School of Arts and Sciences

Author: Jonathan Anjaria, Associate Professor of Anthropology

"Through ethnographic vignettes and descriptions of diverse biking experiences, [Mumbai on Two Wheels] shows how pedaling through the city produces a way of seeing and understanding infrastructure. Readers will come away with a new perspective on what makes a city bicycle friendly and an awareness that lessons for a more equitable and sustainable urban future can be found in surprising places."– University of Washington Press

Author: Michael Willrich, Leff Families Professor of History

"Drawing heavily on primary sources, including court records and correspondence, Willrich combines a riveting legal narrative with an astute analysis of American political history. It’s a revealing study of an overlooked foundation of American notions of liberty."– Publishers Weekly

Co-Editor: Steven Lloyd Wilson, Assistant Professor of Politics

"This Handbook on Democracy and Security provides a fascinating analysis of the predominant causes of democratic erosion facing the world today. The book's contributors define and bound new threats – such as the double-edged sword of “militant democracy” – as well as reexamine long-standing threats – such as the triumphs and pitfalls of democracy assistance. Part IV of the book, in particular, offers keen insights regarding how online media both bolster and undermine democracy. This Handbook should be required reading for any democratization student, scholar or practitioner."– Brigitte Seim, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, US

Author: Ilana Szobel, Professor on the Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun Chair in Hebrew Literature

"Ilana Sobel's extraordinary writing investigates the existential paradoxes, unavoidable and painful, but also enlightening enriching, that characterize human life [. . .] I have never encountered such a complex and original weaving of the realistic and the fantastic. Reality is breached in a funny, horrifying, surprising and grotesque way - as the boundaries of the self, and the boundaries of time and space are paradoxically breached." - Zvia Litavsky

Co-Editor: Lynn Kaye, Associate Professor of Rabbinic Literature and Thought

"Accessible to students and scholars alike, the book demonstrates that far from natural, stable, or singular, time is culturally dependent, historically contingent, socially constructed, and disciplinarily specific — and that multidisciplinary and cross-cultural conversations transform our understanding of time." — De Gruyter

Author: Mark Hulliung, Richard Koret Professor Emeritus of the History of Ideas

"The sharp focus on Burke's legacy permits the author to cover a great many years while remaining quite concise. Written in an accessible style, modest in length, covering major debates in England over the course of two centuries and more, this book aims to reach out to as many potential readers as possible." — Oxford University Press

Author: John Plotz, Professor of English and Barbara Mandel Professor of Humanities

"The 'My Reading' series offers personal models of what it is like to care about particular authors and works, and to show their effect upon a reader's own thinking and development [...] Drawing on his own crooked path — from a DC childhood to teaching in Prague to San Francisco journalism to graduate school and then parenthood — Plotz maps the ways that readers young and old find in Earthsea a kind of scholar's stone, a delightfully mutable surface that rewards recurrent contemplation." — Oxford University Press

Translator: Stephen Dowden, Professor of German

Author: Meike G. Werner (Vanderbilt University)

"The conventional wisdom is that the cultural sea change that was European modernism arose in urban centers like Berlin, Paris, Munich, and Vienna. Meike G. Werner's book, now in English translation, is a study of modernism in the provinces. Taking the small provincial city of Jena as a paradigmatic case, it re-creates the very different social and intellectual framework in which modernist experimentation occurred beyond the metropolitan centers. Invented traditions, social and spatial "liminality," and new ideas of social and aesthetic transformation combined in Jena to create a unique moment of cultural innovation.

