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 typesort descending
Violent Utopia Jovan Scott Lewis 2022 Book
Max and Tansy's Secret Hideaway Vanessa Castro 2022 Book
Holocaust Consciousness and Cold War Violence in Latin America Estelle Tarica 2022 Book
Homage to the Black Arts Movement: A Handbook Judy Juanita 2018 Book
America Street: A Multicultural Anthology of Stories Edited by Brice Particelli and Anne Mazer 2019 Book

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

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

Genesis and Validity: The Theory and Practice of Intellectual History

2021

There is no more contentious and perennial issue in the history of modern Western thought than the vexed relationship between the genesis of an idea and its claim to validity beyond it. Can ideas or values transcend their temporal origins and overcome the sin of their original context, and in so...Read more about Genesis and Validity: The Theory and Practice of Intellectual History

The Right of Sovereignty: Jean Bodin on the Sovereign State and the Law of Nations

2021

Sovereignty is the vital organizing principle of modern international law. Daniel Lee's book The Right of Sovereignty: Jean Bodin on the...Read more about The Right of Sovereignty: Jean Bodin on the Sovereign State and the Law of Nations

Interventions for Women

2021

This is a book for those who were raised to be girls and expected to become women, for those who were told they were too girly and not girly enough, and for those who were ogled, talked over, touched, fed, imagined, and indoctrinated in ways they didn’t want. Angela Hume writes directly...Read more about Interventions for Women