Faculty Bookshelf
2025
The Tlingit in Sitka: The Photography of Elbridge W. Merrill
University of Washington Press, July 2025
Sergei Kan, Department of Anthropology
Kan presents a first-ever collection of Merrill’s photographs, which includes images of important Tlingit events and scenes of everyday life from the Indigenous Tlingit community in Alaska.
Command of Commerce: America's Enduring Economic Power Advantage Over China
Oxford University Press, April 2025
Stephen Brooks, Department of Government, and Ben Vagle ’22
Brooks and Vagle provide a systematic analysis of how both China and the U.S. would be affected by a rapid economic cutoff during a conflict
The End of the Schism: Catholics, Protestants, and the Remaking of Christian Life in Europe, 1880s-1970s
Harvard University Press, April 2025
Udi Greenberg, Department of History
Greenberg examines how and why the great falling out that pitted Protestants and Catholics in Europe against each other came to an abrupt end.
Rethinking Metaphysics
Oxford University Press, April 2025
Amie Thomasson, Department of Philosophy
Thomasson proposes a rethinking of metaphysics as conceptual engineering, and presents a clear way to think about the functions of different parts of language.
How Politicians Polarize: Political Representation in an Age of Negative Partisanship
The University of Chicago Press, March 2025
Mia Costa, Department of Government
Costa draws on surveys, analysis of congressional newsletters and tweets, and data on fundraising and media coverage to examine how and why politicians often rely on negative partisan attacks.
Intersectional Listening: Gentrification and Black Sonic Life in Washington, DC
Oxford University Press, March 2025
Allie Martin, Department of Music
Martin draws on an innovative combination of methodologies, including interviews, soundwalks, acoustic recording, and machine learning, to argue gentrification ultimately serves to silence some voices and amplify others.
Black Elegies: Meditations on the Art of Mourning
The MIT Press, February 2025
Kimberly Juanita Brown, Department of English and Creative Writing
Brown examines the form of elegy found in visual art, music, and literature, and its unique capacity to convey the elongated grief borne of sustained racial violence.
The Scientific Sublime in Imperial Rome: Manilius, Seneca, Lucan, and the Aetna
Oxford University Press, February 2025
Patrick Glauthier, Department of Classics
Glauthier charts the role of the sublime in first-century debates about how and why we investigate the natural world, and renders the classical sublime more expansive, dynamic, and contested.
The Woman Question in Jewish Studies
Princeton University Press, February 2025
Susannah Heschel, Jewish Studies Program, and Sarah Imhoff
Heschel and Imhoff take a critical look at the difficulties women face in the field of Jewish studies, drawing on quantitative data, personal stories, and the gendered history of the field.
The Dressing Room: Backstage Lives and American Film
Rutgers University Press, January 2025
Desirée Garcia, Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies
In the only book-length study of the dressing room, Garcia explores how these spaces are dynamic realms in which a diverse cast of performers are made and exposed.
The Cambridge History of The Vietnam War, Volume 1: Origins
Cambridge University Press, January 2025
Edward Miller (editor), Department of Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages
The first volume presents the scholarship that has flourished since the 1990s to situate the war and its origins within longer chronologies and larger interpretative perspectives.
A Measure Short of War: A Brief History of Great Power Subversion
Oxford University Press, January 2025
William Wohlforth, Department of Government, and Jill Kastner
Wohlforth and Kastner provide a unique transhistorical perspective on a topic that regularly emerges as a serious problem in world politics.
2024
Hard Neighbors: The Scotch-Irish Invasion of Native America and the Making of an American Identity
Oxford University Press, December 2024
Colin Calloway, Department of History, Native American Studies and Indigenous Studies
Calloway details early American settlers who acted as the tip of the spear of white colonial expansion into Native American lands.
Stanford University Press, December 2024
Jonathan Smolin, Middle Eastern Studies Program
Smolin frames the work of Kouddous as a new model of Arabic fiction as dissent—considering both his cultural influence and position in Egyptian politics.
Forest Lost: Producing Green Capitalism in the Brazilian Amazon
Duke University Press, November 2024
Maron Greenleaf, Department of Anthropology
Greenleaf explores how the market forces threatening rainforests worldwide can be marshaled to help protect them.
Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism: South Africa in the Chinese Century
Duke University Press, November 2024
Mingwei Huang, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program
Huang offers tools for decentering contemporary Western conceptions of race, empire, and racial capitalism in the Chinese Century.
Free Imagination: The Deep Roots of Creativity, Freedom and Meaning in the Human Brain and Mind
Oxford University Press, October 2024
Peter Tse, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences
Tse argues that the brain's capacity to imagine is the fundamental basis of human free will.
Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism
W.W. Norton & Company, September 2024
Brooke Harrington, Department of Sociology
Harrington reveals how the offshore finance system works, as well as how it degrades democracy, the economy, and the public goods on which we all depend.
Ungoverning: The Attack on the Administrative State and the Politics of Chaos
Princeton University Press, October 2024
Russell Muirhead, Department of Government and Political Economy Project, and Nancy Rosenblum
Muirhead and Rosenblum traces how “ungoverning”—the deliberate effort to dismantle the capacity of government to do its work—has become a malignant part of politics.
American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism
Princeton University Press, October 2024
Keidrick Roy, Department of Government
Roy sheds new light on how Black abolitionist writers and activists worked to eradicate the pernicious ideology of racial feudalism from American liberalism.
Freak Inheritance: Eugenics and Extraordinary Bodies in Performance
Oxford University Press, August 2024
Analola Santana (co-editor), Department of Theater
This collection identifies the pernicious and ongoing effects of eugenics in contemporary culture as well as across historical periods.
enajenada
Editorial Anticanon, July 2024
Kianny Antigua, Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Antigua’s collection of poems represents the visceral human experience through the voice and body that make up the aesthetic experiences of femininities geopolitically situated in the Caribbean.
Revolutionary Philanthropy: Aid to Political Prisoners and Exiles in Late Imperial Russia
Oxford University Press, July 2024
Stuart Finkel, Department of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Studies
Finkel reframes the late 19th-century Russian revolutionary/liberationist movement to show how a form of political prisoner advocacy emerged significantly earlier than previously thought.
L’ABC di Alberto Manzi: Maestro Degli Italiani
Anicia Edizioni, May 2024
Tania Convertini, Department of French and Italian Studies
Convertini explores the fundamental values of the Italian educator’s pedagogical and humanistic approach to teaching.
A Neurophilosophy of Libertarian Free Will
Oxford University Press, May 2024
Peter Tse, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences
Tse offers a neuroscientific defense of the reality of free will and explores philosophical issues considering the latest data and theories of neuroscience.
Common Boundaries: The Theory and Practice of Environmental Property
Agenda Pubishing, April 2024
Michael Cox, Department of Environmental Studies
Cox examines environmental property rights across cultures and communities.
Water on Fire: A Memoir of War
Other Press, April 2024
Tarek El-Ariss, Middle Eastern Studies Program
El-Ariss revisits his childhood in war-torn Lebanon and his family's global history, coming to terms with trauma and desire.
Against Extraction: Indigenous Modernism in the Twin Cities
Duke University Press, April 2024
Matt Hooley, Department of Native American and Indigenous Studies
Hooley traces a modern tradition of Ojibwe invention in Minneapolis and St. Paul from the mid-19th century to the present through the lens of anticolonialism.
A Politics of Melancholia: From Plato to Arendt
Princeton University Press, March 2024
George Edmondson, Department of English and Creative Writing, and Klaus Mladek, Department of German Studies and Comparative Literature Program
Edmondson and Mladek make the case for melancholia as a vital form of social critique and political renewal.
Messianic Zionism in the Digital Age: Jews, Noahides, and the Third Temple Imaginary
Rutgers University Press, March 2024
Rachel Feldman, Department of Religion
Through ethnographic research across continents, Feldman details how Third Temple visions have gained considerable momentum and political support in Israel and abroad.
Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual
MIT Press, February 2024
Kimberly Juanita Brown, Department of English and Creative Writing
Brown details how documentary photography and the cultural legacy of empire have come together to produce the understanding that blackness and suffering—and death—are inextricable.
