University of Chicago Press Books: New books

Ripples of the Universe

Susannah Crockford — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Ask a random American what springs to mind about Sedona, Arizona, and they will almost certainly mention New Age spirituality. Nestled among stunning sandstone formations, Sedona has built an identity completely intertwined with that of the permanent residents and throngs of visitors who insist it is home to powerful vortexes—sites of spiraling energy where meditation, clairvoyance, and channeling are enhanced. It is in this uniquely American town that Susannah Crockford took up residence for two years to make sense of spirituality, religion, race, and class.

Many people move to Sedona because, they claim, they are called there by its special energy. But they are also often escaping job loss, family breakdown, or foreclosure. Spirituality, Crockford shows, offers a way for people to distance themselves from and critique current political and economic norms in America. Yet they still find themselves monetizing their spiritual practice as a way to both “raise their vibration” and meet their basic needs. Through an analysis of spirituality in Sedona, Crockford gives shape to the failures and frustrations of middle- and working-class people living in contemporary America, describing how spirituality infuses their everyday lives. Exploring millenarianism, conversion, nature, food, and conspiracy theories, Ripples of the Universe combines captivating vignettes with astute analysis to produce a unique take on the myriad ways class and spirituality are linked in contemporary America.

Myanmar’s Education Reforms

Marie Lall — Wed, 02 Jun 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Myanmar’s Education Reforms reviews the changing state of education in Myanmar as the country has dealt with a profound transformation over the past decade and a half. Education has served as a litmus test for judging the level of openness of any Myanmar government, especially those in place for the past seven decades. Marie Lall situates education within the context of the wider reforms and the process of making peace that began in 2012, using it as a case study on how these reforms have progressed and continue to progress. Drawing on data collected over fifteen years in the field, Lall argues that despite controlling the majority of the civilian government, the National League for Democracy is not delivering on its promise of social justice.

Ruins Lesson

Susan Stewart — Wed, 02 Jun 2021 05:00:00 GMT

How have ruins become so valued in Western culture and so central to our art and literature? Covering a vast chronological and geographical range, from ancient Egyptian inscriptions to twentieth-century memorials, Susan Stewart seeks to answer this question as she traces the appeal of ruins and ruins images, and the lessons that writers and artists have drawn from their haunting forms.

Stewart takes us on a sweeping journey through founding legends of broken covenants and original sin, the Christian appropriation of the classical past, and images of decay in early modern allegory. Stewart looks in depth at the works of Goethe, Piranesi, Blake, and Wordsworth, each of whom found in ruins a means of reinventing his art. Lively and engaging, The Ruins Lesson ultimately asks what can resist ruination—and finds in the self-transforming, ever-fleeting practices of language and thought a clue to what might truly endure.

Affect of an Experience

Kate Love — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Despite the contemporary trend to focus on personal experience in art and writing, there is very little critical analysis of the concept of experience within fine art. The overarching conceptual aim of the book is to examine the concept of experience as both content and as interpretative register in the context of fine art. It explores the reasons why experience, when compared to other modes of consciousness—such as understanding, knowing, perceiving, or recognizing—is more aligned with the notion of actuality and thus more likely to be viewed as authentic. It then discusses the idea of writing about experience as a practice in fine art—the idea that writing can be understood as a practice like painting, sculpture, video, etc.—and explores a viable methodology for the art writing practice.

The book seeks to provide a more fluid interpretation of experience. In so doing, it explores the following questions: Why does the reading of experience as self-presence predominate? What is the status and value of experience as evidence? How is experience written and seen? In exploring these questions, Kate Love creates a workable strategy for writing about experience.

Ogooué Delta

Jean P. Vande Weghe; Tariq Stévart — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Located in a sparsely populated stretch of wetland in the coastal West African nation of Gabon, the Ogooué is among the most well-preserved of the continent’s major river deltas. Home to large populations of hippopotamuses, manatees, long-nosed crocodiles, and fish—as well as the nesting grounds for terns and other sea birds—the Ogooué also hosts a complex mix of flora, from meadows and mangroves to swamps and forests. It includes populations of more than 150 threatened plant species, making it a crucial site for ecological conservation.

This book presents a comprehensive and lushly illustrated overview of the biodiversity of this remarkable area, one that should appeal as much to scientists as to general readers. Coauthored by 21 international experts, The Ogooué Delta explores the rich multitude of plant and animal life that make this area such a singular site. The authors also detail the delta’s history of human settlement and interaction, as well as lay out a series of proposed conservation measures to ensure that the Ogooué remains a haven for natural diversity.

Crisis of the Danish Golden Age and Its Modern Resonance

Nathaniel Kramer; Jon Stewart — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 05:00:00 GMT

The Danish Golden Age was marked by several key events: the Napoleonic Wars, the bombardment of Copenhagen, the state bankruptcy in 1814 and the ensuing financial crisis, the revolution of 1848, and the establishment of a parliamentary democracy in 1849. At the same time, there were peasant reforms, religious upheavals, and significant changes in class and social structures. The contributors to this volume argue that these different crises did not just serve as a backdrop for or as obstacles to the flowering of culture in the Golden Age, but were instead the catalysts for it. Despite their many debates and polemics among themselves, the leading figures of Golden Age Denmark were generally in agreement about the fact that their age was in a state of crisis. The dramatic events spilled over into the various cultural spheres and shaped them in different ways. The essays in this volume trace the different crises as they appear in literature, criticism, religion, philosophy, politics, and the social sciences. Drawing compelling parallels between the perceived crisis of the Golden Age and the acute issues of our own day, this book strongly makes the case for the continuing relevance of the Golden Age for readers today.

Embodying Contagion

Sandra Becker; Megen De Bruin-Molé; Sara Polak — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 05:00:00 GMT

From Outbreak to The Walking Dead, apocalyptic narratives of infection, contagion, and a global pandemic are an inescapable part of twenty-first-century popular culture. Yet, these fears and fantasies are too virulent to be simply quarantined within fictional texts; vocabulary and metaphors from outbreak narratives have now infiltrated how news media, policymakers, and the general public view the real world and the people within it. In an age where fact and fiction seem increasingly difficult to separate, contagious bodies (and the discourses that contain them) continually blur established boundaries between real and unreal, legitimacy and frivolity, science, and the supernatural. Where previous scholarly work has examined the spread of epidemic realities in horror fiction, the essays in this collection also consider how epidemic fantasies and fears influence reality. Bringing scholarship from cultural and media studies into conversation with scholarship from the medical humanities and social sciences, Embodying Contagion aims to give readers a fuller picture of the viropolitics of contagious bodies in contemporary global culture.

Embodying Contagion

Sandra Becker; Megen De Bruin-Molé; Sara Polak — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Mercedes-Benz 300 SL

Hans Kleissl; Harry Niemann — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 05:00:00 GMT

A lavishly illustrated tribute to one of the most beloved European cars of all time.

For nearly seventy years, no car has moved the lovers of classic cars more than the 300 SL. A legend since its launch in 1954 as a gullwing coupe, the 300 SL has been seen as the very model of what a sports car can be, its style and beauty perfectly matched to its power and handling.

This beautifully illustrated tribute volume brings together Hans Kleissl, one of the world’s leading experts on the 300 SL, and former Daimler historian and Mercedes-Benz archive manager Harry Niemann. The resulting book captures the magic and mystique of the car through history, photographs, insights into its technological breakthroughs, and firsthand accounts of its storied run. There’s no better gift for the passionate fan of the 300 SL.

Laurits Tuxen

Tue, 01 Jun 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Laurits Tuxen (1853–1927) was a phenomenally talented artist who, thanks to his skills within both painting and diplomacy, established himself as one of the most important European court painters in the nineteenth century—active, among other places, in Great Britain, where he created a number of memorable portraits of Queen Victoria and her family, and in Russia, where he depicted coronations and weddings in the families of the Czars. This book offers the first complete presentation of Tuxen’s royal portraits and paintings and shows both full and detailed views of familiar and by now iconic works of art, such as the 1887 group portrait of Queen Victoria and her family at Windsor Castle. The British Queen also commissioned Tuxen to depict important royal events such as the wedding of the Duke of York and Princess Mary of Teck in 1893, and he produced several masterful paintings on the occasion of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897.Laurits Tuxen: The Court Paintings is a must for students, scholars, and readers with a general interest in art and the world of the European courts. The book takes us one step closer to the great painter and his relations with the royals of Europe, not least those of Great Britain.

Kin, Clan and Community in Indo-European Society

Birgit Anette Olsen; Benedicte Nielsen Whitehead; Janus Bahs Jacquet — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 05:00:00 GMT

This book analyses the latest trends in Indo-European studies, combining linguistic study with insights from archaeology, anthropology and genetics in an attempt to shed new light on the social structure of the pastoralist society of Proto-Indo-European speakers.

An introduction on the benefits of approaching Indo-European studies from an anthropological angle precedes nine chapters representing the book’s two parts: one on kinship terminology and family structure, and one on wooing and marriage.

Part one includes a lengthy overview of Proto-Indo-European kinship terminology, as well as five chapters on individual branches: Anatolian, Avestan, Latin, Germanic and Albanian. Part two comprises a chapter on consanguinity and marriage in early Indo-European societies, one on Anatolian marriage and marriage types, and one on the processes and rites related to wooing.

Together, these form the first study of Indo-European family structure to draw on linguistics, archaeology and genetics, an important contribution to our understanding of how social and family structures developed in prehistoric and early historic times.

Legal Records at Risk

Clare Cowling — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Why do so few institutions in the legal sector have professional records managers or archivists on their staff? This book is the culmination of a three year project by experienced archivist and records managers on private sector legal records at risk in England at Wales. It summarises the work of the Legal Records at Risk (LRAR) project and its predecessors, diagnoses the problems of preservation of archives in the legal sector in England and Wales and outlines a national strategy for such records.

Joseph Beuys—Manresa

Tue, 01 Jun 2021 05:00:00 GMT

The first performances by Joseph Beuys were a radical turning point for twentieth-century art. Beuys saw art as a transformative action that is both personal and communal, and his expanded artistic practice engaged spirituality, personal mythology, political structures, and symbolic materials. For Manresa, one of his legendary performance actions, which took place on December 15, 1966 in Düsseldorf, he collaborated with the Danish artists Henning Christiansen and Björn Nörgaard. In 1994 those two artists performed a new version of the piece as Manresa Hauptbahnhof. The performance was carried out in Manresa, the city that both gave the name to the original action and also was where Saint Ignatius Loyola had the revelations that led him to write his Spiritual Exercises, which Beuys considered essential reading.

This book, marking the centenary of the artist’s birth, presents never-before-seen materials from the two performances, including texts, images, scripts, and preparatory drawings, and contributions from scholars and critics offer further insight. Friedhelm Mennekes, an art critic and Jesuit priest, analyses the Ignatian imprint in Beuys’s work while explaining its spiritual complexity, looking beyond the popular vision of the artist as shaman. Pilar Parcerisas examines Beuys’s spiritual geography, explaining the importance the town of Manresa within it while also laying out the physical and mystical coordinates of Eurasia, a site that was always present in Beuys’s work. While reviewing the features of Manresa, Klaus-D. Pohl also addresses the paradoxical union between Beuys’s mysticism and the neo-Dadaists of Fluxus. Beuys’s collaborator Björn Nörgaard recalls his time working with the German artist and reflects on the paths he opened up. Finally, art historian Harald Szeemann considers the possibility of liberating politics through spirituality.

Visual Research Methods in Architecture

Igea Troiani; Suzanne Ewing — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 05:00:00 GMT

This book offers a distinctive approach to the use of visual methodologies for qualitative architectural research. It presents a diverse selection of ways for the architect or architectural researcher to use their gaze as part of their research practice for the purpose of visual literacy. Its contributors explore and use, “critical visualizations,” which employ observation and socio-cultural critique through visual creations—texts, drawings, diagrams, paintings, visual texts, photography, film, and their hybrid forms—to research architecture, landscape design, and interior architecture. The visual methods intersect with those used in ethnography, anthropology, visual culture, and media studies. In presenting a range of interdisciplinary approaches, Visual Research Methods in Architecture opens up territory for new forms of visual architectural scholarship.

Blood, Land and Power

Manuel Perez-Garcia — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 05:00:00 GMT

The analysis of land management, lineage, and family through the case study of early modern Spanish nobility from sixteenth to early nineteenth century is a major issue in recent historiography. It aims to shed light on how upper social classes arranged strategies to maintain their political and economic status. Rivalry and disputes between old factions and families were attached to the control and exercise of power. Blood, land management and honor were the main elements in these disputes. Honor, service to the crown, participation in the conquest and “pure” blood were the main features of Spanish nobility. Blood, Land and Power analyses the origins of the entailed-estate [mayorazgo] from medieval times to early modern period, as central elements that enable us to understand the socio-economic behavior of these families over generations. This long-durée chronology within a Braudelian methodology used in this research aims to show how strategies and family networks changed over time. This research is an example of a micro-history study of daily life and social practices of the main social actors of the elites and oligarchies in early modern Spain.

Billion-Dollar Fish

Kevin M. Bailey — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Alaska pollock is everywhere. If you’re eating fish but you don’t know what kind it is, it’s almost certainly pollock. Prized for its generic fish taste, pollock masquerades as crab meat in california rolls and seafood salads, and it feeds millions as fish sticks in school cafeterias and Filet-O-Fish sandwiches at McDonald’s. That ubiquity has made pollock the most lucrative fish harvest in America—the fishery in the United States alone has an annual value of over one billion dollars. But even as the money rolls in, pollock is in trouble: in the last few years, the pollock population has declined by more than half, and some scientists are predicting the fishery’s eventual collapse.

In Billion-Dollar Fish, Kevin M. Bailey combines his years of firsthand pollock research with a remarkable talent for storytelling to offer the first natural history of Alaska pollock. Crucial to understanding the pollock fishery, he shows, is recognizing what aspects of its natural history make pollock so very desirable to fish, while at the same time making it resilient, yet highly vulnerable to overfishing. Bailey delves into the science, politics, and economics surrounding Alaska pollock in the Bering Sea, detailing the development of the fishery, the various political machinations that have led to its current management, and, perhaps most important, its impending demise. He approaches his subject from multiple angles, bringing in the perspectives of fishermen, politicians, environmentalists, and biologists, and drawing on revealing interviews with players who range from Greenpeace activists to fishing industry lawyers.

Seamlessly weaving the biology and ecology of pollock with the history and politics of the fishery, as well as Bailey’s own often raucous tales about life at sea, Billion-Dollar Fish is a book for every person interested in the troubled relationship between fish and humans, from the depths of the sea to the dinner plate.

Scientific Freedom under Attack

Ralf Roth; Asli Vatansever — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Recent years have seen an alarming rise in antiintellectual outbursts by politicians, documented threats against radical scholars across continents, and serious blows to the fundamental right of scientific freedom. Scientific Freedom under Attack is an edited volume that ties together proceedings of the international conference on “The Problems of Scientific Freedoms in Modern and Contemporary History”, which was held at the Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, on in November 2018. Covering a broad geographic and temporal span, stretching from the early nineteenth century through the Cold War and on to the neoliberal era, from Eurasia to China and to the United States, it presents an illuminating and important panorama of the political and structural challenges that scientific production and critical thinking continue to face. As these forces continue to attack scientific freedom, this volume offers necessary and critical analysis of their emergence.

Navigating Normative Orders

Matthias C. Kettemann — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Normative orders emerge and pollinate everywhere. Whether it be with Kant or among conservatives, posts on the internet, in environmental discourses, or in our raising of our children: Norms populate and spread. This book explains how norms are created, why they are adopted, how they can be legitimated, and how they are contested and disappear. Combining twelve contributions from a diverse range of disciplines, the book unites, for the first time, younger scholars from the Research Centre “Normative Orders” at the University of Frankfurt. Even as certainties are questioned, norms are shown to play a central and vital role in regulating our behavior and understandings. Together, these norms form normative orders, with and through which political authority and the distribution of rights and goods are legitimized, in criminal law, educational systems, the territorial state, the discourse on progress, and in the Anthropocene. As Navigating Normative Orders shows, these norms control our personal and political lives in ways we may not even realize.

Illiberal Politics and Religion in Europe and Beyond

Anja Hennig; Mirjam Weiberg-Salzmann — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Despite the broadly assumed institutional separation of church and state in contemporary Western politics, there is a trend towards renewed alliances between illiberal interpretations of religion and right-wing populist politics that challenge liberal democracy. This book explores the theoretically and empirically complex ideological, structural, and historical linkage between religion and illiberal politics within a broad range of European states. It shows how political actors apply Christian identity narratives to push exclusionist anti-Muslim politics, while simultaneously showcasing the ways in which religious actors evolve as illiberal players searching for political allies. This timely volume offers a critical look at a key contemporary issue that challenges assumptions and the reputations of current relationships between church and state.

Race Gender And Work

Amott — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Aboriginal Peoples

Marie Leger — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Primer of Libertarian Education

Joel Spring — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 05:00:00 GMT

In this book Joel Spring traces the long tradition of libertarian opposition to established forms of schooling from Rousseau and William Godwin to A.S. Neill and Paulo Freire. He illuminates the central questions that have concerned radical educators: How can teaching encourage independence and self-reliance? Can rigid ideas and ideologies be avoided by radical educators? What is the contradiction between "schooling" and "education"? How does truly libertarian child rearing challenge the family structure? How can real learning free people so they can begin to change the world around them? Spring also discusses the ideas of several figures whose relevance to education is just beginning to be appreciated, including Max Stirner, Franciso Ferrer, Wilhelm Reich, and Tolstoy. Spring concludes with suggestions for what directions radical educational change might now take.

1984 And After

Roussopoulos Hewitt — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Decentralism

Mildred Loomis — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Today it is likely that more people than ever before are consciously engaged in some kind of decentralist venture which expresses not merely rebellion against authoritarianism, but also faith in the possibility of a new kind of society. Each crises in the human situation has produced its decentralist movements in which men and women have turned away from the nightmares of megapolitics to the radical realities of human relationships. Often mistakenly identified as radical, decentralism is in fact based on many traditional values. With Loomis’ great historical understanding, this invaluable book provides indispensable grounding for today’s activists. In it she documents the ideas and experiments of some of the early decentralists--among which include Arthur Morgan, Henry George, Benjamin Tucker, Paul Goodman, Ralph Borsodi. They all shared a common belief in restoring community self-reliance and bringing economic and social activities back to a more human scale. Friend of cooperation, of self-sufficiency, of the household economy, of the small community, their early experiments played a pivotal role in introducing and supporting: organic agriculture, consumer rights, and cooperatives and worker-owned businesses. Actively engaged in community land trust, the ecological use of resources, alternative education, consensus decision making, non-exploitive banking, and alternative currency, these earlier movements saw a resurgence of neighbourhood revival, community economic reconstruction, co-ops, and land trusts--many of which continue to operate successfully today.

Green Guerrillas

Helen Collinson — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 05:00:00 GMT

On the Spirit of Rights

Dan Edelstein — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 05:00:00 GMT

By the end of the eighteenth century, politicians in America and France were invoking the natural rights of man to wrest sovereignty away from kings and lay down universal basic entitlements. Exactly how and when did “rights” come to justify such measures?

In On the Spirit of Rights, Dan Edelstein answers this question by examining the complex genealogy of the rights that regimes enshrined in the American and French Revolutions. With a lively attention to detail, he surveys a sprawling series of debates among rulers, jurists, philosophers, political reformers, writers, and others who were all engaged in laying the groundwork for our contemporary systems of constitutional governance. Every seemingly new claim about rights turns out to be a variation on a theme, as late medieval notions were subtly repeated and refined to yield the talk of “rights” we recognize today. From the Wars of Religion to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, On the Spirit of Rights is a sweeping tour through centuries of European intellectual history and an essential guide to our ways of thinking about human rights today.

Pandora’s Box: Ethnography and the Comparison of Medical Beliefs

Gilbert Lewis — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 05:00:00 GMT

In this book, written between 1979 and 2020, Gilbert Lewis distills a lifetime of insights he garnered as a medical anthropologist. He asks: How do different cultures' beliefs about illness influence patients' abilities to heal? Despite the advances of Western medicine, what can it learn from non-Western societies that consider sickness and curing to be as much a matter of social relationships as biological states? What problems arise when one set of therapeutic practices displaces another?

Lewis compares Indigenous medical beliefs in New Guinea in 1968, when villagers were largely self-reliant, and in 1983, after they became dependent on Western medicine. He then widens his comparative scope by turning to West Africa and discussing a therapeutic community run by a prophet who heals the ill through confession and long-term residential care.

Pandora's Box began life with the prestigious Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures that Gilbert Lewis delivered in 1979 at the University of Rochester. He expanded them with materials gathered over the next forty years, completing the manuscript a few weeks before his death. Engagingly written, this book will inspire anthropologists, medical professionals, students, and curious readers to look with new eyes at current crises in world health.

Doña Bárbara Unleashed

Jenni M. Lehtinen — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Since its publication in 1929, the story of Doña Bárbara has continued haunting the collective imagination of people of Latin American descent and has been adapted on various occasions both for the small and big screen. Doña Bárbara Unleashed explores how Rómulo Gallegos’s original story has been kept alive yet altered by subsequent screen adaptations. The book illustrates how both the film and telenovela adaptations have reinterpreted the story of Doña Bárbara in order to mirror changes in societal norms, such as the role of women in Latin American societies, and audience expectations. Specific attention is paid to the way in which in the twenty-first-century the spectators have played a crucial role in influencing the alterations to which Gallegos’s original plot has been subjected. Doña Bárbara Unleashed offers an original way of studying screen adaptations by putting a number of adaptations of the same source text in dialogue rather than simply comparing the individual adaptations with the source text. By further intertwining more traditional theories of screen adaptations with approaches emerging from fandom studies, this book unearths completely new ground, as existing studies on-screen adaptations have barely touched on the issue of audience responses.

