Letters & Science Bookshelf

Our virtual bookshelf features publications authored, translated, or edited by members of the L&S community. To submit a publication, please use this form or email lscomms@berkeley.edu. 

Looking for a specific title? Please use the search bar; responses will appear in the table below. Email lscomms@berkeley.edu with additional inquiries or requests.

Title Author Year Publication type
Closures: Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom Grace Lavery 2024 Book
Fundamentals of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Silvia A. Bunge; Heather Bortfeld 2024 Book
Who’s Afraid of Gender? Judith Butler 2024 Book
Eclipse and Revelation: Total Solar Eclipses in Science, History, Literature, and the Arts Co-Editor: Henrike Lange 2024 Book
Odd Affinities: Virginia Woolf’s Shadow Genealogies Elizabeth Abel 2024 Book

Holocaust Consciousness and Cold War Violence in Latin America

2022

This book proposes the existence of a recognizably distinct Holocaust consciousness in Latin America since the 1970s. Community leaders, intellectuals, writers, and

...Read more about Holocaust Consciousness and Cold War Violence in Latin America

Troublemaker

2022

12-year-old Jordan feels like he can't live up to the example his older sister set, or his parent's expectations. When he returns home from school one day hoping to hide his suspension, Los Angeles has reached a turning point. In the wake of the acquittal of the police officers filmed beating...Read more about Troublemaker

Figures of Possibility: Aesthetic Experience, Mysticism, and the Play of the Senses

2022

From medieval contemplation to the early modern cosmopoetic imagination, to the invention of aesthetic experience, to nineteenth-century decadent literature, and to early-twentieth century essayistic forms of writing and film, Niklaus Largier shows that mystical practices have been reinvented...Read more about Figures of Possibility: Aesthetic Experience, Mysticism, and the Play of the Senses

My Little Book of Exiles

2022

The poems of My Little Book of Exiles sift through layers of diaspora and return, wrestling with the twin experiences of exile and separation. The diasporas of the collection take place in history, family, and the privacy of a mind as it navigates its daily work. In a set of "Labor Poems...Read more about My Little Book of Exiles

Bigger Than Life: The Close-Up and Scale in the Cinema

2022

In Bigger Than Life Mary Ann Doane examines how the scalar operations of cinema, especially those of the close-up, disturb and reconfigure the spectator's sense of place, space, and orientation. Doane traces the history of scalar transformations from early cinema to the...Read more about Bigger Than Life: The Close-Up and Scale in the Cinema

Engineering Vulnerability In Pursuit of Climate Adaptation

2022

In Engineering Vulnerability Sarah E. Vaughn examines climate adaptation against the backdrop of ongoing processes of settler colonialism and the global climate change initiatives that seek to intervene in the lives of the world’s most vulnerable. Her case study is Guyana in the aftermath...Read more about Engineering Vulnerability In Pursuit of Climate Adaptation

Keeping It Unreal: Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics

2022

Characters like Black Panther, Storm, Luke Cage, Miles Morales, and Black Lightning are part of a growing cohort of black superheroes on TV and in film. Though comic books are often derided as naïve and childish, these larger-than-life superheroes demonstrate how this genre can serve as...Read more about Keeping It Unreal: Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics

Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture

2021

Following the failure of communist revolutions in Europe, in the 1920s the Soviet Union turned its attention to fostering anticolonial uprisings in Asia. China, divided politically between rival military factions and dominated economically by imperial powers, emerged as the Comintern’s prime...Read more about Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture

The Defiant Middle

2021

For every woman, from the young to those in midlife and beyond, who has ever been told, "You can't" and thought, "Oh, I definitely will!"--this book is for you.

Women are expected to be many things. They should be young enough, but not too young; old enough, but not too old; creative, but...Read more about The Defiant Middle

Where Sight Meets Sound

2021

The main function of western musical notation is incidental: it prescribes and records sound. But during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, notation began to take on an aesthetic life all its own. In the early fifteenth century, a musician might be asked to sing a line slower, faster...Read more about Where Sight Meets Sound