A sampling of new and forthcoming titles from our college community:

The Subject of Experience
Oxford Unversity Press, March 2017
By Galen Strawson, professor, Department of Philosophy

What is a person? How should we think of our death? Is there really such a thing as the “self”? How do we — and how should we — experience life in and through time? The Subject of Experience explores the self and the person in a series of essays that draw on literature, psychology and philosophy.

The Atlas of Reality: A Comprehensive Guide to Metaphysics
Wiley-Blackwell, March 2017
By Robert C. Koons, professor, Department of Philosophy; and Timothy H. Pickavance

The Atlas of Reality examines a full range of topics, concepts and guiding principles in metaphysics. This accessible, comprehensive guide explores concepts including space, time, powers, universals and composition, carefully tracking the use of common assumptions and methodological principles.

Wait Till You See Me Dance
Graywolf Press, March 2017
By Deb Olin Unferth, associate professor, Department of English

Unferth has published startlingly askew and wickedly comic fiction in magazines such as Granta, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, NOON and The Paris Review. Her new book, Wait Till You See Me Dance, is a long-awaited first collection of her short fiction.

Different Latitudes: My Life in the Peace Corps and Beyond
Peace Corps Writers, April 2017
By Mark D. Walker, Million Mile Walker LLC
Institute of Latin American Studies alumnus (1977)

In this memoir, Walker recounts how his years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Central America and the Caribbean launched a career dedicated to service and, eventually, global philanthropy. His training in Latin American studies led to thirteen years of rural development work, some of it in war-torn Guatemala, and a life that has straddled cultures and borders.

Cuba’s Revolutionary World
Harvard University Press, April 2017
By Jonathan C. Brown, professor, Department of History and LLILAS

Following the overthrow of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, the rebel comandante Fidel Castro told a jubilant crowd that this time “the real Revolution” had arrived. This capacious history of the Cuban Revolution shows that Castro’s words proved prophetic not only for his countrymen, but for Latin America and the wider world.

A Passage to China: Literature, Loyalism, and Colonial Taiwan
Harvard University Press, April 2017
By Chien-hsin Tsai, associate professor, Department of Asian Studies

This book examines how writers from colonial Taiwan creatively and selectively employed loyalist ideals to cope with Japanese colonialism and in the process redefined their relationship with China and Chinese culture. The author argues that the changing tradition of loyalism complicates Taiwan’s ties to China.

Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos
Oxford University Press, April 2017
By Juliet Hooker, associate professor, Departments of Government and African and African Diaspora Studies

Charting the intellectual genealogy of 19^th– and 20^th-century racial thought in the Americas, this book is the first to simultaneously analyze U.S. African American and Latin American political thinkers and their ideas about race. Through a hemispheric analysis it transforms understandings of prominent U.S. African American and Latin American intellectuals.

Bodies and Ruins – Imagining the Bombing of Germany, 1945 to the Present
University of Michigan Press, May 2017
By David F. Crew, professor, Department of History

Crew explores changing German memories of World War II, analyzing narratives in the postwar period including the depiction of the bombing in German cities. The book reveals that the bombing war was in fact a central strand of German memory and identity that allowed Germans to see themselves as victims rather than perpetrators or accomplices.

Ezra and the Second Wilderness
Oxford University Press, May 2017
By Philip Yoo, lecturer, Center for the Study of Core Texts and Ideas

Yoo addresses the relationship between Ezra, the Ezra Memoir and the Pentateuch, arguing that the Ezra Memoir is a coherent account of Ezra’s leadership of the Babylonian exiles and modeled on the multiple presentations of Moses and the Israelite wilderness preserved in the Pentateuch.

American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream 
University of Chicago Press, May 2017
By Julia L. Mickenberg, associate professor of American Studies; interim chair, Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies; and acting director, Center for Russian and Eastern European Studies

A century after the Bolshevik revolution “shook the world,” American Girls in Red Russia recovers a forgotten counterpoint to the well-worn story of a “lost” generation’s escape to Paris, exploring Soviet Russia’s significance for independent, liberated and socially conscious American “new women” in the first half of the 20^th century.

Feature image by Mariana Vusiatytska, Unsplash