The Digital and Its Discontents
University of Minnesota Press, February 2024
Aden Evens, Department of English and Creative Writing
Interweaving technical and philosophical concepts, Evens analyzes universal technological principles to show that they encourage certain ways of thinking while making others more challenging or impossible.
The Incarcerated Modern: Prisons and Public Life in Iran
Stanford University Press, February 2024
Golnar Nikpour, Department of History
Nikpour traces the transformation of Iran from a decentralized empire with few imprisoned persons at the turn of the twentieth century into a modern nation-state with over a quarter million prisoners today.
Sounds As They Are: The Unwritten Music in Classical Recordings
Oxford University Press, January 2024
Richard Beaudoin, Department of Music
Beaudoin pioneers a field of inquiry called inclusive track analysis, which recognizes often-overlooked sounds made by the bodies of performers and their recording equipment as music.
One Soul We Divided: A Critical Edition of the Diary of Michael Field
Princeton University Press, January 2024
Carolyn Dever (editor), Department of English and Creative Writing
Dever presents the first book-length selection from the unpublished diary of the late-Victorian writer "Michael Field"—the pen name of two female coauthors and romantic partners.
Myth and Menagerie: Seeing Lions in the Nineteenth Century
Yale University Press, January 2024
Katie Hornstein, Department of Art History
Hornstein constructs a theoretical framework for acknowledging a history in which both humans and animals had a stake.
2023
Dancing in My Dreams: A Spiritual Biography of Tina Turner
Eerdmans Publishing, November 2023
Ralph H. Craig III, Department of Religion
Craig traces Tina Turner's journey from the Black Baptist church to Buddhism and situates her at the vanguard of large-scale movements in religion and pop culture.
Settler Indigeneity in the West Bank
McGill-Queen's University Press, November 2023
Rachel Feldman (co-editor), Department of Religion
This volume explores what Israeli settlers mean when they say they are indigenous; how settler indigeneity is felt, performed, and mediated; and the implications of indigeneity claims on the international stage.
The Necessity of Exile: Essays From a Distance
Ayin Press, November 2023
Shaul Magid, Jewish Studies Program
The celebrated scholar and rabbi reclaims exile as a positive stance for constructive Jewish engagement with Israel|Palestine, antisemitism, and diaspora.
Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea
Hachette Book Group, November 2023
Darrin McMahon, Department of History
McMahon traces equality's global origins and spread from the dawn of humanity through the Enlightenment to today.
False Starts: The Segregated Lives of Preschoolers
NYU Press, November 2023
Casey Stockstill, Department of Sociology
Drawing on a two-year observational study, Stockstill details the racial and class divides between Head Start and private pre-K classrooms for children and their families.
Consistent Democracy: The "Woman Question" and Self-Government in Nineteenth-Century America
Oxford University Press, October 2023
Leslie Butler, Department of History
Butler examines how wide-ranging discussions about self-government and the so-called woman question developed in published opinion from the 1830s through the 1890s.
Social Voices: The Cultural Politics of Singers Around the Globe
University of Illinois Press, September 2023
Levi Gibbs (editor), Department of Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages
Designed as a textbook for advanced undergraduate students, this collection brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to engage with issues of race, gender, ethnicity, and class.
Families on the Edge
MIT Press, August 2023
Elizabeth Carpenter-Song '01, Department of Anthropology
Carpenter-Song draws on a decade of research to chart the struggles of a cohort of families she met in a Vermont family shelter in 2009 as they contend with housing insecurity, mental illness, and substance use.
The Dawn of a Mindful Universe
HarperCollins Publishers, August 2023
Marcelo Gleiser, Department of Physics and Astronomy
Gleiser issues a call to embrace how rare and precious life is and why it should be our mission to preserve and nurture it.
Anti-Racist Community Engagement
Stylus Publishing, August 2023
Roopika Risam (co-editor), Department of Film and Media Studies, Comparative Literature Program
The authors showcase anti-racist community-engaged traditions that BIPOC academics and community members have created through collaborations across university and community.
Prophetic Leadership and Visionary Hope
University of Pennsylvania Press, May 2023
Barbara Will (editor), Department of English and Creative Writing
This volume of essays by leading scholars of Black studies, religious studies, and social justice history examines Cornel West's classic 1993 book Race Matters and the future of racial understanding and healing in American society today.
