwrights, painters, sculptors, and graphic artists—passed through these organizations, many ultimately remaining within the community and others moving on to achieve international fame. In The Dark Tree, Steven L. Isoardi draws on one hundred in-depth interviews with the Arkestra’s participants to tell the history of the important and largely overlooked community arts movement of African American Los Angeles. This revised and updated edition brings the story of the Arkestra up to date, as its ethos and aesthetic remain vital forces in jazz and popular music to this day.
Steven L. Isoardi is an independent scholar and editor of Songs of the Unsung: The Musical and Social Journey of Horace Tapscott, also published by Duke University Press, Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles, and Jazz Generations: A Life in American Music and Society. He is the author of The Music Finds a Way: A PAPA/ UGMAA Oral History of Growing up in Postwar South Central Los Angeles
MIKE FORTUN
In Genomics with Care Mike Fortun presents an experimental ethnography of contemporary genomics, analyzing science as a complex amalgam of cognition and affect, formal logics and tacit knowledge, statistics, and ethics. Fortun examines genomics in terms of care—a dense composite of affective and cognitive forces that drive scientists and the relations they form with their objects of research, data, knowledge, and community. Reading genomics with care shows how each resists definition yet are so entangled as to become indistinguishable. Fortun analyzes four patterns of genomic care—curation, scrupulousness, solicitude, and friendship—seen in the conceptual, technological, social, and methodological changes that transpired as the genetics of the 1980s became the genomics of the 1990s, and then the “post-genomics” of the 2000s. By tracing the dense patterns made where care binds to science, Fortun shows how these patterns mark where scientists are driven to encounter structural double binds that are impossible to resolve, and yet are where scientific change and creativity occur.
Mike Fortun is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Promising Genomics: Iceland and deCODE Genetics in a World of Speculation
October 2023
456 pages
Music / Jazz / American Studies / African American Studies and Black Diaspora
Rights: World
July 2023
360 pages
Science and Technology Studies / Anthropology
Rights: World
November
Rights: World
ANDREW GOFFEY, TRANSLATOR
In Virgin Mary and the Neutrino, first published in French in 2006 and appearing here in English for the first time, Isabelle Stengers experiments with the possibility of addressing modern practices not as a block but through the way they diverge from each other. Drawing on thinkers ranging from Dewey to Deleuze, she develops what she calls an “ecology of practices” into a capacious and heterogeneous perspective that is inclusive of cultural and political forces but not reducible to them. Stengers first advocates for an approach to sciences that would emphasize the way each should be situated by the kind of relationship demanded by what it attempts to address. This approach turns away from the disabling scientific/nonscientific binary—like the opposition between the neutrino and Virgin Mary. An ecology of practices stimulates instead an appetite for thinking reality not as an arbiter but as what we can relate with through the generation of diverging concerns and obligations.
Isabelle Stengers is Emerita Professor of the Philosophy of Science at the Université libre de Bruxelles and is the author of numerous books, including Making Sense in Common: A Reading of Whitehead in Times of Collapse, Another Science is Possible: A Manifesto for Slow Science, and In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism.
September 2023
280 pages
Sociology / Social Theory / Theory and Philosophy / Critical Theory / Cultural Studies
Rights: World
TONY BENNETT
Habit has long preoccupied a wide range of theologians, philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, and neuroscientists. In Habit’s Pathways Tony Bennett explores the political consequences of the varied ways in which habit’s repetitions have been acted on to guide or direct conduct. Bennett considers habit’s uses and effects across the monastic regimens of medieval Europe, in plantation slavery and the factory system, through colonial forms of rule, and within a range of medicalized pathologies. He brings these episodes in habit’s political histories to bear on contemporary debates ranging from its role in relation to the politics of white supremacy to the digital harvesting of habits in practices of algorithmic governance. Throughout, Bennett tracks how habit’s repetitions have been articulated differently across divisions of class, race, and gender, demonstrating that although habit serves as an apparatus for achieving success, self-fulfilment, and freedom for the powerful, it has simultaneously served as a means of control over women, racialized peoples, and subordinate classes
Tony Bennett is Emeritus Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University and Honorary Professor in the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University. Among his many books are Making Culture, Changing Society and, as coauthor, Collecting, Ordering, Governing: Anthropology, Museums, and Liberal Government.
