School of Arts and Sciences

Author: Joel Christensen, Professor of Classical and Early Mediterranean Studies

“Written with great learning and elegance, this stunningly original book changes not only how we think about Greek epic but how stories make and break us in the present as well as the past.”- Candida Moss, author of God’s Ghostwriters

Co-Author: Prakash Kashwan, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies

"Decolonizing Environmentalism dismantles the assumptions of mainstream Western environmentalism, offering a powerful critique in clear and accessible language. It goes beyond critique, however, by providing a valuable roadmap for building more inclusive and equitable environmental movements." - Amitav Ghosh, author of  The Nutmeg's Curse

Co-Editor: Darlene Brooks-Hedstrom, Myra and Robert Kraft and Jacob Hiatt Associate Professor of Christian Studies

"This book is a collective reflection on the relationship between theory and methods, as practiced by American archaeologists of the Byzantine period in Greece, Turkey, Ukraine, and Egypt between the 1990s and 2020s. The eleven authors represent a generational voice that employed theory to redirect the established narratives of the golden age of Byzantine archaeology (1960s–1980s) that privileged art and religion." - Routledge

Co-Author: Sarah Mayorga, Professor of Sociology

"In addition to being essential reading for sociologists interested in neighborhood change and the modalities of racial capitalism, this book will be a highly engaging addition to graduate and undergraduate urban sociology courses." - Nora Taplin-Kaguru, Bryn Mawr College

Author: Muna Güvenç, Assistant Professor of Fine Arts

"One of the last decade's best books concerning Kurdish activism in Turkey, Muna Güvenç's deeply researched and beautifully written study is accessible and intellectually elegant. It offers important new conceptualizations on Kurdish nationalist politics and on how urbanism and the politics of place may shape nation-building, especially in undemocratic contexts." - Nicole F. Watts, San Francisco State University

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

"This volume, along with Burton Watson's classic kanshi translations, constitutes the finest translations of poetry written in classical Chinese by Japanese poets. The introduction and preface immerse the reader in the cultural history surrounding the lives of Seigan and Kōran—perfect preparation for the literary feast that follows in the form of 195 exquisite poems. A profound aesthetic experience." - David K. Schneider, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Editor: Caren Irr, Kevy and Hortense Kaiserman Professor in the Humanities

"This book is a winner. There’s nothing like it currently available for readers and instructors – nothing even close. It provides a range of texts never before available in English and puts these in dialogue with ones which have been available."– Imre Szeman, Director of the Institute for Environment, Conservation and Sustainability, University of Toronto Scarborough

Co-Editor: Irina Dubinina, Professor of Russian

"Presenting a wide range of new empirical findings, the volume explores topics at the forefront of HL studies, from assessment of HL learners’ linguistic competence and language attitudes to research on communities and institutional affordances impacting HL acquisition and maintenance. Each chapter connects current research with specific classroom applications, presenting Russian as a global language in various sociopolitical and majority-language contexts."– Routledge Taylor & Francis Group

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

Co-Author: Alice Noble, Senior Lecturer in Legal Studies and in Health: Science, Society and Policy

“Reliable source on medical liability law. Written by experts in the field, this Nutshell offers insight on establishing professional relationships and examines negligence-based claims, intentional torts, causation, damages, affirmative defenses, limitations, immunities, and liabilities. It also provides an overview of medical care liability issues affecting hospitals and managed care organizations." - West Academic Publishing

Author: Ramie Targoff, Jehuda Reinharz Professor in the Humanities

“[A] fascinating excavation of four intellectual powerhouse women of the 16th and early 17th centuries . . . Targoff’s intent is to scrape away the layer of literary obscurity from Shakespeare’s sisters and present the pentimento as transcendent survivors. Their work indeed lives on.” - Tina Brown, The New York Times Book Review

Author: Yuri Doolan, Assistant Professor of History and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

"[...] a meticulously researched analysis of the geopolitical construction of the 'Amerasian' and an incisive critique of US humanitarianism after the Korean War. At turns subtle and scathing, this book exposes the violence beneath the rescue narratives and performs a kind of reparation for the families separated by that violence. It is a loving tribute to a people as much as it is an exceptional work of scholarship." - Grace M. Cho, Author of Tastes Like War

Author: Ziva Hassenfeld, Jack, Joseph & Morton Mandel Assistant Professor in Jewish Education and Assistant Director of Research for the Mandel Center

“With abiding respect for learners, teachers, and texts, Ziva Hassenfeld beautifully articulates a rarely addressed but deeply compelling problem of practice. The Second Conversation gets to the heart of teaching and learning and invites educators to join the author in a vital, field-building conversation about the meaning-making process itself — what is at stake and for whom. Serving as a model herself, Hassenfeld guides educators to become ever more intentional in shaping the communities of learning they envision” - Allison Cook, Founder and Co-Director of Pedagogy of Partnership, Powered by Hadar