Tempest

William Shakespeare; Kenneth Cavander — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Considered by most scholars to be the last play that Shakespeare wrote, The Tempest is a stormy tale of betrayal and forgiveness. After being banished by his brother Antonio, Prospero harnesses the magic of an otherworldly island full of monsters and spirits to seek revenge. In reworking this play for a twenty-first-century audience, Kenneth Cavander focuses on the humor and the magic in the tale, much of which has largely escaped modern audiences in recent years.

Cavander’s translation of The Tempest, which premiered at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in 2017, was written as part of the Play On! Shakespeare project, an ambitious undertaking from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival that commissioned new translations of 39 Shakespeare plays. These translations present the Bard’s work in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare’s verse. Enlisting the talents of a diverse group of contemporary playwrights, screenwriters, and dramaturges from diverse backgrounds, this project reenvisions Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print—a new First Folio for a new era.

As You Like It

William Shakespeare; David Ivers — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Actor and director David Ivers presents As You Like It, as you’d like to hear it today. Presenting a new translation of Shakespeare into contemporary English, Ivers reimagines Shakespeare’s comedy from an actor’s point of view. Analyzing the play line by line to uncover the meaning of every joke, pun, and witty aside, Ivers repurposes Shakespeare’s language while maintaining an homage to the original rhythm, cadence, and structure. An accomplished actor and director, and a lifelong lover of the Bard, Ivers is the perfect writer to bring As You Like It into the present moment.

This translation of As You Like It was written as part of the Play On! Shakespeare project, an ambitious undertaking from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival that commissioned new translations of 39 Shakespeare plays. These translations present the Bard’s work in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare’s verse. Enlisting the talents of a diverse group of contemporary playwrights, screenwriters, and dramaturges from diverse backgrounds, this project reenvisions Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print—a new First Folio for a new era.

Osiris, Volume 36

Helen Tilley — Mon, 31 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

This volume of Osiris takes as its point of departure a simple premise: we have yet to fully flesh out the complex historical interplay between medicine and law across the globe. Therapeutic Properties takes an inventive look at the issue, presenting welcome insights on the worldwide ascendancy of biomedicine, the persistence of nonofficial and unorthodox approaches to healing, and the legal contexts that have served to shape these dynamics.

The contributions draw upon source material from the Americas, Africa, Western Europe, the Caribbean, and Asia to trace the influence of penal and civil codes, courts and constitutions, and patents and intellectual properties on not only health practices but also the very foundations of state-sanctioned medicine. The authors explore, too, how institutions of global governance, including those underpinning empires and trade, have historically created feedback loops that enabled laws and regulatory regimes to spread, amplifying their effects and standardizing approaches to diseases, drugs, professions, personhood, and well-being along the way. Highlighting the payoff of interdisciplinary and transnational analyses, this volume adroitly teases apart how different actors fought to write the rules of global health, rendering certain approaches to life and death irrelevant and invisible, others pathological and punishable by law, and others still, normal and natural.

Western Disease

Claire Laurier Decoteau — Mon, 31 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Because autism is an increasingly common diagnosis, North Americans are familiar with its symptoms and treatments. But what we know and think about autism is shaped by our social relationship to health, disease, and the medical system. In The Western Disease Claire Laurier Decoteau explores the ways that recent immigrants from Somalia to Canada and the US make sense of their children’s diagnosis of autism. Having never heard of autism before migrating to North America, they often determine that it must be a Western disease. Given its apparent absence in Somalia, they view it as Western in nature, caused by environmental and health conditions unique to life in North America.

Following Somali parents as they struggle to make sense of their children's illness and advocate for alternative care, Decoteau unfolds how complex interacting factors of immigration, race, and class affect Somalis’ relationship to the disease. Somalis’ engagement with autism challenges the prevailing presumption among Western doctors that their approach to healing is universal. Decoteau argues that centering an analysis on autism within the Somali diaspora exposes how autism has been defined and institutionalized as a white, middle-class disorder, leading to health disparities based on race, class, age, and ability. The Western Disease asks us to consider the social causes of disease and the role environmental changes and structural inequalities play in health vulnerability.

MEDIA

Jeremy Swartz; Janet Wasko — Sun, 30 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

MEDIA: A Transdisciplinary Inquiry explores evolving definitions of media and interrogates how media technologies are transforming media theory and practice. The collection addresses the emerging roles of media across a wide range of disciplines, featuring contributions from an array of internationally known scholars and practitioners.

The definition of media itself is in a constant state of flux, expanding to include an ever-widening range of concepts, products, services, and institutions. Here, the authors reconceptualize media, drawing not only on media and communication studies, but also philosophy, sociology, political science, biology, art, computer science, and information studies, among other disciplines. The collection challenges traditional notions of media, explores emerging media, and reexamines concepts including technology, environment, and ecology; multimedia, mediation, and labor; and participation, repair, and curation. These timely and original discussions by established scholars in the field provide a valuable contribution to the fusion of media across disciplines.

MEDIA

Jeremy Swartz; Janet Wasko — Sun, 30 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Art and Industry

David Stacey — Sun, 30 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Essays discuss industry-related artworks created in Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century

In a series of linked essays, art historian David Stacey discusses paintings of industrial scenes by seven artists working from the late eighteenth century to the early nineteenth. The works presented in Art and Industry reflect on new technology and the changing use of capital; reveal the impact of the exploitation of men, women, and children; and challenge the patrons and the conventions of the period.

For Valour Volume 4

Michael Charles Robson; P. J. Brownsword — Sun, 30 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

For Valour: The Complete History of the Victoria Cross is the first definitive reference detailing every winner of the Victoria Cross, the highest award in the British military honor system, awarded for gallantry in the face of the enemy. This book is the fourth of eight volumes to be published in association with the Victoria Cross Trust.

Each volume is divided into two parts. Part one, “Wars, Battles & Deeds,” contains descriptions of each war and battle or engagement that involved deeds resulting in the awarding of a Victoria Cross. The deeds are described within the context of the war and battle during which they occurred. Part two, “Portraits of Valour,” presents a biography of each recipient of the Victoria Cross.

In this offering, Volume Four covers the Colonial Wars from 1896-7. This volume also includes a foreword by Lord Ashcroft, who owns the largest collection of Victoria Crosses, and are part of a limited edition print run numbered 1 to 500.

Bicycling through Paradise

Kathleen Smythe; Chris Hanlin — Sun, 30 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Bicycling Through Paradise is a collection of twenty historically themed cycling tours broken into 10-mile segments centered around Cincinnati, Ohio. Written by two longtime cyclists—one a professor of history and one an architect—the book is an affectionate, intimate, and provocative reading of the local landscape and history from the perspectives of cycling and Cincinnati enthusiasts. Tours, navigated by Smythe and Hanlon, take cyclers past Native American sites, early settler homesteads, and locations made know through recent Ohio change-makers as navigated by the authors. With extensive details on routes and sites along the way, tours between 20 and 80 miles in length are designed for all levels of cyclists, and even the armchair explorer.

Riders and readers will visit towns called Edenton, Loveland, Felicity, and Utopia. Along the journey, they’ll encounter an abandoned Shaker village near the Whitewater Forest and a tiny dairy house called “Harmony Hill,” the oldest standing structure in Clermont County, Ohio. They’ll also take in the view from the top of a 2,000-year-old, 75-foot tall, conical Indian mound at Miamisburg. Riders can follow the Little Miami Scenic Trail and take a detour to a castle on the banks of the Little Miami River. Other sights include a full-scale replica of the tomb of Jesus in Northern Kentucky and the small pleasures of public parks, covered bridges, tree-lined streets, riverside travel, and one-room schoolhouses. And if all this isn’t exactly Paradise, well, it’s pretty close.

Church and People in Interregnum Britain

Fiona McCall — Sun, 30 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

The English Civil War was followed by a period of unprecedented religious tolerance and the spread of new religious ideas and practices. Britain experienced a period of so-called “Godly religious rule” and a breakdown of religious uniformity that was perceived as a threat to social order by some and a welcome innovation to others. The period of Godly religious rule has been significantly neglected by historians—we know remarkably little about religious organization or experience at a parochial level in the 1640s and 1650s. This volume addresses these issues by investigating important questions concerning the relationship between religion and society in the years between the first Civil War and the Restoration. How did ordinary people experience this period of dramatic upheaval? How did religious imperatives change and develop? Did people resist Godly imperatives?With its nuanced analysis of Cromwell's England, Church and People in Interregnum Britain will interest religious scholars, enthusiasts of military history, and public historians.

Fat Activism (Second Edition)

Charlotte Cooper — Sun, 30 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

What is fat activism and why is it important? To answer this question, Charlotte Cooper presents an expansive grassroots study that traces the forty-year history of international fat activism and grounds its actions in their proper historical and geographical contexts. She details fat activist methods, analyzes existing literature in the field, challenges long-held assumptions that uphold systemic fatphobia, and makes clear how crucial feminism and queer theory are to the lifeblood of the movement. She also considers fat activism’s proxy concerns, including body image, body positivity, the obesity epidemic, and fat stigma.

Combining rigorous scholarship with personal, accessible writing, Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement is not only an invaluable contribution to the burgeoning field of fat studies, but also a vehicle for much-needed social change.

Confronting Totalitarian Minds

Aspen Brinton — Sun, 30 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Jan Patočka was a Czech philosopher who not only lived through the turbulent politics of twentieth-century Central Europe, but he shaped his intellectual contributions in response to that tumult. One of the last students of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, he was a philosophical inspiration to Václav Havel and other dissidents who confronted the Soviet regimes before 1989, as well as being actively involved in authoring and enacting Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia. He died in 1977 from medical complications resulting from interrogations of the secret police, his political involvement cut short by an untimely death.

Confronting Totalitarian Minds examines his legacy along with several contemporary applications of his ideas about dissidence, solidarity, and the human being’s existential confrontation with unjust politics. Aspen Briton puts Patočka’s ideas about dissidence, citizen mobilization, and civic responsibility in conversation with those of notable world historical figures like Mohandas Gandhi, expanding the current possibilities of comparative political theory. In adding a fresh voice to contemporary conversations on transcending injustice, Confronting Totalitarian Minds seeks to educate a wider audience about this philosopher’s continued relevance to political dissidents across the world.

Malvina, or Spoken Word in the Novel

Ewa Szary-Matywiecka; Magdalena Ozarska — Sun, 30 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

In this book-length study, Ewa Szary-Matywiecka examines Maria Wirtemberska’s Malvina, or the Heart’s Intuition, an international success upon its publication in 1816 that is now widely considered to be Poland’s first psychological novel. Applying structuralist methods, Szary-Matywiecka situates Wirtemberska among other literary luminaries of her day, including Rousseau and Goethe, and explores how the nineteenth-century salon culture formed the concerns and themes of her novel. Malvina’s obsession with language games recall the vocabulary quizzes and semantic puzzles popular in the European salons frequented by Wirtemberska. Szary-Matywiecka also argues that the novel’s motif of twins and twinned characters emerges from both the theatrical preoccupations of salons, as well as how Wirtemberska seemingly splits her voice between traditional narration and a more intrusive authorial style, helping shape her novel’s innovative narrative method. Malvina, or Spoken Word in the Novel is an insightful deconstruction of a female-penned classic of European literature.

Health and Disease in the Neolithic Lengyel Culture

Václav Smrcka; Olivér Gábor — Sun, 30 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Lasting from around 4800 to 4000 BCE, the Lengyel culture helped usher in the Copper Age in Central Europe with the rise of mining, craft production, and the trading of copper and obsidian, in addition to larger-scale farming. In Health and Disease in the Neolithic Lengyel Culture, the authors investigate the migration of the Lengyel people as they moved west from their place of origin in modern-day Hungary to areas in what is now the Czech Republic and Poland. By drawing on research into the trace elements of strontium, carbon, and nitrogen found in human bone tissue, as well paleopathological analyses of congenital defects, this book proves that the Lengyel migration occurred in waves, providing important details about the changes in the diet, health, and mobility of a people who were crucial to the development of early European civilization

Rus–Ukraine–Russia

Martin C. Putna; Michael Dean — Sun, 30 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

An outspoken opponent of pro-Russian, authoritarian, and far-right streams in contemporary Czech society, Martin C. Putna received a great deal of media attention when he ironically dedicated the Czech edition of Russ–Ukraine–Russia to Miloš Zeman—the pro-Russian president of the Czech Republic. This sense of irony, combined with an extraordinary breadth of scholarly knowledge, infuses Putna’s book.

Examining key points in Russian cultural and spiritual history, Russ–Ukraine–Russia is essential reading for those wishing to understand the current state of Russia and Ukraine—the so-called heir to an “alternative Russia.” Putna uses literary and artistic works to offer a rich analysis of Russia as a cultural and religious phenomenon: tracing its development from the arrival of the Greeks in prehistoric Crimea to its invasion by “little green men” in 2014; explaining the cultural importance in Russ of the Vikings as well as Pussy Riot; exploring central Russian figures from St. Vladimir the Great to Vladimir Putin.

Unique in its postcolonial perspective, this is not merely a history of Russia or of Russian religion. This book presents Russia as a complex mesh of national, religious, and cultural (especially countercultural) traditions—with strong German, Mongol, Jewish, Catholic, Polish, and Lithuanian influences—a force responsible for creating what we identify as Eastern Europe.

Negotiator

Francis Walder; Gerald Lees — Sun, 30 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

A novelization of the historic peace negotiations at Saint-Germain

The year is 1570, and France has been torn apart by a religious war between Catholics and Huguenots. The indomitable Queen Mother, Catherine de Médicis, calls upon Henri de Malassise to negotiate a peace treaty with the Huguenots. This wily nobleman needs all the experience and psychological insight he can muster to navigate the discussions. He sees division in the Huguenot ranks: is this a weakness, or a clever ploy by his adversaries? Is it by chance or design that his Huguenot cousin, the attractive and enigmatic Eléonore, appears at the palace of Saint-Germain at a critical moment? As the talks falter, tension rises and a return to war seems inevitable.

Transformational HRM Practices for Hong Kong

Anna P. Y. Tsui; Wilfred K. P. Wong — Sun, 30 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Focusing on the latest management trends, Transformational HRM Practices for Hong Kong provides HR professionals with a comprehensive and accessible guide to human resource management in Hong Kong. Written by a leading team of HR professionals, psychologists, legal experts, and academics, the book provides up-to-date coverage of current practices, laws and procedures, as well as guidance on the professional skills required to operate successfully in the region. Suitable for practitioners and students alike, the book contains authentic cases studies for local context and sets out the latest strategies for talent acquisition, assessment, performance, and reward. It provides essential coverage of organizational change management, recent technological advancements in the field, and outlines the development of Hong Kong’s employment laws and their likely implications for professionals. In one volume, this book provides the key information, guidance, and context HR professionals require to be successful in Hong Kong’s fast-changing business environment.

Mute Pianos

Phoebe Wong — Sun, 30 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Although Hong Kong painter Yeung Tong Lung has explored a variety of media and techniques throughout the past four decades, his interest in the everyday scenes and sensations of Hong Kong has always been central. Specifically, his mixed media artwork and oil paintings have brought the neighborhoods of North Point, Western District, and Kennedy Town to life. Featuring more than three hundred color images, Mute Pianos offers a thorough survey of Yeung Tong Lung’s artwork and, in doing so, reveals a unique perspective on the commonplace and Hong Kong.

Urban Condition

Olivier Mongin; Gerald Turner — Sun, 30 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

The first installment in Karolinum’s new Václav Havel Series—which aims to continue the philosophical discourse of that thinker, playwright, dissident, and president—this book asks whether it will be possible to reestablish urban spaces that are in tune with our times. By recalling the distinctive elements that comprise the urban experience, Olivier Mongin lays the basis for reflection on the contemporary urban condition. We live in an epoch in which information exchange takes place according to flows rather than in locations, in which globalization has thrust us into a post-city, post-urban world.

In the past, we were accustomed to seeing the city as a circumscribed space, the setting for cultural, social, and political life that enabled the civic integration of individuals. Now we find ourselves confronted by both seemingly limitless, gigantic megalopolises and the emergence of global networks of entities cut off from a physical environment. The current reconfiguration is cause for concern: Are we witnessing the terminal decline of the urban values that have been a concomitant part of recent human history? Will fragmentation and chaotic urban sprawl inevitably prevail? Are we doomed to lament the lost legacies of the Greek polis, the Renaissance city, Enlightenment Paris, and the great industrial cities of the nineteenth century?

Tropical Lung

Roberto Harrison — Sat, 29 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Tropical Lung is a collection of writings and drawings from and to a new homeland, a vision of Panamá and the Tecumseh Republic where technology is necessary for understanding the ancient, then is erased and transcended by an ever-present electronic circle. Roberto Harrison combines poetry and visual art in this surrealist vision of a world both historical and reborn, where the futuristic links to the ancient. Harrison looks to symbolic beginnings, spaces of light and mystery that counter disassociation with explorations of the foundational structures of personhood.

Tropical Lung shows how apocalypses can give us the keys to new futures and how aloneness and silence can lead us to live multidimensionally, beyond the boundaries of time and space. The screen makes itself known and offers a means of kinship, but it is also removed by song and born in the red of encounter and the dark of seven pupils. These wild visions coalesce into a fantastic vision of a future both technological and communal.

Aesthetics of the Commons

Cornelia Sollfrank; Felix Stalder; Shusha Niederberger — Fri, 28 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

What do a feminist server, an art space located in a public park in North London, a so-called pirate library of high cultural value yet dubious legal status, and an art school that emphasizes collectivity have in common? They all demonstrate that art plays an important role in imagining and producing a real quite different from what is currently hegemonic, and that art has the possibility to not only envision or proclaim ideas in theory, but also to realize them materially.

Aesthetics of the Commons examines a series of artistic and cultural projects—drawn from what can loosely be called the (post)digital—that take up this challenge in different ways. What unites them, however, is that they all have a double character. They are art in the sense that they place themselves in relation to (Western) cultural and art systems, developing discursive and aesthetic positions, but, at the same time, they are operational in that they create recursive environments and freely available resources whose uses exceed these systems. The first aspect raises questions about the kind of aesthetics that are being embodied, the second creates a relation to the larger concept of the commons. In Aesthetics of the Commons, the commons are understood not as a fixed set of principles that need to be adhered to in order to fit a definition, but instead as a thinking tool—in other words, the book’s interest lies in what can be made visible by applying the framework of the commons as a heuristic device.

Refaire le monde

Simon Maurer; Daniel Morgenthaler — Fri, 28 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Staging an exhibition as choreography, as drama, as opera, as a place where reality, politics, aesthetics, art, film, and music can address the issues of our day through documentaries, dialogues, science, activism, and creativity: This is the dream, the idea, and the mission of the “refaire le monde” exhibition trilogy at Helmhaus Zürich.

The exhibition involves some eighty different authorial voices, bringing diverse attitudes and actions into the safe space of the museum. This book is both a documentation of these new values and new worlds and a guide to them. It is people-focused, positing the arts as the model for a new human reality. Refaire le monde features many artists, including: Ursula Biemann, Pascale Birchler, Corina Gamma, Vincent Glanzmann, Fabrice Gygi, A. C. Kupper, Asia Andrzejka Merlin, Gianni Motti, Tanja Roscic, Heidi Specogna, Bertold Stallmach, and many more, as well as all those who participated in various parallel events.

Afterall

Fri, 28 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Established in 1998, Afterall is a journal of contemporary art that provides in-depth analysis of art and its social, political, and philosophical contexts. Each issue provides the reader with well-researched contributions that discuss each artist’s work from different perspectives. Contextual essays and other texts discussing events, works, or exhibitions further develop the thematic focus of each issue.

Connect and Divide

Erhard Schüttpelz; Ulrike Bergermann; Monika Dommann; Jeremy Stolow; Nadine Taha — Fri, 28 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Media is a kind of gatekeeper, connecting disparate entities and shielding them from one another at the same time. When we speak of media, we often refer to those entities themselves—to persons, organizations, artifacts, signals, and inscriptions—referencing directors, artists, newspapers, films, iPhones, paper, ink, notes, beats, color, and soundwaves. But as the middle or between, the essence of media itself seems to be distributed across the mix of entities involved, and its location and agency are hard to pin down.

This new anthology takes stock of our empirical and historical understanding of the two-sided nature of media and tracks the recent turn in media studies to examining practice itself. A unique discussion of the intersection of media theory and practice theory, Connect and Divide explores how distributions of knowledge, labor, and power may be hidden in what remains untraceable about media, shedding vital light on the social implications of media theory today.

What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be?

Fri, 28 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

As we face an ever-more-fragmented world, What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be? demands a return to the force of lineage—to spiritual, social, and ecological connections across time. It sparks a myriad of ageless-yet-urgent questions: How will I be remembered? What traditions do I want to continue? What cycles do I want to break? What new systems do I want to initiate for those yet-to-be-born? How do we endure? Published in association with the Center for Humans and Nature and interweaving essays, interviews, and poetry, this book brings together a thoughtful community of Indigenous and other voices—including Linda Hogan, Wendell Berry, Winona LaDuke, Vandana Shiva, Robin Kimmerer, and Wes Jackson—to explore what we want to give to our descendants. It is an offering to teachers who have come before and to those who will follow, a tool for healing our relationships with ourselves, with each other, and with our most powerful ancestors—the lands and waters that give and sustain all life.

