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Young woman pulling suitcase in the shape of a book with pink background.
Illustration by Michelle Kondrich

Books

Ticket to Read

By Michelle Bryant October 20, 2020 facebook twitter email

Book cover for "Sex, Love and Letters: Writing Simone de Beauvoir."

Sex, Love, and Letters: Writing Simone de Beauvoir
Cornell University Press, Sept. 2020
By Judith G. Coffin, associate professor, Department of History

Sex, Love, and Letters lays bare the private lives and political emotions found in Beauvoir’s correspondence with her audience. Her readers did not simply pen fan letters but, as Coffin shows, engaged in a dialogue that revealed intellectual and literary life to be a joint and collaborative production.


Book cover for "The Photoromance: A Feminist Reading of Popular Culture."

The Photoromance: A Feminist Reading of Popular Culture
MIT Press, Sept. 2020
By Paola Bonifazio, associate professor, Department of French and Italian

Bonifazio makes a case for the relevance of the photoromance for both feminism and media culture. She argues that it pioneered storytelling across platforms, elevated characters and artists into brands and nurtured a devoted fan base. Moreover, she shows that female readers — condescended to by intellectuals, journalists and politicians — powered the Italian industry’s success.


Book cover for "Flash of Light, Wall of Fire: Japanese Photographs Documenting the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ."

Flash of Light, Wall of Fire: Japanese Photographs Documenting the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 
University of Texas Press, Sept. 2020
By The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History (preface by the center’s Executive Director Don Carleton; essay by Michael B. Stoff, associate professor, Department of History; and afterword by Japanese journalist Michiko Tanaka).

Following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanese photographers recorded the devastation. The Briscoe Center for American History recently acquired the collection from the Anti-Nuclear Photographers Movement of Japan. More than 100 images by 23 photographs are featured in this book.


Book cover for "Sex in an Old Regime City: Young Workers and Intimacy in France, 1660-1789."

Sex in an Old Regime City: Young Workers and Intimacy in France, 1660-1789
Oxford University Press, Sept. 2020
By Julie Hardwick, professor, Department of History

Our ideas about the long histories of young couples’ relationships and women’s efforts to manage their reproductive health revolve around a powerful sexual double standard. Sex in an Old Regime City explores the extraordinary stories of the ordinary lives of silk workers to reframe the history of a young people’s intimacy and the management of its consequences. 


Book cover for "The Castilians of Peru: History, Variation and Linguistic Contact."

The Castilians of Peru: History, Variation and Linguistic Contact
Routledge, Sept. 2020
By Luis Andrade Ciudad, associate professor of linguistics at PUCP; and Sandro Sessarego, associate professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese

This book brings together contributions from leading researchers in Hispanic linguistics to offer a comprehensive overview of the Castilians of Peru, including some who have traditionally been subject to discrimination, such as the Andean, Amazonian and Afro-Peruvian populations.


Book cover for "The Zealot and the Emancipator:  John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and the Struggle for American Freedom."

The Zealot and the Emancipator:  John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and the Struggle for American Freedom
Doubleday, Oct. 2020
By H.W. Brands, professor, Department of History

Two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist H. W. Brands offers a dual portrait of John Brown and Abraham Lincoln in the epic struggle over slavery. With clear parallels to our contemporary moment, Brands narrates how two men — who held radically different views —confronted democracy’s most extreme injustice as the nation careened toward civil war.


Book cover for "Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing."

Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing
Oxford University Press, Oct. 2020
By Sarah Brayne, assistant professor, Department of Sociology and Population Research Center

Brayne offers an inside look at how police use big data and new surveillance technologies, leveraging fieldwork with one of the most technologically advanced law enforcement agencies in the world — the Los Angeles Police Department. While big data analytics has the potential to reduce bias, increase efficiency and improve prediction accuracy, she argues it also reproduces and deepens existing patterns of inequality, threatens privacy and challenges civil liberties.