In Archaism and Actuality eminent Marxist historian Harry Harootunian explores the formation of capitalism and fascism in Japan as a prime example of the uneven development of capitalism. He applies his theorization of subsumption to examine how capitalism integrates and redirects preexisting social, cultural, and economic practices to guide the present. This subumption leads to a global condition in which states and societies all exist within different stages and manifestations of capitalism. Drawing on Japanese philosophers Miki Kiyoshi and Tosaka Jun, Marxist theory, and Gramsci’s notion of passive revolution, Harootunian shows how the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and its program dedicated to transforming the country into a modern society exemplified a unique path to capitalism. Japan’s capitalist expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, rise as an imperial power, and subsequent transition to fascism signal a wholly distinct trajectory into modernity that forecloses any notion of a pure or universal development of capitalism. With Archaism and Actuality, Harootunian offers both a retheorization of capitalist development and a reinterpretation of epochal moments in modern Japanese history.
Harry Harootunian is Max Palevsky Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Chicago and Associate Research Scholar at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University. He is the author of numerous books, most recently, The Unspoken as Heritage: The Armenian Genocide and Its Unaccounted Lives, also published by Duke University Press.
November 2023
320 pages
Theory and Philosophy / Marxism / History / Asian History / Asian Studies / East Asia
Rights: World
Baylor University Press is the academic book publishing arm of Baylor University. Established in 1897, Baylor University Press publishes around forty new academic titles each year. The Press publishes technical scholarship for researchers, tools for teachers, and textbooks for students. All Press publications under our primary academic imprint enjoy rigorous peer review and project development.
The list focuses on scriptural, historical, and theological studies of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Press publications also investigate the relationship between religion and politics, the sciences, sociology, anthropology, literature, philosophy, history, and culture. baylorpress.edu
October 2023
Religion
Rights: World
KATHARINE J. DELLIn Proverbs, Wisdom is personified as a woman who is with God at the creation of the world, delighting in what God has made. In Job, God appears in theophany and describes the wonders of the earth and heavens. There are thus revealed detailed descriptions of God’s work in creation in the wisdom literature. Key themes emerge of the foundation of the earth, its division from the heavens and the waters, God’s provision of all of nature as well as human and animal life, God’s relationship to the world, and the ethics and morality of our human response. There is also a wealth of covenant language that includes creation and links up with wisdom texts too. This is epitomized in Noah’s covenant with God and the sign of the rainbow. In The Lord by Wisdom Founded the Earth, Katharine Dell illuminates the Old Testament theological themes of creation and covenant, interpreting them through the lens of wisdom. Regarding creation, Dell shifts attention from the Genesis accounts, allowing a fresh reading from texts in Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes, through which subsequently Genesis and certain “creation” Psalms are assessed for similarities and differences. This approach allows the creation theme to be prioritized in new ways and then brought into dialogue with covenant ideas, leading to a reconsideration of Genesis 9, with its profound image of the rainbow as a sign within creation of the covenant between God and the world, and various prophetic texts—passages wherein the close symbiosis of covenant with creation has been overlooked. Furthermore, a “cosmic covenant” emerges over time, a covenant of peace that will characterize the eschatological age, as found in some later prophetic literature. Dell contends that wisdom literature is often misrepresented for its lack of reference to covenant, demonstrating key relations through intertextual parallels from the Psalms and Deuteronomy. The figure of Wisdom in Proverbs 3 and 8, in the emphases on relationship and communication, anticipates the ultimate merging of themes of Wisdom, creation, covenant, and Torah in later apocryphal texts. Likewise, Dell also suggests that Solomon emerges as the canonical figurehead of wisdom’s “covenant” with humanity and the world.
Katharine Dell is Read in Old Testament Literature and Theology at the University of Cambridge.
With A Storm of Images, Philip Jenkins offers a compelling retelling of the saga of how the iconoclastic movement detonated ferocious controversy within the church and secular society, as icon supporters challenged the image breakers. Decades of internal struggle followed, marked by rebellions and civil wars, purges and persecutions, plotting and coups d’etat. After their cause triumphed, the image supporters made the cult of icons ever more central to the faith of Orthodox Christianity. Iconoclasm marked a watershed in the history of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, and it contributed to Western attempts to establish new empires. The questions raised during these struggles are all the more relevant at a time when such controversy rages over the public depictions of history, and the removal of statues, monuments, and names associated with hated figures. As in those earlier times, debates over images serve as vehicles for authentic cultural revolutions.