The Birth of Computer Vision
University of Minnesota Press, April 2023
James E. Dobson, Department of English and Creative Writing
Dobson takes readers back to the Cold War-era scientists who taught computers how to see.
The Shared World
Northwestern University Press, April 2023
Vievee Francis, Department of English and Creative Writing
Francis imagines the ideas, ideals, and spaces of the Black woman. The poetry collection delves into inherited memories and restrictions between families, lovers, and strangers and the perception and inconvenient truth of Black woman as mother.
Eli and the Octopus
Harvard University Press, April 2023
Matt Garcia, Department of History
Garcia chronicles the tragic quest of rabbi-turned-businessman Eli Black to merge business with social responsibility.
Disturbing Development in the Jim Crow South
University of Georgia Press, March 2023
Mona Domosh, Department of Geography
Domosh documents how Black government employees practiced rural improvement in ways that sustained southern Black farmers' lives and livelihoods in the early decades of the 20th century.
Playing Oppression
MIT Press, March 2023
Mary Flanagan, Department of Film and Media Studies, and Mikael Jakobsson
Flanagan and Jakobsson apply the frameworks of postcolonial theory to show how board games reinforce the logic of imperialism—and why the future of play depends on reckoning with it.
Seneca, The Literary Philosopher
Cambridge University Press, March 2023
Margaret Graver, Department of Classics
After detailing Seneca's positions on scholarship, value, and human psychology, Graver explores the Roman Stoic's use of genre, humor, and style as vehicles for philosophical writing.
The Undertow
W.W. Norton & Company, March 2023
Jeff Sharlet, Department of English and Creative Writing
Sharlet explores how, over the last decade, social division has morphed into distrust, distrust into paranoia, and hatred into fantasies—sometimes realities—of violence.
#You Know You're Black in France When...
MIT Press, February 2023
Trica Keaton, Departments of African and African American Studies
Keaton illuminates how b/Black (racialized/politicized) French people distinctly expose and refuse what she calls "raceblind republicanism."
Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self (second edition)
Princeton University Press, January 2023
Susan Brison, Department of Philosophy
Brison tells the story of her recovery from a violent assault and offers a philosophical exploration of trauma. This paperback edition includes a new preface by the author.
Power and Persuasion in Cicero's Philosophy
Cambridge University Press, January 2023
Margaret Graver (co-editor), Department of Classics
New studies by leading scholars in Roman philosophy investigate Cicero's views on the motives of political agents and the morality of political arguments as well as his use of emotion, self-correction, and even fiction in intellectual inquiry.
Dostoevsky’s Provocateurs
Northwestern University Press, January 2023
Lynn Ellen Patyk, Department of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Studies
Patyk singles out Dostoevsky’s deliberate deployment of provocation, forms of incitement, as a communicative strategy that drives his paradoxical art.
2022
Institutions Under Siege
Cambridge University Press, December 2022
John Campbell, Department of Sociology
Campbell examines Trump's attack on the "deep state" through the lens of institutional change theory and demonstrates how he capitalized on distinct leadership tactics to inspire, make deals with, and threaten people to get what he wanted.
Dante's Gluttons
Amsterdam University Press, November 2022
Danielle Callegari, Department of French and Italian
For medieval Italian poet Dante Alighieri, the consumption of food is not a frivolity, but a crux of life, and gluttony is the abdication of civic and spiritual responsibility and a danger to both the individual body and soul, as well as the greater collective. Callegari explores how Dante expresses the social, political, and cultural values of his time through food.
The Enchanted Boot
Wayne State University Press, November 2022
Nancy Canepa, Department of French and Italian
This comprehensive collection of Italian tales in English encourages a revisitation of the fairy-tale canon in light of some of the most fascinating material that has often been excluded from it.
The Best American Essays
HarperCollins Publishers, November 2022
Alexander Chee (editor), Department of English and Creative Writing
Under Chee's leadership, the iconic essay collection features the most diverse lineup of authors and publications in the history of the series.
Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad
Penguin Random House, October 2022
Mathew Delmont, Department of History
Delmont illuminates Black Americans' heroism during the war and experience of racism.