Vice Patrol

Anna Lvovsky — Fri, 28 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

In the mid-twentieth century, gay life flourished in American cities even as the state repression of queer communities reached its peak. Liquor investigators infiltrated and shut down gay-friendly bars. Plainclothes decoys enticed men in parks and clubs. Vice officers surveilled public bathrooms through peepholes and two-way mirrors.

In Vice Patrol, Anna Lvovsky chronicles this painful story, tracing the tactics used to criminalize, profile, and suppress gay life from the 1930s through the 1960s, and the surprising controversies those tactics often inspired in court. Lvovsky shows that the vice squads’ campaigns stood at the center of live debates about not only the law’s treatment of queer people, but also the limits of ethical policing, the authority of experts, and the nature of sexual difference itself—debates that had often unexpected effects on the gay community’s rights and freedoms. Examining those battles, Vice Patrol enriches understandings of the regulation of queer life in the twentieth century and disputes about police power that continue today.

Metamodernism

Jason Ananda Josephson Storm — Fri, 28 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

For decades, scholars have been calling into question the universality of disciplinary objects and categories. The coherence of defined autonomous categories—such as religion, science, and art—has collapsed under the weight of postmodern critiques, calling into question the possibility of progress and even the value of knowledge. Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm aims to radicalize and move beyond these deconstructive projects to offer a path forward for the humanities and social sciences using a new model for theory he calls metamodernism.

Metamodernism works through the postmodern critiques and uncovers the mechanisms that produce and maintain concepts and social categories. In so doing, Storm provides a new, radical account of society’s ever-changing nature—what he calls a “Process Social Ontology”—and its materialization in temporary zones of stability or “social kinds.” Storm then formulates a fresh approach to philosophy of language by looking beyond the typical theorizing that focuses solely on human language production, showing us instead how our own sign-making is actually on a continuum with animal and plant communication.

Storm also considers fundamental issues of the relationship between knowledge and value, promoting a turn toward humble, emancipatory knowledge that recognizes the existence of multiple modes of the real. Metamodernism is a revolutionary manifesto for research in the human sciences that offers a new way through postmodern skepticism to envision a more inclusive future of theory in which new forms of both progress and knowledge can be realized.

Decolonial Metal Music in Latin America

Nelson Varas-Díaz — Thu, 27 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

The long-lasting effects of colonialism—racism, political persecution, ethnic extermination, and extreme capitalism—are still felt throughout Latin America. This volume explores how heavy metal music in the region has been used to challenge coloniality and its present-day manifestations. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research in Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, Peru, Chile, and Argentina, Nelson Varas-Díaz documents how metal musicians and listeners engage in “extreme decolonial dialogues” as a strategy to challenge past and present forms of oppression.

Most existing work on metal music in Latin America has relied on theoretical frameworks developed in the global North. By contrast, this volume explores the region through its own history and experiences, providing a roadmap for this emerging mode of musical analysis by demonstrating how decolonial metal scholarship can be achieved.

Bead by Bead

Yvonne Boyer; Larry Chartrand — Wed, 26 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

At once bound by and beyond the constitution, Métis peoples occupy an unstable position in Canadian law. While scholars debate the scope of Métis constitutional rights, reconciliation cannot be achieved without confronting indigenous experiences with colonization. In Bead by Bead, contributors unpack the ongoing denial of Métis land, resource, and sovereignty claims under Canadian law. This nuanced analysis of how current legal doctrine limits Métis rights reveals the complexity of indigenous and settler relationships and uncovers new avenues toward a more just future.

(Re:) Claiming Ballet

Adesola Akinleye — Wed, 26 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Though ballet is often seen as a white, cis-heteropatriarchal form of dance, in fact it has been, and still is, shaped by artists from a much broader range of backgrounds. This collection looks beyond the mainstream, bringing to light the overlooked influences that continue to inform the culture of ballet. Essays illuminate the dance form’s rich and complex history and start much-needed conversations about the roles of class, gender normativity, and race, demonstrating that despite mainstream denial and exclusionary tactics, ballet thrives with “difference.”

With contributions from professional ballet dancers and teachers, choreographers, and dance scholars in Europe and the United States, the volume introduces important new thinkers and perspectives. An essential resource for the field of ballet studies and a major contribution to dance scholarship more broadly, (Re:) Claiming Ballet will appeal to academics, researchers, and scholars; dance professionals and practitioners; and anyone interested in the intersection of race, class, gender, and dance.

Performing #MeToo

Judith Rudakoff — Wed, 26 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

In October 2017, a wave of sexual assault allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein prompted an outpouring of similar stories on Twitter and beyond, all bound by the same hashtag: #MeToo. The phrase, initially coined by activist Tarana Burke in 2006, reverberated across the internet and invigorated a movement. The essays in this volume engage with many of the performative interpretations of and responses to the #MeToo movement and invite reflection, discussion, and action.

Written by an international group of scholars and artists, the essays bring a global perspective to discussions on topics at the intersection of the #MeToo movement and the performing arts, including celebrity feminism, the practice of protest as a coping mechanism, misogynistic speech, the politics of performance, rehearsing and performing intimacy, and more. Contributors highlight works they have performed, witnessed, or studied, offering analysis and nuance while creating an archive of a powerful cultural moment.

Paper Collage

Georges Perros; John Taylor — Wed, 26 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Should you find yourself strolling along the coastal heights of Douarnenez, a Brittany town near the westernmost point of continental France, you would do well to look out for a signpost marked, “Georges Perros (1923–1978) ‘Dazzled by the sea.’” Perros, who famously made that remark and settled there in 1959, was initially an actor but is now best known for his literary output, which was marked by stylistic freshness and frank criticism. Perros lived anonymously in the fishing port of Douarnenez, scraping by as a freelance author and manuscript reader who taught and published a few books, but mostly corresponded with fellow writers or rode his motorcycle along the country roads. Indeed, Perros is known for his fame-shunning habits and for choosing to take up residence far from the sophistication of the capital city.

But behind the folksy, sometimes sighing, sometimes bitter, sometimes sardonic, sometimes even resigned voice lurks an intensely sensitive, highly cultivated ruminator on the human condition. He is best remembered for the autobiographical poems collected in Blue Poems and An Ordinary Life, as well as for Paper Collage, his compendium of maxims, vignettes, short prose narratives, occasional diary-like notations, critical remarks, and personal essays. Making this essential work available for the first time in English, this book presents a selection of these touching and thought-provoking short texts alongside numerous maxims, a genre in which Perros excelled. With typical modesty, the author called himself a journalier des pensées, a day labourer who tills thoughts. As readers, we can do no better than to read the tilled thoughts of Georges Perros.

Constitutional Pariah

Emmett Macfarlane — Wed, 26 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Attempts to reform the Canadian Senate stalled in 2014 when the Supreme Court ruled direct parliamentary change unconstitutional. Constitutional Pariah explores both the immediate and long-term aftermath of the Reference re Senate Reform decision. Driven outside the law by the court’s ruling, Parliament enacted sweeping informal changes that effectively curbed unchecked patronage and partisanship. Emmett Macfarlane argues that this decision and parliamentary response offer a roadmap toward constitutional reform in other contexts. Indeed, Macfarlane’s sharp critique raises the specter of a frozen constitution, one unable to evolve with the country.

Surviving Hemophilia

Cees Smit; Marcel Levi — Wed, 26 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Cees Smit, was born with hemophilia almost seventy years ago. No one expected him to survive long into adulthood, much less old age, but despite that prognosis he has lived a full life. The successes and failures in the field of treatments for hemophilia during the past decades, have led to his work today as a lobbyist for patients’ rights and the improvement of patients’ position in the healthcare system. Of particular interest to Smit is the issue of large-scale trade in human blood plasma—a topic he has discussed in various publications since 1979, and one that became especially critical during the AIDS crisis. Covering the history of hemophilia, hepatitis, and HIV, and our attempts to treat and cure them, Surviving Hemophilia also serves as a call for our health care systems to return to their traditional ideals of altruism, self-sufficiency, unity, and solidarity.

Paolo Sorrentino’s Cinema and Television

Annachiara Mariani — Wed, 26 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

With a list of critically acclaimed and award-winning films, the Naples-born director and screenwriter Paolo Sorrentino has established himself as an auteur of world renown—arguably the most successful and significant contemporary Italian filmmaker. To date, he has written and directed nine films and won an Academy Award, a BAFTA, and a Golden Globe, among others.

This is the first English-language collection dedicated to the prolific director, who has emerged as one of the most compelling figures in twenty-first-century European cinema. International contributors—from the UK, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Australia, Israel, Canada, and the US—offer original interpretations of Sorrentino’s work in film and television. In an invaluable contribution to the existing literature, they examine Sorrentino’s recurrent grand themes, offer new perspectives and cues for discussion, and challenge established notions about the filmmaker and his career.

Philosophy by Other Means

Robert B. Pippin — Wed, 26 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Throughout his career, Robert B. Pippin has examined the relationship between philosophy and the arts. With his writings on film, literature, and visual modernism, he has shown that there are aesthetic objects that cannot be properly understood unless we acknowledge and reflect on the philosophical concerns that are integral to their meaning. His latest book, Philosophy by Other Means, extends this trajectory, offering a collection of essays that present profound considerations of philosophical issues in aesthetics alongside close readings of novels by Henry James, Marcel Proust, and J. M. Coetzee.

The arts hold a range of values and ambitions, offering beauty, playfulness, and craftsmanship while deepening our mythologies and enriching the human experience. Some works take on philosophical ambitions, contributing to philosophy in ways that transcend the discipline’s traditional analytic and discursive forms. Pippin’s claim is twofold: criticism properly understood often requires a form of philosophical reflection, and philosophy is impoverished if it is not informed by critical attention to aesthetic objects. In the first part of the book, he examines how philosophers like Kant, Hegel, and Adorno have considered the relationship between art and philosophy. The second part of the book offers an exploration of how individual artworks might be considered forms of philosophical reflection. Pippin demonstrates the importance of practicing philosophical criticism and shows how the arts can provide key insights that are out of reach for philosophy, at least as traditionally understood.

Creep Love

Michael Walsh — Wed, 26 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Michael Walsh’s poetry collection Creep Love explores a family contending with a complex and ongoing crisis, the aftermath of which creates a shockwave that reverberates through these poems. Stories, half-truths, and lies combine into disturbing fable: A young pregnant woman flees her abusive boyfriend only to discover with terror that he is focused on her younger sister. When her younger sister later gives birth to her abusive ex’s other sons, the unsettling presence of the child’s father becomes unavoidable, and the family soon forces the first son to become a family secret.

We come to find out that the father carries a secret of his own. As tensions rise, attacks within the family escalate and finally culminate in an attempted murder. In Creep Love, Walsh captures the terror of this event, and these poems take us through the surprising outcomes. Near death, rather than floating into light due to hypoxia—a temporary release from the grip of compounding trauma—the speaker sinks into all-encompassing darkness. The anxiety of this moment returns him to his body from the edge of death. These poems give witness to the fallout, demonstrating how love can be charged with something ultimately unknowable.

Guide for Design, Installation, and Assessment of Post-installed Reinforcements

Ray K. L. Su; Daniel T. W. Looi; Yanlong Zhang — Wed, 26 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

The frequent use of post-installed reinforcements to rehabilitate and strengthen existing buildings and other structures have made this technology increasingly important. The technology, which connects new structural components to existing concrete structures, offers flexibility in design and construction. The international market, however, has a paucity of guides for the design, installation, and quality control of post-installed reinforcements. Guide for Design, Installation, and Assessment of Post-Installed Reinforcements aims to address this gap by proposing an innovative approach to post-installed reinforcements combined with local design provisions, revealing the possibilities for post-installed reinforcements to designers, contractors, and building control bodies alike.

Oishii

Eric C. Rath — Wed, 26 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Sushi and sashimi are by now a global sensation and have become perhaps the best known of Japanese foods—but they are also the most widely misunderstood. Oishii: The History of Sushi reveals that sushi began as a fermented food with a sour taste, used as a means to preserve fish. This book, the first history of sushi in English, traces sushi’s development from China to Japan and then internationally, and from street food to high-class cuisine. Included are two dozen historical and original recipes that show the diversity of sushi and how to prepare it. Written by an expert on Japanese food history, Oishii is a must read for understanding sushi’s past, its variety and sustainability, and how it became one of the world’s greatest anonymous cuisines.

London

Phil Baker — Wed, 26 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

City of cities, the modern world’s first great metropolis, London has shaped everything from clothing to youth culture. It has a unique place in the world’s memory, even as its role has changed from the capital of the planet to its playground, and as its lived history has mutated into the heritage industry.

In this book, Londoner Phil Baker explores the city’s history and the London of today, balancing well-known major events with more curious and eccentric details. He reveals a city of almost unmatched historical density and richness. For Baker, London turns out to be Gothic in all senses of the word and enjoyably haunted by its own often bloody past. And despite extensive redevelopment, as he shows in this engaging and insightful book, some of the magic remains.

Government of Natural Resources

Stéphane Castonguay; Käthe Roth — Wed, 26 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

As conservation and extractive agencies both expanded over in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, scientific personnel played an increasingly significant role in Canadian governance. Beginning with the Confederation, the state created geology, forestry, fishery, and agronomy departments with one goal: exploit resources and occupy territory. In The Government of Natural Resources, Stéphane Castonguay traces the history of mining, logging, hunting, fishing, and agriculture activities in Quebec, revealing how environmental transformation became a tool of government. Far from being neutral observers, scientists, he argues, must acknowledge their role as pivotal actors in the expansion of state power.

Atlas des Mammifères Sauvages de France

Tue, 25 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

With the second-largest exclusive economic zone in the world at over 11 million square kilometers of coastal waters, France hosts seventy-one species of marine mammals. This French-language volume, produced in partnership with the Observatory Pelagis, presents the most up-to-date information available on the distribution of the sixteen Carnivores, fifty-three Cetaceans, and two Sirenia that live in French waters, summarizing over 90,000 observation data points collected since 2000 at approximately thirty locations. The book is divided into two complementary parts: species monographies providing information on distribution, biology, population dynamics, threats, and existing management measures; and oceanic region monographies of nine ocean territories, noting the species therein. In addition, the book includes an overview of various tools of legal protection and species conservation.

Big Med

David Dranove; Lawton Robert Burns — Tue, 25 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

There is little debate that health care in the United States is in need of reform. But where should those improvements begin? With insurers? Drug makers? The doctors themselves? In Big Med, David Dranove and Lawton Robert Burns argue that we’re overlooking the most ubiquitous cause of our costly and underperforming system: megaproviders, the expansive health care organizations that have become the face of American medicine. Your local hospital is likely part of one. Your doctors, too. And the megaproviders are bad news for your health and your wallet.

Drawing on decades of combined expertise in health care consolidation, Dranove and Burns trace Big Med’s emergence in the 1990s, followed by its swift rise amid false promises of scale economies and organizational collaboration. In the decades since, megaproviders have gobbled up market share and turned independent physicians into salaried employees of big bureaucracies, while delivering on none of their early promises. For patients this means higher costs and lesser care. Meanwhile, physicians report increasingly low morale, making it all but impossible for most systems to implement meaningful reforms.

In Big Med, Dranove and Burns combine their respective skills in economics and management to provide a nuanced explanation of how the provision of health care has been corrupted and submerged under consolidation. They offer practical recommendations for improving competition policies that would reform megaproviders to actually achieve the efficiencies and quality improvements they have long promised.
This is an essential read for understanding the current state of the health care system in America—and the steps urgently needed to create an environment of better care for all of us.

Congress and the First Civil Rights Era, 1861-1918

Jeffery A. Jenkins; Justin Peck — Tue, 25 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Civil rights legislation figured prominently in the agenda of Congress during the Civil War and Reconstruction. But as Reconstruction came to an end and discrimination against African Americans in the South became commonplace, civil rights advocates in Congress increasingly shifted to policies desired by white constituents in the North who had grown tired of efforts to legislate equality. In this book, the first of a two-volume set, Jeffery A. Jenkins and Justin Peck explore the rise and fall of civil rights legislation in Congress from 1861 to 1918.

The authors examine in detail how the Republican Party slowly withdrew its support for a meaningful civil rights agenda, as well as how Democrats and Republicans worked together to keep civil rights off the legislative agenda at various points. In doing so, Jenkins and Peck show how legal institutions can be used both to liberate and protect oppressed minorities and to assert the power of the white majority against those same minority groups.

Congress and the First Civil Rights Era, 1861-1918

Jeffery A. Jenkins; Justin Peck — Tue, 25 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Gossip Men

Christopher M. Elias — Tue, 25 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

J. Edgar Hoover, Joseph McCarthy, and Roy Cohn were titanic figures in midcentury America, wielding national power in government and the legal system through intimidation and insinuation. Hoover’s FBI thrived on secrecy, threats, and illegal surveillance, while McCarthy and Cohn will forever be associated with the infamous anticommunist smear campaign of the early 1950s, which culminated in McCarthy’s public disgrace during televised Senate hearings. In Gossip Men, Christopher M. Elias takes a probing look at these tarnished figures to reveal a host of startling new connections among gender, sexuality, and national security in twentieth-century American politics. Elias illustrates how these three men solidified their power through the skillful use of deliberately misleading techniques like implication, hyperbole, and photographic manipulation. Just as provocatively, he shows that the American people of the 1950s were particularly primed to accept these coded threats because they were already familiar with such tactics from widely popular gossip magazines.

By using gossip as a lens to examine profound issues of state security and institutional power, Elias thoroughly transforms our understanding of the development of modern American political culture.

What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be?

Mon, 24 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Vice Patrol

Anna Lvovsky — Mon, 24 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

100 Words

Damon Potter; Truong Tran — Sat, 22 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Written as a conversation, 100 Words is an exchange of ideas, dialogues, burdens, and ideals between someone White and someone Brown. Two poets, Damon Potter and Truong Tran, write to each other about one hundred powerful words—like “proximity, “shame,” and “hope”—each of which is an abstraction rife with socially inscribed beliefs and denials. They turn to each other in an exchange, a negotiation, and a series of discoveries as they write of their individual histories, share their burdens, and learn to carry weight together.

Tran explains this project, saying “it is occurring to me even as I am writing this now that this is not an experiment, or case study or collaboration or partnership. Damon is not the subject nor am I. This is a shared endeavor, a lived experience between two very different lives trying to understand what it means to be, to see the other.”

Policing Welfare

Spencer Headworth — Sat, 22 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Means-tested government assistance in the United States requires recipients to meet certain criteria and continue to maintain their eligibility so that benefits are paid to the “truly needy.” Welfare is regarded with such suspicion in this country that considerable resources are spent policing the boundaries of eligibility, which are delineated by an often confusing and baroque set of rules and regulations. Even minor infractions of the many rules can cause people to be dropped from these programs, and possibly face criminal prosecution. In this book, Spencer Headworth offers the first study of the structure of fraud control in the welfare system by examining the relations between different levels of governmental agencies, from federal to local, and their enforcement practices. Policing Welfare shows how the enforcement regime of welfare has been constructed to further stigmatize those already living in poverty and deepens disparities of class, race, and gender in our society.

Modern Myths

Philip Ball — Fri, 21 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

"Impressive. . . . Rich in cultural history and imagination. . . . To Ball, mythic writing is where the conditions of irrationality, superstition, and enchantment persist: forms of wonder that depend on the disconnect between what we know for sure and what we simply believe.”—New York Times Book Review

Myths are usually seen as stories from the depths of time—fun and fantastical, but no longer believed by anyone. Yet, as Philip Ball shows, we are still writing them—and still living them—today. From Robinson Crusoe and Frankenstein to Batman, many stories written in the past few centuries are commonly, perhaps glibly, called “modern myths.” But Ball argues that we should take that idea seriously. Our stories of Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Sherlock Holmes are doing the kind of cultural work that the ancient myths once did. Through the medium of narratives that all of us know in their basic outline and which have no clear moral or resolution, these modern myths explore some of our deepest fears, dreams, and anxieties. We keep returning to these tales, reinventing them endlessly for new uses. But what are they really about, and why do we need them? What myths are still taking shape today? And what makes a story become a modern myth?

In The Modern Myths, Ball takes us on a wide-ranging tour of our collective imagination, asking what some of its most popular stories reveal about the nature of being human in the modern age.

Drop of Treason

Jonathan Stevenson — Fri, 21 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Philip Agee’s story is the stuff of a John le Carré novel—perilous and thrilling adventures around the globe. He joined the CIA as a young idealist, becoming an operations officer in hopes of seeing the world and safeguarding his country. He was the consummate intelligence insider, thoroughly entrenched in the shadow world. But in 1975, he became the first such person to publicly betray the CIA—a pariah whose like was not seen again until Edward Snowden. For almost forty years in exile, he was a thorn in the side of his country.

The first biography of this contentious, legendary man, Jonathan Stevenson’s A Drop of Treason is a thorough portrait of Agee and his place in the history of American foreign policy and the intelligence community during the Cold War and beyond. Unlike mere whistleblowers, Agee exposed American spies by publicly blowing their covers. And he didn’t stop there—his was a lifelong political struggle that firmly allied him with the social movements of the global left and against the American project itself from the early 1970s on. Stevenson examines Agee’s decision to turn, how he sustained it, and how his actions intersected with world events.