Book cover for "Frontier Intimacies: Ayoreo Women and the Sexual Economy of the Paraguayan Chaco."

Frontier Intimacies: Ayoreo Women and the Sexual Economy of the Paraguayan Chaco
University of Texas Press, Oct. 2020
By Paola Canova, assistant professor, Department of Anthropology

Set in a Mennonite colony of Paraguay’s remote Chaco region, this book tracks the lives and contested practices of Indigenous Ayoreo women who commodify their sexuality, exposing the fractured workings of frontier capitalism. Canova shows how the advancement of economic and missionary frontiers has reconfigured gender roles, sexual ethics and notions of desire in the region.


Book cover for "Silent Film: A Very Short Introduction."

Silent Film: A Very Short Introduction
Oxford University Press, Oct. 2020
By Donna Kornhaber, associate professor, Department of English

Covering the full scope of the silent era — from the invention of motion pictures to the rise of the Hollywood studios — and touching on films and filmmakers from every corner of the globe, Silent Film: A Very Short Introduction offers a brief, vivid and readable account of the cinema’s formative decades.


Book cover for "Queer and Trans Migrations: Dynamics of Illegalization, Detention, and Deportation."

Queer and Trans Migrations: Dynamics of Illegalization, Detention, and Deportation
University of Illinois Press, Oct. 2020
Co-edited by Eithne Luibhéid, professor, Department of Gender Studies at The University of Arizona and UT Austin Latino Research Institute fellow; and Karma R. Chávez, chair and associate professor, Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies

Queer and Trans Migrations provides a first-of-its-kind look at the experiences of LGBTQ migrants and communities. The academics, activists and artists in the volume center illegalization, detention and deportation in U.S. and transnational contexts and examine how migrants and allies negotiate, resist, refuse and critique these processes. 


Book cover for "An Introduction to International Relations: Opening the Global System."

An Introduction to International Relations: Opening the Global System
Pearson, Oct. 2020
By Patrick J. McDonald, associate professor; Terrence L. Chapman, associate professor; Robert G. Moser, professor; Department of Government

This international relations textbook appears on a digital platform with core narratives, original videos, interactive figures and charts, current events bulletins updated in real time and shared writing assignments.  It contains 35 modules on topics including international relations theory, nuclear weapons, terrorism, globalization and climate change.


Book cover for "Resisting Pluralization and Globalization in German Culture, 1490–1540: Visions of a Nation in Decline."

Resisting Pluralization and Globalization in German Culture, 1490–1540: Visions of a Nation in Decline
De Gruyter, Oct. 2020
By Peter Hess, associate professor, Department of Germanic Studies

This book traces a nationalistic and nostalgic backlash in Germany around 1500 against intellectual and epistemological disruptions triggered by spatial discoveries and new methods of visual and verbal representation of space as well as against rising global trade networks, related predatory trading practices and perceived harmful foreign influences.


Book cover for "Reason and Character: The Moral Foundations of Aristotelian Political Philosophy."

Reason and Character: The Moral Foundations of Aristotelian Political Philosophy
University of Chicago Press, Oct. 2020
By Lorraine Smith Pangle, professor, Department of Government; and co-director, Thomas Jefferson Center for the Study of Core Texts and Ideas

Reason and Character unpacks Aristotle’s arguments for virtue as the core of happiness and for reason as the guide to virtue in the Nicomachean Ethics, showing how these arguments constitute a complex project of giving guidance to lawgivers and ordinary citizens while posing puzzles to spur deep theoretical reflection.


Book cover for "Variation and Evolution: Aspects of Language Contact and Contrast Across the Spanish-speaking World."

Variation and Evolution: Aspects of Language Contact and Contrast Across the Spanish-speaking World
John Benjamins Publishing Company, Oct. 2020
Edited by Sandro Sessarego, associate professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese; Juan J. Colomina-Almiñana, instructor at Louisiana State University; and Adrán Rodríguez-Riccelli, visiting assistant professor of Spanish at SUNY at Buffalo

This collection of original studies analyzes how different internal and external factors affect Spanish language variation and evolution across a number of (socio)linguistic scenarios. Its primary goal is to expand our understanding of how native and non-native varieties of Spanish co-exist with other languages and dialects under the influence of several linguistic and extra-linguistic forces.