In the years leading up to the First World War, the Jena publisher Eugen Diederichs envisioned and guided the development of this alternative modernism. Taken up by young writers including Diederichs's wife Helene Voigt-Diederichs, numerous intellectual outsiders from across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and members of the Free Student movement and of Jena's Sera Circle, this "other" modernism was above all a youth movement, full of energy and bold optimism. Figures such as Rudolf Carnap, Wilhelm Flitner, Hans Freyer, Karl Korsch, and Elisabeth Busse-Wilson emerged from this Jena paradigm. Werner pieces together the story of Jena's modernism in its full richness, complexity, and inner contradictions." — Boydell & Brewer

Author: Chad Williams, Samuel J. and Augusta Spector Chair in History

"The dramatic story of W.E.B. Du Bois's reckoning with the betrayal of Black soldiers during World War I — and a new understanding of one of the great 20th-century writers."

When W.E.B. Du Bois, believing in the possibility of full citizenship and democratic change, encouraged African Americans to "close ranks" and support the Allied cause in World War I, he made a decision that would haunt him for the rest of his life. Seeking both intellectual clarity and personal atonement, for more than two decades Du Bois attempted to write the definitive history of Black participation in World War I. His book, however, remained unfinished. In "The Wounded World," Chad Williams offers the dramatic account of Du Bois's failed efforts to complete what would have been one of his most significant works. The surprising story of this unpublished book offers new insight into Du Bois's struggles to reckon with both the history and the troubling memory of the war, along with the broader meanings of race and democracy for Black people in the twentieth century.

Drawing on a broad range of sources, most notably Du Bois's unpublished manuscript and research materials, Williams tells a sweeping story of hope, betrayal, disillusionment, and transformation, setting into motion a fresh understanding of the life and mind of arguably the most significant scholar-activist in African American history. In uncovering what happened to Du Bois's largely forgotten book, Williams offers a captivating reminder of the importance of World War I, why it mattered to Du Bois, and why it continues to matter today." — MacMillan Publishers

Author: Faith Smith, Marta F. Kauffman Chair in African and African American Studies

"In 'Strolling in the Ruins,' Faith Smith engages with a period in the history of the Anglophone Caribbean often overlooked as nondescript, quiet, and embarrassingly pro-imperial within the larger narrative of Jamaican and Trinidadian nationalism. Between the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion and World War I, British imperialism was taken for granted among both elites and ordinary people, while nationalist discourses would not begin to shape political imagination in the West Indies for decades. Smith argues that this moment, far from being uneventful, disrupts the inevitability of nationhood in the mid-twentieth century and anticipates the Caribbean's present-day relationship to global power. Smith assembles and analyzes a diverse set of texts, from Carnival songs, poems, and novels to newspapers, photographs, and gardens, to examine theoretical and literary-historiographic questions concerning time and temporality, empire and diaspora, immigration and indigeneity, gender and the politics of desire, Africa's place within Caribbeanist discourse, and the idea of the Caribbean itself. Closely examining these cultural expressions of apparent quiescence, Smith locates the quiet violence of colonial rule and the insistence of colonial subjects on making meaningful lives." — Duke University Press

Co-Editor: Elizabeth Bradfield, Co-Director of Creative Writing & Associate Professor in the Practice of English

"​​ 'Cascadia Field Guide' brings together art, poetry, and stories holding scientific, sensory, and cultural knowledge to celebrate and illuminate Cascadia, the diverse ecoregion stretching from Alaska’s Prince William Sound to Northern California and from the Pacific Coast to the Continental Divide! ​This unique book contains 13 communities (from Tidewater Glacier to Shrub-Steppe) and 128 beings (from Geoduck to Cassia Crossbill), offering any reader, local or visitor, a new way of connecting — with heart and mind and body — to place." — Mountaineers Books

Author: Derron Wallace, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Education

"In 'The Culture Trap,' Derron Wallace argues that the overreliance on culture to explain Black students' achievement and behavior in schools is a trap that undermines the historical factors and institutional processes that shape how Black students experience schooling. This trap is consequential for a host of racial and ethnic minority youth in schools, including Black Caribbean young people in London and New York City.