Having made profound betrayals and questionable decisions, Agee lived a rollicking, existentially fraught life filled with risk. He traveled the world, enlisted Gabriel García Márquez in his cause, married a ballerina, and fought for what he believed was right. Raised a conservative Jesuit in Tampa, he died a socialist expat in Havana. In A Drop of Treason, Stevenson reveals what made Agee tick—and what made him run.

Changing Their Minds?

George C. Edwards III — Fri, 21 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Despite popular perceptions, presidents rarely succeed in persuading either the public or members of Congress to change their minds and move from opposition to particular policies to support of them. As a result, the White House is not able to alter the political landscape and create opportunities for change. Instead, successful presidents recognize and skillfully exploit the opportunities already found in their political environments. If they fail to understand their strategic positions, they are likely to overreach and experience political disaster.

Donald Trump has been a distinctive president, and his arrival in the Oval Office brought new questions. Could someone with his decades of experience as a self-promoter connect with the public and win its support? Could a president who is an experienced negotiator obtain the support in Congress needed to pass his legislative programs? Would we need to adjust the theory of presidential leadership to accommodate a president with unique persuasive skills?

Building on decades of research and employing extensive new data, George C. Edwards III addresses these questions. He finds that President Trump has been no different than other presidents in being constrained by his environment. He moved neither the public nor Congress. Even for an experienced salesman and dealmaker, presidential power is still not the power to persuade. Equally important was the fact that, as Edwards shows, Trump was not able to exploit the opportunities he had. In fact, we learn here that the patterns of the president’s rhetoric and communications and his approach to dealing with Congress ultimately lessened his chances of success. President Trump, it turns out, was often his own agenda’s undoing.

Blue Divide

Linda Nemec Foster — Thu, 20 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

The poems in this powerful new collection explore the history of conflict and resilience—whether it occurs during the Nazi occupation of Poland, the Balkan wars in Bosnia and Croatia, or within the intimate tableaux of a family’s dissonance. Weaving poems into three distinct sections, Linda Nemec Foster pays close attention to not only what divides us, but also to what can heal and redeem our common journey: an artist’s notebook; the imagined life of Mary Magdalene; a fascination with Mount Fuji; a mother’s obsession with vintage movie stars; a dead father’s love. The Blue Divide resonates with the landscape of the world and the landscape of the heart.

Phantom World of Digul

Takashi Shiraishi — Thu, 20 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Digul was an internment colony for political prisoners that was established in 1926 in West Papua. This book argues that Digul is the key to understanding Indonesia’s colonial governance between the failed communist rebellion of late 1926 and the declaration of independence in 1945, a time when the Dutch regime attempted to impose what they called “rust en orde,” or peace and order, on the Indonesian people via the suppression of politics by the police. The political policing regime the Dutch Indies state created, Takashi Shiraishi shows, was simultaneously a success and a failure. While unrest was to some degree put down, the native terrain was never completely pacified, as activists linked up with each other in fluid networks that cut across spatial and ideational boundaries.

How did the government deploy political policing to achieve its policy objectives? What were the consequences and challenges for Indonesian activists? How was the government able to fashion its policing apparatus as the most potent instrument to achieve peace and order when the Great Depression hit the Indies, nationalist and communist forces were gaining strength in other places of the world, and war was coming both in Europe and Asia? This book answers those questions and more, breaking new ground for our understanding of the history of the Dutch Indies state in the early part of the twentieth century.

First International Sevgi Gönül Byzantine Studies Symposium

Ayla Ödekan — Thu, 20 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

The Proceedings of the International Sevgi Gönül Byzantine Studies Symposium contains seventy five of ninety two papers presented at the First International Sevgi Gönül Byzantine Studies Symposium with a theme of “Change in the Byzantine World in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries” held from 25th to 28th June 2007. The book is organized into subtitles of History and Geography, Identity, Cultural Interaction, Economy, Settlements, Architecture, and Visual Culture identified in the concept of the symposium. The writing principles of the articles follow the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection Style Guide for Publication, which is widely appropriated in international academic circles. Turkish articles follow the principles of Turkish Language Society. The book contains the opening and closing speeches bilingual, both in English and Turkish, while the articles are published in their original language.

Celluloid Colony

Sandeep Ray — Thu, 20 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

How should colonial film archives be read? How can historians and ethnographers use colonial film as a complement to conventional written sources? Sandeep Ray uses the case of Dutch colonial film in Indonesia to show how a critically, historically, and cinematically informed reading of colonial film in the archive can be a powerful and unexpected source—one that is more accessible than ever today because of digitization. The language of film and the conventions and forms of nonfiction film were still in formation in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Colonialism, Ray shows, was one of the drivers of this development, as the picturing of the native “other” in film was seen as an important tool to build support for missionary and colonial efforts. While social histories of photography in non-European contexts have been an area of great interest in recent years; Celluloid Colony for the first time brings moving images into the same scope of study.

SMRH 15

Joel T. Rosenthal; Paul E. Szarmach — Thu, 20 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

EMWJ v15.2

Bernadette Andrea; Julie D. Campbell; Allyson M. Poska — Thu, 20 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

City Basilica of Tlos

Taner Korkut; Satoshi Urano — Thu, 20 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Philanthropy in Anatolia through the Ages

Oguz Tekin; Christopher H. Roosevelt; Engin Akyürek — Thu, 20 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

The articles of this volume offer a rich diversity of perspectives on philanthropy as practiced in Anatolia over some 2500 years. From such an extensive set of investigations, one would expect to compose a coherent synthetic statement on the nature of Anatolian philanthropy as well as some proposals for how to develop further a meaningful program of research on the topic. It turns out that the latter is far easier than the former; although this volume contains twenty original studies, they do not ultimately clarify either the definition of philanthropy or any essential aspect of Anatolia. The reflections below address first what might be called “the problem with philanthropy” and “the ambiguity of Anatolia.” Once these waters are sufficiently muddied, it nonetheless emerges that a program of research on the topic is possible and even promising.

The First International Suna and Inan Kiraç Symposium on Mediterranean Civilization - March 26-29, 2019, Antalya

Youssouf Bey

Bahattin Öztuncay — Thu, 20 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Yusuf Franko Kusa Bey (1856–1933), a high-ranking bureaucrat in fin-de-siècle Ottoman imperial administration, was also a talented caricaturist. Because of his duties in the Ottoman Foreign Ministry, and spending most of his life in Istanbul, he was both a member and an observer of high-society social circles in Pera [Beyoglu]. Ambassadors, ministers, diplomats, famous opera singers, painters, Pashas and Efendis, Madames and Monsieurs, were part of this social milieu, and most of them became eternally recorded through the ‘types and charges’ in Yusuf Franko’s caricature album. Including images of himself, he charged his subject materials, the people in his social network, with their particular qualities and transformed their portraits into witty caricatures that reflected contemporary scenes of social life and political debates in Pera. This book, which accompanies the facsimile of Yusuf Franko’s own caricature album, Youssouf, consists of three articles and an annotated appendix. While the articles analyze the majority of his caricatures from diverse perspectives (his family history and biography, the history of contemporary European caricature art and politics, and the social and spatial context in which he drew his caricatures), the appendix gives brief information about each caricature plate following the exact order in the facsimile. These extraordinary caricatures are published for the first time in their entirety since they were discovered in an antique rug dealer’s shop in Istanbul in 1957.

Nostoi

Nicolas Chr. Stampolidis; Çigdem Maner; Konstantinos Kopanias — Thu, 20 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Nostoi. Indigenous Culture, Migration and Integration in the Aegean Islands and Western Anatolia during the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age is presenting one comprehensive volume with papers discussing various aspects of the intercultural contact between West Anatolia and the Aegean during the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age. The conference proceedings are focusing on the various Anatolian and Aegean cross-cultural “interfaces”, the archaeological testimonies of the “indigenous” population, the impact of the Hittite, Mycenaean and Ionian migration movements, on the pre-existing population, as well as inter-cultural and cross-cultural mingling of the Aegean and Anatolia or vice versa.

Second Inernational Congress on the History of Money and Numismatics in the Mediterranean World

Oguz Tekin — Thu, 20 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Spolia Reincarnated

Ivana Jevtic; Suzan Yalman — Thu, 20 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

At the cutting edge of spolia studies, the collected essays in this volume explore diverse forms and types of reuse in Anatolia over centuries through a cross-cultural lens. Gathered from the joining of disciplines archaeology, art history, and the history of architecture and landscapean exceptional array of examples is presented, including architectural elements and decoration, sculpture and statuary, space and buildings, and textiles and other objects. Most significantly, this ground-breaking work reveals how objects, materials, and spaces attained new meanings in their afterlives through various modes of reuse.

The scholarly contributions published here stem from the Tenth International ANAMED Annual Symposium “Spolia Reincarnated: Second Life of Spaces, Materials, Objects in Anatolia from Antiquity to the Ottoman Period” held at Istanbul’s Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (ANAMED) in December 2015. This unique conference marked ANAMED’s tenth anniversary and brought together many prominent scholars and former research center fellows, including the volume’s editors.

Sacred Spaces and Urban Networks

Suzan Yalman; A. Hilal Ugurlu — Thu, 20 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

With its history that goes back millennia, Anatolia is studded with sites from different eras that are deemed “sacred.” The collected essays in this volume present diachronic and synchronic studies of Anatolian sacred sites from the medieval period onward that situate them within various spatial, urban, and sociocultural dynamics. Each article explores unique case studies that illustrate the role of human agency in the creative process of transforming awe-inspiring sites into sacred spaces. Collectively, the volume reveals that the magnetic qualities of such destinations create a web of sanctity, as well as a complicated matrix of economic, political, and social relations. The scholarly contributions published here emerged from the 11th International ANAMED Annual symposium, entitled “Sacred Spaces + Urban Networks” and held at Istanbul’s Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (ANAMED) in December 2016. This symposium brought together prominent scholars in the field and former fellows of the research center, including the volume’s editors. While our initial goal was to explore different layers of sacredness in Anatolia, ultimately, the volume sheds light on parallels among case studies and presents the connectedness between these layers.

Spatial Webs

Christopher H. Roosevelt — Thu, 20 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Spatial Webs charts the cultural heritage and identity of Anatolia, focusing on projects that incorporate Geographic Information Systems and other analytical tools in spatially significant research into the past. An important new contribution to archaeology and cultural heritage research, the volume brings together multidisciplinary researchers engaged in creating and using spatialized data resources for interactive web-mapping applications. The topics explored include sociospatial differentiation in bostancibasi registers, identity mapping the Jewish communities of medieval Anatolia, and the Turkey Cultural Heritage Map of the Hrant Dink Foundation.

Sephardic Trajectories

Kerem Tinaz; Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano — Thu, 20 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Sephardic Trajectories brings together scholars of Ottoman history and Jewish studies to discuss how family heirlooms, papers, and memorabilia help us conceptualize the complex process of migration from the Ottoman Empire to the United States. To consider the shared significance of family archives in both the United States and in Ottoman lands, the volume takes as starting point the formation of the Sephardic Studies Digital Collection at the University of Washington, a community-led archive and the world’s first major digital repository of archival documents and recordings related to the Sephardic Jews of the Mediterranean world. Contributors reflect on the role of private collections and material objects in studying the Sephardi past, presenting case studies of Sephardic music and literature alongside discussions of the role of new media, digitization projects, investigative podcasts, and family memorabilia in preserving Ottoman Sephardic culture.

Weaving the History

Filiz Yenisehirlioglu; Gözde Çerçioglu Yücel — Thu, 20 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Weaving the History: Mystery of a City, Sof exhibition explores the history of the Angora goat and its precious mohair and the premium, luxurious fabric called sof produced from the Angora goat’s brilliant unadulterated mohair yarn during the Ottoman Era. Sof production and mohair weaving once shaped the economy and social life of Ankara, especially in the 16th century ceased to an end in the 19th century and sof has become a forgotten value. This exhibition catalog documents the making of a research- based exhibition. Furthermore, it aims to become a reference book for researchers by compiling objects demonstrating the importance of the Angora goat and the usages of mohair together with presenting articles authored by researchers from various disciplines.

Articles compiled in the first part of this book focus on subjects such as the roots of weaving in Anatolia, biological characteristics of the Angora goat, the Angora goat economy in the 19th century and the changes in the Angora goat density in Ankara, the adventure of the Angora goat in France and South Africa, the history of the Angora goat and mohair production in Ankara, mohair supply chain in the republican period, the use of the Angora goat as a symbol in the designs of banknotes, stamps and logos, the story of the 18th century painting the “View of Ankara” from Rijksmuseum collection which is the oldest painting known to depict Ankara and mohair weaving.

The exhibition catalog features objects and artefacts from Koç University Vehbi Koç Ankara Studies Research Center VEKAM’s library and archive, museum and personal collections. Among these, 16th and 17th century examples from mohair from the Topkapi Palace collection, 19th and 20th century clothing fashioned from mohair and sof from Sadberk Hanim Museum collection and sof fabric samples from Ethnographical Museum of Ankara collection and View of Ankara from Rijkmuseum portrays the importance of mohair and exemplifies its usages. A compilation of engravings, rare books, photographs about the Angora goat and mohair preparation tools and natural dyes used for dyeing mohair, in addition to contemporary woven and knitted mohair examples are also included in this catalog for readers to trace both the history and the processes included in mohair related production in Ankara and Anatolia.

What Josephine Saw

Kimberley Hart — Thu, 20 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Born in 1919, Josephine Powell visited Turkey for the first time in 1955 to photograph Byzantine mosaics. She then set out on her first comprehensive trip around Turkey, being the first foreigner to be given permission to drive across the country after the foundation of the Republic. In those years she became interested in Turkish flat-woven textiles. She set out to work with the Turkish nomads themselves, gathering information about their handicraft - what purpose the objects served, why they were made, and how they were created. She began amassing Anatolian kilims, sacks, bands and related artifacts in a collection that reflects the role and importance of weaving in rural Anatolia. She also played a major role in the revival of natural dyes in Turkey and in establishing the DOBAG (Dogal Boya Arastirma Gelistirme, Research and Development of Natural Dyes) Project, the first Turkish women’s cooperative that makes carpets using authentic designs and natural dyes.

By the time of her death in 2007, Josephine had a significant collection and photographic archives. Her collections of Anatolian flat-weaves and ethnographic objects, as well as copies of all her images were donated to the Vehbi Koç Foundation in Istanbul in 2006. In this book, which is published within the framework of What Josephine Saw exhibition organized by Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations on 11 June - 21 October 2012, you will find a selection of photographs of the Anatolia that Josephine saw, as well as the memorial essays of her colleagues, friends, and travel companions.

Trade in Byzantium

Paul Magdalino; Nevra Necipoglu — Thu, 20 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

In the Byzantine Empire, Constantinople served not only as an administrative, military, and religious center, but also as one of trade and commerce. The city was selected as the new imperial capital due to its geographical advantages, its vast hinterland, its situation as an ideal vantage point for travel by land and sea, and its safe natural harbors, making it a perfect location for trade. Considering that medieval Anatolia, and especially Constantinople, was located at the center of a broad trade network and was a center of both production and consumption, trade is rightfully a continuing subject matter of Byzantine studies. In addition, since 2004, the Directorate of the Istanbul Archaeological Museums has carried out archaeological research in Üsküdar, Sirkeci, and Yenikapi, as part of the Marmaray and Metro projects. The excavations have revealed spectacular artifacts and new knowledge on Byzantine trade, ship-building technology, and ships and their cargo. In light of harbor excavation results and information accumulated from other ongoing research, it was the right time to re-evaluate trade in Byzantium. New findings and knowledge arising from the Yenikapi excavations, in particular, gave reason to revisit issues of trade in Byzantium again.

The articles collected in this volume derive from papers presented at the Third International Sevgi Gönül Byzantine Studies Symposium on “Trade in Byzantium” held in Istanbul on 24–27 June 2013.

Tell Atchana, Alalakh Volume 2 (2A/2B)

Kutlu Aslihan Yener; Murat Akar; Mara T. Horowitz — Thu, 20 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

The excavations at Tell Atchana (Alalakh) are a part of long-range, broadly-based archaeological investigations in the Turkish state of Hatay’s Plain of Antioch, today called the Amuq Valley. Tell Atchana is located at the southern center of the valley close to the major westward bend of the Orontes River and was for nearly a thousand years the capital of a small Bronze Age principality called variably Alalakh and Mukish. This volume presents the major new archaeological campaing from 2006-2010, which was designed to revisit the phasing and dating of previously excavated strata, to explore untouched areas of the site, to establish a typology and seriation of local artifact types, and to study local cultural and political history in the dynamic and international Late Bronze II period. The Alalakh Excavations project’s ongoing research on chronology, political history, material culture, city landscapes, international relations, and many other topics is beginning to form a coherent picture of ancient Alalakh. Coming into focus is a small city with ancient roots that dared to play a hard game of territorial checkers with its larger LB II neighbor kingdoms and empires. Today Alalakh continues to engage and amaze as excavations and analyses reveal surprise after surprise. The Alalakh Excavations project has taken great care to include a wide variety of scholarly voices and opinions and to challenge preconceptions and conventional wisdom at every turn. In keeping with the tradition of sound methodology and perseverance begun by Woolley, and the interdisciplinary and international spirit of the Alalakh Excavations project, this volume now proudly presents the excavation results of LB II strata from 2006-2010.

Tell Atchana, Ancient Alalakh Volume 1

Kutlu Aslihan Yener — Thu, 20 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

The Oriental Institute initiated the first two excavation seasons based at Tell Atchana, ancient Alalakh, in the Amuq Valley, east of Antakya, Turkey with a team from the University of Chicago under the directorship of Prof. Kutlu Aslihan Yener.
The Oriental Institute initiated the first two excavation seasons based at Tell Atchana, ancient Alalakh, in the Amuq Valley, east of Antakya, Turkey with a team from the University of Chicago under the directorship of Prof. Kutlu Aslihan Yener. The Tell Atchana/Alalakh Excavations are presently under the auspices of the Turkish Ministry of Culture. Institutional support is provided by Koc University in Istanbul with the continuing collaboration of the Antakya Mustafa Kemal University. This volume with specialist reports presents the first two seasons (2003-2004) of the new round of ongoing excavations at the site after a pause of 54 years. Archaeological and textual evidence from the earlier 1930-1940’s excavations has defined this important site as the regional capital (Alalakh) of a small territorial state, Mukiš, which existed during the 2nd millennium BC. Deposits from the Late Bronze Age occupations were identified above an extensive Middle Bronze Age settlement with evidence of site-wide destruction and reorganization of the settlement at the turn of the 13th-14th centuries BC. The publication of the 2003-2004 results represents the first volume in a monograph series of the team’s continued systematic work at the site. Subsequent volumes will specifically target the Late Bronze Age levels and the Middle Bronze Age city. A separate volume on ceramics will present the relative sequences, technical analyses, and experimental procedures on pottery. Earlier references pertaining to Leonard Woolley’s operations, the excavation results and ongoing interpretations of these materials prior to the team’s new excavations are listed in the bibliography. Further references for the 2003-2004 seasons can be found in the bibliography and on the project website www.alalakh.org.

Tribe of the Esraris

Ahmet Güntan — Thu, 20 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

The Tribe of the Esraris. is an acclaimed Turkish poet’s heartfelt commentary on our times, an inquiring companion to the new millennium. In a series of fragmentary prose pieces on a wide range of topics, Ahmet Guntan offers new ways to break the proverbial “silence” of the poet and tackle the world head-on. He takes the floor as one of the Esraris, the eponymous tribe of uneasy souls, and builds the framework of a poetics of deeper engagement with the world around us. Reading in part like a philosophical diary, The Tribe of the Esraris. is a wake-up call to be heard, a poetic testimony written with olive trees, income inequality, and E.M. Cioran in mind.

Ottoman Arcadia

Bahattin Öztuncay; Özge Ertem — Thu, 20 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

The English volume of the exhibition. In conjunction with the exhibition, the book examines the locations where the Ottoman Empire was founded, and the meanings attributed to these in the past and in the nineteenth century. It includes articles by expert researchers and academicians, Selim Deringil, T.G. Otte, Sinan Kuneralp, Ahmet Ersoy (co-curator), Deniz Türker (co-curator), Beatrice St. Laurent, Resat Kasaba, and Berin Gölönü. In the articles, they study the foundation myths, the relationship among history, memory and representation through nomads of Anatolia, monuments, and architectural works in the earliest settlements of the empire as well as late 19th century European-Ottoman diplomatic relations. In addition, many of the photographs and artifacts from the exhibition can be found as high-quality reproductions in an addendum in the book. Turkish language version of the publication translated by Umur Çelikyay will be available for sale in the upcoming months.

Book of Devices

Ihsan Oktay Anar — Thu, 20 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Ihsan Oktay Anar’s 1996 novella, "The Book of Devices," is a skeleton key to the ever-inventive author’s fictional world set in the Ottoman times. Here are the wonderful histories of the triumphs and tribulations of three Ottoman inventors, “as reported by the narrators of events and relators of traditions.” By turns humorous and touching, these interlinked stories are nutshells of vividly imagined past. While we follow Yafes Chelebi and his two successors in their search for the secret of the perpetual motion, the crumbling empire undergoes drastic changes in the background and the city of their dreams, Istanbul, witnesses coup d’états, Westernizing reforms, and the advent of technological innovation. Written in a unique idiom that is both a tender mimicry and witty parody of the Ottoman bureaucratic prose, The Book of Devices is Anar at his imaginative best. One cannot help but wonder how a twenty-first-century author can dwell in the past with such ease and come back to the present, as in a Borgesian parable, with a cabinet of dreamy curiosities.

