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.
Quito Swan
Oceania is a vast sea of islands, large scale political struggles and immensely significant historical phenomena. Pasifika Black is a compelling history of understudied anti-colonial movements in this region, exploring how indigenous Oceanic activists intentionally forged international connections with the African world in their fights for liberation.
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Cynthia Bannon
The Romans are famous for constructing aqueducts, canals, and dams. But their law is also a lasting, if less visible, monument to their attempts to control water. A Casebook on Roman Water Law presents an analytical collection of Roman sources for water rights.
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Quito Swan
Pauulu’s Diaspora is a sweeping story of black internationalism across the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Ocean worlds, told through the life and work of twentieth-century environmental activist Pauulu Kamarakafego. Challenging U.S.-centered views of Black Power, Quito Swan offers a radically broader perspective, showing how Kamarakafego helped connect liberation efforts of the African diaspora throughout the Global South.
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Christoph Irmscher and Richard J. King
Charting the course of Audubon’s life and work, from his birth in Haiti to his death in New York City, Irmscher and King’s sweeping introduction and carefully drawn commentary confront the challenges Audubon’s legacy poses for us today. Rounded out by hundreds of historical and ornithological notes and beautiful illustrations, and with a foreword by distinguished photographer and conservationist Subhankar Banerjee, Audubon at Sea is the most comprehensively annotated collection of Audubon’s work ever published.
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Angela Jackson-Brown
The author of When Stars Rain Down returns with a historical romance about all that has---and has not---changed in these United States. As 1947 opens, Eva Cardon is the twenty-four-year-old owner of Washington, D.C.’s, most famous Black-owned restaurant. When her path crosses with Courtland, a handsome white senator from Georgia, both find themselves drawn to one another—but the danger of a relationship between a Black woman and a white man from the South could destroy them and everything they’ve worked for.
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A. Freya Thimsen
A multidisciplinary analysis of the lasting effects of the Occupy Wall Street protest movement. What did Occupy Wall Street accomplish? While it began as a startling disruption in politics as usual, in The Democratic Ethos Freya Thimsen argues that the movement's long-term importance rests in how its commitment to radical democratic self-organization has been adopted within more conventional forms of politics.
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Matt Christ
This book seeks to understand Xenophon as an elite Athenian writing largely for an elite Athenian audience in the first half of the fourth century BC. It argues that Xenophon calls on men of his own class to set aside their assumptions of superiority based on birth or wealth and to reinvent themselves as individuals who can provide effective leadership to the democratic city and serve it as good citizens. Xenophon challenges, criticizes, and sometimes satirizes the Athenian elite, and seeks to instruct them concerning the values, knowledge, and practical skills they will need to succeed as civic leaders.
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Lindsey Mazurek
In Isis in a Global Empire, Lindsey Mazurek explores the growing popularity of Egyptian gods and its impact on Greek identity in the Roman Empire. Bringing together archaeological, art historical, and textual evidence, she demonstrates how the diverse devotees of gods such as Isis and Sarapis considered Greek ethnicity in ways that differed significantly from those of the Greek male elites whose opinions have long shaped our understanding of Roman Greece.
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Sarah Bassett
This Companion explores Constantinople from Late Antiquity until the early modern period. Examining its urban infrastructure and the administrative, social, religious, and cultural institutions that gave the city life, it also considers visitors' encounters with both its urban reality and its place in imagination.
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Margaret S. Graves and Alex Dika Seggerman
Covering a range of media and a wide geographical spread, Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean reveals how 19th-century artists in the Middle East and North Africa reckoned with new tools, materials, and tastes from local perspectives.
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Margaret Graves
Arguing for the role of the intellect in the applied arts and for the communicative potential of ornament, Arts of Allusion asserts the reinstatement of craftsmanship into Islamic intellectual history.
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Cordula Grewe
The Arabesque from Kant to Comics tracks the life and afterlife of the arabesque in its surprising transformation from an iconoclastic literary theory of early German Romanticism to aesthetic experimentation in both avant-garde art and popular culture.