Since the 1920s, Black Caribbeans in New York have been considered a high-achieving Black model minority. Conversely, since the 1950s, Black Caribbeans in London have been regarded as a chronically underachieving minority. In both contexts, however, it is often suggested that Caribbean culture informs their status, whether as a celebrated minority in the U.S, or as a demoted minority in Britain.

Drawing on rich observations, interviews and archives in London and New York City schools, Wallace suggests that the use of culture to justify Black Caribbean students' achievement obscures the very real ways that school structures, institutional processes, and colonial conditions influence the racial, gender, and class inequalities minority youth experience in schools. Wallace reveals how culture is at times used as an alibi for racism in schools, and points out what educators, parents, and students can do to change the beliefs and practices that reinforce racism." — Oxford University Press

Co-Author: James Morris, Professor of Biology

"I would recommend this text without reservation to anyone teaching a traditional introductory biology course — I like the level of detail, the clear writing, the emphasis on evolution, and the high-quality question banks." — Chris Andrews, University of Chicago

Co-Author: Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso, Associate Professor of African and African American Studies

" 'African Refugees' is a comprehensive overview of the context, causes, and consequences of refugee lives, discussing issues, policies, and solutions for African refugees around the world. It covers overarching topics such as human rights, policy frameworks, refugee protection, and durable solutions, as well as less-studied topics such as refugee youths, refugee camps, LGBTQ refugees, urban refugees and refugee women. It also takes on rare but emergent topics such as citizenship and the creativity of African refugees.

Toyin Falola and Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso showcase the voices and experiences of individual refugees through the sweep of history to tell the African refugee story from the historical past through current developments, covering the full range of experience from the causes of flight to living in exile, all while maintaining a persistent focus on the complicated search for solutions.

'African Refugees' recognizes African agency and contributions in pursuit of solutions for African refugees over time but avoids the pitfalls of the colonial gaze — where refugees are perpetually pathologized and Africa is always the sole cause of its own problems — seeking to complicate these narratives by recognizing African refugee issues within exploitative global, colonial, and neo-colonial systems of power." — Indiana University Press

Author: Wendy Cadge, Professor of Sociology and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanistic Social Sciences

"Chaplains are America's hidden religious leaders. Required in the military, federal prisons, and Veterans Administration Medical Centers, chaplains also work in two-thirds of hospitals, most hospices, many institutions of higher education, and a growing range of other settings. The chaplains of the U.S. House and Senate regularly engage with national leaders through public prayer and private conversation. Chaplains have been present at national protests, including the racial justice protests that took place across the country in 2020. A national survey conducted in the United States in 2019 found that 21% of the Americans public had contact with a chaplain in the prior two years. Contact with chaplains likely increased with the COVID-19 pandemic, which thrust chaplains into the spotlight, as they cared for patients, family members, and exhausted and traumatized medical staff fighting the pandemic in real time.

Wendy Cadge steps back to ask who chaplains are, what they do across the United States, how that work is connected to the settings where they do it, and how they have responded to and helped to shape contemporary shifts in the American religious landscape. She focuses on Boston as a case study to show how chaplains have been, and remain, an important part of institutional religious ecologies, both locally and nationally. She has combed through the archives of major Boston institutions including the city government, police and fire department, hospitals, universities, rest and rehabilitation centers, the Catholic church, and several Protestant denominations, as well as the Boston Globe, to chart the work of chaplains historically. Cadge also interviewed over one hundred chaplains who work in greater Boston and shadowed them whenever possible, going on board container ships, walking through homeless shelters, and attending religious services at local prisons. The result is a rich study of a little-noticed but essential group of religious leaders." — Oxford University Press

Author: Sarah Lamb, Professor of Anthropology, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Barbara Mandel Professor of Humanistic Social Sciences

