IU Bloomington faculty produce scores of innovative and award-winning books that expand the bounds of knowledge in the humanities and enrich understanding of the arts. Scroll through for some of the year’s most exciting scholarship produced by our faculty.
This text explores the unprecedented changes in the realms of politics, demography, economics, culture, knowledge, and kinship that women have brought about in the 20th and 21st centuries. Beginning with suffrage and moving to participation in international movements, Bucur explores how women have transformed the operation of states and international institutions. She focuses on the radical demographic shifts since 1900 through the prism of changing practices in women’s sexuality, from birth control practices to education. Examining the continuing economic gender gap around the world, Bucur highlights ways women have been both beneficiaries of new economic opportunities and participants in developing new forms of inequality. Learn more about The Century of Women.
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This edited volume provides information and strategies to understand and report the modern Muslim experience. Journalists, activists, bloggers, and scholars offer insights into how Muslims are represented in the media today and offer tips for those covering Islam in the future. Interviews provide personal firsthand accounts of people confronting the challenges of modern life while maintaining their Muslim faith, and brief overviews of Muslim beliefs and practices are included. Learn more about On Islam.
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In a closely linked trio of essays, this book offers new perspectives on the arguments about church and state. Paul Johnsonoffers a new interpretation of the Brazilian community gathered at Canudos and its massacre in 1896–97. Pamela Klassen examines the colonial church-state relationship of Canada. Winnifred Sullivan’s essay reflects on the increased effort within the United States to ban Bibles and scriptural references from death penalty courtrooms and jury rooms, considering the political theological pressure placed on a jury that decides between life and death. Learn more about Ekklesia.
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(2017) Called one of America’s most beautiful college campuses, IU Bloomington is rich in architectural tradition, a testament to careful campus planning and committed stewardship. Planning principles adopted in the earliest stages of campus development have been protected, enhanced, and faithfully preserved. Illustrated with 481 photographs, this book tells the story of the campus—both the buildings and architecture and the people who brought the buildings to life.
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(2017) More than a decade has passed since the last comprehensive survey of U.S. journalists was carried out in 2002 by IU scholars. The American Journalist in the Digital Age is based on interviews with a sample of nearly 1,100 U.S. journalists to document the tremendous changes that have occurred in U.S. journalism, many of them due to the rise of new communication technologies and social media. This survey updates findings from previous studies and asks new questions about the impact of new technologies and social media in the newsroom, and it includes more nontraditional online journalists than the previous studies.
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(2017) A collaborative project by photojournalist Andrew Lichtenstein and his brother, IU historian Alex Lichtenstein, this collection of 57 original black-and-white photographs records historic sites representing aspects of some of the country’s traumatic, yet often unacknowledged, past. Focusing especially on landscapes related to African American, Native American, and labor history, Marked, Unmarked, Remembered reveals new vistas of officially commemorated sites, sites that are neglected or obscured, and sites that serve as a gathering place for active rituals of organized memory. The project is enhanced by short essays commissioned from 11 leading historians of the American experience and American memory.
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(2017) Down and Out in the New Economy offers a snapshot of how the quest for work today has changed and what that change means, not just for job seekers, but for businesses and our very culture. Gershon covers all parts of the employment spectrum: she interviews hiring managers about how they assess candidates; attends personal branding seminars; and talks with managers at companies around the United States. She finds that not everything has changed: though the technological trappings may be glitzier, in a lot of cases, who you know remains more important than what you know. Throughout, Gershon keeps her eye on bigger questions such as what it means to consider yourself a business. Learn more about Down and Out in the New Economy.
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(2017) How did American Jewish men experience manhood, and how did they present their masculinity to others? In this distinctive book, Sarah Imhoff shows that the project of shaping American Jewish manhood was not just one of assimilation or exclusion, demonstrating how early 20th-century Jews constructed a gentler, less aggressive manhood, drawn partly from the American pioneer spirit and immigration experience, but also from Hollywood and the YMCA. Tapping into a rich historical literature to reveal how Jews looked at masculinity differently than Protestants or other religious groups, Imhoff illuminates the particular experience of American Jewish men. Learn more about Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism.