Still No Word from You
Catapult, October 2022
Peter Orner, Department of English and Creative Writing
Orner's nonfiction collection weaves personal memories with reflections on why we read and write, including his own stories of loss, love, despair, and hope.
Gods, Goddesses, and the Women Who Serve Them
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., September 2022
Susan Ackerman, Department of Religion
Drawing on three decades researching underexamined aspects of the Hebrew Bible pertaining to women, Ackerman describes the worship of goddesses in ancient Israel, the roles women played as priests and prophets, the cultic significance of queen mothers, and the Hebrew Bible's accounts of women's religious lives.
Passion Plays
University of North Carolina Press, September 2022
Randall Balmer, Department of Religion
From baseball to basketball and football to ice hockey, Balmer explores the origins and histories of big-time sports from the late 19th century to the present, with anecdotes and insights into their ties to religious life.
A Dream Defaulted
Harvard Education Press, August 2022
Jason Houle, Department of Sociology
Co-authors Houle and Fenaba Addo explore how the student loan crisis disproportionately affects Black borrowers and why rising student debt is both a cause and consequence of social inequality in the United States.
Embodied Economies
Rutgers University Press, May 2022
Israel Reyes, Department of Spanish and Portuguese
The discourse of white nationalism in the U.S. compels upwardly mobile Latinx Caribbean immigrants to trade in their ties to ethnic and linguistic communities to assimilate to the dominant culture. Reyes terms this phenomenon "transcultural capital" and explores it in the contemporary fiction and theater of the Latinx Caribbean diaspora.
Women and the Religion of Ancient Israel
Yale University Press, April 2022
Susan Ackerman, Department of Religion
In this comprehensive account of ancient Israelite women's religious lives and experiences, Ackerman examines their household shrines, regional sanctuaries, national temples, rituals, and their special roles in religious settings.
Chains of Love and Beauty
Princeton University Press, April 2022
Carolyn Dever, Department of English and Creative Writing
Dever makes the case that a monumental diary by an aunt and niece who published poetry together as "Michael Field"—and who were prolific writers as well as partners for decades—is one of the great unknown works of late-Victorian and early modernist literature.
Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media
University of Illinois Press, April 2022
Reighan Gillam, Department of Latin American, Latino & Caribbean Studies
Gillam examines the alternative and activist Black media and the people creating it in today's Brazil. She looks at a cross-section of media to show the ways Afro-Brazilians artists contribute to the fight to change how Brazilian media depicts Black people.
Voices From Beyond
University of Virginia Press, April 2022
Scott Sanders, Department of French and Italian
In the early 18th century, how voice related to body became a major subject of scientific and cultural interest. This interdisciplinary and transnational study examines the diversity of thought about vocal materialtiy and its roles in philosophical and literary works from that period.
Media of the Masses
Stanford University Press, April 2022
Andrew Simon, Department of History
Audiocassette technology gave ordinary individuals an opening to challenge state-controlled Egyptian media. At the intersection of social history, cultural anthropology, and media and sound studies, the book ultimately shows how the most ordinary things may yield the most surprising insights.
Los Angeles Review of Books Review
Economy and Modern Christian Thought
Brill, March 2022
Devin Singh, Department of Religion
Singh presents key features of the engagement of Christian theology, ethics, and related disciplines with the market and economic concerns. The book contends that economy and Christian thought have long been interconnected and recounts why this matters for engaging the economy ethically and theologically.
Holy Digital Grail
Stanford University Press, March 2022
Michelle Warren, Comparative Literature Program
Medieval books have been through a lot: singed by fire, mottled by mold, eaten by insects, annotated by readers, cut into fragments, or damaged through well-intentioned preservation efforts. This is the story of one such manuscript—an Arthurian romance with textual origins in 12-century England now diffused across the 21st-century internet.
Nationalisms in International Politics
Princeton University Press, February 2022
Kathleen Powers, Department of Government
With nationalism on the rise around the world, many worry that nationalistic attitudes could lead to a surge in deadly conflict. Powers examines how different forms of nationalism shape foreign policy attitudes and raises important questions about whether transnational identities increase support for cooperation or undermine it.