TRACI ARDREN. ANTHROPOLOGY. The Maya World brings together over 60 authors representing the fields of archaeology, art history, epigraphy, geography, and ethnography, who explore cutting-edge research on every major facet of the ancient Maya and all sub-regions within the Maya world. The book explores their renowned writing system, towering stone pyramids, exquisitely painted murals, and elaborate funerary tombs as well as their creative agricultural strategies, complex social, economic, and political relationships, widespread interactions with other societies, and remarkable cultural resilience in the face of historical ruptures (Routledge).
KATHRYN FREEMAN. ENGLISH. Rethinking the Romantic Era focuses on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Robinson, and Mary Shelley and uses key concepts of androgyny, subjectivity and the re-creative as a productive framework to trace the fascinating textual interactions and dialogues among these authors. It crosses the boundary between male and female writers of the Romantic period by linking representations of gender with late Enlightenment upheavals regarding creativity and subjectivity, demonstrating how these interrelated concerns dismantle traditional binaries separating the canonical and the noncanonical; male and female; poetry and prose; good and evil; subject and object (Bloomsbury Academic).
MARC GELLMAN. PSYCHOLOGY. Encyclopedia of Behavioral Medicine is a second-edition publication focusing on the interdisciplinary field of Behavioral Medicine. The encyclopedia highlights the development and integration of sociocultural, psychosocial, behavioral, and biomedical knowledge and techniques relevant to the understanding of health and illness and the application of this knowledge and these techniques to disease prevention, health promotion, etiology, diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitation. The primary purpose of the Encyclopedia of Behavioral Medicine is to provide current knowledge in the three fundamental domains of behavioral medicine: basic research, clinical investigation, and public health (Springer Natures).
KRISTA GOFF. HISTORY. Nested Nationalism is a study of the politics and practices of managing national minority identifications, rights, and communities in the Soviet Union and the personal and political consequences of such efforts. Titular nationalities that had republics named after them in the USSR were comparatively privileged within the boundaries of "their" republics, but they still often chafed both at Moscow's influence over republican affairs and at broader Russian hegemony across the Soviet Union. Drawing on extensive archival and oral history research conducted in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Dagestan, Georgia, and Moscow, Krista Goff argues that Soviet nationality policies produced recursive, nested relationships between majority and minority nationalisms and national identifications in the USSR (Cornell University Press).
GEORGE GONZALEZ. POLITICAL SCIENCE. Popular Culture, Conspiracy Theory, and the Star Trek Text is a book written against a background of contemporary American politics revolving around conspiracy theories and allegations of conspiracy. Gonzalez makes a distinction between conspiracy theories and their unsubstantiated narratives with actual conspiracies forged by corporate and political elites engaging in illegal or unethical activities for their own interests and at the expense of the American people (Lexington Books).
DAVID KLING. RELIGIOUS STUDIES. In A History of Christian Conversion, Kling examines the dynamic of turning to the Christian faith by individuals, families, and peoples. Global in reach, the narrative progresses from early Christian beginnings in the Roman world to Christianity’s expansion into Europe, the Americas, China, India, and Africa. A History of Christian Conversion is the most satisfying and comprehensive account of conversion in Christian history to date (Oxford University Press).
ALEX PIQUERO. CRIMINOLOGY. Developmental Criminology and the Crime Decline looks through the lens of developmental and life-course criminology and compares the criminal offending trajectories of two Australian birth cohorts born ten years apart in 1984 and 1994. The book finds that the drop in crime was unlikely the result of any significant change in the prevalence or persistence of early onset and chronic offending, but the disproportionate disappearance of their low-rate, adolescent-onset peers. Despite decades of research that has prioritized interventions for minimizing chronic offending, it seems the greatest global crime prevention achievement to date was in reducing the prevalence of criminal offending in the general population (Cambridge University Press).
COSTANTINO PISCHEDDA. POLITICAL SCIENCE. Conflict Among Rebels: Why Insurgent Groups Fight Each Other examines the dynamics of civil wars in Iraq, Ethiopia, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, and Syria. Pischedda argues that infighting is a calculated response by rebel groups to perceived opportunities and vulnerabilities. Conflicts break out between groups when one sees the potential to eliminate weaker rivals at a low cost or fears the deterioration of its power relative to a competitor and embarks on a desperate gamble. Counterintuitively, Pischedda finds that rebels sharing an ethnic identity are especially prone to violent conflict, as they see each other as both potential existential threats and enticing opportunities for expansion (Columbia University Press).
YOLANDA MARTINEZ-SAN MIGUEL. MODERN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES. Contemporary Archipelagic Thinking takes as point of departure the insights of Antonio Benítez Rojo, Derek Walcott and Edouard Glissant on how to conceptualize the Caribbean as a space in which networks of islands are constitutive of a particular epistemology or way of thinking. The book includes 21 chapters, a series of poems and an Afterword from both senior and junior scholars in American Studies, Archaeology, Biology, Cartography, Digital Mapping, Environmental Studies, Ethnomusicology, Geography, History, Politics, Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, and Sociology who engage with Archipelago studies. Archipelagic Studies has become a framework with a robust intellectual genealogy (Rowman & Littlefield).
PETER SCHMITT. ENGLISH. In Goodbye, Apostrophe, his first new collection in more than a decade, nationally recognized and prize-winning poet Peter Schmitt has assembled nearly 50 poems exemplary for their range and emotional power. From the hard lessons of childhood to the loss of parents, these poems confront the challenging issues of our time, including race, religion, abuse of varying kinds, and reflexive political correctness. By turns poignant and funny, elegiac and celebratory, formal and free, the mature work of a poet Richard Wilbur hailed as “one of the strongest talents in his generation” will resonate indelibly with any serious reader of American poetry (Regal House Publishing).
ROBYN FAITH WALSH. RELIGIOUS STUDIES. The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture argues that the Synoptic gospels were written by elite cultural producers working within a dynamic cadre of literate specialists, including persons who may or may not have been professed Christians. Comparing a range of ancient literature, her ground-breaking study demonstrates that the gospels are creative works produced by educated elites interested in Judean teachings, practices, and paradoxographical subjects in the aftermath of the Jewish War and in dialogue with the literature of their age. Walsh's study thus bridges the artificial divide between research on the Synoptic gospels and Classics (Cambridge University Press).
