Herbert Ellison (History and International Studies)
Boris Yeltsin and Russia's Democratic Transformation
(University of Washington Press, 2006)
November 30, 2006: Boris Yeltsin is one of modern history's most dynamic and underappreciated figures. In this vivid, analytical masterwork, Herbert J. Ellison establishes Yeltsin as the principal leader and defender of Russia's democratic revolution - the very embodiment of Russia's fragile new liberties, including the evolving respect for the rule of law and private property as well as core freedoms of speech, religion, press, and political association.
Sasha Su-Ling Welland (Anthropology and Women Studies)
A Thousand Miles of Dreams: The Journeys of Two Chinese Sisters
(Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006)
January 16, 2007: A Thousand Miles of Dreams is an evocative and intimate biography of two Chinese sisters who took very different paths in their quest to be independent women. Ling Shuhao arrived in Cleveland in 1925 to study medicine in the middle of a U.S. crackdown on Chinese immigrant communities, and her effort to assimilate began. She became an American named Amy, while her sister Ling Shuhua burst onto the Beijing literary scene as a writer of short fiction. Shuhua's tumultuous affair with Virginia Woolf's nephew during his years in China eventually drew her into the orbit of the Bloomsbury group. The sisters were Chinese "modern girls" who sought to forge their own way in an era of social revolution that unsettled relations between men and women, and among nations. Daughters of an imperial scholar-official and a concubine, they followed trajectories unimaginable to their parents' generation. Download e-Flyer
Joel Walker (History)
The Legend of Mar Qardagh: Narrative and Christian Heroism in Late Antique Iraq
(University of California Press, 2006)
March 7, 2007: This pioneering study uses an early seventh-century Christian martyr legend to elucidate the culture and society of late antique Iraq. Translated from Syriac into English here for the first time, the legend of Mar Qardagh introduces a hero of epic proportions whose characteristics confound simple classification. During the several stages of his career, Mar Qardagh hunts like a Persian King, argues like a Greek philosopher, and renounces his Zoroastrian family to live with monks high in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan. Drawing on both literary and artistic sources, Joel Walker explores the convergence of these diverse themes in the Christian culture of the Sasanian Empire (224-642). Taking the Qardagh legend as its foundation, his study guides readers through the rich and complex world of late antique Iraq. Download e-Flyer
Brian Reed
(English)
Hart Crane: After His Lights
(University of Alabama Press, 2006)
April 10, 2007: With his suicide in 1932, Hart Crane left behind a small body of work—White Buildings (1926) and The Bridge (1930). Yet, Crane's poetry was championed and debated publicly by many of the most eminent literary and cultural critics of his day. In Hart Crane: After His Lights, Brian Reed undertakes a study of Crane's poetic output that takes into account, but also questions, the post-structural and theoretical developments in humanities scholarship of the last decade that have largely approached Crane in a piecemeal way, or pigeonholed him as representative of his class, gender, or sexual orientation. Download e-Flyer
William Talbott (Philosophy)
Which
Rights Should Be Universal?
(Oxford University Press, 2005)
January 18, 2006: Talbott builds on the work of John Rawls, Jurgen Habermas,
J.S. Mill, Amartya Sen, and Henry Shue to explain how,
over the course of history, human beings have learned
how to adopt a distinctively moral point of view from
which it is possible to make universal, though not infallible,
judgments of right and wrong. He explains how this distinctively
moral point of view has led to the discovery of the moral
importance of nine basic rights. Talbott's book speaks
to not only debates on human rights but to broader issues
of moral and cultural relativism.
Vicente Rafael (History)
The Promise of the Foreign:
Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the
Spanish Philippines
January 24, 2006: Rafael argues that translation was key to the emergence of Filipino nationalism
in the nineteenth century. Acts of translation entailed
technics from which issued the promise of nationhood. Such a promise
consisted of revising the heterogeneous and violent origins of the
nation by mediating one's encounter with things foreign while preserving
their strangeness. Rafael examines the workings of the foreign in the
Filipinos' fascination with Castilian, the language of the Spanish
colonizers. In Castilian, Filipino nationalists saw the possibility
of arriving at a lingua franca with which to overcome linguistic, regional, and class differences.
Yet they were also keenly aware of the social limits and
political hazards of this linguistic fantasy.
Matthew Sparke (Geography)
In
the Space of Theory: Postfoundational Geographies
of the Nation-State
(University of Minnesota Press, 2005)
October 20, 2005: Concerned with revisioning
global politics, In the Space of Theory explores important
questions surrounding the meaning of the nation-state in a changing world. How is the meaning of the hyphen
in "nation-state" changing in the context of globalization
and proliferating political struggles? How can we investigate
the transformation of the nation-state by marking the
normally unmarked hyphen in "geo-graphy"? Debunking deterritorialization
both as a discourse and as an antiessentialist abstraction,
Sparke offers answers to these questions by examining
the contemporary geographies of the United States and
Canada.
Marshall Brown (Comparative Literature and English)
The
Gothic Text
(Stanford University Press, 2005)
February 7, 2006: Brown's book combines
the teleological approach to literary history developed in his book Preromanticism (1991) with a European perspective on the one truly
international literary form of its era. New insights into literary history and the history of ideas provide a framework for innovative close readings that approach classics of the genre from unusual angles. Brown gives extended readings of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, Ann Radcliffe's The Italian, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, among
others. In this thoroughly researched account of German romantic psychology
as it developed out of Kant's idealist philosophy, gothic sensibility
becomes a pioneer in the rendering of consciousness. The Gothic Text
will give many new impulses to the study of romanticism, nineteenth-century
fiction, and the origins of psychoanalysis.