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Giles Knox
An accessible history of The Frick's magnificent ‘King Philip IV of Spain' by Velázquez, loaned to The Meadows Museum (Texas), famed for its collection of Spanish art.
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Jeffrey Saletnik
An incisive analysis of the pedagogy of influential artist and teacher Josef Albers.
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Hall Bjørnstad
In this sweeping reconsideration of absolutist culture, Hall Bjørnstad argues that the exuberance of Louis XIV’s reign was not top-down propaganda in any modern sense, but rather a dream dreamt collectively, by king, court, image-makers, and nation alike.
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Margaret E. Gray
Gray traces these moments of illicit visibility through six twentieth-century French fictions, including canonical novels by Gide, Colette, Mauriac, and Duras as well as African Francophone writer Oyono and detective novelist Japrisot.
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Eric MacPhail
This book reveals a tradition of thought overlooked in our intellectual history but enormously influential even now: the tradition of odious praise. Distinct from more conventional rhetorical exercises, such as panegyric or the funeral oration, odious praise uses acclaim to censure or to critique. This book reassesses the genre of praise-and-blame rhetoric by considering the potential of odious praise to undermine consensus and to challenge a society’s normative values.
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Oana Panaïté
The book traces the trope of the 'literary tomb' back to the Early Modern period, and demonstrates how has been reconfigured in contemporary literature in French.
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Helena Phillips-Robins
In Liturgical Song and Practice in Dante’s “Commedia,” Helena Phillips-Robins explores for the first time the ways in which the relationship between humanity and divinity is shaped through the performance of liturgy in the Commedia.
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Massimo Scalabrini
The rhetorical and ethical values of conversation, decorum and moderation—all inherited from Greco-Latin antiquity—became instruments of conflict prevention, containment and resolution in the literary Classicism of sixteenth-century Italy, particularly in the canonical genres of the treatise on behavior, the epic poem and erudite comedy.
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Sarah Imhoff
In The Lives of Jessie Sampter, Sarah Imhoff tells the story of an individual full of contradictions. Jessie Sampter (1883–1938) was best known for her Course in Zionism (1915), an American primer for understanding support of a Jewish state in Palestine.
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David L. Haberman
Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworld,edited by David Haberman, presents a unique collection of essays that detail how the effects of human-related climate change are actively reshaping religious ideas and practices, even as religious groups and communities endeavor to bring their traditions to bear on mounting climate challenges.
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Mary Dunn and Brenna Moore
Religious Intimacies, edited by Mary Dunn and Brenna Moore, brings together nine scholars of modern Christianity to probe this in-between space. In essays that range from treatments of Jesuit-indigenous relations in early modern Canada to the erotics of contemporary black theology, each contributor makes the case for the study of the presence and power of affective ties and relational dynamics between friends, lovers, and intimate others (even things) as vital to the understanding of religion.
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Winnifred Fallers Sullivan and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd
At Home and Abroad bridges the divide in the study of American religion, law, and politics between domestic and international, bringing together diverse and distinguished authors from religious studies, law, American studies, sociology, history, and political science to explore interrelations across conceptual and political boundaries.
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Michael Adams
Problems in Lexicography is an essential, classic work of practical lexicography (the practice of writing dictionaries) and meta-lexicography. Originally published over sixty years ago, it was based on the proceedings of the Indiana University Conference on Lexicography, held November 11–12, 1960. It set a standard that still holds today, three generations later.
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Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar
A brilliant, sweeping history of the contemporary women’s movement told through the lives and works of the literary women who shaped it. Forty years after their first groundbreaking work of feminist literary theory, The Madwoman in the Attic, award-winning collaborators Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar map the literary history of feminism’s second wave.
