Haunted Dreams, by Jenny Kaminer, associate professor of Russian, is the first in-depth study of the representation of post-Soviet adolescence in fiction, film and drama. The book maps how the adolescent hero has become a locus for multiple anxieties throughout the tumultuous years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
The 5150 Poems is the 12th poetry collection by Sandra McPherson, professor emerita of English. The "5150" in the title refers to a section of California law which allows an adult who is experiencing a mental health crisis to be involuntarily detained for a 72-hour psychiatric hospitalization and was inspired by her own experiences.
The Eyes of the World focuses on the lives and experiences of Eastern Congolese people involved in extracting and transporting the minerals needed for digital devices. This book examines how Eastern Congolese understand the work in which they are engaged, the forces pitted against them, and the complicated process through which substances in the earth and forest are converted into commodified resources.
In this book, opera scholar Pierpaolo Polzonetti explores how convivial culture shaped the birth of opera and opera-going rituals until the mid-nineteenth century, when eating and drinking at the opera house were still common. Through analyses of convivial scenes in operas, the book also shows how the consumption of food and drink, and sharing or the refusal to do so, define characters’ identity and relationships.
In Extraction Ecologies, English professor Elizabeth Carolyn Miller examines how literature created during the rise of large-scale mining in the British imperial world from 1830 to 1930 reflected and commented upon a world where humans became dependent on finite, nonrenewable resources. Miller is also the Interim Chair of the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies.
The Swank Hotel is an acrobatic, unforgettable, surreal, and unexpectedly comic novel that interrogates the illusory dream of stability that pervaded early twenty-first century America.
In Roadrunner, English professor Joshua Clover charts Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers' 1972 song "Roadrunner's" emotional power and its elaborate history in pop music along with its connection to American car culture, industrialization, consumption, mobility and politics.
Peculiar Places: A Queer Crip History of White Rural Nonconformity, by American studies assistant professor Ryan Lee Cartwright, maps racialized queer and disability histories of white social nonconformity across the rural US, from the 1910s to the 1990s. Cartwright teaches disability studies, queer and trans history, research methodologies, social welfare, and landscapes and places.
The Persian Revival by art history professor Talinn Grigor is the first architectural history that traces the evolution of this style first in Europe, then Parsi architecture in British India and the culmination in the revivalistic architecture of Zand, Qajar and Iran. The book is a winner of the Saidi-Sirjani Book Award from the Association of Iranian Studies.
A lyric fable, Life in a Field intersperses Katie Peterson’s slow-moving, cinematic, and sensual writing with three folios of photographs by Young Suh. Life in a Field tries to reverse our accelerating destruction of the natural world, reminding us of “the cold clarity we need to continue on this earth.”
