Books in the Humanities

Author’s Website – Apple An
no library ebook access
Leaving turbulent China in 1989 with nothing to fall back on, the author travels across the Pacific Ocean, across two cultures, across time, and across her comfort zone to build a new life in America.

Author’s Website – Philp P. Arnold
Print edition
Arnold uses a collaborative method, derived from 'Two-Row Wampum' (1613) and his 40-year relationship with the Haudenosaunee in exploring the urgent need to understand and apply Indigenous values for humanity's survival in the face of ecological and environmental catastrophe. Designed to initiate classroom and community conversations about what is essential to the category of Indigeneity, this book pairs concepts of Indigeneity and religion around their competing values systems, thus transforming our understanding of both categories.

Author’s Website – Adam Avin
Print edition
Teen mental health education advocate (and Syracuse University Newhouse School undergraduate student) Adam Avin walks readers through the reasons why stress and pressure are bad for your body and mind. He explains what mindfulness is and how to develop a mindful mindset so that you can be in the moment and focus on the present, rather than worrying about the past or the future.

Author’s Website – Mona Awad
Print edition
Snow White meets Eyes Wide Shut in this surreal descent into the dark side of beauty, envy, grief, and the complicated love between mothers and daughters. With black humor and seductive horror, Awad explores the cult-like nature of the beauty industry—as well as the danger of internalizing its pitiless gaze.

Author’s Website – G. Douglas Barrett
Print edition
Barrett argues that experimental music speaks to the contemporary posthuman, a condition in which science and technology decenter human agency amid the uneven temporality of postwar global capitalism. Time moves forward for some during this period, while it seems to stand still or even move backward for others. Through its unique meeting of intimate analysis, music studies, media theory, and art history, Experimenting the Human provides fresh insights into what it means to be human.

Author’s Website – Virginia Burrus
Print edition
In Jerome's Life of Saint Hilarion, a fourth-century saint briefly encounters the ruins of an earthquake-toppled city and a haunted garden in Cyprus. From two fragmentary passages, the author delivers a series of sweeping meditations on our experience of place and the more-than-human worlds, the earth and its gods that surround us. Burrus's close readings reimagine religion as a practice that unsettles certainty and develops mutual flourishing.

Author’s Website – Dympna Callaghan
Print edition
Callaghan's volume presents a fresh interpretation of Shakespeare's non-dramatic poems, providing insights into the individual poems, their themes and composition, and their relation to the cultural context of Shakespeare's world.

Author’s Website – Francis DiClemente
Print edition
DeClemente assembles a collection of narrative and philosophical poems written in free-verse style. Employing a minimalistic approach and whimsical language, the author explores the themes of self, identity, loneliness, memory, existence, family, parenthood, disability, gratitude, and compassion.

Author’s Website – Vlad Dima
Print edition
Dima provides a study of meaning and meaninglessness through the figure of the undead, beginning with Africa and extending to postcolonial France. The project has three goals: show that the African cinematic image may produce meaning without any attachment to European time; argue that meaning is connected instead to the philosophy of negritude, to the notion of rhythm, and to representations of the undead; and, finally, introduce a new term, the rhythm-sequence, to measure how meaning, negritude, and the undead all connect with the African moving image.

Editor's Website – Kathryn Everly
Editor's Website – Stefano Giannini
Editor's Website – Karina von Tippelskirch
Print edition
This volume analyzes the impact migrations, both internal and external, have on Europe's literary and visual representations in the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. It includes peripheral thinkers, writers, and visual artists operating in transcultural contexts. Its essays highlight and investigate the fertile artistic discourses generated in the spatial peripheries outside of Europe or its inner peripheries.

Editor's Website – Beth Ferri
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This volume offers deep personal explorations and innovative interventions aimed at transforming schools, communities, research practices, and global conversations around what it means for DisCrit theory to travel beyond its original borders or concerns. Its chapters use DisCrit as a springboard for further thinking, illustrating its role in fostering transgressive, equity-based, and action-oriented scholarship.

Author’s Website – Wayne Franits
Print edition
This is the first book in English dedicated to the entire artistic output of seventeenth-century Dutch artist Godefridus Schalcken (1643–1706). It examines the artist’s paintings and career trajectory against the background of his ceaseless pursuit of fame and fortune.

Editor's Website – Ken Frieden
Print edition
Set in a small Lithuanian town in the late nineteenth century, Kanovich's novel, edited by Ken Frieden, begins with the arrival of a stranger who sets everyone on edge and seems to know their secrets. Is he a messenger from God, a long-lost son, a saint, or a madman?

