Bookshelf: Arts + Humanities Division

In the Shadows of the Big House Twenty-First-Century Antebellum Slave Cabins and Heritage Tourism in Louisiana

Stephen Small
2023

In the midst of calls for the removal of Confederate monuments across the South, tens of thousands of museums, buildings, and other historical sites currently comprise a tourist infrastructure of the southern heritage industry. Louisiana, one of the most prominent and frequently visited states that benefit from this tourism, has more than sixty heritage sites housed in former slave plantations. These sites contain the remains, restorations, reconstructions, and replicas of antebellum slave cabins and slave quarters. In the Shadows of the Big House: Twenty-First-Century Antebellum Slave...

The Word of the Muse

Bridgette Portman
2023

With Coseema off planet, Olive has bought herself some time—but the clock is ticking. After a risky rescue mission, she and her friends make their way to the center of the rebellion against Emperor Burnash, who is desperate to capture Olive and claim her power for his own. Without her journal, Olive must rely on her newfound courage to elude Burnash and help her friends. But that courage is put to the test as she and Coseema clash in a final showdown—one that will decide the fate of a star system.

The Word of the Muse, the thrilling conclusion to the Coseema Saga...

Embodying Peripheries

Edited By: Giuseppina Forte
Edited By: Kuan Hwa
2022

This book combines approaches from the design disciplines, humanities, and social sciences to foster interdisciplinary engagement across geographies around the identities embodied in and of peripheries. Peripheral communities bear human faces and names, necessitating specific modes of inquiry and commitments that prioritize lived human experience and cultural expression. Hence, the peripheries of this book are a question, not a given, the answers to which are contingent forms assembled around embodied identities. Peripheries are urban fringes, periphery countries in the modern world-...

Max and Tansy's Secret Hideaway

Vanessa Castro
2022

This book is about two mallard ducks who constantly come and swim in the pool right outside my kitchen window of the complex where I live. Throughout the years my husband, Steve, and I created many stories about them. One day I decided that these two ducks, Tansy and Max should be the stars of my next children’s book.

This story focuses on social anxiety and having time to ourselves is very necessary. For Max, having a secret hideaway gives him peace and something to look forward to. I incorporate main characters from all of my previous books into this story....

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

Mary Ann Doane
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 contemporary use of digital technology. In the early years of cinema, audiences regarded the monumental close-up, particularly of the face, as grotesque and often horrifying, even as it sought to expose a character's interiority through its magnification of detail and expression. Today, large-scale...

Feeling Media: Potentiality and the Afterlife of Art

​​Miryam Sas
2022

In Feeling Media Miryam Sas explores the potentialities and limitations of media theory and media art in Japan. Opening media studies and affect theory up to a deeper engagement with works and theorists outside Euro-America, Sas offers a framework of analysis she calls the affective scale—the space where artists and theorists work between the level of the individual and larger global and historical shifts. She examines intermedia, experimental animation, and Marxist theories of the culture industries of the 1960s and 1970s in the work of artists and thinkers ranging from...

Living Pictures

Polina Barskova
2022

Living Pictures refers to the parlor game of tableaux vivants, in which people dress up in costume to bring scenes from history back to life. It’s a game about survival, in a sense, and what it means to be a survivor is the question that Polina Barskova explores in the scintillating literary amalgam of Living Pictures. Barskova, one of the most admired and controversial figures in a new generation of Russian writers, first made her name as a poet; she is also known as a scholar of the catastrophic siege of Leningrad in World War II. In Living Pictures, Barskova writes with caustic humor...

The August Trials: The Holocaust and Postwar Justice in Poland

Andrew Kornbluth
2021

The first account of the August Trials, in which postwar Poland confronted the betrayal of Jewish citizens under Nazi rule but ended up fashioning an alibi for the past.

When six years of ferocious resistance to Nazi occupation came to an end in 1945, a devastated Poland could agree with its new Soviet rulers on little else beyond the need to punish German war criminals and their collaborators. Determined to root out the “many Cains among us,” as a Poznań newspaper editorial put it, Poland’s judicial reckoning spawned 32,000 trials and spanned more than a decade before being largely...

Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field

Angela Hume
2018

Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field makes a formidable intervention into the emerging field of ecopoetics. The volume’s essays model new and provocative methods for reading twentieth and twenty-first century ecological poetry and poetics, drawing on the insights of ecocriticism, contemporary philosophy, gender and sexuality studies, black studies, Native studies, critical race theory, and disability studies, among others.

Contributors offer readings of a diverse range of poets, few of whom have previously been read as nature writers—from midcentury Beat poet Michael McClure,...

Interventions for Women

Angela Hume
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 about the experience of womanhood, addressing the boundaries and pressures imposed from childhood on. She considers the persistent instructions to smile, be quiet, and act happy, all administered with the promise that this forced behavior would make everything better. The poems address rigid social...