Slave Sites on Display: Reflecting Slavery’s Legacy through Contemporary “Flash” Moments
The University Press of Mississippi, Sept. 2019
By Helena Woodard, associate professor, Departments of English and African and African Diaspora Studies
Woodard examines how certain modern-day slave sites — a renovated slave fort, a slave burial ground, a reconstructed slave ship and the Bench By the Road Project slave memorial near Charleston — are especially readable through contemporary “flash” moments: specific circumstances and/or seminal events that bind slavery’s historical resonance with its continued impact on the instability, volatility and unsettledness of race and slavery.
Hebrew Gothic: History and the Poetics of Persecution
Indiana University Press, Sept. 2019
By Karen Grumberg, associate professor, Department of Middle Eastern Studies
Hebrew Gothic illustrates how modern Hebrew literature has regularly appropriated key gothic ideas to help conceptualize the Jewish relationship to the past. Comparatively reading Hebrew, British, and American texts, the study engages Hebrew literature globally and sheds new light on tensions that continue to characterize contemporary Israeli cultural and political rhetoric.
We Got This
She Writes Press, Sept. 2019
Edited by Marika Lindholm; Cheryl Demesnil; Domenica Ruta and Katherine Shonk, M.A. English ’99
In We Got This, seventy-five solo mom writers tell the truth about their lives — their hopes and fears, their resilience and setbacks, their embarrassments and triumphs. Some of these writers’ names will sound familiar, like Amy Poehler, Anne Lamott and Elizabeth Alexander.
Language Contact and the Making of an Afro-Hispanic Vernacular: Variation and Change in the Colombian Chocó
Cambridge University Press, Sept. 2019
By Sandro Sessarego, associate professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Exploring creole studies from a linguistic and socio-cultural perspective, this book advances our knowledge of the subject to provide new theoretical insights into contact-induced language change. While primarily focused on Afro-Hispanic varieties, these findings can be applied to address other black communities in the Americas and the languages they speak.
The Lost Books of Jane Austen
Johns Hopkins University Press, Oct. 2019
By Janine Barchas, professor, Department of English
This book aims to shift institutional collecting practices to include the cheapest categories of Austen’s early reprintings. Many inexpensive Victorian reprints, the stuff bought by working-class readers at railway stations and book stalls for sixpence or a shilling, have gone unrecorded by bibliographers, uncollected by major libraries and unremarked by scholars. Yet, these books did the heavy lifting of raising Austen into the canon and spreading her fame.
Dreams of El Dorado: A History of the American West
Basic Books, Oct. 2019
By H. W. Brands, professor, Department of History
Brands tells the thrilling, panoramic story of the settling of the American West — from John Jacob Astor’s fur trading outpost in Oregon to the Texas Revolution, from the California gold rush to the Oklahoma land rush. Migrants’ dreams drove them to feats of courage and perseverance and to outrageous acts of violence against indigenous peoples and one another.
Border Land, Border Water: A History of Construction on the US-Mexico Divide
University of Texas Press, Oct. 2019
By C.J. Alvarez, assistant professor, Departments of Mexican American and Latino/a Studies, and History
This book is the first and most comprehensive history of construction projects on the U.S.-Mexico divide. Spanning more than 150 years, the narrative traces the accumulation of fencing and surveillance infrastructure on the land border and hydraulic engineering projects on the river border. It includes dozens of never before seen blueprints, maps and photographs.
History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200-2000
University of Washington Press, Oct. 2019
By Sumit Guha, professor, Departments of History and Asian Studies
Collective memory is how communities recollect their pasts to shape their presents. This far-ranging and erudite exploration of the South Asian past discusses the shaping of collective and historical memory in world context. Its analysis reaches beyond the formal academy to argue that “history” is but one kind of collective memory.
The Ambivalent State. Police-Criminal Collusion at the Urban Margins
Oxford University Press, Oct. 2019
By Javier Auyero, professor, Department of Sociology; and Katherine Sobering, Plan II ’09 and Ph.D. Sociology ’18
This book offers an unprecedented look into the clandestine relationships between police agents and drug dealers in Argentina. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and documentary evidence, including hundreds of pages of wiretapped phone conversations, the authors analyze the inner-workings of police-criminal collusion, how it shapes drug markets, policing and life at the urban margins.
Fault, Responsibility, and Administrative Law in Late Babylonian Legal Texts
Eisenbrauns; Pennsylvania State University Press, Oct. 2019
By F. Rachel Magdalene; Cornelia Wunsch and Bruce Wells, associate professor, Department of Middle Eastern Studies
Through a detailed examination of more than 90 cuneiform tablets, including 32 previously unpublished documents, the book investigates the governmental system in Mesopotamia during the Neo-Babylonian and early Persian periods (612 – 484 BCE). It demonstrates that the region developed a new and sophisticated form of administrative law during this time.
Religion around Bono: Evangelical Enchantment and Neoliberal Capitalism
Penn State University Press, Nov. 2019
By Chad E. Seales, associate professor, Department of Religious Studies
U2’s Bono is an icon of both evangelical spirituality and secular moral activism. This book examines the religious and spiritual culture that has built up around the rock star over the course of his career and considers how Bono engages with that religion in his music and in his activism.
Quinceañera Style: Social Belonging and Latinx Consumer Identities
University of Texas Press, Nov. 2019
By Rachel Valentina González, assistant professor, Department of Mexican American and Latino/a Studies
Quinceañera Style is a dynamic study of social negotiation and consumerism in the coming-of-age quinceañera celebration and the impact of normalizing spectacles of luxury. These celebrations, which recognize a girl’s transition to young womanhood at age fifteen, are practiced in Latinx communities throughout the Americas.
Reading Shakespeare in the Movies: Non-Adaptations and Their Meaning
Palgrave Macmillan, Nov. 2019
By Eric S. Mallin, associate professor, Department of English
This book analyzes the unacknowledged, covert presence of Shakespearean themes, structures, characters and symbolism in selected films. Writers and directors who forge an unconscious, unintentional connection to Shakespeare’s work create non-adaptations, cinema that is unexpectedly similar to certain Shakespeare plays while remaining independent as art.
New Directions for Historical Linguistics
Brills, Nov. 2019
Edited by Hans C. Boas, professor and chair, Department of Germanic Studies; and Marc Pierce, associate professor, Department of Germanic Studies
This volume consists of revised versions of presentations given at a roundtable on “New Directions for Historical Linguistics: Impact and Synthesis, 50 Years Later” held at the 23rd International Conference on Historical Linguistics in San Antonio.
The Canterbury Tales Handbook
W.W. Norton, Nov. 2019
By Elizabeth Scala, professor, Department of English
In engaging and student-friendly prose, Scala contextualizes each tale by genre and form and examines crucial matters such as the teller of the tale, historical background and critical history. Students can read or re-read Chaucer with confidence, knowing they can turn to the handbook for help with challenging language or unfamiliar concepts.