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Ross Gay
In these gorgeously written and timely pieces, prize-winning poet and author Ross Gay considers the joy we incite when we care for each other, especially during life’s inevitable hardships. Throughout Inciting Joy, he explores how we can practice recognizing that connection, and also, crucially, how we expand it.
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Constance M. Furey
We are living in a time of radical uncertainty, faced with serious political, ecological, economic, epidemiological, and social problems. Scholars of religion Constance M. Furey, Sarah Hammerschlag, and Amy Hollywood come together in this volume with a shared conviction that what and how we read opens new ways of imagining our political futures and our lives.
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Jacob Emery
Countries That Don’t Exist showcases a selection of Krzhizhanovsky’s exceptional nonfiction, which spans a dizzying range of genres and voices. Playful fantasies dwelling in the borderlands between essay and fable, metaphysical conversations and probing literary criticism, philosophical essays and wartime memoirs—in all these modes Krzhizhanovsky’s writing bristles with idiosyncratic erudition and a starkly original vision of literary creation.
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Jacob Emery
Epic, rollicking and in love with language, Jacob and Sara Emery's sprawling debut novel of humble kitchen magics and awe-inspiring civil engineering is a rare and delicious commodity – the world's first hydropunk novel.
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Translated by Russell Scott Valentino
Kin is a dazzling family epic from one of Croatia’s most prized writers. In this sprawling narrative which spans the entire twentieth century, Miljenko Jergović peers into the dusty corners of his family’s past, illuminating them with a tender, poetic precision.
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Christopher I Beckwith
A rich, discovery-filled history that tells how a forgotten empire transformed the ancient world.
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Antonina Luszcykiewicz and Michael Brose
This volume provides the first study of the history of sinology (aka China studies) as charted across several communist states during the Cold War. International in scope, this book is ideal for scholars and researchers of modern history, Chinese studies, sinology, and the Cold War.
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Fritz Breithaupt
he Narrative Brain: The Stories our Neurons Tell is a unique interdisciplinary exploration of emotional rewards of narrative thinking. Fritz Breithaupt is a distinguished literary scholar, cognitive scientist, and the Director of the Experimental Humanities Lab at the IU Bloomington.
Christopher D. Sapp
This book offers new dating of the poems of the Old Norse Poetic Edda , perhaps our best sources about the mythology and legends of the Viking Age. This study compares the anonymous Eddic poems to dated skaldic poems with respect to five phenomena that develop diachronically in early Old Norse: the expletive particle of, types of negation, word order, types of relative clause, and metrical criteria.
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Tracy Alan Hall
Velar Fronting is the cover term referring to any phonological process shifting the primary place of articulation of a velar sound to the palatal region of the vocal tract.
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Lara Kriegel
In this book a series of six case studies transport us from the mid-Victorian moment to the current day, focusing on the heroes, institutions, and values wrought out of the crucible of the war. Time and again, ordinary Britons looked to the war as a template for social formation and a lodestone for national belonging. With lucid prose and rich illustrations, this book vividly demonstrates the uncanny persistence of a Victorian war in the making of modern Britain.
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Caitlin G. Watt and Stephen Watt
Each John Wick film has earned more money and recognition than its predecessor, defying the conventional wisdom about the box office's action movie landscape, normally dominated by superhero movies and science fiction epics. A deep dive into this popular neo-noir franchise, The Worlds of John Wick celebrates and complicates the cult phenomenon that is John Wick.
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Ann-Sophie Barwich
This volume establishes the conceptual foundation for sustained investigation into tool development in neuroscience. Neuroscience relies on diverse and sophisticated experimental tools, and its ultimate explanatory target—our brains and hence the organ driving our behaviors—catapults the investigation of these research tools into a philosophical spotlight.
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Sharon Berry
In a detailed and original reassessment of these axioms, Sharon Berry uses a potentialist (as opposed to actualist) approach to develop a unified determinate conception of set-theoretic truth that vindicates many of our intuitive expectations regarding set theory. Her book will appeal to readers with interests in the philosophy of set theory, modal logic, and the role of mathematics in the sciences.