Co-Editor: Charles Golden, Professor of Anthropology

"The book brings together fifteen chapters focused on many parts of Mesoamerica, including Western Mexico, the Basin of Mexico, Veracruz, Oaxaca, and various parts of the Maya Lowlands, and range chronologically from the Classic period (250-900 CE) to the Spanish Conquest in the early 16th Century. It appeals to those working in archaeology, economic anthropology, economic history, and all those interested in how value can be understood in terms of contemporary cultural and political differences." - Palgrave MacMillan

Author: Stephen McCauley, Professor of the Practice of English and Co-Director of the Creative Writing Program

“I don’t think I will find a book I love more this year.” - Jane Green, New York Times bestselling author

Author: Laura Quinney, Professor of English

"In her third book of poems, Laura Quinney [. . .] remembers what she thought the past would look like from the present moment, and in so doing deepens the meaning of memory." - Borderland Books

Translator: Carl El-Tobgui, Associate Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies and Director of the Arabic Language Program

Author: Farid Suleiman (Greifswald University)

“Farid Suleiman pieces together, on the basis of statements scattered unsystematically over numerous individual treatises, an overall picture of the methodological foundations of Ibn Taymiyya’s doctrine of the divine attributes." - De Gruyter Brill

Co-Editor: Alexandra Ratzlaff, Assistant Professor of Classical and Early Mediterranean Studies

"Tel Kabri was the center of a Canaanite polity during the Middle Bronze Age. Initial excavations conducted at the site from 1986 to 1993 revealed the remains of a palace dating primarily during the first half of the second millennium BCE [...] This volume presents the results of the work done at Tel Kabri during the years from 2013 to 2019, focused especially on the exploration of the rooms within the Wine Storage Complex of the palace." - Brill

Author: Darlene Brooks Hedstrom, Myra and Robert Kraft and Jacob Hiatt Associate Professor of Christian Studies

"This book grounds the mythologized stories of Desert Ascetics in the materiality of the desert, demonstrating the closeness of the desert, the connections between non-monastic and monastic communities, and the exciting insights into lived monasticism through the archaeology of monasticism in Egypt." - ARC Humanities 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: Jonathan D. Sarna, University Professor and Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History

"Covering topics ranging from art, music, and literature to politics, medicine, and religion, these illuminating essays highlight patterns and trends that demonstrate how the Gilded Age shaped Jewish life in the twentieth century."– Princeton University Press

Author: Sarah Mayorga, Associate Professor of Sociology

"By linking theories of racial capitalism with tangible lived experiences, Sarah Mayorga takes the blinders off of the titular 'specters,' allowing us to see the bigger picture of capitalist underdevelopment and exploitative inclusion with greater clarity." - Eileen O'Brien, Saint Leo University

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." — Boydell & Brewer

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

"Illuminating . . . Deeply researched, crisply written . . . By rendering this story in such rich archival detail, Williams’s book is a fitting coda to Du Bois’s unfinished history of Black Americans and the First World War."  - Matthew Delmont, The New York Times

Translator: Sabine von Mering, Professor of German and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies

Authors: Luisa Neubauer and Alexander Repenning

"In a time where climate disaster is taking hold all over the world, this book is needed now more than ever. This book strikes the balance between not sugar coating the climate crisis, but also providing hope in the form of action." - Jamie Sarai Margolin, Zero Hour founder and author of Youth to Power

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

"Faith Smith’s Strolling in the Ruins seeks to perturb and discompose the pervasive story of Anglophone Caribbean sovereignty, with its familiar rhythms and moments, events and directions, and texts and figures. With an insouciant edge, muted irony, and compelling insight, she invites us to reevaluate some of our most cherished conceits of gendered, sexual, racial, and political citizenship. Above all, Smith is a consummate critic of the will to power of the heroic Caribbean narrative of postcolonial achievement.” - David Scott, Columbia University

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

"​​Have you ever been so filled up with the wonder of a place that it wants to spill out as a song? Well, here is the songbook....A gift in reciprocity for the gifts of the land." - Robin Wall Kimmerer

Author: Derron Wallace, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Education

"Derron Wallace has written a field-defining book. Comparing Black Caribbeans in London and New York, he shows how ethnic expectations, rooted in history, colonialism, and the proliferation of U.S. media culture, influence the incorporation and academic outcomes of second-generation Black Caribbean youth. Bursting with rich narrative accounts, powerful theoretical insights, and exceptional writing, this book will shape the sociology and education discourse on Black Caribbean students for years to come. Everyone who cares about race, ethnicity, education, and immigration should read this book." - John B. Diamond, Professor of Sociology and Education Policy, Brown University

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

"This voluminous work takes an all-inclusive decolonial approach to the study of forced migration, causes and consequences, refugees in Africa and the diaspora, humanitarian studies, and rethinking futuristic approaches to solving the crises." - Ogenga Otunnu, DePaul University