Artamonoff

Günder Varinlioglu — Thu, 20 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Nicholas V. Artamonoff left behind a photographic puzzle of over one thousand images. He was a student and engineer, who, while studying and living at Robert College in Istanbul, gained an appreciation for the city’s history and culture. With his Rollei camera, he captured Byzantine remains, ntering nooks and crannies of fortifications and cisterns. He strolled through the city in the footsteps of architectural historians and archaeologists who explored and uncovered Byzantine Istanbul. his interests were broad: they ranged from imposing churches to the smallest details of architectural sculpture, from bustling marketplaces to the diligent work of lone craftsmen. The abundance of subjects es the Nicholas V. Artamonoff Collection rich and engaging, providing a glimpse into the diverse urban environment in which he lived, and into the versatile photographer he was.

Archival Memories

Lioba Theis; Su Sultan Akülker; Caroline Mang — Thu, 20 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Marcell Restle was born in 1932 in a small town named Bad Waldsee in southern Germany and studied art history, Byzantine studies, and the history of Christianity at the universities of Tu¨bingen and Munich. The classes Restle took from German and Turkish professors at Istanbul University, where he studied for a year, opened up new horizons for him. The studies he made of Islamic, Seljuk, and, especially, Ottoman art and architecture, as well as of Byzantine art; the classes he taught at the universities of Vienna and Munich on these topics; and the countless study trips he made around the Eastern Mediterranean, including to Istanbul and Anatolia, made him an expert in the field of architecture, especially in the systematic documentation of buildings.

“Archival Memories” on the one hand informs viewers about how a researcher organized his working day, how he systematically allotted his time, and what methods he used in the pre-digital age. On the other hand, it aims to present from retrospective perspectives the states of numerous cultural assets, most of which remain today only as memories within urban structures.

Alakent Church

Engin Akyürek — Thu, 20 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

The presence of this small Byzantine church in the Alakent neighborhood of Demre has been known to archaeologists and art historians for quite some time. Revealing the structure from under the five meter deep alluvial fill in which it was buried was only possible as a result of the excavation work carried out in 2010 as part of the Myra–Andriake Excavations. The alluvial fill kept most of the aspects of the building such as mural paintings, roof tiles, facade decorations and spolia intact.

Ilkhanids in Anatolia

Suzan Yalman; Filiz Yenisehirlioglu — Thu, 20 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Starting from Spring 2014, VEKAM has been organizing yearly international symposiums to introduce various cultures that lived in Anatolia and support research in these fields of study. The symposium proceeding volume titled Cultural Encounters in Anatolia in the Medieval Period : Ilkhanids in Anatolia which was held on may 21st-22nd May, 2015 at the premises of VEKAM in Ankara/ Turkey focuses on the fields such as; history, literature, mysticism, art, urban history and architecture during the Ilkhanid Period. In this respect we believe that the Ilkhanids in Anatolia symposium proceedings will fill an important gap and lead up new researches in this field.

Identity and the other in Byzantium

Koray Durak; Ivana Jevtic — Thu, 20 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Glazed Wares as Cultural Agents in the Byzantine, Seljuk, and Ottoman Lands

Filiz Yenisehirlioglu; Beate Böhlendorf-Arslan — Thu, 20 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

This volume collects research presented at the Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (ANAMED) 2018 international annual symposium. It brings together researchers engaged in the study of the decoration and technology of glazed pottery, ranging from the early Byzantine era to the end of the Ottoman period. Topics explored include pottery production in Constantinople, glazed ceramic production and consumption in medieval Thebes, pottery imports in Algiers during the Turkish Regency, considerations of trading routes and their influences, the relationships between Italy and the Byzantine and Ottoman world through pottery, and more.

Europe Knows Nothing about the Orient

Zeynep Çelik; Aron Aji; Gregory Key — Thu, 20 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

A century before the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, a passionate discourse emerged in the Ottoman Empire, rebutting politicized Western representations of the East. Until the 1930s, Ottoman and early Turkish Republican intellectuals, well acquainted with the European political and cultural scene and charged with their own ideological agendas, deconstructed tired clichés about “the Orient.” In this book, Zeynep Çelik recontextualizes Eurocentric postcolonial studies, unearthing an important episode in modern Middle Eastern intellectual history and curating a selection of primary texts illustrating the debates.

Legends of Authority

Scott Redford — Thu, 20 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

This book reintroduces and reexamines the Seljuk inscriptions from the walls of Sinop citadel. First published at the beginning of the last century, these inscriptions open a window onto scribal, administrative, and architectural practice during an important, formative period of the Seljuk sultanate in the early thirteenth century. 16 inscriptions of Sinop citadel, all made within a five month period in the summer of 1215, allow us a glimpse of the Seljuk elite at work, with aspirations and ideals of state and office mixing and competing with individual and factional rivalries and administrative changes. This book corrects previous published versions, and offers for the first time a reading of the main sultanic inscription, which has been chiselled out. Contributors analyze the Persian verse inscription, the first of its kind from Seljuk Anatolia, and the only known Seljuk bilingual Arabic-Greek inscription.
In addition to an in-depth rereading and analysis of these inscriptions, this book examines their architectural context. This includes the first signed work of Abu Ali al-Halabi, the Syrian military architect who served the Seljuk state, and who later built the well-known Red Tower in Alanya. This book provides a new analysis not only of Seljuk architectural practice based on architectural and inscriptional evidence, it also reevaluates the architecture of the citadel itself. Sinop citadel, one of the most impressive in medieval Anatolia, is redated to the Byzantine era.

Camera Ottomana

Zeynep Çelik; Edhem Eldem — Thu, 20 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

From its birth in 1839, photography has participated in modernity as much as it has symbolized it. Its capacity to record and display and its claim to accuracy and truth intricately linked the new technology to the dynamism of the modern world. The Ottoman Empire embraced photography with great enthusiasm. In fact, the impact and meaning of photography were compounded with the thrust of modernization and westernization of the Tanzimat movement. By the turn of the century, photography in the Ottoman lands had become a standard feature of everyday life, of public media, and of the state apparatus.

This volume explores some of the most striking aspects of the close connection between photography and modernity with a particular focus on the Ottoman Empire. Much of the material concerns the display of modernity through photography, as was so often the case in the photographs and albums commissioned by the Sultan to showcase his empire for Western audiences. Nevertheless, modernity was often embedded in the photographic act, transforming it into a common and mundane practice. Be it in the form of images disseminated through the illustrated press, postcards sent out to family members or anonymous collectors, portraits presented to friends and acquaintances, or pictures taken of employees and convicts, photography had started to invade practically every sphere of public and private life.

The visual world we live in today was born some 150 years ago. Camera Ottomana is both a homage to, and a critical assessment of, the local dimension of one of the most potent and transformative technological inventions of the recent past.

Byzantine Court

Ayla Ödekan; Nevra Necipoglu; Engin Akyürek — Thu, 20 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

The designation of Istanbul by the European Union’s Council of Ministers as the European Capital of Culture for 2010 was instrumental in the decision to focus on Constantinople in the Second International Sevgi Gönül Byzantine Studies Symposium, which was held on 21–23 June 2010 at the Istanbul Archaeological Museum. The particular theme of the symposium, “The Byzantine Court: Source of Power and Culture,” was selected, on the other hand, in view of Constantinople’s essential role as Byzantine imperial capital soon after its foundation by the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great on 11 May 330. The aim of the symposium was to evaluate, from administrative, political, social, economic, and religious perspectives, the impact of the political power that spread out from the Great Palace and, as of the twelfth century, from the Blachernai Palace to the rest of the empire, and to investigate the reflections of this power in the cultural sphere.
Presented in this volume are thirty out of the forty papers delivered at the Second International Sevgi Gönül Byzantine Studies Symposium. The papers have been grouped under the following four section headings: “Byzantine Palace Architecture,” “The Byzantine Court as the Center of Imperial Power,” “Ceremonies at the Court and in the City,” and “Court Culture and Visual Arts.”

Byzantium’s Other Empire

Antony Eastmond — Thu, 20 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Trebizond, that “long-anticipated city of the Komnenians with its soft and melodious name” to quote Jakob Fallmerayer, has long lured scholars, attracted by its unique combination of Byzantine familiarity and Anatolian foreignness. From 1204 to 1461 the city was at the heart of an empire that proudly proclaimed its inheritance of Byzantine power, but simultaneously stood apart from it; a “Greek Emirate” surrounded by Turkish and Caucasian states.

Focusing on the church of Hagia Sophia in Trebizond, with its unusual architecture, unique sculptural decoration and extraordinary wall paintings, Byzantium’s Other Empire: Trebizond reveals the ways in which these tensions were expressed in public in the monuments of the empire. It draws extensively on the photograph and drawing archives of David and June Winfield, held in the Conway Library at the Courtauld Institute of Art. The Winfields restored the church from 1959-1963, in a project masterminded by David Talbot Rice. Here, Talbot Rice’s photographs from 1929, as well as those of other early scholars who visited Trabzon, notably Gabriel Millet in 1893 and Fyodor Uspenskii in 1916-1917 are presented. These scholars
recorded the city, its palaces, churches and monasteries. They provide glimpses of a lost empire and of the city of Trebizond which has been transformed in the decades since their visits. This volume also includes the first published translation into English of the fourteenth-century chronicle of Michael Panaretos.

Promoting All-Round Education for Girls

Patricia P. K. Chiu — Thu, 20 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Promoting All-Round Education for Girls presents the history of Heep Yunn School, one of the oldest girls’ schools in Hong Kong. Amalgamated from two British mission schools founded in the 1880s for destitute girls and daughters of Christian parents, and renamed Heep Yunn School in 1936, the institution has witnessed and responded to the dramatic changes of Hong Kong over the years. By the time of the outbreak of the Second World War, Heep Yunn had expanded to offer a full Chinese middle school course for girls based upon Christian principles of all-round education. The school expanded rapidly after the war and became a bilingual institution to meet the demand for English language education. Eventually English would become the primary medium of instruction soon after the introduction of nine-year universal education in 1978. Heep Yunn strives to provide a full-fledged all-round education in the midst of political and education reforms. The school opted to switch its status from a government-aided school to a direct subsidy scheme school in the early 2010s so as to retain a larger degree of autonomy. This history of Heep Yunn School documents the concerted efforts of the school council, staff, students, alumnae, and parents to achieve the evolving visions of Christian education for girls as Hong Kong grew from a colonial trading port to a global financial centre in the twenty-first century.

Information Now, Second Edition

Matt Upson; Holly Luetkenhaus; C. Michael Hall; Kevin Cannon — Thu, 20 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Today’s information environments are complex, and learning how to find relevant and reliable information online, as well as how to fact-check and evaluate that information, is essential. Enter Information Now, a graphic guide that uses humor and sequential art to teach students about information, research, and the web.

This second edition of the popular guide incorporates critical analysis of information systems, asking students to think about the biases and problems in how databases and search engines are designed and used. It also addresses how different populations of people are disproportionately affected by the algorithmic biases built into information systems. And it includes revised critical thinking exercises in every chapter.

Written and revised by library professionals, Information Now is a fun and insightful tool for high school and college students, writers, and anyone wanting to improve their research skills.

Colours of Congo

Florian Knothe; Estela Ibáñez-García; Thomas Bayet — Thu, 20 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

A richly illustrated study on the history and reception of twentieth-century Congolese painting.

A strong international interest in Congolese art has grown steadily since the founding of Belgium’s Royal Museum of Central Africa in the early 1900s, which was the first museum to institutionalize its study. In order to represent the chronological development of painting studios from Elisabethville to Brazzaville, this book is organized into three distinct sections. The first section provides a general introduction to Congolese art, focusing on the time period following the initial colonial encounter, and the second section discusses the painting studio established by Pierre Romain-Desfossés. The book concludes with a look at the schools of Laurent Moonens and Pierre Lods, highlighting the development of the various institutions that brought European art materials to the Congo and established techniques that subsequently popularized Congolese artists in Europe. This book is certain to draw attention to a significant area of African art history that continues to arouse popular interest.

Chaucer and Italian Culture

Helen Fulton — Wed, 19 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Chaucerian scholarship has long been intrigued by the nature and consequences of Chaucer’s exposure to Italian culture during his professional visits to Italy in the 1370s. In the eight chapters of Chaucer and Italian Culture, leading scholars take a fresh and holistic view of Chaucer’s engagement with Italian cultural practice, moving beyond the traditional ‘sources and analogues’ approach to reveal the varied strands of Italian literature, art, politics, and intellectual life which permeate Chaucer’s work. Each chapter unfolds, from a different lens, links between Chaucerian texts and Italian intellectual models, including poetics, choreography, visual art, classicism, diplomacy, and prophecy. Echoes of Petrarch, Dante, and Boccaccio reverberate throughout the book, across a rich and diverse landscape of Italian cultural legacies. Taken together, these eight chapters cover a wide range of theories and references while sharing a united understanding of the rich impact of Italian culture on Chaucer’s narrative art.

Arthur of the Low Countries

Bart Besamusca; Frank Brandsma — Wed, 19 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

In the medieval Low Countries (nowadays Belgium and the Netherlands), Arthurian romance flourished in the 13th and 14th centuries. The Middle Dutch poets translated French material), but also created romances of their own. The Arthur of the Low Countries provides a ‘state of the art’ overview of the Dutch Arthurian material and the research it has provoked. The region is a crossroads between the French and Germanic spheres of influence and the movement of texts and manuscripts (West to East) reflects that position, as chapters on the historical context, the French material and the Germanic Arthuriana of the Rhinelands reveal. Three chapters, on the translations of French verse texts, the translations of French prose texts, and on the indigenous romances, form the core of the book, enriched by chapters on the manuscripts, on Arthur in the chronicles and on the post-medieval Arthurian material.

Global TV Horror

Stacey Abbott; Lorna Jowett — Wed, 19 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

It can have escaped no-one’s attention that the horror genre has become one of the most popular genres of TV drama, with the global success and fandom surrounding The Walking Dead, Supernatural, and Stranger Things. Horror has, of course, always had a truly international reach, and nowhere is this more apparent than on television, as explored in this provocative new collection that looks at series from across the globe and considers how horror manifests in different cultural and broadcast/streaming contexts. Gathering expertise from established scholars and new voices, Global TV Horror examines historical and contemporary TV horror from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Iran, Japan, Spain, New Zealand, USA, and the UK. This collection deepens the discussion of television horror by offering fresh perspectives, examining new shows, and excavating new cultural histories, rendering what has become so familiar—horror on television—unfamiliar yet again.

Performances of Sacred Spaces

Silvia Battista — Wed, 19 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

This collection offers a multi-layered, contemporary analysis of sacred sites and their practices, politics, and ecologies. Presenting practice-as-research accounts alongside theoretical analysis, this multidisciplinary volume brings together religious studies, philosophy, anthropology, and performance studies. By focusing on practice and performance rather than theology, it also expands the notion of sacred places to contexts beyond institutionalized religion.

The questions investigated are: what is a sacred place? Is a place inherently sacred or does it become sacred? Is it a paradigm, a real location, an imaginary place, a projected condition, a charged setting, an enhanced perception? What kind of practices and processes allow the emergence of a sacred place in human perception? And what is its function in contemporary societies?

In exploring these questions and more, Silvia Battista challenges the conventional understanding of sacred places in contemporary contexts and sparks lively new debate on the roles of religiosity and spirituality.

Tinker to Evers to Chance

David Rapp — Wed, 19 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Their names were chanted, crowed, and cursed. Alone they were a shortstop, a second baseman, and a first baseman. But together they were an unstoppable force. Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, and Frank Chance came together in rough-and-tumble early twentieth-century Chicago and soon formed the defensive core of the most formidable team in big league baseball, leading the Chicago Cubs to four National League pennants and two World Series championships from 1906 to 1910. At the same time, baseball was transforming from small-time diversion into a nationwide sensation. Americans from all walks of life became infected with “baseball fever,” a phenomenon of unprecedented enthusiasm and social impact. The national pastime was coming of age.

Tinker to Evers to Chance examines this pivotal moment in American history, when baseball became the game we know today. Each man came from a different corner of the country and brought a distinctive local culture with him: Evers from the Irish-American hothouse of Troy, New York; Tinker from the urban parklands of Kansas City, Missouri; Chance from the verdant fields of California’s Central Valley. The stories of these early baseball stars shed unexpected light not only on the evolution of baseball and on the enthusiasm of its players and fans all across America, but also on the broader convulsions transforming the US into a confident new industrial society. With them emerged a truly national culture.

This iconic trio helped baseball reinvent itself, but their legend has largely been relegated to myths and barroom trivia. David Rapp’s engaging history resets the story and brings these men to life again, enabling us to marvel anew at their feats on the diamond. It’s a rare look at one of baseball’s first dynasties in action.

Lady Ranelagh

Michelle DiMeo — Wed, 19 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

For centuries, historians have speculated about the life of Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh. Dominant depictions show her either as a maternal figure to her younger brother Robert Boyle, one of the most significant scientists of his day, or as a patroness of the European correspondence network now known as the Hartlib circle—but neither portrait captures the depth of her intellect or the range of her knowledge and influence.

Philosophers, mathematicians, politicians, and religious authorities sought her opinion on everything from decimalizing the currency to producing Hebrew grammars. She practiced medicine alongside distinguished male physicians, treating some of the most elite patients in London. Her medical recipes, political commentaries, and testimony concerning the philosophers’ stone gained international circulation. She was an important influence on Boyle and a formidable thinker in her own right.

Drawing from a wealth of new archival sources, Michelle DiMeo fills out Lady Ranelagh’s legacy in the context of a historically sensitive and nuanced interpretation of gender, science, and religion. The book re-creates the intellectual life of one of the most respected and influential women in seventeenth-century Europe, revealing how she managed to gain the admiration of diverse contemporaries, effect social change, and shape contemporary science.

Nature Fast and Nature Slow

Nicholas P. Money — Wed, 19 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

This book is a vision of biology set within the entire timescale of the universe. It is about the timing of life, from microsecond movements to evolutionary changes over millions of years. Human consciousness is riveted to seconds, but a split-second time delay in perception means that we are unaware of anything until it has already happened. We live in the very recent past. Over longer timescales, this book examines the lifespans of the oldest organisms, prospects for human life extension, the evolution of whales and turtles, and the explosive beginning of life four billion years ago.

With its poetry, social commentary, and humor, this book will appeal to everyone interested in the natural world.

Spare the Rod

Campbell F. Scribner; Bryan R. Warnick — Mon, 17 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Spare the Rod argues against how school discipline is increasingly integrated with prisons and policing, instead they argue for an approach to that aligns with the moral community that schools could and should be.

In Spare the Rod, historian Campbell F. Scribner and philosopher Bryan R. Warnick investigate the history and philosophy of America’s punishment and discipline practices in schools. To delve into this controversial subject, they first ask questions of meaning. How have concepts of discipline and punishment in schools changed over time? What purposes are they supposed to serve? And what can they tell us about our assumptions about education? They then explore the justifications. Are public school educators ever justified in punishing or disciplining students? Are discipline and punishment necessary for students’ moral education, or do they fundamentally have no place in education at all? If some form of punishment is justified in schools, what ethical guidelines should be followed?

The authors argue that as schools have grown increasingly bureaucratic over the last century, formalizing disciplinary systems and shifting from physical punishments to forms of spatial or structural punishment such as in-school suspension, school discipline has not only come to resemble the operation of prisons or policing, but has grown increasingly integrated with those institutions. These changes and structures are responsible for the school-to-prison pipeline. They show that these shifts disregard the unique status of schools as spaces of moral growth and community oversight, and are incompatible with the developmental environment of education. What we need, they argue, is an approach to discipline and punishment that fits with the sort of moral community that schools could and should be.

Sorting Sexualities

Stefan Vogler — Mon, 17 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

In Sorting Sexualities, Stefan Vogler deftly unpacks the politics of the techno-legal classification of sexuality in the United States. His study focuses specifically on state classification practices around LGBTQ people seeking asylum in the United States and sexual offenders being evaluated for carceral placement—two situations where state actors must determine individuals’ sexualities. Though these legal settings are diametrically opposed—one a punitive assessment, the other a protective one—they present the same question: how do we know someone’s sexuality?

In this rich ethnographic study, Vogler reveals how different legal arenas take dramatically different approaches to classifying sexuality and use those classifications to legitimate different forms of social control. By delving into the histories behind these diverging classification practices and analyzing their contemporary reverberations, Vogler shows how the science of sexuality is far more central to state power than we realize.

Machines of the Mind

Katharine Breen — Mon, 17 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

In Machines of the Mind, Katharine Breen proposes that medieval personifications should be understood neither as failed novelistic characters nor as instruments of heavy-handed didacticism. She argues that personifications are instead powerful tools for thought that help us to remember and manipulate complex ideas, testing them against existing moral and political paradigms. Specifically, different types of medieval personification should be seen as corresponding to positions in the rich and nuanced medieval debate over universals. Breen identifies three different types of personification—Platonic, Aristotelian, and Prudentian—that gave medieval writers a surprisingly varied spectrum with which to paint their characters.

Through a series of new readings of major authors and works, from Plato to Piers Plowman, Breen illuminates how medieval personifications embody the full range of positions between philosophical realism and nominalism, varying according to the convictions of individual authors and the purposes of individual works. Recalling Gregory the Great’s reference to machinae mentis (machines of the mind), Breen demonstrates that medieval writers applied personification with utility and subtlety, employing methods of personification as tools that serve different functions. Machines of the Mind offers insight for medievalists working at the crossroads of religion, philosophy, and literature, as well as for scholars interested in literary character-building and gendered relationships among characters, readers, and texts beyond the Middle Ages.