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Kathryn Graber
Focusing on language and media in Asian Russia, particularly in Buryat territories, Mixed Messages engages debates about the role of minority media in society, alternative visions of modernity, and the impact of media on everyday language use. Graber demonstrates that language and the production, circulation, and consumption of media are practices by which residents of the region perform and negotiate competing possible identities.
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Rega Wood
This is the first great commentary in the Western European tradition of expounding Aristotle's Metaphysics. Dated about 1238, this work by Richard Rufus of Cornwall is a major contribution to the history of Western philosophy and the study of Aristotle. No future account of thirteenth-century metaphysics will be able to ignore its contribution.
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Ann-Sophie Barwich
Smellosophy asks a deceptively simple question: What does the nose tell the brain, and how does the brain understand it? A. S. Barwich interviews experts in neuroscience, psychology, chemistry, and perfumery in an effort to understand the biological mechanics and myriad meanings of odors, ultimately arguing that it’s time to stop recycling ideas based on the paradigm of vision for the olfactory system.
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Purnima Bose
Intervention Narratives examines the contradictory cultural representations of the US intervention in Afghanistan that help to justify an imperial foreign policy. By investigating the familiar recurring tropes of heroism, terrorism, entrepreneurship, and canine love, Purnima Bose demonstrates that contemporary imperialism operates on an ideologically diverse cultural terrain to enlist support for the war across the political spectrum.
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Melissa Dinverno
An exhibition catalog containing two scholarly essays, this bilingual monograph celebrates Suites y el viaje de la percepción (Suites and the Voyage of Perception), a 2020 exhibit curated by Melissa Dinverno at the Centra Federico García Lorca in Granada, Spain. Focused on Lorca’s little-known poetry collection Suites, the exhibit mirrored his vision of poetry as a voyage both temporal and conceptual.
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Rebecca Dirksen
This book is a study of carnival, politics, and the musical engagement of ordinary citizens and celebrity musicians in contemporary Haiti. Drawing on more than fifteen years of ethnographic research, Rebecca Dirksen presents an in-depth consideration of politically and socially engaged music and what these expressions mean for the Haitian population in the face of challenging political and economic circumstances.
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Michael S. Dodson
This book is a re-evaluation of modern urbanism and architecture and a history of urbanism, architecture, and local identity in colonial north India at the turn of the twentieth century. Focusing on Banaras and Jaunpur, Dodson argues that interactions with the colonial state were an integral aspect of the ways that Indians created a sense of their own personal investment in the city in which they lived.
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Colin P. Elliott
Modern economics tantalizes historians, promising them a set of simple verbal and mathematical formulas to explain and even retrospectively predict historical actions and choices. In this volume, Colin P. Elliott challenges economic historians to rethink the way they use economic theory, offering novel analyses of key events in Roman monetary history, from Augustus' triumph over Mark Antony and Cleopatra, to third-century AD coinage debasements.
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Lessie Jo Frazier
Desired States challenges the notion that in some cultures, sex and sexuality have become privatized and located in individual subjectivity rather than in public political practices and institutions. Instead, Frazier contends that desire is a central aspect of political culture. Through fieldwork and archival research, she explores the gendered and sexualized dynamics of political culture in Chile, an imperialist context.
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Henry Glassie
Drawing from his international fieldwork in ceramic traditions and years of interviews with potter Daniel Johnston, Henry Glassie presents a portrait of the young artist in this book. Raised on a farm in Randolph County, Johnston traveled to Thailand and returned with a new way to make monumental, distinctive pots, now crafting them from his studio in North Carolina.
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Raiford Guins
Drawing from archival research and extensive interviews, Atari Design is a rich, historical study of how Atari's industrial and graphic designers contributed to the development of the video game machine. By actively shaping the interaction between user and machine, overcoming styling limitations, and generating a distinct corporate identity, Atari designed products that impacted the everyday visual and material culture of the late 20th century.