"Today, the majority of the world's population lives in a country with falling marriage rates, a phenomenon with profound impacts on women, gender, and sexuality. In this exceptionally crafted ethnography, Sarah Lamb probes the gendered trend of single women living in India, examining what makes living outside marriage for women increasingly possible and yet incredibly challenging. Featuring the stories of never-married women as young as 35 and as old as 92, the book offers a remarkable portrait of a way of life experienced by women across class and caste divides, from urban professionals and rural day laborers, to those who identify as heterosexual and lesbian, to others who evaded marriage both by choice and by circumstance. For women in India, complex social-cultural and political-economic contexts are foundational to their lives and decisions, and evading marriage is often an unintended consequence of other pressing life priorities. Arguing that never-married women are able to illuminate their society's broader social-cultural values, Lamb offers a new and startling look at prevailing systems of gender, sexuality, kinship, freedom, and social belonging in India today." — University of California Press

Co-Editor: James Mandrell, Director of the University Writing Program, and Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies, Comparative Literature, and Film Studies

" 'The Gastronomical Arts in Spain' includes essays that span from the medieval to the contemporary world, providing a taste of the many ways in which the art of gastronomy developed in Spain over time. This collection encompasses a series of cultural objects and a number of interests, ranging from medicine to science, from meals to banquets, and from specific recipes to cookbooks.

The contributors consider Spanish cuisine as presented in a variety of texts, including literature, medical and dietary prescriptions, historical documents, cookbooks, and periodicals. They draw on literary texts in their socio-historical context in order to explore concerns related to the production and consumption of food for reasons of hunger, sustenance, health, and even gluttony.

Structured into three distinct 'courses' that focus on the history of foodstuffs, food etiquette, and culinary fashion, 'The Gastronomical Arts in Spain' brings together the many sights and sounds of the Spanish kitchen throughout the centuries." — University of Toronto Press

Co-Editor: Sabine von Mering, Professor of German and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies

" 'Antisemitism on Social Media' is a book for all who want to understand this phenomenon.

Researchers interested in the matter will find innovative methodologies (CrowdTangle or Voyant Tools mixed with discourse analysis) and new concepts (tertiary antisemitism, antisemitic escalation) that should become standard in research on antisemitism on social media. It is also an invitation to students and up-and-coming and established scholars to study this phenomenon further. This interdisciplinary volume addresses how social media with its technology and business model has revolutionized the dissemination of antisemitism and how this impacts not only victims of antisemitic hate speech but also society at large. The book gives insight into case studies on different platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and Telegram. It also demonstrates how social media is weaponized through the dissemination of antisemitic content by political actors from the right, the left, and the extreme fringe, and critically assesses existing counter-strategies.

People working for social media companies, policy makers, practitioners, and journalists will benefit from the questions raised, the findings, and the recommendations. Educators who teach courses on antisemitism, hate speech, extremism, conspiracies, and Holocaust denial but also those who teach future leaders in computer technology will find this volume an important resource." — Routledge Taylor & Francis Group

Co-Editor: Matthew Fraleigh, Associate Professor of East Asian Literature and Culture

" 'Sino-Japanese Reflections' offers 10 richly detailed case studies that examine various forms of cultural and literary interaction between Japanese and Chinese intellectuals from the late Ming to the early twentieth century. The authors consider efforts by early modern scholars on each side of the Yellow Sea to understand the language and culture of the other, to draw upon received texts and forms, and to contribute to shared literary practices. Whereas literary and cultural flow within the Sinosphere is sometimes imagined to be an entirely unidirectional process of textual dissemination from China to the periphery, the contributions to this volume reveal a more complex picture: highlighting how literary and cultural engagement was always an opportunity for creative adaptation and negotiation. Examining materials such as Chinese translations of Japanese vernacular poetry, Japanese engagements with Chinese supernatural stories, adaptations of Japanese historical tales into vernacular Chinese, Sinitic poetry composed in Japan, and Japanese Sinology, the volume brings together recent work by literary scholars and intellectual historians of multiple generations, all of whom have a strong comparative interest in Sino-Japanese studies." — De Gruyter Oldenbourg