Pictorial Silks

Kikki Lam — Mon, 17 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

A beautiful showcase of silks from the Qing dynasty to the mid-twentieth century.

Prized by Chinese and foreign merchants as an essential commodity along a vast trade network, silk served multiple roles throughout the ancient world: as fabric for garments, as a form of currency and method of tax payment, and as a medium and subject matter for artists and the literati. Over the centuries, silk fabrics have remained synonymous with beauty and are still intertwined throughout Chinese art and literature. As showcased in this highly illustrated book, the Hong Kong University Museum and Art Gallery's silk textile collection encompasses a diverse range of subjects and formats that include hanging scrolls, framed panels, banners, and robes from the Qing dynasty to the mid-twentieth century. Each artwork exemplifies the sophisticated craftsmanship of the artisan, as well as the collective stories of the Qing dynasty’s textile industry.

Burke Collection of Italian Manuscript Paintings

Sandra Hindman; Federica Toniolo; Christopher De Hamel — Sun, 16 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

The outstanding Burke Collection of Italian miniatures, which is housed in the Special Collections and University Archives of the Stanford Libraries, has been growing for more than twenty years. It includes manuscript leaves, cuttings, and codices by many of the greatest Italian artists of the medieval and Renaissance periods. Works in the collection range in date from the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries, comprising more than forty miniatures from thirty-five artists representing thirteen different regions of Italy. They are showcased here through three hundred stunning images, accompanied by an introduction by medieval manuscript expert Christopher de Hamel.

Soutine / de Kooning

Simonetta Fraquelli; Claire Bernardi — Sun, 16 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

“I’ve always been crazy about Soutine—all of his paintings,” said Willem de Kooning in 1977, speaking about Lithuanian artist Chaim Soutine (1893–1943). Of all the abstract expressionists, de Kooning was the only one who continued to praise Soutine throughout his career and to credit him with an influence on his work. But how much was de Kooning’s approach impacted by Soutine?

Soutine / de Kooning’s dramatic juxtaposition of the two artists reveals Soutine’s decisive influence on the development of de Kooning’s art. The expressive force of Soutine’s painting, coupled with his image as an “accursed” artist struggling with the vicissitudes and excesses of bohemian life in Paris during the interwar years, held a powerful sway over a new generation of postwar painters in the United States—it was during these years that de Kooning matured his own personal form of expressionism.

This lavishly illustrated book traces the development of Soutine’s influence, paying particular attention to the posthumous retrospective of Soutine’s work that was held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1950.

Advanced School of Collective Feeling

Matthew Kennedy; Nile Greenberg — Sat, 15 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Modern architecture’s evolution during the interwar period represents one of the most radical turns in design history. While the role of new materials and production modes in this development is beyond dispute, of equal importance was the emergence of a distinctly modern physical culture. Largely unacknowledged today, new conceptions of body and movement had a profound influence on how architects designed not only public spaces like the gymnasium or the stadium, but also domestic spaces. Hannes Meyer, Swiss modernist and director of Bauhaus in Dessau from 1928 to 1930, colorfully encapsulated this phenomenon in his 1926 essay The New World as “the advanced school of collective feeling.”

In their new book, Matthew Kennedy and Nile Greenberg explore the impact of physical culture during the 1920s and ’30s on the thinking of some of modern architecture’s most influential figures. Using archival photographs, diagrams, and redrawn plans, they reconstruct an obscure constellation of domestic projects by Marcel Breuer, Charlotte Perriand, Richard Neutra, Franco Albini, and others. They argue that the impact of sport on modern architecture was a discursive phenomenon, best understood by going beyond a mere typological reading of the stadium or the gymnasium, to an examination of how gymnastic equipment and other trappings of physical culture were folded into domestic space. The featured houses, apartments, and exhibitions demonstrate their architects’ response to, and attempt to dictate, the relationship between body, and the spaces and objects that give it shape.

Faces

Walter Moser — Sat, 15 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Between 1918 and 1933, artists in the Weimar Republic reinvented photography. Though photographers to that point had generally aimed at capturing their subjects’ personalities, now they began to understand the face as a vehicle for their own ideas. Through the portrait, artists explored concepts as diverse as Germany’s political transformation, modernist aesthetics, and emerging feminist theory. Battling over the seemingly straightforward composition of the portrait, these artists expanded the aesthetic capacity of photography for all time. Beginning with Helmar Lerski’s groundbreaking series “Metamorphosis Through Light,” Faces features more than two hundred photographs from a variety of well-known and overlooked artists in this radical period.

Featured artists include Gertrud Arndt, Marta Astfalck-Vietz,Herbert Bayer, Irene Bayer, Aenne Biermann, Erwin Blumenfeld, Max Burchartz, Suse Byk, Paul Citroen, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Andreas Feininger, Werner David Feist, Trude Fleischmann, Jozef Glogowski, Paul Edmund Hahn, Lotte Jacobi, Grit Kallin-Fischer, Edmund Kesting, Rudolf Koppitz, Kurt Kranz, Anneliese Kretschmer, Germaine Krull, Erna Lendvai-Dircksen, Helmar Lerski, László Moholy-Nagy, Lucia Moholy, Oskar Nerlinger, Erich Retzlaff, Hans Richter, Leni Riefenstahl, Franz Roh, Werner Rohde, Ilse Salberg, August Sander, Franz Xaver Setzer, Robert Siodmak, Anton Stankowski, Edgar G. Ulmer, Umbo, Robert Wiene, and Willy Zielke.

Architectural History and Globalized Knowledge

Michael Gnehm; Sonja Hildebrand — Sat, 15 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Gottfried Semper’s years in exile in London (1850–1855) were a time of highly inspirational experiences. The London of the first World Expo offered the German architect an immense trove of objects for study and an intellectual surrounding which provided the basis for his innovative cultural-history-based theory of architecture. That revolutionary period saw upheavals not only in the realms of politics and society, but also art and science. Globalization of knowledge was thereby a particularly distinctive phenomenon, especially in the capital of the British Empire. The texts extend beyond a focus on Semper as an individual to consider his work in designing, teaching and writing architecture based on his historical, architectural and disciplinary surroundings.

Paulo Nazareth

Alex Gartenfeld; Gean Moreno — Sat, 15 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

The first exhaustive catalog of one of the most important young global artists reckoning with colonialism and its afterlives.

Published to mark Paulo Nazareth’s first solo US museum show, Paulo Nazareth: Melee presents an engaging and timely look at the artist’s heterogeneous work. The exhibition, held at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami in 2019, explored how Nazareth’s work engages the complex colonial and racial histories of the Americas. An artist who works across media, Nazareth uses performance and sculpture to critique the colonial experience and its afterlives across the Americas, especially in Brazil. His performances and installations draw from his African and Indigenous heritage to highlight marginalized historical legacies, progressive political figures, non-Western worldviews, and potential methods of non-exploitative living and relating to others. Nazareth’s work assumes a new poignancy in light of the racial reckoning that our historical moment demands. This beautifully produced volume contains more than one hundred color illustrations in addition to newly commissioned scholarship. Paulo Nazareth: Melee is the first exhaustive catalog of Nazareth’s work, solidifying his place as one of today’s most important global artists.

Manet to Bracquemond:

Jean-Paul Bouillon — Sat, 15 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

With his radical usage of etching, painter Félix Bracquemond (1833–1914) influenced his contemporary Édouard Manet (1832–1883) significantly, an influence that is evident in Manet’s oeuvre. The relationship between the two artists, however, was even closer than their art reveals. As the countless letters sent by Manet to Bracquemond—unknown until surfacing at a sale in Paris in 2016—prove, the friendship between the two men was more profound than mere artistic influence.

The letters, collected here for the first time, are presented in their original French and edited by Jean-Paul Bouillon, whose lifelong occupation with Bracquemond’s life and work enabled him to situate the mostly undated letters in their proper time and context. To make these written documents more tangible, an introduction explores the friendship between the two men and highlights the principal subjects and themes around which the correspondence revolves, and the meticulous text is accompanied by nearly fifty color reproductions of the artwork referenced in the letters.

Many of the letters attest to the frequent, at times daily, contacts between the two men, who met in Manet’s studio and at dinners with Manet’s wife and mother. Others concern joint projects, such as the illustration of Émile Zola’s brochure issued on the occasion of Manet’s solo exhibition of 1867. After more than a century of intense scholarship, our knowledge of Manet still presents many gaps. The correspondence presented in Manet to Bracquemond proves an essential new resource for our understanding of the life and work of the artist.

Archetypes

Reto Geiser; David K. Ross; Sky Goodden; Ted Kesik; Peter Sealy — Sat, 15 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Archetypes features a recent series by Canadian artist David K. Ross, who works at the interface of photography, film, and installation. His images of architectural mock-ups, staged at night with dramatic lighting that isolates structures from their surroundings, demonstrate how these objects have become a charged form of proto-architecture. They also change how we view the practice of architecture by documenting and framing unseen aspects of its emergence. Built at full scale, these architectural fragments—to be removed from construction sites as buildings near completion—ensure that a project can be executed exactly to design, and they provide clients with a simulation of a building that leaves little space for speculation. The task of mock-up documentation is usually left to architects and contractors, who take quick snapshots for their reference during site visits.

Archetypes is the first-ever photographic compilation of this type, reaching beyond a mere artistic record of building technologies and typologies. Instead, the book offers an effective platform to consider what it means to pre-construct fragments of buildings in all their complexity. Published alongside Ross’s images are four essays framing the historical, technological, and civic significance of the mock-up. Archetypes offers an intellectual and aesthetic reference for a wide range of audiences from professionals in architecture to anyone interested in photography and art, or fascinated by arcane aspects of building construction.

Shahzia Sikander

Sadia Abbas; Jan Howard — Sat, 15 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Pioneering Pakistani American artist Shahzia Sikander is one of the most influential artists working today. Sikander is widely celebrated for expanding and subverting miniature painting to explore gender roles and sexuality, cultural identity, racial narratives, and colonial and postcolonial histories. This lively volume presents her powerful early work, created between 1987 and 2003, from South Asian, West Asian, and Western perspectives, illuminating new understandings for a wide audience. Charting her early development as an artist in Lahore and the United States, the book reclaims her critical role in bringing miniature painting into dialogue with contemporary art, especially in Pakistan, international art discourse of the 1990s, and contemporary global practices and debates.

Julia Avramidis

Maria Schneider — Sat, 15 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

The pictures created by contemporary artist Julia Avramidis are never conclusively explicable—there is no simple solution to her riddles and secrets. Despite their apparent abstraction, her collages—seemingly thrown together in haste—permit us to recognize life deep down, hidden beneath the layers of materials. In Avramidis’s work, plaster and gauze are pushed together into folds and forms on surfaces and grids. Her landscapes and seascapes, painted in a lyrically abstract and sometimes calligraphic style, are not real, but rather Arcadian and expansive, as if from another time. Initially abstract, on closer viewing human and bird-like figures begin to stand out with increasing clarity, and start to tell their stories. This volume features full-color reproductions of key works from throughout the artist’s career and will be the perfect introduction to this fascinating Austrian artist.

Cremator

Ladislav Fuks; Eva M. Kandler; Rajendra A. Chitnis — Sat, 15 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

“The devil’s neatest trick is to persuade us that he doesn’t exist.”—Giovanni Papini

It is a maxim that both rings true in our contemporary world and pervades this tragicomic novel of anxiety and evil set amid the horrors of World War II. As a gay man living in a totalitarian, patriarchal society, noted Czech writer Ladislav Fuks identified with the tragic fate of his Jewish countrymen during the Holocaust. The Cremator arises from that shared experience. Fuks presents a grotesque, dystopian world in which a dutiful father, following the strict logic of his time, liberates the souls of his loved ones by destroying their bodies—first the dead, then the living. As we watch this very human character—a character who never ceases to believe that he is doing good—become possessed by an inhuman ideology, the evil that initially permeates the novel’s atmosphere concretizes in this familiar family man. A study of the totalitarian mindset with stunning resonance for today, The Cremator is a disturbing, powerful work of literary horror.

Golden Horde

Richard Braude; Richard Braude — Sat, 15 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

The Golden Horde is a definitive work on the Italian revolutionary movements of the 1960s and ’70s. An anthology of texts and fragments woven together with an original commentary, the volume widens our understanding of the full complexity and richness of this period of radical thought and practice. The book covers the generational turbulence of Italy’s postwar period, the transformations of Italian capitalism, the new analyses by worker-focused intellectuals, the student movement of 1968, the Hot Autumn of 1969, the extra-parliamentary groups of the early 1970s, the Red Brigades, the formation of a radical women’s movement, the development of Autonomia, and the build-up to the watershed moment of the spontaneous political movement of 1977. Far from being merely a handbook of political history, The Golden Horde also sheds light on two decades of Italian culture, including the newspapers, songs, journals, festivals, comics, and philosophy that these movements produced. The book features writings by Sergio Bologna, Umberto Eco, Elvio Fachinelli, Lea Melandri, Danilo Montaldi, Toni Negri, Raniero Panzieri, Franco Piperno, Rossana Rossanda, Paolo Virno, and others, as well as an in-depth introduction by translator Richard Braude outlining the work’s composition and development.

Endless,

Karen Reimer — Sat, 15 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

For over fifteen years, Karen Reimer has dedicated her artistic life to reconsidering modernist ideals and minimalist embodiment through the intriguing quirks of handmade and everyday objects. Endless, offers over seventy-five gorgeous reproductions of Reimer’s past works, with a particular focus on her new architecture–related project, Endless Set. With this installation, Reimer uses appliquéd pillowcases to connect the domesticity of hand-sewn fabric to the infiniteness of the prime number sequence. Endless, also includes essays from Lauren Berlant and Judith Russi Kirshner, two of the most respected voices in the art, architecture, and contemporary theory fields.

Architectures of Embodiment

Alex Arteaga — Sat, 15 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

This book was originated within the research environment Architecture of Embodiment, which inquires into architecture from an enactivist perspective and through aesthetic practices. This research environment does not primarily aim to formulate answers to its main research question—how does architecture condition the emergence of sense?—but to provide the adequate conceptual, methodological, and communicative conditions to address it. Ultimately, it aims to destabilize its objects of research in order to disclose new intelligibilities of the issues under inquiry. In this sense, Architecture of Embodiment, as an environment, intends to fulfill a fundamental cognitive function of research through aesthetic practices.

Architectures of Embodiment is a constellation of coexisting autonomous artifacts: texts by Alex Arteaga, Mika Elo, Ana García Varas, Lidia Gasperoni, Jonathan Hale, Susanne Hauser, Dieter Mersch and Gerard Vilar in dialogue with one another through comments and comments on the comments. It is conceived as a dialogical research dispositive: an invitation to participate in an open-ended process of research within a growing ecology of research practices.

Here Is a Game We Could Play

Jenny Bitner — Sat, 15 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

A dreamlike novel set in Pennsylvania in the 1990s, Here Is a Game We Could Play is the story of Claudia, an intelligent eccentric trapped in the rundown industrial town she grew up in—a place plagued with troubling memories and hidden threats. Seeking escape from tedium, loneliness, and her obsessive fear of poisoning, Claudia retreats into books. . . and into a fantasy life with her perfect lover, to whom she addresses letters about her life, all the while imagining outlandish sexual scenarios.

In each fantasy, her lover takes a different form, ranging from a prison guard in a world where metaphor is forbidden, to a more-than-brotherly Hansel from the Grimms’ fairy tale, to a tentacled mind-reading space alien. All share a desire for a deep intimacy that eludes Claudia, even as she forms new real-life relationships and reconsiders her sexual identity—building a rapport with an elderly volunteer at the library, striking up a friendship with a wily temp at her dead-end job, and embarking on a passionate affair with Rose, the town’s new librarian. When paranoia threatens to ruin her relationship with Rose, Claudia is forced not only to combat her anxiety but to face the unresolved trauma in her past—the disappearance of her father on a night she has long repressed.

Funny, dark, inventive, and moving, Here Is a Game We Could Play is an original debut novel recalling the work of Aimee Bender, Angela Carter, Rebecca Brown, and Margaret Atwood.

Reading Marx

Reiner Schürmann; Malte Fabian Rauch; Nicolas Schneider — Sat, 15 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

In this book, Reiner Schürmann argues that what is most original about Marx is his philosophical axis. Extending his highly original engagement with the history of philosophy, Schürmann draws out this axis, which determines and localizes his theories of history, social relations, and economy. Whereas Marxist readings of Marx conceive history, classes, and social relations as primary realities, Schürmann brings out a radically immanent understanding of praxis that introduces multiplicity. This edition is complemented by a reprinting of Schürmann’s Anti-Humanism essay, in which he reads Marx alongside Nietzsche and Heidegger as spelling out the dissociation of being and action. Reading Marx showcases underappreciated facets of Schürmann’s work and offers an interpretation of Marx that resonates with the readings of Jacques Derrida, Michel Henry, Antonio Negri, and François Laruelle.

L’anarchie – pour ainsi dire

David Graeber — Sat, 15 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

David Graeber n’est pas seulement l’un des plus importants penseurs vivants. Il est aussi l’un des plus influents, mais, au contraire de bien d’intellectuels « engagés », l’un des très rares à avoir fait preuve d’une efficacité militante à répercussion mondiale. Nul n’a peut-être autant « impacté » sur la gauche internationale que cet homme.Tant par ses grands concepts comme ceux de la dette, de la bureaucratie ou des bullshit jobs, que par son implication cruciale dans le mouvement Occupy Wall Street, qui lui a valu un exil quasi forcé de son pays d’origine, il est peut-être l’intellectuel vivant à offrir le plus de pistes crédibles pour la sortie du capitalisme.

Se revendiquant depuis toujours anarchiste, dans ce livre d'entretiens avec Assia Turquier Zauberman et Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Graeber parle tant sur l’histoire de l’anarchie que sur sa pertinence contemporaine et sur son avenir; tant sur les liens qui unissent l’anthropologie à l’anarchisme qu’aux « traces ADN » de celui-ci dans le mouvement d’OWS ou dans celui des gilets jaunes; sur la signification de l’éthique anarchiste non seulement dans sa portée politique, mais esthétique et artistique, sexuelle et amoureuse, etc.
Avec une verve étonnante de vivacité, de drôlerie et d’érudition, le présent livre contribue à redéfinir les contours de ce que pourrait être, comme le disait Kropotkine, une « morale anarchiste » aujourd’hui.

Northern Garden Symphony

Cyndie Warbelow — Sat, 15 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Put the power of a garden planning pro to work for you! Northern Garden Symphony offers explanations and illustrations of the sequential blooms of ornamental perennials as a tool for garden design. The idea of sequential blooming, Fairbanks-famous author Cyndie Warbelow explains, is similar to the workings of a musical symphony, in which at least a portion of its stunning constituent plants is blooming at all times, even though they are not all blooming together. Given that perennial plants bloom for limited and specific periods of time during the growing season, Warbelow notes, it is crucial that a garden be designed with sequential blooming in mind. Yet this concept can often overwhelm and discourage gardeners.

Using narrative, figures, photographs, and a groundbreaking set of layout charts that can aid even the most experienced horticulturist in the process of flower garden planning, Northern Garden Symphony gives gardeners the tools they need to be a successful northern perennial gardener.

Singapore’s Building Stock

Sat, 15 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Singapore is undergoing rapid urbanization, including the construction of new buildings and infrastructure and the renovation of existing structures. These physical changes become interwoven within the “built fabric” of the evolving city, reflecting an ever-changing social and cultural landscape. At the same time, the ecological systems of the city interact with these changes and themselves change over time.
A thorough and visually compelling account of Singapore’s rapid urban development, Singapore’s Building Stock analyzes the city’s transformation, drawing on a wealth of sources, including historic maps and surveys, aerial photographs, planning documents, and contemporary building surveys. The book offers three perspectives in the form of different spatial scales—the territory, the district, and the building—and insightful contributions by the books editors, Uta Hassler and Iris Belle, and other renowned experts on art, architecture, and urbanization.

Vindicatio Aristotelis

John Monfasani — Fri, 14 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

The Greek philosopher George of Trebizond started the Plato-Aristotle Controversy of the Renaissance with two works published in Rome in the late 1450s. The first was his Protectio Aristotelis Problematum (The Protection of Aristotle’s Problemata), which was as much a treatise on translation as it was a polemic in defense of Aristotle. The second was his Comparatio Philosophorum Platonis et Aristotelis (A Comparison of the Philosophers Plato and Aristotle).

This publication is the critical edition. It analyze the background, themes, and arguments of the works, as well as offering the texts themselves in new English translations.

Bettering Humanomics

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey — Fri, 14 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Economic historian Deirdre Nansen McCloskey has distinguished herself through her writing on the Great Enrichment and the betterment of the poor—not just materially but spiritually. In Bettering Humanomics she continues her intellectually playful yet rigorous analysis with a focus on humans rather than the institutions. Going against the grain of contemporary neo-institutional and behavioral economics which privilege observation over understanding, she asserts her vision of “humanomics,” which draws on the work of Bart Wilson, Vernon Smith, and most prominently, Adam Smith. She argues for an economics that uses a comprehensive understanding of human action beyond behaviorism.

McCloskey clearly articulates her points of contention with believers in “imperfections,” from Samuelson to Stiglitz, claiming that they have neglected scientific analysis in their haste to diagnose the ills of the system. In an engaging and erudite manner, she reaffirms the global successes of market-tested betterment and calls for empirical investigation that advances from material incentives to an awareness of the human within historical and ethical frameworks. Bettering Humanomics offers a critique of contemporary economics and a proposal for an economics as a better human science.