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Laura Gurzynski-Weiss
This edited volume examines the role of interlocutors and their individual differences (IDs) in second language development from four theoretical lenses: the cognitive-interactionist approach, sociocultural theory, the variationist approach, and complex dynamic systems theory. A theoretical overview to each approach is written by a preeminent scholar in the framework, and each overview is followed by an empirical study demonstrating how interlocutor IDs can be fruitfully researched within that framework.
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David L. Haberman
Loving Stones is a study of devotees' conceptions of and worshipful interactions with Mount Govardhan, a sacred mountain located in the Braj region of north-central India that has for centuries been considered an embodied form of Krishna. In this book, David L. Haberman examines the perplexing paradox of an infinite god embodied in finite form, wherein each particular form is non-different from the unlimited.
Laura Carlson Hasler
In Archival Historiography in Jewish Antiquity, Laura Carlson Hasler suggests that the concept of archival historiography makes sense of Ezra and Nehemiah's unusual format and place in the Bible. Adapting the symbolic quality of ancient Near Eastern archives to their own purposes, the writers of these books found archiving an expression of religious and social power in a colonized context.
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Alisha Lola Jones
Male-centered theology, a dearth of men in the pews, and an overrepresentation of queer males in music ministry: these elements coexist within the spaces of historically black Protestant churches, creating an atmosphere where simultaneous heteropatriarchy and "real" masculinity anxieties are all in play. In this book, Jones observes how male vocalists traverse their tightly-knit social networks and negotiate their identities through and beyond the worship experience.
Michael T. Martin
Charles Burnett's 1977 film Killer of Sheep, a deliberate counterpoint to popular blaxploitation films of the period, is one of the towering classics of African American cinema. Co-edited by Michael T. Martin, From Street to Screen: Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep is the first book-length collection dedicated to the film and designed to introduce viewers to this still relatively unknown masterpiece.
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Solimar Otero
In Afrolatinx religious practices such as Cuban Espiritismo, Puerto Rican Santería, and Brazilian Candomblé, the dead tell stories. Communicating with and through mediums’ bodies, they give advice, make requests, and propose future rituals, creating a living archive that is coproduced by the dead. In this book, Solimar Otero explores how Afrolatinx spirits guide collaborative spiritual-scholarly activist work through rituals and the creation of material culture.
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Gregory Schrempp
The Truth of Myth is a thorough and accessible introduction to the study of myth, surveying the intellectual history of the topic, methods for studying myth cross-culturally, and emerging trends. Offering serious students with an intellectual "toolkit" for launching into this fascinating field, the book is especially useful in conjunction with case studies of individual mythological traditions.
Rebecca L. Spang
Now in its second edition, this is a book about the French revolution in taste—about how Parisians invented the modern culture of food, changing the social life of the world in the process. Rebecca Spang shows us how over the course of the Revolution, restaurants that had begun as purveyors of health food became symbols of aristocratic greed.
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Winnifred Fallers Sullivan
Church and state: a simple phrase that reflects one of the most famous and fraught relationships in the history of the United States. But what exactly is “the church,” and how is it understood in US law today? In Church State Corporation, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan uncovers the deeply ambiguous and often unacknowledged ways in which Christian theology remains alive in the American legal imagination.
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Winnifred Fallers Sullivan
Co-edited by Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Theologies of American Exceptionalismis a collection of fifteen interlocking essays reflecting on the vagaries of exceptionalist claims in and about the United States. Loosely and generatively curious, these essays bring together a range of historical and contemporary voices, some familiar and some less so, to stimulate new thought about America.
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Allen W. Wood
This masterful work on Kant's Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason explores Kant's treatment of the Idea of God, his views concerning evil, and the moral grounds for faith in God. Kant and Religion works to deepen our understanding of religion's place and meaning within the history of human culture, touching on Kant's philosophical stance regarding theoretical, moral, political, and religious matters.
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