Philip Jenkins is Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University and Co-Director for the Program on Historical Studies of Religion at the Institute for Studies of Religion, Baylor University. He is the author of Fertility and Faith: The Demographic Revolution and the Transformation of World Religions (Baylor University Press, 2020) and is a regular contributor at The Christian Century magazine.
AMY CARR, CHRISTINE HELMER
Christians in the United States and around the world are politically polarized today, unable to speak to one another across deep divisions regarding urgent social issues. Justification and the Pursuit of Justice addresses this dire reality by offering a theological framework for Christian justice-seeking. Amy Carr and Christine Helmer draw on Paul’s theology to center the idea of justification by faith in Christ as the primary ground of Christian belonging and community. Carr and Helmer articulate ways that justification by faith grounds Christian practices of affective listening and storytelling, even on the most contentious ethical questions today, with the hope that mutual conversation in and through the Beloved Community can get Christians who disagree oriented towards each other again for the good of the world.
Amy Carr is Professor of Religious Studies in the Liberal Arts & Sciences Department at Western Illinois University. She earned her BA at Carleton College, spent a year in the Lutheran Volunteer Corps working for the ecumenical/interfaith Chicago Religious Leadership Network on Central America, then pursued an M.Div. from Vanderbilt Divinity School and a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. Christine Helmer is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Humanities, as well as Professor of German and Religious Studies, at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois. She was awarded an honorary doctorate in theology by the University of Helsinki in 2017. She is an internationally recognized scholar of Martin Luther, and has been a leader in the field of the study of Luther in relation to medieval philosophy since the publication of her dissertation The Trinity and Martin Luther in 1999. She founded the Lutheran Scholars Network in 2016, which has a regular newsletter that she publishes with Amy Carr, and sponsors sessions at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion.
September 2023
Religion
Rights: World
October 2023
Religion Rights: World
November 2022
Religion
Rights: World
MARK LANIER
A trial lawyer by trade, a Christian by heart—author Mark Lanier has trained in biblical languages and devoted his life to studying and living the Bible. Facing daily the tension between the demands of his career and the desire for a godly life, Lanier recognizes the importance and challenge of finding daily time to spend in God’s Word. His meditations on the Gospels reveal the need for daily devotion from the teachings of Jesus. In Jesus for Living, Lanier shares a year’s worth of meditations centered around the church calendar. Unlike his other devotionals, these are meant to be read according to the rhythms of the liturgical seasons—Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, and Ordinary Time. Lanier reflects on the actions and teachings of Jesus, offering insight on how our lives might imitate Jesus, and concludes each reading with a prayer of encouragement.
Mark Lanier is a nationally renowned trial lawyer; founder of the Lanier Theological Library and the Christian Trial Lawyers Association; and author of Psalms for Living: Daily Prayers, Wisdom, and Guidance, Torah for Living: Daily Prayers, Wisdom, and Guidance, and Christianity on Trial: A Lawyer Examines the Christian Faith. He and his wife, Becky, have five children and live near Houston, Texas.
JOHN D. BARTON
In the twenty-first century, humanity faces both unprecedented existential threats and remarkable possibilities for development. While no one knows how things will unfold by century’s end, it is increasingly clear that religion will play a major role in shaping the outcomes, for better or worse. In Better Religion, philosopher and religion scholar John Barton explores how grassroots interreligious peacebuilding can help ensure the “better.”
September 2022
Religion / General
Rights: World
More specifically, the book argues that for religion’s “better” to be realized, interreligious peacebuilding must honor and directly engage religious differences. This challenges a common assumption that religious differences inevitably lead to hostilities and must therefore be minimized or functionally neutralized for collaborative peacebuilding to be possible. Better Religion explains why such assumptions are misguided and charts a more realistic and hopeful way forward. Using a blend of data analysis, theoretical models, and real-life anecdotes, the book makes sense of global religious diversity and projects the possibilities of peacebuilding across even the most irreconcilable of differences.
Written for academic and professional audiences, this “conceptual primer” will equip readers to understand religion in the twenty-first century and pursue constructive collaborations for human flourishing, all for the sake of the world we currently share and the world we want our grandchildren to inherit.
John Barton is Professor of Teaching in the Religion and Philosophy Division at Pepperdine University where he also serves as director of the Pepperdine Center for Faith and Learning.