Four Shakespearean Period Pieces

Margreta de Grazia — Fri, 14 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

In the study of Shakespeare since the eighteenth century, four key concepts have served to situate Shakespeare in history: chronology, periodization, secularization, and anachronism.

Yet recent theoretical work has called for their reappraisal. Anachronisms, previously condemned as errors in the order of time, are being hailed as alternatives to that order. Conversely chronology and periods, its mainstays, are now charged with having distorted the past they have been entrusted to represent, and secularization, once considered the driving force of the modern era, no longer holds sway over the past or the present.

In light of this reappraisal, can Shakespeare studies continue unshaken? This is the question Four Shakespearean Period Pieces takes up, devoting a chapter to each term: on the rise of anachronism, the chronologizing of the canon, the staging of plays “in period,” and the use of Shakespeare in modernity’s secularizing project.

To read these chapters is to come away newly alert to how these fraught concepts have served to regulate the canon’s afterlife. Margreta de Grazia does not entirely abandon them but deftly works around and against them to offer fresh insights on the reading, editing, and staging of the author at the heart of our literary canon.

Sorting Sexualities

Stefan Vogler — Fri, 14 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Routine Crisis

Sarah Muir — Fri, 14 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Argentina, once heralded as the future of capitalist progress, has a long history of economic volatility. In 2001–2002, a financial crisis led to its worst economic collapse, precipitating a dramatic currency devaluation, the largest sovereign default in world history, and the flight of foreign capital. Protests and street blockades punctuated a moment of profound political uncertainty, epitomized by the rapid succession of five presidents in four months. Since then, Argentina has fought economic fires on every front, from inflation to the cost of utilities and depressed industrial output. When things clearly aren't working, when the constant churning of booms and busts makes life almost unlivable, how does our deeply compromised order come to seem so inescapable? How does critique come to seem so blunt, even as crisis after crisis appears on the horizon? What are the lived effects of that sense of inescapability?

Anthropologist Sarah Muir offers a cogent meditation on the limits of critique at this historical moment, drawing on deep experience in Argentina but reflecting on a truly global condition. If we feel things are being upended in a manner that is ongoing, tumultuous, and harmful, what would we need to do—and what would we need to give up—to usher in a revitalized critique for today's world? Routine Crisis is an original provocation and a challenge to think beyond the limits of exhaustion and reimagine a form of criticism for the twenty-first century.

To Zenzi

Robert L. Shuster — Thu, 13 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

To Zenzi is the extraordinary story of Tobias Koertig’s odyssey through the apocalypse of Berlin in 1945. An orphaned thirteen-year-old who loves to draw, Tobias is coerced into joining the German youth army in the last desperate weeks of the war. Mistaken for a hero on the Eastern Front, he receives an Iron Cross from Hitler himself, who discovers the boy’s cartoons and appoints Tobias to sketch pictures of the ruined city.

Shuttling between the insanity of the Führer’s bunker and the chaotic streets, Tobias must contend with a scheming Martin Bormann, a deceitful deserter, the Russian onslaught, and his own compounding despair—all while falling for Zenzi, a girl of Jewish descent (a mischling) who relays secret news of death camps and convinces Tobias to make a treacherous escape to the Americans.

With thrilling risks in plotting and prose, with moments of pathos and absurdity, Shuster richly conjures a mad, tragic world.

Petrarch and His Legacies

Ernesto Livorni; Jelena Todorovic — Wed, 12 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

This book gathers cutting-edge articles by prominent scholars reflecting on Petrarch’s poetry and his long legacy, from the Renaissance to the present day. The scholars engaged in this volume read Petrarch in the context of his own world and with a variety of theoretical and critical approaches, never overlooking the opportunity for an interdisciplinary reading that combines poetry and visual arts. The volume includes scholars from the United States and Europe (Italy, in particular), thus offering the opportunity to compare different theoretical approaches.

The articles in the second half of the volume celebrate Petrarch’s legacies beyond the historically fundamental Renaissance Petrarchism, while exploring the presence of Petrarch’s poetry in several cultural realities. The scholars also read Petrarch with necessary attention to new disciplines such as digital humanities. The richness of the volume lies in these innovative perusals of Petrarch’s works not only through the critical lens of dedicated scholars, but also through their readings of artists who throughout the centuries appreciated and revived Petrarch’s poetry in their own literary endeavors.

Measuring and Accounting for Innovation in the Twenty-First Century

Carol Corrado; Jonathan Haskel; Javier Miranda; Daniel Sichel — Wed, 12 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Measuring innovation is a challenging task, both for researchers and for national statisticians, and it is increasingly important in light of the ongoing digital revolution. National accounts and many other economic statistics were designed before the emergence of the digital economy and the growth in importance of intangible capital. They do not yet fully capture the wide range of innovative activity that is observed in modern economies. This volume examines how to measure innovation, track its effects on economic activity and on prices, and understand how it has changed the structure of production processes, labor markets, and organizational form and operation in business. The contributors explore new approaches to and data sources for measurement, such as collecting data for a particular innovation as opposed to a firm and using trademarks for tracking innovation. They also consider the connections between university-based R&D and business start-ups and the potential impacts of innovation on income distribution. The research suggests strategies for expanding current measurement frameworks to better capture innovative activity, including developing more detailed tracking of global value chains to identify innovation across time and space and expanding the measurement of innovation’s impacts on GDP in fields such as consumer content delivery and cloud computing.

Seeing Silicon Valley

Mary Beth Meehan; Fred Turner — Wed, 12 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Acclaimed photographer Mary Beth Meehan and Silicon Valley culture expert Fred Turner join forces to give us an unseen view of the heart of the tech world.

It’s hard to imagine a place more central to American mythology today than Silicon Valley. To outsiders, the region glitters with the promise of extraordinary wealth and innovation. But behind this image lies another Silicon Valley, one segregated by race, class, and nationality in complex and contradictory ways. Its beautiful landscape lies atop underground streams of pollutants left behind by decades of technological innovation, and while its billionaires live in compounds, surrounded by redwood trees and security fences, its service workers live in their cars.

With arresting photography and intimate stories, Seeing Silicon Valley makes this hidden world visible. Instead of young entrepreneurs striving for efficiency in minimalist corporate campuses, we see portraits of struggle—families displaced by an impossible real estate market, workers striving for a living wage, and communities harmed by environmental degradation. If the fate of Silicon Valley is the fate of America—as so many of its boosters claim—then this book gives us an unvarnished look into the future.

Immunization

Stuart Blume — Wed, 12 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

As the world pins its hope for the end of the coronavirus pandemic to the successful rollout of vaccines, this book offers a vital long view of such efforts—and our resistance to them.

At a time when vaccines are a vital tool in the fight against COVID-19 in all its various mutations, this hard-hitting book takes a longer historical perspective. It argues that globalization and cuts to healthcare have been eroding faith in the institutions producing and providing vaccines for more than thirty years. It tells the history of immunization from the work of early pioneers such as Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch through the eradication of smallpox in 1980, to the recent introduction of new kinds of genetically engineered vaccines. Immunization exposes the limits of public health authorities while suggesting how they can restore our confidence. Public health experts and all those considering vaccinations should read this timely history.

Integrations

Lawrence Blum; Zoë Burkholder — Wed, 12 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

The promise of a free, high-quality public education is supposed to guarantee every child a shot at the American dream. But our widely segregated schools mean that many children of color do not have access to educational opportunities equal to those of their white peers. In Integrations, historian Zoë Burkholder and philosopher Lawrence Blum investigate what this country’s long history of school segregation means for achieving just and equitable educational opportunities in the United States.

Integrations focuses on multiple marginalized groups in American schooling: African Americans, Native Americans, Latinxs, and Asian Americans. The authors show that in order to grapple with integration in a meaningful way, we must think of integration in the plural, both in its multiple histories and in the many possible definitions of and courses of action for integration. Ultimately, the authors show, integration cannot guarantee educational equality and justice, but it is an essential component of civic education that prepares students for life in our multiracial democracy.

Old English Tradition

Lindy Brady — Tue, 11 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Old English Tradition contains eighteen new essays by leading scholars in the field of Old English literary studies. The collection is centered around five key areas of research—Old English poetics, Anglo-Saxon Christianity, Beowulf, codicology, and early Anglo-Saxon studies—on which the work of scholar J. R. Hall, the volume’s honorand, has been influential over the course of his career.

The volume’s contents range from fresh insights on individual Old English poems such as The Wife’s Lament and Beowulf; new studies in Old English metrics and linguistics; codicological examinations of individual manuscripts; fresh editions of understudied texts; and innovative examinations of the role of early antiquarians in shaping the field of Old English literary studies as we know it today.

Silke Otto-Knapp

Tue, 11 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Los Angeles-based artist Silke Otto-Knapp has developed a painting practice characterized by its rigorous process and attentiveness to the medium’s possibilities. Using layers of black watercolor pigment, she builds up delicate surfaces, producing subtle variations in density and a powerful sense of atmosphere. Otto-Knapp’s exhibition at the Renaissance Society, In the waiting room, presented a new group of large-scale free-standing paintings in that evokes a multidimensional stage set. Some depict silhouetted bodies while others introduce scenic elements reminiscent of painted backdrops.

Offering a close look at the exhibition, this volume includes an array of illustrations, a conversation between curator Solveig Øvstebø and the artist, and four newly commissioned essays by Carol Armstrong, Darby English, Rachel Hann, and Catriona MacLeod, grounded in art history and performance studies.

Fighting Financial Crises

Gary B. Gorton; Ellis W. Tallman — Tue, 11 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

If you’ve got money in the bank, chances are you’ve never seriously worried about not being able to withdraw it. But there was a time in the United States, an era that ended just over a hundred years ago, when bank customers had to pay close attention to the solvency of the banking system, knowing they might have to rush to retrieve their savings before the bank collapsed. During the National Banking Era (1863–1913), before the establishment of the Federal Reserve, widespread banking panics were indeed rather common.

Yet these pre-Fed banking panics, as Gary B. Gorton and Ellis W. Tallman show, bear striking similarities to our recent financial crisis. Fighting Financial Crises thus turns to the past to better understand our uncertain present, investigating how panics during the National Banking Era played out and how they were eventually quelled and prevented. The authors then consider the Fed’s and the SEC’s reactions to the recent crisis, building an informative new perspective on how the modern economy works.

Policing Welfare

Spencer Headworth — Tue, 11 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Philosophy by Other Means

Robert B. Pippin — Tue, 11 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Spare the Rod

Campbell F. Scribner; Bryan R. Warnick — Tue, 11 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Routine Crisis

Sarah Muir — Tue, 11 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Machines of the Mind

Katharine Breen — Tue, 11 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Integrations

Lawrence Blum; Zoë Burkholder — Tue, 11 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Tear Down the Walls

Patrick Burke — Mon, 10 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

From the earliest days of rock and roll, white artists regularly achieved fame, wealth, and success that eluded the Black artists whose work had preceded and inspired them. This dynamic continued into the 1960s, even as the music and its fans grew to be more engaged with political issues regarding race. In Tear Down the Walls, Patrick Burke tells the story of white American and British rock musicians’ engagement with Black Power politics and African American music during the volatile years of 1968 and 1969. The book sheds new light on a significant but overlooked facet of 1960s rock—white musicians and audiences casting themselves as political revolutionaries by enacting a romanticized vision of African American identity. These artists’ attempts to cast themselves as revolutionary were often naïve, misguided, or arrogant, but they could also reflect genuine interest in African American music and culture and sincere investment in anti-racist politics. White musicians such as those in popular rock groups Jefferson Airplane, the Rolling Stones, and the MC5, fascinated with Black performance and rhetoric, simultaneously perpetuated a long history of racial appropriation and misrepresentation and made thoughtful, self-aware attempts to respectfully present African American music in forms that white leftists found politically relevant. In Tear Down the Walls Patrick Burke neither condemns white rock musicians as inauthentic nor elevates them as revolutionary. The result is a fresh look at 1960s rock that provides new insight into how popular music both reflects and informs our ideas about race and how white musicians and activists can engage meaningfully with Black political movements.

Tear Down the Walls

Patrick Burke — Mon, 10 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Disalienation

Camille Robcis — Mon, 10 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

From 1940 to 1945, forty thousand patients died in French psychiatric hospitals. The Vichy regime’s “soft extermination” let patients die of cold, starvation, or lack of care. But in Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole, a small village in central France, one psychiatric hospital attempted to resist. Hoarding food with the help of the local population, the staff not only worked to keep patients alive but began to rethink the practical and theoretical bases of psychiatric care. The movement that began at Saint-Alban came to be known as institutional psychotherapy and would go on to have a profound influence on postwar French thought.

In Disalienation, Camille Robcis grapples with the historical, intellectual, and psychiatric meaning of the ethics articulated at Saint-Alban by exploring the movement’s key thinkers, including François Tosquelles, Frantz Fanon, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault. Anchored in the history of one hospital, Robcis's study draws on a wide geographic context—revolutionary Spain, occupied France, colonial Algeria, and beyond—and charts the movement's place within a broad political-economic landscape, from fascism to Stalinism to postwar capitalism.

Brief Apology for a Catholic Moment

Jean-Luc Marion; Stephen E. Lewis — Mon, 10 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

A timely new work by one of France’s premier philosophers, A Brief Apology for a Catholic Moment offers insight into what “catholic” truly means. In this short, accessible book, Jean-Luc Marion braids the sense of catholic as all-embracing and universal into conversation about what it is to be Catholic in the present moment. A Brief Apology for a Catholic Moment tackles complex issues surrounding church-state separation and addresses a larger Catholic audience that transcends national boundaries, social identities, and linguistic differences. Marion insists that Catholic universalism, with its core of communion and community, is not an outmoded worldview, but rather an outlook that has the potential to counter the positivist rationality and nihilism at the core of our current political moment, and can help us address questions surrounding liberalism and religion and what is often presented as tension between “Islam and the West.” As an inviting and sophisticated Catholic take on current political and social realities—realities that are not confined to France alone—A Brief Apology for a Catholic Moment is a valuable contribution to a larger conversation.

Segregation by Experience

Jennifer Keys Adair; Kiyomi Sánchez-Suzuki Colegrove — Mon, 10 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Early childhood can be a time of rich discovery, a period when educators have an opportunity to harness their students’ fascination to create unique learning opportunities. Some teachers engage with their students’ ideas in ways that make learning collaborative--but not all students have access to these kinds of learning environments.

In Segregation by Experience, the authors filmed and studied a a first-grade classroom led by a Black immigrant teacher who encouraged her diverse group of students to exercise their agency. When the researchers showed the film to other schools, everyone struggled. Educators admired the teacher but didn’t think her practices would work with their own Black and brown students. Parents of color—many of them immigrants—liked many of the practices, but worried that they would compromise their children. And the young children who viewed the film thought that the kids in the film were terrible, loud, and badly behaved; they told the authors that learning was supposed to be quiet, still, and obedient. In Segregation by Experience Jennifer Keys Adair and Kiyomi Sánchez-Suzuki Colegrove show us just how much our expectations of children of color affect what and how they learn at school, and they ask us to consider which children get to have sophisticated, dynamic learning experiences at school and which children are denied such experiences because of our continued racist assumptions about them.

Shepherds, Sheep, Hirelings and Wolves

Tim Williams — Sat, 08 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

A fresh, wide-ranging collection that charts English Christianity’s historical path from the sixth century to the present

For many today, the Christian church stands picturesquely in the background of modern life, yet its time-honored place remains firmly in the foreground, woven into the fabric of English society and culture over thousands of years. Though the church itself may have faded from view, its legacy is everywhere. This edited collection brings its past to life, exploring what it has stood for, what it has achieved, and the upheavals it has caused.

Tracing English Christianity from its pioneering origins through the flowerings of the Enlightenment and up to the uncertain age of the present, this collection tells the still-unfolding story of a religion as told by its saints and sinners, dignitaries and dissidents, shrewd observers, and ordinary parishioners.

Lion

Mark Adlington — Sat, 08 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

A collection of 150 stunning illustrations of lions by one of the most famous wildlife painters working today

Lion follows internationally collected artist Mark Adlington’s three-year mission to find lions in six different habitats across East and Southern Africa. The resulting body of work, including paintings, drawings, and sketchbooks, represents months of patient waiting, observation, and interactions that gave the artist new insight into these most beautiful of big cats. With written contributions from frontline lion conservationists, without whose help and support the project would have been impossible, this book will delight and inform art and nature lovers alike.

King Among Ministers

Tom King — Sat, 08 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Tom King, a leading figure in Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet and a key player in 1980s British government, reflects on fifty years in Parliament

Tom King’s personal memoir recounts a fascinating life: at age nineteen, he found himself commanding a military company against Mau Mau terrorists in Kenya; at thirty, he became the youngest-ever general manager of a major printing and packaging group, in charge of a factory with a staff of seven hundred and dealing with nine different trade unions; and in 1970, at age thirty-seven, he was elected to British Parliament. He went on to serve as Secretary of State for five different departments in the Cabinets of Margaret Thatcher and John Major, shaping the British cultural and political landscape for decades to come. Told with sharp recollection, A King Among Ministers is a full and frank record of half a century of British politics.

Trans-Global Punk Scenes

Russ Bestley; Mike Dines; Alastair "Gords" Gordon; Paula Guerra — Sat, 08 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

While the punk scenes and subcultures of the late 1970s and early 1980s are well known and well documented, the proliferation of punk after the year 2000 has been far less studied. Picking up where The Punk Reader left off, Trans-Global Punk Scenes examines the global influence of punk in the new millennium, with a focus on punk demographics, the evolution of subcultural punk styles, and the notion of punk identity across cultural and geographic boundaries.

International in scope and analytical in perspective, the chapters offer insight into the dissemination of punk scenes and their form, structure, and contemporary cultural significance in New Zealand, Indonesia, Singapore, Ireland, South Africa, Mexico, the UK, the US, Siberia, and the Philippines.

Sovereign of the Isles

Iain Milligan — Sat, 08 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

An in-depth look at how the United Kingdom was created by years of conquest by an aggressive and land-hungry monarchy

By conquest, treaty, and ruthless colonization, the English won sovereignty over what are known as the British Islands—the United Kingdom, the Isle of Man, and the Channel Islands. It was England’s aggressive predations that led to the formation of the uneasy union with Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, perhaps explaining the commonplace confusion between “English” and “British.” The looser federal relationship with the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands perhaps explains why they are happier with their lot. The history in Iain Milligan’s Sovereign of the Isles offers an explanation for why the British Isles are held together by such a fragile and often hostile bond.

Macbeth

William Shakespeare; Migdalia Cruz — Sat, 08 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

In Migdalia Cruz’s Macbeth, the Witches run the world. The Macbeths live out a dark cautionary tale of love, greed, and power, falling from glory into calamity as the Witches spin their fate. Translating Shakespeare’s language for a modern audience, Nuyorican playwright Migdalia Cruz rewrites Macbeth with all the passion of the Bronx.

This translation of Macbeth was presented in 2018 as part of the Play On! Shakespeare project, an ambitious undertaking from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival that commissioned new translations of 39 Shakespeare plays. These translations present the Bard’s work in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare’s verse. Enlisting the talents of a diverse group of contemporary playwrights, screenwriters, and dramaturges from diverse backgrounds, this project reenvisions Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print—a new First Folio for a new era.

Appalachia as Contested Borderland of the Early Modern Atlantic, 1528-1715

Kimberly C. Borchard — Fri, 07 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

While political activists have long decried the cultural and economic marginalization of Appalachia in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Appalachia has similarly been excluded from the study of colonial expansion, transatlantic conflict, and slavery in the early modern Atlantic world. Drawing on sources in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Latin, and English, this monograph underscores the chaotically international, polyglot nature of early Appalachian history and foregrounds the region as a locus of imperial conflict during the early modern period. It likewise explores the European obsession with Appalachian mineral resources from 1528 to 1715, reframing Appalachian history within the fields of Latin American, early American, and Atlantic history. Ultimately, Appalachia as Contested Borderland of the Early Modern Atlantic provides new perspectives for scholars and students and suggests new directions for research in Native American and Indigenous studies, environmental studies, and Appalachian studies.

Waves Across the South

Sujit Sivasundaram — Fri, 07 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

This is a story of tides and coastlines, winds and waves, islands and beaches. It is also a retelling of indigenous creativity, agency, and resistance in the face of unprecedented globalization and violence. Waves Across the South shifts the narrative of the Age of Revolutions and the origins of the British Empire; it foregrounds a vast southern zone that ranges from the Arabian Sea and southwest Indian Ocean across to the Bay of Bengal, and onward to the South Pacific and the Tasman Sea. As the empires of the Dutch, French, and especially the British reached across these regions, they faced a surge of revolutionary sentiment. Long-standing venerable Eurasian empires, established patterns of trade and commerce, and indigenous practice also served as a context for this transformative era. In addition to bringing long-ignored people and events to the fore, Sujit Sivasundaram opens the door to new and necessary conversations about environmental history, the consequences of historical violence, the legacies of empire, the extraction of resources, and the indigenous futures that Western imperialism cut short. The result is nothing less than a bold new way of understanding our global past, one that also helps us think afresh about our shared future.

Decent Life

Todd May — Fri, 07 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

You’re probably never going to be a saint. Even so, let’s face it: you could be a better person. We all could. But what does that mean for you?

In a world full of suffering and deprivation, it’s easy to despair—and it’s also easy to judge ourselves for not doing more. Even if we gave away everything we own and devoted ourselves to good works, it wouldn’t solve all the world’s problems. It would make them better, though. So is that what we have to do? Is anything less a moral failure? Can we lead a fundamentally decent life without taking such drastic steps?

