Three faculty have new books

Professors Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, Ulka Anjaria and John Burt have new publications.


Professor Abdur-Rahman's Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race will be published in September 2012 by Duke University Press. Her first book will unpack tropes of sexual transgression in African-American literature as a lens through which authors confronted a cultural history of oppression.

Prof. Ulka Anjaria's book, Realism in the Twentieth-Century Indian Novel, will be published in September 2012 by Cambridge University Press. This book challenges the distinction between early twentieth-century social realism and modern-day magical realism, arguing that realism in the colony functioned as a mode of experimentation and aesthetic innovation – not merely as mimesis of the "real world."

Professor Burt's book, Lincoln's Tragic Pragmatism: Lincoln, Douglas, and Moral Conflict, will be published in January 2013 by Harvard University Press. The work focuses on the debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, the Civil War, and the problems in using a liberal democratic system to "mediate moral disputes."