Book cover for "Shaving the Beasts: Wild Horses and Ritual in Spain."

Shaving the Beasts: Wild Horses and Ritual in Spain
University of Minnesota Press, Nov. 2020
By John Hartigan Jr., professor, Department of Anthropology

Wild horses still roam the mountains of Galicia, Spain. But each year, in a ritual dating to the 1500s called rapa das bestas, villagers herd these “beasts” together and shave their manes and tails. Shaving the Beasts is a firsthand account of how the horses experience this traumatic rite and the durability of sociality in the face of violent domination.


Book cover "New Faces of God in Latin America: Emerging Forms of Vernacular Christianity."

New Faces of God in Latin America: Emerging Forms of Vernacular Christianity
Oxford University Press, Nov. 2020
By Virginia Garrard, professor, Department of History

This monograph is a study of local encounters with Christianity in Latin America and how everyday people inscribe supernormal spirit power with the ability to provide alternative sources of authority and validate knowledge. It examines Christianity as global religion, focusing on the experience, perceptions and adaptations of those who adopt it outside the context of colonizing projects.  


Cover for "Cistercian Stories for Nuns and Monks:  The Sacramental Imagination of Engelhard of Langheim."

Cistercian Stories for Nuns and Monks:  The Sacramental Imagination of Engelhard of Langheim
University of Pennsylvania Press, Nov. 2020
By Martha G. Newman, associate professor, Departments of History and Religious Studies

In Cistercian Stories for Nuns and Monks, Newman shows how Engelhard of Langheim’s late 20th century tales about Cistercian monks illuminate the religiosity of Cistercian nuns. Engelhard’s writings locate a sacramental value in everyday objects and behaviors and teach a spiritual formation that nuns and monks could share.  


Book cover for "Where’s the Rhetoric? Imagining a Unified Field."

Where’s the Rhetoric? Imagining a Unified Field
The Ohio State University Press, Nov. 2020
By S. Scott Graham, assistant professor, Department of Rhetoric and Writing

Graham excavates the shared intellectual history of traditional rhetorical inquiry, rhetorical new materialisms and computational rhetoric with particular emphasis on works by Carolyn Miller, Kenneth Burke and Henri Bergson. In so doing, he argues for a more unified approach to rhetoric — one that eschews sub-disciplinary demarcations.


Laughter and Civility: The Theater of Emma Gad
University of Wisconsin Press, Nov. 2020
By Lynn R. Wilkinson, associate professor, Department of Germanic Studies

Emma Gad was a prolific Danish playwright who raised important questions about sexuality and morality — including the status of women in marriage, divorce, same‐sex desire and marital infidelity. This biographical volume is the first to examine and contextualize her dramas. It is crucial for scholars interested in turn‐of‐the‐century Scandinavian drama, literature, culture and politics.


Book cover for "Portrait of the Artist and His Mother in Twentieth-Century Italian Culture."

Portrait of the Artist and His Mother in Twentieth-Century Italian Culture
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and Rowman & Littlefield, Nov. 2020
By Daniela Bini, professor, Department of French and Italian

This book focuses on case studies of five prominent creative personalities, representing different, sometimes overlapping artistic genres (Luigi Pirandello, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Dino Buzzati, Carlo Levi, Federico Fellini). The author examines how the mother-son relationship not only affected, but actually shaped their work.

Filed Under: Book List, Books Tagged With: Department of Anthropology, Department of French and Italian, Department of Germanic Studies, Department of Government, Department of History, Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, Department of Religious Studies, Department of Rhetoric and Writing, Department of Sociology, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Latino Research Institute, LLILAS Benson, Population Research Center, The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, Thomas Jefferson Center for the Study of Core Texts and Ideas

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