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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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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