In Jesus Among the gods, Michael Bird gives renewed attention to divine ontology—what a god is—in relation to literary representations of Jesus. Most studies of the origins of early Christology focus on christological titles, various functions, divine identity, and types of worship. The application of ontological categories to Jesus is normally considered something that only began to happen in the second and third centuries as the early church engaged in platonizing interpretations of Jesus. Bird argues, to the contrary, that ontological language and categories were used to describe Jesus as an eternal, true, and unbegotten deity from the earliest decades of the nascent church.
In Being and Becoming, Frederick David Carr offers a fresh examination of the theme of human transformation and identity in Paul’s letters. Carr structures his investigation beneath two acute questions about Paul’s writings: What does Paul mean when he speaks of people being transformed? What do such transformations tell us about Paul’s understanding of the self? Carr’s study yields new insights into the apostle’s anthropology, shedding light on the interpretation of the Pauline canon. Carr approaches the topic of “new creation” in Paul’s letters analytically, comparatively, and synthetically. Analytically, he gives special attention to specific references to human transformation found in the Pauline epistles. Comparatively, he places Paul’s transformation references into conversation with a range of other ancient writings, and in doing so highlights the distinctiveness of the apostle’s approach to anthropological questions. Synthetically, he considers how these varied references relate to one another and what they entail for how we understand the apostle’s thought. From these categories, Carr develops a phenomenology of human transformation in Paul and analyzes the “models” of selfhood at work in his language of human change.
October 2022
480 pages
Religion / Christian Theology / Biblical Studies
Rights: World
September 2022
366 pages
Religion / Biblical Criticism / Biblical Studies
Rights: World
August 2022
114
Religion / Biblical Meditations / New Testament
Rights: World
Food and Meals in the Gospel of Luke
MATTHEW CROASMUN AND MIROSLAV VOLF.
“Scripture is also a feast.” As an invitation to feast at the table of God’s word, The Hunger for Home explores the deepest human longings for home through the simple ingredients of bread, water, wine, and stories. Matthew Croasmun and Miroslav Volf read the meals of the Gospel of Luke as stories of God eating with God’s people. By making a common home with us in this way, God turns all our meals into invitations to eat in God’s home—a home with a seat open for all who are willing. No longer is bread simply fuel for getting through the day, but also a call to be present to the agricultural workers, grocers, chefs, friends, and strangers with whom food connects us: everyone God is calling to the banquet. As Croasmun and Volf show, Luke gives us an image of creation at home by bringing God into the home, as it was always meant to be.
Matthew Croasmun is Associate Research Scholar and Director of the Life Worth Living Program at the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. Miroslav Volf is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School and the Founding Director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture.
The Speeches in Acts and the Essence in Christianity CHRISTOPHER R.J. HOLMES
In Hearing and Doing, Christopher Holmes invites us to feast upon the speeches of Paul and Peter. As a work of constructive theological exegesis, he engages Aquinas and Calvin and some of the most important theologians of our day, notably Rowan Williams and Katherine Sonderegger. At the heart, Holmes aims to draw us to the speeches themselves so that we might become encompassed in their divine beauty. By the same token, he treats the doctrine of God and that of the church, articulating something of what the speeches urge us to say regarding God and the shape of life in relation to God. In sum, Holmes argues that the speeches provide a window into the faith’s essentials, inspiring reverence and obedience toward God. Hearing and Doing submits to divine tutoring via the speeches, passing on the fruits of that contemplation to the reader with nuance and clarity, unfolding in an exegetically charged fashion the Christian faith’s horizon.
Christopher R. J. Holmes is Professor of Systematic Theology at University of Otago.
October 2022
214
Religion / Christian Theology / Systematic
Rights: World
Drawing together redemptive-historical biblical theology and narrative ethics, Trevor Laurence’s Cursing with God assesses the imprecatory psalms and the viability of their performance by the Christian church. Laurence argues that prayerful enactment of the imprecatory psalms is an obligatory exercise of the church’s God-given calling as a royal priesthood in God’s story. This study evaluates the imprecations within their intertextually constructed narrative world, presenting a biblical theological reading of their petitions as the faithful prayers of the royal-priestly son of God whose vocation is to guard God’s temple-kingdom from the forces that would defile it and to subdue the earth as sacred space. Attention to the New Testament’s polyvalent interaction with the imprecatory psalms discloses how the New Testament narrates God’s work in Christ with reference to the figures and structures of the imprecations. With the resultant biblical theological synthesis as a narrative framework for ethical reflection, Cursing with God culminates with a proposal for faithful Christian cursing that coheres with the church’s royal-priestly vocation and inter-advent location in God’s narrative and contends that imprecatory performance has the dynamic capacity to stimulate faith, hope, and love while galvanizing the church to work for a more just world. With scholars, students, and trained clergy in view, Cursing with God aims to generate a recovery of the imprecatory psalms in Christian worship and piety.