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(2017) The stories that ancient Greeks and Romans told in their daily lives created a rich body of popular oral stories that include, but range well beyond, mythology, from heroic legends, fairy tales, and fables to ghost stories, urban legends, and jokes. This anthology presents the largest collection of these tales ever assembled. Featuring nearly 400 stories in authoritative and highly readable translations, this is the first book to offer a representative selection of the entire range of traditional classical storytelling. The narratives range from the well-known -- for example, Cupid and Psyche, Diogenes and his lantern, and the tortoise and the hare -- to lesser-known tales that deserve wider attention. The volume also contains illustrations by Glynnis Fawkes, a comprehensive introduction, and notes. Learn more about The Book of Greek and Roman Folktales, Legends, and Myths.
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(2017) This fourth poetry collection from National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist Adrian Matejka navigates the tensions between race, geography, and poverty in America during the Reagan Era. In Matejka’s poems, hope is the link between the convoluted realities of being poor and the inspiring possibilities of transcendence and escape—whether it comes from Star Trek, the dream of being one of the first black astronauts, or Sun Ra’s cosmic jazz. Learn more about Map to the Stars.
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(2017) When Igor Stravinsky's ballet Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) premiered during the 1913 Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, its avant-garde music and jarring choreography scandalized audiences. Today it is considered one of the most influential musical works of the 20th century. In this volume, the ballet receives full critical attention. Essays explore four key facets of the ballet: its choreography and movement; the cultural and historical contexts of its performance and reception in France; its structure and use of innovative rhythmic and tonal features; and the reception of the work in Russian music history and theory.
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(2017) In this new edition of Stone Country, Scott Russell Sanders and Jeffrey A. Wolin talk with the stone workers, explore the quarries and mills, and trample along creeks and railroad spurs uncovering the history of the limestone industry and the people who built it. These new stories and photographs are a biography, not of a person—although it is filled with many portraits of individuals—but of a place. It is an up-close look at a singular point on the planet where the miracles of geology have yielded a special kind of stone, and where landscape, towns, and the people themselves bear its mark.
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Kirk Ludwig develops an account of plural discourse about collective action and shared intention, offering an original perspective on how we should understand collective action that is of particular use to students and researchers in the social sciences and philosophy. Learn more about From Individual to Plural Agency.
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This work documents an important collection of master drawings at the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University, including five drawings by the celebrated Venetian genius Giambattista Tiepolo and sixteen drawings by his most famous son, Domenico Tiepolo. Gealt and Knox are world-renowned experts on the Tiepolos. This beautiful illustrated volume will appeal to art lovers, biblical scholars, and those who value the unique work of the Tiepolos. Published in association with the Indiana University Art Museum. Learn more about Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo.
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The role of objects and images in everyday life are illuminated in this volume combining historical, ethnographic, and object-based methods. The contributors offer insights into the significance of practices such as scrapbooking, folk art produced by the elderly, the wedding coat in Osage ceremonial exchanges, temporary huts built during the Jewish festival of Sukkot, and Kiowa women’s traditional roles in raiding and warfare. Learn more about Material Vernaculars.
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Stanley Ritchie has developed a technical guide to the interpretation and performance of J. S. Bach’s enigmatic sonatas and partitas for solo violin. Published in 1802, over 80 years after its completion in 1720, Bach’s manuscript is without expression marks, leaving the performer to freely interpret the dynamics, fingering, bowings, and articulations. Ritchie provides violinists with deep insights into the interpretation and technicalities at the heart of these challenging pieces. Learn more about Accompaniment in “Unaccompanied” Bach.
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In September 1868, the remains of Jacob and Nancy Jane Young were found lying near the banks of Indiana’s White River. Suspicion for both deaths turned to Nancy Clem, a housewife who was also one of Mr. Young’s former business partners. In The Notorious Mrs. Clem, Wendy Gamber chronicles the life and times of this charming and persuasive Gilded Age confidence woman, who became famous not only as an accused murderess but also as an itinerant peddler of patent medicine and the supposed originator of the Ponzi scheme. Learn more about The Notorious Mrs. Clem.
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Elaborating upon her “Living with Cancer” column in the New York Times, Gubar describes how the activities of reading and writing can right some of cancer’s wrongs. To stimulate the writing process, she proposes specific exercises, prompts, and models. In discussions of the diary of Fanny Burney, the stories of Leo Tolstoy and Alice Munro, numerous memoirs, novels, paintings, photographs, and blogs, Gubar shows how readers can learn from art that deepens our comprehension of what it means to live or die with the disease. Learn more about Reading and Writing Cancer.
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