Author’s Website – Michael Gill
Print edition
Allergic Intimacies celebrates the creative ways food allergic communities are challenging long-held practices of exclusion, while identifying the depth of work that still needs to be done, particularly toward understanding the racial, ethnic, religious, and economic diversity. Gill's book is a discerning and vital exploration of the key debates about risks, dangers, safety, representations, and political concerns affecting the lives of individuals with food allergies.

Editor's Website – Michael Gill
Editor's Website – Beth Myers
Print edition
This volume powerfully challenges assumptions that intellectual disability is best met with protection or segregation, offering an important record of the first generation of students enrolled in inclusive higher education programs.

Author’s Website – Samuel Gorovitz
Print edition
In these 25 true stories, Gorovitz recounts 60 years of interaction with people in all walks of life – some extremely famous, others complete strangers – from hospitals to restaurants, concert halls to airplanes, in private conversations and nationally broadcast interviews. Stories are heartbreaking, distracting, funny, shocking, inspiring, revealing, and sometimes unforgettable.

Author’s Website – Biko Mandela Gray
Print edition
In Black Life Matter, Biko Mandela Gray offers a philosophical eulogy for Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Tamir Rice, Alton Sterling, and Sandra Bland that attests to their irreducible significance in the face of unremitting police brutality. Gray employs a theoretical method he calls "sitting-with"--a philosophical practice of care that seeks to defend the dead and the living.

Author’s Website – Diane Grimes
Print edition
This research provides detailed analysis and examples of vivid images and personal stories to help readers dismantle existing biases toward developing an antiracist perspective. Its co-authors are guided by the principle that white people bear the responsibility for dismantling racist structures (and so primarily address white readers) with hope that it might become a powerful tool of resistance for all readers.

Editor's Website – Dimitar Gueorguiev
Print edition
This book examines the increasingly dire state of academic freedom in Asia. Using cross-national data and in-depth case studies, the authors shed light on the multifaceted nature of academic censorship and provide reference points to those working in restrictive academic environments.

Author’s Website – Roger Hallas
Print edition
Hallas takes a new look at how political, historical, and art documentaries engage with photographic images, objects, and archives, arguing that film allows us to better understand what people do with analog and digital photographs as material objects that enable social and political relations through multisensory experience. The volume combines new critical perspectives on well-known documentary filmmakers and photographers with analyses of lesser known but important documentaries with global range.

Author’s Website – Timur Hammond
Print edition
For centuries, the Mosque of Eyüp Sultan has been one of Istanbul's most important pilgrimage destinations, in large part because of the figure buried in the tomb at its center: Halid bin Zeyd Ebû Eyûb el-Ensârî, a Companion of the Prophet Muhammad. Following practices of storytelling and building projects from the final years of the Ottoman Empire to the early 2010s, Hammond shows how different connections among people, places, traditions, and histories provide an opportunity to reconsider how we understand the changing cultures of Islam in Turkey and beyond.

Editor's Website – Jeanette Yih Harvie
Print edition
Although the faculty and student populations of universities have diversified, mothers in academia are disproportionately overrepresented in precarious faculty and staff positions and experience myriad institutional and interpersonal barriers, such as gender wage gaps exacerbated by stop-the-clock tenure policies, inadequate parental leave policies, expensive or scarce local childcare options, and social biases. This book gives space to the many ways women create and challenge their own versions of motherhood and how they use virtual communities to seek and enact different kinds of support.

Author’s Website – Erin Accampo Hern
Print edition
Scholarship on Africa tends to focus on the barriers to reaching desired outcomes. While recognizing that these barriers are very real, Hern takes a contrary, unabashedly optimistic approach: rather than treating countries that perform well as "miracles," she seeks to normalize their success, analyzing the performance of those that have made good choices in the face of adverse circumstances.

Author’s Website – George Kallander
Print edition
Kallander's book focuses on animals and hunting in Korea from the 1270s until 1506, situating the Korean peninsula in relation to the neighboring Mongol Empire and Ming dynasty China. During this period, Korean statesmen expanded their influence over people and the environment, and human–animal relations became increasingly significant to politics, national security and elite identities. Animals were used in ritual sacrifices, submitted as tax tribute, exchanged in regional trade and, most significantly, hunted.

Editor's Website – Eunjung Kim
Print edition
Contributors to Crip Genealogies reorient the field of disability studies by centering the work of transnational feminism, queer of color critique, and trans scholarship and activism. They challenge the white, Western, and Northern rights-based genealogy of disability studies, showing how a single coherent narrative of the field is a mode of exclusion that relies on logics of whiteness and imperialism.