Trevor Laurence is Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Bible and Violence and Executive Director at the Cateclesia Institute. The Theopolis Institute awarded Laurence's doctoral dissertation, on which this book is based, the 2021 James B. Jordan Prize for outstanding work in biblical theology
AMY E. MARGA
Fifty years since the signing of the Paris Peace Accords signaled the final withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam, the war’s mark on the Pacific world remains. The essays gathered here offer an essential, postcolonial interpretation of a struggle rooted not only in Indochinese history but also in the wider Asia Pacific region. Extending the Vietnam War’s historiography away from a singular focus on American policies and experiences and toward fundamental regional dynamics, the book reveals a truly global struggle that made the Pacific world what it is today.
Amy E. Marga is Professor of Systematic Theology at Luther Seminary.
November 2022
416 pages
Religion / Biblical Studies / Old Testament
Rights: World
October 2022
207 pages
Religion / Christianity / History / Social Science / Women's Studies
Rights: World
August 2022
230 pages
Poetry / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh / Religion / Biblical Meditations Rights: World
Testament is an imaginative improvisation on the Bible that engages with the intensities, the ups and downs, of existence in our complex and fragmented world. Psalter, the first part, comprises 150 psalm-like poems that sound the depths and heights of life lived in the presence of God. Here, shaped into powerful, accessible poetry, is the wisdom of a mature and practical faith that knows love, grief, doubt, fear, disappointment, and overwhelming delight and joy. Micheal O’Siadhail stretches heart, mind, and imagination to open up profound questions of God, suffering and aging, truth and trust, freedom and surprise, desire and love. There are passionate exchanges with God and daring leaps of insight. Through them all runs a gripping conversational relationship expressed in praise, thanks, lament, and distilled wisdom, embracing a dazzling variety of forms and rhythms. Gospel, the second part, retells in poetry stories from the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The emphasis is on the plain sense of the stories, newly imagined. We are invited to reread them, to discover insights and nuances, angles and depths, and above all to encounter afresh the familiar yet endlessly mysterious central character—Jesus. The world’s bestselling book shows yet again its capacity to excite and inspire. O’Siadhail’s acclaimed The Five Quintets engaged with the ways in which the arts, economics, politics, the sciences, philosophy, and theology have shaped our twenty-first-century world. Here in Testament is an imaginative faith and wise spirituality that can inspire day-to-day living in that world, revealed through the inner life and penetrating discernment of a great poet.
Micheal O’Siadhail is an internationally acclaimed poet whose works include The Five Quintets, Collected Poems, and One Crimson Thread. He is Distinguished Poet in Residence at Union Theological Seminary
American Christianity tends to view disabled persons as problems to be solved rather than people with experiences and gifts that enrich the church. Churches have generated policies, programs, and curricula geared toward “including” disabled people while still maintaining “able-bodied” theologies, ministries, care, and leadership. Ableism—not a lack of ramps, finances, or accessible worship—is the biggest obstacle for disabled ministry in America. In From Inclusion to Justice, Erin Raffety argues that what our churches need is not more programs for disabled people but rather the pastoral tools to repent of able-bodied theologies and practices, listen to people with disabilities, lament ableism and injustice, and be transformed by God’s ministry through disabled leadership. Without a paradigm shift from ministries of inclusion to ministries of justice, our practical theology falls short.Drawing on ethnographic research with congregations and families, pastoral experience with disabled people, teaching in theological education, and parenting a disabled child, Raffety, an able-bodied Christian writing to able-bodied churches, confesses her struggle to repent from ableism in hopes of convincing others to do the same. At the same time, Raffety draws on her interactions with disabled Christian leaders to testify to what God is still doing in the pews and the pulpit, uplifting and amplifying the ministry and leadership of people with disabilities as a vision toward justice in the kingdom of God.
Erin Raffety is a Research Fellow at the Center of Theological Inquiry, a cultural anthropologist, and an ordained PCUSA pastor.
September 2022
Religion / Christian Ministry /General / Social Science / People with Disabilities
Rights: World