Todd May has answers. He’s not the sort of philosopher who tells us we have to be model citizens who display perfect ethics in every decision we make. He’s realistic: he understands that living up to ideals is a constant struggle. In A Decent Life, May leads readers through the traditional philosophical bases of a number of arguments about what ethics asks of us, then he develops a more reasonable and achievable way of thinking about them, one that shows us how we can use philosophical insights to participate in the complicated world around us. He explores how we should approach the many relationships in our lives—with friends, family, animals, people in need—through the use of a more forgiving, if no less fundamentally serious, moral compass. With humor, insight, and a lively and accessible style, May opens a discussion about how we can, realistically, lead the good life that we aspire to.

A philosophy of goodness that leaves it all but unattainable is ultimately self-defeating. Instead, Todd May stands at the forefront of a new wave of philosophy that sensibly reframes our morals and redefines what it means to live a decent life.

Chaucer’s Fame in Britannia 1641–1700

Jackson C. Boswell — Thu, 06 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

This volume is a compilation of references and allusions to Chaucer from the beginning of the English Civil War to the beginning of the eighteenth century. Chaucer’s Fame in Britannia 1641–1700 is a continuation of Jackson Campbell Boswell and Sylvia Wallace Holton’s Chaucer’s Fame in England: 1475–1640. Both books are meant to supplement the equivalent parts of Caroline Spurgeon’s invaluable Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion 1357–1900. Together, the two volumes considerably expand previous work in this area and offer a substantial contribution to intellectual history that gives us a much fuller and more profound understanding of Chaucer’s influence (and of his uses) during the period covered. Together, these volumes are a massive expansion of Spurgeon’s work. The references and allusions are full and, when possible, complete. Chaucer’s Fame in England: 1475–1640 has proven to be essential for those interested in the afterlives of Chaucer, and Chaucer’s Fame in Britannia 1641–1700 will take a similar place alongside its companion volume.

Cherry

Constance L. Kirker; Mary Newman — Thu, 06 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Ripe, sensuous, irresistible: the cherry tree and its stunning blossoms conjure up many literal, metaphorical, and visceral sensations. We enjoy cherry picking, a cherry on top, and even, on occasion, losing one’s cherry. Cherries have been consumed since prehistoric times, reaching great popularity among the ancient Romans. They have come to symbolize such divergent concepts as fertility, innocence, and seductiveness, inspiring Dutch still-life paintings, Freudian theory, contemporary pop artists, and one of the first food emojis. In Japan and other Asian cultures, the short-lived but beautiful cherry blossoms are important elements throughout art and literature. In this intriguing natural and cultural history, Constance L. Kirker and Mary Newman recount the origins, legends, celebrations, production, and health benefits of this beloved tree.

Capitalism and the Emergence of Civic Equality in Eighteenth-Century France

William H. Sewell Jr. — Thu, 06 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

There is little doubt that the French Revolution of 1789 changed the course of Western history. But why did the idea of civic equality—a distinctive signature of that revolution—find such fertile ground in France? How might changing economic and social realities have affected political opinions?

William H. Sewell Jr. argues that the flourishing of commercial capitalism in eighteenth-century France introduced a new independence, flexibility, and anonymity to French social life. By entering the interstices of this otherwise rigidly hierarchical society, expanded commodity exchange colored everyday experience in ways that made civic equality thinkable, possible, even desirable, when the crisis of the French Revolution arrived. Sewell ties together masterful analyses of a multitude of interrelated topics: the rise of commerce, the emergence of urban publics, the careers of the philosophes, commercial publishing, patronage, political economy, trade, and state finance. Capitalism and the Emergence of Civic Equality in Eighteenth-Century France offers an original interpretation of one of history’s pivotal moments.

Band with Built-In Hate

Peter Stanfield — Thu, 06 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

“The best book on The Who. Stanfield understands that they were built entirely around opposition—they didn't want to be The Beatles or The Stones; they didn't even want to be The Who most of the time. He smartly states the case for peak Who as transgressive . . . the closest thing to Pop art British music has ever produced.”—Bob Stanley, author of Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop

“With impressive eloquence, A Band with Built-In Hate situates '60s Britain's most volatile and incendiary group at the heart of pop's wild vortex. . . . Stanfield digs brilliantly into The Who's transgressions, their up-ending of pop music into art-rock and proto-punk. He can see for miles.”—Barney Hoskyns, author of Major Dudes: A Steely Dan Companion and creator of Rock's Backpages

“Ours is music with built-in hatred.”—Pete Townshend, cofounder of the Who

This book is a biography of the Who unlike any other. From their inception as the Detours in the mid-sixties, to the late seventies, post-Quadrophenia, the Who are pictured through the prism of pop art and the radical leveling of high and low culture that it brought about—a drama that was consciously and aggressively performed by the band. Peter Stanfield lays down a path through the British pop revolution, its attitude and style, as it was uniquely embodied by the band: first, under the mentorship of arch-mod Peter Meaden, as they learned their trade in the pubs and halls of suburban London; and then with Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, two aspiring filmmakers, at the very center of things in Soho. Guided by the concerns of contemporary commentators—among them George Melly, Lawrence Alloway, and, most conspicuously, Nik Cohn—Stanfield tells the story of a band driven by fury, and of what happened when Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey, Keith Moon, and John Entwistle moved from backroom stages to international arenas, from explosive 45s to expansive concept albums. Above all, he tells of how the Who confronted their lost youth as it was echoed in punk.

Breathing

Edgar Williams — Wed, 05 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Our knowledge of breathing has shaped our social history and philosophical beliefs since prehistory. Breathing occupied a spiritual status for the ancients, while today it is central to the practice of many forms of meditation, like Yoga. Over time physicians, scientists, and engineers have pieced together the intricate biological mechanisms of breathing to devise ever more sophisticated devices to support and maintain breathing indefinitely, from iron lungs to the modern ventilator. Breathing supplementary oxygen has allowed us to conquer Everest, travel to the Moon, and dive to ever greater ocean depths. We all expect to breathe fresh and clean air, but with an increase in air pollution that expectation is no longer being met. Today, respiratory viruses like COVID-19 are causing disasters both human and economical on a global scale. This is the story of breathing—a tale relevant to everyone.

Twins

William Viney — Wed, 05 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Human twins have many meanings and different histories. They have been seen as gods and monsters, signs of danger, death, and sexual deviance. They are taken as objects of wonder and violent repression, the subjects of scientific experiment. Now millions are born through fertility technologies. Their history is often buried in philosophies and medical theories, religious and scientific practices, and countless stories of devotion and tragedy. In this history of superstitions and marvels, fantasies and experiments, William Viney—himself a twin—shows how the use and abuse of twins has helped to shape the world in which we live. This book has been written not just for twins, but for anyone interested in their historical, global, and political impact.

Jack London

Kenneth K. Brandt — Wed, 05 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Jack London (1876–1916) lived a life of excess by conventional standards. Daring, outspoken, politically radical, amazingly imaginative, and emotionally complicated, the author of literary classics such as The Call of the Wild and The Sea-Wolf emerges in Kenneth K. Brandt’s new biography as a vital and flawed embodiment of conflicting yearnings. London’s exuberant energies propelled him out of the working class to become a world-famous writer by the age of twenty-seven—after stints as a child laborer, an oyster pirate, a Pacific seaman, and a convict. He wrote extensively about his travels to Japan, the Yukon, the slums of London’s East End, Korea, Hawaii, and the South Seas. Swiftly paced, intellectually engaging, and richly dramatic, London’s writings—bolstered by their wildly clashing philosophical viewpoints derived from thinkers like Nietzsche, Marx, and Darwin—continue to engross readers with their depictions of primal urges, raw sensations, and reformist politics.

Guitar

Chris Gibson; Andrew Warren — Wed, 05 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Guitars inspire cult-like devotion: an aficionado can tell you precisely when and where their favorite instrument was made, the wood it is made from, and that wood’s unique effect on the instrument’s sound. In The Guitar, Chris Gibson and Andrew Warren follow that fascination around the globe as they trace guitars all the way back to the tree. The authors take us to guitar factories, port cities, log booms, remote sawmills, Indigenous lands, and distant rainforests, on a quest for behind-the-scenes stories and insights into how guitars are made, where the much-cherished guitar timbers ultimately come from, and the people and skills that craft those timbers along the way.

Gibson and Warren interview hundreds of people to give us a first-hand account of the ins and outs of production methods, timber milling, and forest custodianship in diverse corners of the world, including the Pacific Northwest, Madagascar, Spain, Brazil, Germany, Japan, China, Hawaii, and Australia. They unlock surprising insights into longer arcs of world history: on the human exploitation of nature, colonialism, industrial capitalism, cultural tensions, and seismic upheavals. But the authors also strike a hopeful note, offering a parable of wider resonance—of the incredible but underappreciated skill and care that goes into growing forests and felling trees, milling timber, and making enchanting musical instruments, set against the human tendency to reform our use (and abuse) of natural resources only when it may be too late. The Guitar promises to resonate with anyone who has ever fallen in love with a guitar.

Guitar

Chris Gibson; Andrew Warren — Wed, 05 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Follow Your Conscience

Peter Cajka — Wed, 05 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

What is your conscience? Is it, as Peter Cajka asks in this provocative book, “A small, still voice? A cricket perched on your shoulder? An angel and devil who compete for your attention?” Going back at least to the thirteenth century, Catholics viewed their personal conscience as a powerful and meaningful guide to align their conduct with worldly laws. But, as Cajka shows in Follow Your Conscience, during the national cultural tumult of the 1960s, the divide between the demands of conscience and the demands of the law, society, and even the church itself grew increasingly perilous. As growing numbers of Catholics started to consider formerly stout institutions to be morally hollow—especially in light of the Vietnam War and the church’s refusal to sanction birth control—they increasingly turned to their own consciences as guides for action and belief. This abandonment of higher authority had radical effects on American society, influencing not only the broader world of Christianity, but also such disparate arenas as government, law, health care, and the very vocabulary of American culture. As this book astutely reveals, today’s debates over political power, religious freedom, gay rights, and more are all deeply infused by the language and concepts outlined by these pioneers of personal conscience.

Dante’s Volume from Alpha to Omega

Christiana Purdy Moudarres; Carol Chiodo — Tue, 04 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Dante’s Volume from Alpha to Omega brings together essays written by internationally recognized scholars to explore the poet’s encyclopedic impulse in light of our own frenzied information age. This comprehensive collection of essays, coedited by Carol Chiodo and Christiana Purdy Moudarres, examines how Dante’s spiritual quest is powered by an encyclopedic one, which has for more than seven centuries drawn a readership as diverse as the knowledge his work contains. The essays investigate both the intellectual and spiritual pleasures that Dante’s Commedia affords, underscoring how, through the sheer breadth of its knowledge, the poem demands collective and collaborative inquiry. Rather than isolating the poetic or theological strands of the Commedia, the book acts as a bridge across disciplines, braiding together the well-worn strands of poetry and theology with those of philosophy, the sciences, and the arts. The wide range of entries within Dante’s poetic summa yield multiple opportunities to reflect on their points of intersection, and the urgency of the convergence of the poem’s aesthetic, intellectual, and affective aims.

Apocalypse of Truth

Jean Vioulac; Matthew J. Peterson; Jean-Luc Marion — Mon, 03 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

We inhabit a time of crisis—totalitarianism, environmental collapse, and the unquestioned rule of neoliberal capitalism. Philosopher Jean Vioulac is invested in and worried by all of this, but his main concern lies with how these phenomena all represent a crisis within—and a threat to—thinking itself.
In his first book to be translated into English, Vioulac radicalizes Heidegger’s understanding of truth as disclosure through the notion of truth as apocalypse. This “apocalypse of truth” works as an unveiling that reveals both the finitude and mystery of truth, allowing a full confrontation with truth-as-absence. Engaging with Heidegger, Marx, and St. Paul, as well as contemporary figures including Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Žižek, Vioulac’s book presents a subtle, masterful exposition of his analysis before culminating in a powerful vision of “the abyss of the deity.” Here, Vioulac articulates a portrait of Christianity as a religion of mourning, waiting for a god who has already passed by, a form of ever-present eschatology whose end has always already taken place. With a preface by Jean-Luc Marion, Apocalypse of Truth presents a major contemporary French thinker to English-speaking audiences for the first time.

Disalienation

Camille Robcis — Mon, 03 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Four Shakespearean Period Pieces

Margreta de Grazia — Mon, 03 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Brief Apology for a Catholic Moment

Jean-Luc Marion; Stephen E. Lewis — Mon, 03 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Segregation by Experience

Jennifer Keys Adair; Kiyomi Sánchez-Suzuki Colegrove — Mon, 03 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Violent Peace

Carolyn N. Biltoft — Mon, 03 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

The newly born League of Nations confronted the post-WWI world—from growing stateless populations to the resurgence of right-wing movements—by aiming to create a transnational, cosmopolitan dialogue on justice. As part of these efforts, a veritable army of League personnel set out to shape “global public opinion,” in favor of the postwar liberal international order. Combining the tools of global intellectual history and cultural history, A Violent Peace reopens the archives of the League to reveal surprising links between the political use of modern information systems and the rise of mass violence in the interwar world. Historian Carolyn N. Biltoft shows how conflicts over truth and power that played out at the League of Nations offer broad insights into the nature of totalitarian regimes and their use of media flows to demonize a whole range of “others.”

An exploration of instability in information systems, the allure of fascism, and the contradictions at the heart of a global modernity, A Violent Peace paints a rich portrait of the emergence of the age of information—and all its attendant problems.

Unnatural Selection

Andrea Ross; Miriam Peskowitz — Sun, 02 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Adopted at birth, Andrea Ross grew up inhabiting two ecosystems: one was her tangible, adoptive family, the other her birth family, whose mysterious landscape was hidden from her. In this coming-of-age memoir, Ross narrates how in her early twenties, while working as a ranger in Grand Canyon National Park, she embarked on a journey to discover where she came from and, ultimately, who she was. After many missteps and dead ends, Ross uncovered her heartbreaking and inspiring origin story and began navigating the complicated turns of reuniting with her birth parents and their new families. Through backcountry travel in the American West, she also came to understand her place in the world, realizing that her true identity lay not in a choice between adopted or biological parents, but in an expansion of the concept of family.

Boyish

Brody Parrish Craig — Sat, 01 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

The poems in Boyish reveal a reconciliation of southern and queer identities, following the poet from a Louisiana Baptist upbringing into transgender liberation. With a sense of rebellion and the revival of the hollered voice, this is an urgent narrative propelled by the necessity of upheaval, imagining what happens when we break through barriers of systemic violence and communal oppression to reconsider what could be. Boyish looks back at the status quo in order to move beyond, into a dream of a nonbinary utopia. A reckoning, this collection brings the reader along for revolution—a deep belief in possibility.

Each page builds tension that then shatters, bringing us into the interior of a story. Brody Parrish Craig invites us to carve out a space and to find ourselves carried over the gravel along the creek. Moving through the subconscious and embodied desire, these poems are rich with formal play, twisting language in dense sonnets. Landscapes of the city’s dystopia meet the queer pastoral, where conservation often means knowing what must be burned down.

Luminaries

Kristin Keane — Sat, 01 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Agnes has been drifting away from herself. People look through her, her husband doesn’t understand her, and lately, she’s begun losing the sensations in her body. When a tube of shoplifted lipstick awakens her back to life, an impulse for stealing emerges that leads her to a court-ordered service at a camp for grieving children. While initially hoping only that the time there will help her give up stealing, Agnes soon learns that she can use objects to connect grieving children with the spirits of their parents. She must navigate the choice between using her compulsion for her own pleasure and helping the bereaved. Luminaries is about the things we take and about the things that are taken from us. It asks what it means to exist in lives filled with loss, to reach for the things we hope will restore us, and the risks we’re willing to take to ward off yearning—both in our material lives and social lives.

Luminaries is the winner of the Omnidawn Fabulist Fiction Novelette/Chapbook Prize, selected by Kellie Wells.

Harold Mendez

Yesomi Umolu; Harold Mendez; Candice Hopkins; J. Michael Martinez; Katja Rivera — Sat, 01 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

The 2020 exhibition Harold Mendez: The years now presented a suite of existing and newly commissioned works—including photography, sculpture and sound—by visual artist Harold Mendez at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts. Mendez’s practice draws on artifacts and rituals from sites across the Americas, spanning from pre-Columbian times to the present, to create poetic assemblages that connect histories of violence and erasure with acts of renewal and remembrance. Building on a process-driven approach, in The years now, the artist employed various techniques such as digital scanning, three-dimensional printing, photo transfer, and sonic amplifications to explore the apparitions of bodies, and the ego across materials, site, and memory.

Featuring installation views and research material, this volume is the first substantial monograph dedicated to the artist’s work. This publication includes a foreword by director and curator Yesomi Umolu, contributions from scholar and curator Candice Hopkins and poet J. Michael Martinez, and an interview with Mendez and curator Katja Rivera.

Global TV Horror

Stacey Abbott; Lorna Jowett — Sat, 01 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Global TV Horror

Stacey Abbott; Lorna Jowett — Sat, 01 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Transnationalism and Genre Hybridity in New British Horror Cinema

Lindsey Decker — Sat, 01 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Intervening in conversations on transnationalism, film culture, and genre theory, this book theorizes transnational genre hybridity—combining tropes from foreign and domestic genres—as a way of thinking about films through a global and local framework. Taking the 2000s British horror resurgence as a case study, Transnationalism and Genre Hybridity in New British Horror Cinema combines genre studies with close formal analysis to argue that embracing transnational genre hybridity enabled the boom. Starting in 2002, this resurgence saw British horror film production outpace the golden age of British horror. Yet, resurgence films like 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead had to reckon with horror’s vilified status in the UK, a continuation of attitudes perpetuated by middlebrow film critics who coded horror as dangerous and Americanized. Moving beyond British cinema studies’ focus on the national, this book also presents a fresh take on longstanding issues in British cinema, including genre and film culture.

Transnationalism and Genre Hybridity in New British Horror Cinema

Lindsey Decker — Sat, 01 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Transnationalism and Genre Hybridity in New British Horror Cinema

Lindsey Decker — Sat, 01 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Unforgetting Private Charles Smith

Jonathan Locke Hart — Sat, 01 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

Private Charles Smith had been dead for close to a century when Jonathan Hart discovered the soldier’s small diary in the Baldwin Collection at the Toronto Public Library. The diary’s first entry was marked 28 June 1915. After some research, Hart discovered that Charles Smith was an Anglo-Canadian, born in Kent, and that this diary was almost all that remained of this forgotten man, who like so many soldiers from ordinary families had lost his life in the First World War. In reading the diary, Hart discovered a voice full of life, and the presence of a rhythm, a cadence that urged him to bring forth the poetry in Smith’s words. Unforgetting Private Charles Smith is the poetic setting of the words in Smith’s diary, work undertaken by Hart with the intention of remembering Smith’s life rather than commemorating his death.

Life in a Field

Katie Peterson; Young Suh — Sat, 01 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

This is a comedy about climate change, in which a girl and a donkey become friends, then decide to marry time.

A lyric fable, Life in a Field intersperses Katie Peterson’s slow-moving, cinematic, and sensual writing with three folios of photographs by Young Suh. Introspection, wish, dream, and memory mark this tale, which is set in a location resembling twenty-first-century California—with vistas and orchards threatened by drought and fires. This is also a place of enchantment, a fairy-tale landscape where humans and animals live as equals. As the girl and the donkey grow up, they respond to the difficulties of contemporary civilization, asking a question that meets our existential moment: What do you do with the story you didn’t wish for? A narrator’s voice combines candor with distance, attempting to find a path through our familiar strife, toward a future that feels all but impossible, and into what remains of beauty and pleasure. Life in a Field tries to reverse our accelerating destruction of the natural world, reminding us of “the cold clarity we need to continue on this earth.”

Metamorphosis or Confrontation

Florian Knothe; Harald Kraemer — Sat, 01 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

A close look at the work of innovative artist and architect Tobias Klein.

Contemporary German architect Tobias Klein often explores applications of 3D printing in architecture, art, design, and interactive media installations in his work in order to create a fusion of contemporary computer-aided design and manufacturing technologies built from natural materials, found objects, and cultural-historical references. Through his work, Klein has developed the emerging discipline of Digital Craftsmanship as an operational synthesis between digital and physical tools and techniques. This publication traces Klein’s work over the past decade, as each chapter unravels the relationship and evolution of the artist’s body of work.

Field Guide to the Amaryllis Family of Southern Africa & Surrounding Territories

Graham Duncan; Barbara Jeppe; Leigh Voigt — Sat, 01 May 2021 05:00:00 GMT

An in-depth guide to southern Africa’s profusion of amaryllises.

The 1,600 species of bulbous and perennial plants that comprise the amazingly diverse amaryllis family are among the tropical world’s foremost botanical treasures. This field guide follows Kew’s 2016 book The Amaryllidaceae of Southern Africa, highlighting the region’s amaryllises with more than five hundred photographs and several new paintings and maps that make for a decidedly effective guide for field identification. Graham Duncan provides a botanical description for each species, along with other helpful tidbits of information, such as their flowering period, life cycle, distribution, habitat, medicinal or poisonous properties, and conservation status. New illustrations by Barbara Jeppe and Leigh Voigt illuminate the dazzling variety of the African members of the amaryllis family. This superb field guide will surely become the standard book on this treasured group of flowers.