Author’s Website – Natalie Koch
Print edition
In this evocative, narrative history, Koch demonstrates how the exchange of colonial technologies between the Arabian Peninsula and United States over the past two centuries -- from date palm farming and desert agriculture to the utopian sci-fi dreams of Biosphere 2 and Frank Herbert's Dune -- bound the two regions together, solidifying the colonization of the US West and, eventually, the reach of American power into the Middle East. Koch teaches us to see deserts anew, not as mythic sites of romance or empty wastelands but as an "arid empire," a crucial political space where imperial dreams coalesce.

Author’s Website – Anne C. Leone
Print edition
Investigating blood across all of the poet's works, Leone shows that Dante's treatment of blood reveals a sophisticated and self-conscious metaliterary project: the poet exploits blood's connotative force in medieval culture in ways that engage with - and diverge from - the various traditions and cultural practices that inform his work: scientific, theological, devotional, classical and literary.

Author’s Website – Robin Micah McCrary
Print edition
Aimed toward graduate student instructors and other creative writing educators, Teaching Cultural Dexterity in Creative Writing offers a formula for important changes in creative writing instruction-especially in literary/creative nonfiction, probing how instruction might become more inclusive and accessible for minoritized/marginalized student-authors. The book chapters use antiracist, trauma-informed, and anticolonial frameworks toward exploring the 21st-century professional, theoretical, and institutional concerns surrounding creative writing practices in North American higher education.

Author’s Website – David Oh
Print edition
This volume examines the ways racial identification and activation matters, expanding upon existing literature on race and the sociology of news by examining intra-racial differences in the ways Asian-Americans navigate and understand White newsrooms.

Author’s Website – Dan Pacheco
Print edition
Experimenting with Emerging Media Platforms teaches students in media tracks - journalism, advertising, film and public relations - how to independently field-test and evaluate emerging technologies that could impact how media is produced, consumed and monetized in the future.

Author’s Website – Cynthia Pope
no library ebook access
Though traditional art has been strong on showcasing aesthetics to imbue pleasantries, modern public art has been breaking trends to push citizens beyond the pleasure of seeing beauty. Contemporary public sculpture, in particular, has been the impetus of provoking questions about community standards, identity, and race relations. Intending to better understand public sculptures' power to disrupt community, Pope approaches this controversy touching on racial politics, identity, culture, history and public art.

Author’s Website – Dennis Rasmussen
Print edition
Rasmussen's volume is the first book to explore Gouverneur Morris, a fascinating, influential, often neglected American who put the Constitution into its final form, choosing the arrangement and much of the wording of its provisions, and composing the famous preamble (“We the People of the United States . . .”) nearly from scratch. Rasmussen demonstrates that it is impossible to fully understand the Constitution without appreciating the central role that Morris played in shaping it.

Author’s Website – Alex Richards
Print edition
Richards' work recognizes a growing need for general data knowledge in newsrooms across the globe, including an understanding of what's possible for both data reporting and presentation and how it can be achieved. It serves as a roadmap for students and working journalists who seek to understand what data is and how to find it; how to harness it most effectively for news; how to think critically about analysing results, potential shortcomings in the data, and the inclusion of appropriate context; and how to present compelling, data-driven stories online.

Editor's Website – Will Scheibel
Print edition
This collection of essays on Showtime's Penny Dreadful (2014-2016) examines this series at the intersection of different media, genres, and artistic modes -- television, film, theater, nineteenth-century British fiction, the American dime novel, horror, and the Gothic -- to understand the many different practices of adaptation that shape the meanings of narrative texts.

ebook on order 3/14/2024
Editor's Website – Eileen E. Schell
Print edition
An international representation of scholars from rhetoric, composition, writing studies, and other interdisciplinary fields address food as a topic of inquiry and a matter of social and environmental justice.

Author’s Website – David Sobel
Print edition
Since its revival in the 1970s, political philosophy has been vibrant in the field -- one that intersects with jurisprudence, normative economics, political theory in political science departments, and just war theory. This volume aims to publish some of the best contemporary work in political philosophy and these closely related subfields.

Author's Website -- Justo Antonio Triana
no library ebook access
Triana presents a book of poetry written in Spanish that explores major themes such as love, death, memory, and the passage of time.

Author’s Website – James W. Watts
Print edition
This detailed exposition of Leviticus 11-20 focuses especially on the text's rhetoric of pollution and purity. While engaging a wide variety of contemporary scholarship on Leviticus, it also shows the book's historical influence on Jewish and Christian beliefs and practices. Watts illustrates how Leviticus's rhetoric has therefore echoed in later Jewish and Christian cultures around issues of pollution, atonement, sex, and ethics, especially treatment of women and ethnic others.