Bookmarks

Recent A&S Faculty Publications
bookmarks

Dominique Reill, History, The Fiume Crisis: Life in the Wake of the Habsburg Empire (Harvard University Press)The Fiume Crisis recasts what we know about the birth of fascism, postwar nationalist activism, and the fall of empire after 1918 by telling the story of the three-year period when the Adriatic port-city Fiume (today known by its Croatian name Rijeka) became an international fiasco that stalled negotiations at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and became the setting for the fifteen-month occupation of the city by the poet-soldier Gabriele D’Annunzio, an occupation many believe Mussolini copied explicitly in his rise to power.  

Chantel Acevedo, English, Muse Squad: The Mystery of the Tenth (Balzer + Bray/Harper Collins)Muse Squad: The Mystery of the Tenth is the finale of an action-packed middle grade fantasy duology about a young Cuban American girl who discovers that she’s one of the nine muses of Greek mythology. Perfect for fans of The Serpent’s Secret, the Aru Shah series, and the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. School Library Journal called the first installment of MUSE SQUAD a “riveting, suspenseful book …. Perfect for readers of mythology-based adventures.”  

Lindsay Thomas, English, Training for Catastrophe: Fictions of National Security after 9/11 (University of Minnesota Press). In Training for Catastrophe, Lindsay Thomas shows how our security regime reimagines plausibility to focus on unlikely and even unreal events rather than probable ones. Drawing from a huge archive of texts—including a Centers for Disease Control comic about a zombie apocalypse, the work of Audre Lorde, and the political thrillers of former national security advisor Richard Clarke—she asks difficult questions about the uses and values of fiction. A major statement on how national security intrudes into questions of art and life, Training for Catastrophe is a timely intervention into how we confront disasters.

Traci Ardren, Anthropology, Her Cup for Sweet Cacao (University of Texas Press)Her Cup for Sweet Cacao brings together leading scholars to showcase a variety of approaches and present new evidence from faunal remains, hieroglyphic texts, chemical analyses, and art, exploring how food was both sustenance and a tool for building complex society. 

Guido Ruggiero, History, Love and Sex in the Time of Plague (Harvard University Press). For Florentines, the world seemed to be coming to an end. IN 1348 the first wave of the Black Death swept across the Italian city, reducing its population from more than 100,000 to less than 40,000. Amid the devastation, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron was born. Love and Sex in the Time of Plague guides readers back to Boccaccio’s world to recapture how his work sounded to 14th century ears. Ruggiero explores love and sexual relations in a society undergoing convulsive change. 

Arnold Mittelman, Judaic Studies, Enacting History: A Practical Guide to Teaching the Holocaust through Theater (Routledge). Enacting History is a practical guide for educators that provides mythologies and resources for teaching the Holocaust through a variety of theatrical means, including scripted texts, verbatim testimony, devised theatre techniques and process-oriented creative exercise.

Maureen Seaton, English, Undersea (Jackleg Press). Undersea presents Seaton's free-wheeling series of love notes to her transplanted sea-struck self and her salty sidekick. The poems in this collection celebrate her signature wit and joy in that wild state of mind called Florida.

Susan Leary, English, Contraband Paradise (Main Street Rag Publishing Company). Susan L. Leary’s poetry collection, Contraband Paradise, is structured around a series of X-ray impressions that explore a body with scoliosis—the pain, the sadness, the perversity, as well as the accompanying splendor, what can only be called “the marvelous clairvoyance of a body that believes in its own ability to live.” As such, these poems explore the ways in which we thieve joy, in which we live affirmatively, and astonishingly, amidst all that we inherit. More than anything, these poems juxtapose the beauty and rupture that characterize this world, this “contraband paradise."

Hugh Thomas, History, Power and Pleasure: Court Life under King John, 1199-1216 (Oxford University Press). Although King John is remembered for his political and military failures, he also presided over a magnificent court. Power and Pleasure reconstructs life at the court of King John and explores how his court produced both pleasure and soft power. Much work exists on courts of the late medieval and early modern periods, but the jump in record keeping under John allows a detailed reconstruction of court life for an earlier period. The book examines the many facets of John's court, exploring hunting, feasting, castles, landscapes, material luxury, chivalry, sexual coercion, and religious activities. It explains how John mishandled his use of soft power, just as he failed to exploit his financial and military advantages, and why he received so little political benefit from his magnificent court.