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.
K. Brandon Barker
Wiggling a pencil so that it looks like it is made of rubber or "stealing" your niece's nose– these are examples of folk illusions, youthful play forms that trade on perceptual oddities. K. Brandon Barker and Claiborne Rice argue that these easily overlooked instances of children's folklore offer an important avenue for studying perception and cognition in the contexts of social and embodied development.
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Fritz Breithaupt
Many consider empathy to be the basis of moral action. However, the ability to empathize with others is also a prerequisite for deliberate acts of humiliation and cruelty. In The Dark Sides of Empathy, Fritz Breithaupt contends that people often commit atrocities not out of a failure of empathy but rather as a direct consequence of over-identification and a desire to increase empathy.
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Candy Gunther Brown
Yoga and mindfulness activities, with roots in Asian traditions such as Hinduism or Buddhism, have been brought into growing numbers of public schools since the 1970s. While they are commonly assumed to be secular educational tools, Candy Gunther Brown, an expert witness in four legal challenges, asks whether religion is truly left out of the equation in the context of public-school curricula.
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Mike Conway
In 1962, an innovative documentary on a Berlin Wall tunnel escape brought condemnation from both sides of the Iron Curtain during one of the most volatile periods of the Cold War. The Tunnel, produced by NBC’s Reuven Frank, clocked in at ninety minutes and prompted a range of strong reactions—which, as Conway argues, reveal a major upheaval in American news communications.
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J. César Félix-Brasdefer
Pragmática del español introduces the central topics in pragmatics and discourse from a sociolinguistic perspective. Félix-Brasdefer addresses pragmatic variation within each topic, with examples from different varieties of Spanish spoken in Latin America, Spain and the United States. Key topics include speech acts in context and deictic expressions; implicit meaning and inferential communication; intercultural competence in study abroad contexts; and more.
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Margaret Foster
Co-edited by Margaret Foster, Genre in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry foregrounds innovative approaches to the question of genre, what it means, and how to think about it for ancient Greek poetry and performance. Embracing multiple definitions of genre and lyric, the volume pushes beyond current dominant trends within the field of Classics to engage with a variety of other disciplines, theories, and models.
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Constance Furey
This collection explores how the body became a touchstone for late antique religious practice and imagination. When we read the stories and testimonies of late ancient Christians, what different types of bodies stand before us? The Garb of Being investigates this question and more through stories from the Eastern Christian world of antiquity: monks and martyrs, families and congregations, and textual bodies.
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R. Andrés Guzman
Recently, many critics have questioned the idea of universal citizenship by pointing to the racial, class, and gendered exclusions on which the notion of universality rests. Rather than jettison the idea of universal citizenship, however, R. Andrés Guzmán builds on these critiques to reaffirm it especially within the fields of Latina/o and ethnic studies through close analyses of various literary, cultural, and legal texts.
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Joan Hawkins
By cutting up, folding in, and splicing together newspapers, magazines, letters, book reviews, classical literature, audio recordings, photographs, and films, William S. Burroughs created an eclectic and wide-ranging countercultural archive. This collection features original essays, interviews, and discussions by established Burroughs scholars, respected artists, and people who encountered Burroughs.
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Barbara Hillers
This is the first book to examine the full range of the evidence for Irish charms, from medieval to modern times. As Ireland has one of the oldest literatures in Europe, and also one of the most comprehensively recorded folklore traditions, it affords a uniquely rich body of evidence for such an investigation. The collection includes surveys of the subject, dossiers of the evidence for specific charms, and more.
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Edgar Illas
The Survival Regime explores the concept of survival to describe the effects on politics of the fusion of war and capital in globalization. Through a critical dialogue with various contemporary thinkers (Galli, Hardt and Negri, Esposito, Agamben, Derrida, and Schmitt, among others), Edgar Illas theorizes survival as a global logic that overcomes the links between life and power explained by the Foucauldian paradigm of biopolitics.
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Christoph Irmscher
Early American naturalists assembled dazzling collections of native flora and fauna, from John Bartram’s botanical garden in Philadelphia and the artful display of animals in Charles Willson Peale’s museum to P. T. Barnum’s American Museum. In this now classic book, Christoph Irmscher argues that early American natural historians developed a distinctly poetic sensibility that allowed them to imagine themselves as part of, and not apart from, their environment.
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Christoph Irmscher
Poems Written Abroad is the first publication of the earliest collection of poetry by the famous poet, novelist, literary critic, translator, and radical, Sir Stephen Spender (1909-1995). Spender wrote and compiled this manuscript in 1927. This facsimile edition, authorized by the Spender estate, faithfully reproduces the features of the original manuscript, including an ink drawing by Spender and little-known photographs of the poet.
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Günther Jikeli
On European streets Jews were accosted, attacked, or even killed. In Germany, too, such troubling incidents have been increasing for years. What has so perceptibly strengthened this hate and antipathy toward Jews in Germany? In this volume, twelve experts and activists investigate the causes of the resurgence of anti-Semitism. A book with terrifying findings, but also examples of resolute civil society resistance.
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Giles Knox
Giles Knox examines how El Greco, Velaìzquez, and Rembrandt, though a disparate group of artists, were connected by a new self-consciousness with respect to artistic tradition. In particular, Knox considers the relationship of these artists to the art of Renaissance Italy and sets aside nationalist art histories in order to see the period as one of fruitful exchange.
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