John Christopher Hamm (Asian Languages & Literature)
Paper Swordsmen: Jin Yong and the Modern Chinese Martial
Arts Novel
(University of Hawaii Press, 2004)
November 4th, 2005: The martial arts novel is one of the most distinctive and
widely-read forms of modern Chinese fiction. In Paper Swordsmen,
Hamm offers the first in-depth English-language study of this fascinating
and influential genre, focusing on the work of its undisputed
twentieth-century master, Jin Yong.
Through close readings of Jin Yong's recognized masterpieces, Hamm
shows how these works combine a rich literary tradition with an extraordinary
narrative artistry and an evolving appreciation of the political and
cultural aspects of the contemporary Chinese experience.
Nikhil
Singh
(History)
Black is a Country: Race and the
Unfinished Struggle for Democracy
(Harvard University Press, 2004)
November 2, 2004: Despite black gains in modern America, the end of racism is not yet in sight.
Nikhil Pal Singh asks what happened to the worldly and radical visions of
equality that animated black intellectual activists from W. E. B. Du Bois
in the 1930s to Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 1960s. In so doing, he constructs
an alternative history of civil rights in the twentieth century, a long civil
rights era, in which radical hopes and global dreams are recognized as central
to the history of black struggle.
Tani
Barlow
(Women Studies)
The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism
(Duke University Press, 2004)
December 2, 2004: In this history of thinking about the subject of women in twentieth-century
China, Barlow illustrates the theories and conceptual categories that Enlightenment
Chinese intellectuals have developed to describe the collectivity of women.
Demonstrating how generations of these theorists have engaged with international
debates over eugenics, gender, sexuality, and the psyche, Barlow argues that
as an Enlightenment project, feminist debate in China is at once Chinese
and international.
David
Domke
(Communication)
God Willing? Political Fundamentalism
in the White House, the 'War on Terror,' and the Echoing Press
(London: Pluto Press, 2004)
February 16, 2005: In the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, President George
W. Bush and his administration offered a 'political fundamentalism' that
capitalized upon the fear felt by many Americans. Political fundamentalism
is the adaptation of a conservative religious worldview, via strategic language
choices and communication approaches, into a policy agenda that feels political
rather than religious. These communications dominated public discourse and
public opinion for months on end and came at a significant cost for democracy.
This book analyzes hundreds of administration communications and news
stories from September 2001 to Iraq in spring 2003 to examine how this
occurred and what it means for U.S. politics and the global landscape.
John
Toews
(History & CHID)
Becoming Historical :
Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Early Nineteenth-Century Berlin
(Cambridge University Press, 2004)
April 12, 2005: Toews studies the historical consciousness that emerged from early nineteenth-century
breaks with tradition and shaped the development of new forms of personal
and collective identity. His book examines the stages and conflicts involved
in “becoming historical" through the works of prominent Prussian
artists and intellectuals who attached their personal visions to the reformist
agenda of the Prussian regime that took power in 1840. The analogous and
interrelated commitments of these figures evolved into a cultural reformation
project that sought communal solidarity through subjective identification
with public memory. Toews frames his account of this evolution through philosophical
perspectives on historical selfhood provided by both the spokesperson for
Prussian cultural politics—F.W.J. Schelling—and his radical critics—Karl
Marx and Søren Kierkegaard. He thereby draws this story of building
selves and communities in early nineteenth-century Berlin into current debates
about historically determined and contingently constructed identities.
Heidi Pauwels
(Asian Languages & Literature and Comparative Religion)
In Praise of Holy Men: Hagiographic Poems by and about Hariram Vyas
(Egbert Forsten Publishing, 2002)
October 22, 2003: Pauwels' new book focuses on the North Indian ‘bhakti,' or devotional, movement of Hinduism.
Pauwels is also the author of Krishna's Round Dance Reconsidered: Hariram Vyas's Hindi Ras-pancadhyayi (1996).
Jin Di
(Former Visiting Fellow Simpson Center)
Literary Transliteration: Quest for Artistic Integrity
(St. Jerome Publishing, 2003)
November 5, 2003: Jin Di is a translator, teacher, and theoretician whose Chinese translation of James Joyce's Ulysses is recognized as a monumental achievement and a work of art. Jin Di detailed this epic tale in Shamrock and Chopsticks, James Joyce in China: A Tale of Two Encounters (2001).
Lorna Rhodes
(Anthropology)
Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison
(University of California Press, 2004)
May 25, 2004: In this rare firsthand account, Rhodes takes us into the hidden world of the maximum security prison, exploring the internal contradictions of a system mandated to both punish and treat. Her often harrowing, sometimes poignant account includes vivid testimony from prisoners and prison workers, describes routines and practices inside prison walls, and takes a hard look at the prison industry.
Anthony Geist (Spanish and Portuguese Studies)
They Still Draw Pictures: Children's Art in Wartime from the Spanish Civil War to Kosovo
(University of Illinois Press, 2002)
Of the 600,000 refugees who sought shelter from Franco's tyranny in the relative security of Republican-controlled eastern Spain, more than 200,000 were children. The republic responded to this crisis by establishing colonias infantiles (children's colonies), often in country estates and mansions that had been abandoned by fascist sympathizers. In these colonies, the young refugees - many of them orphaned or sent by their parents to safety - received schooling and medical care, kept each other company, and produced thousands of drawings that serve as a moving, collective testimony of the experience of being a child in wartime. Born of the trauma of exile and separation, the drawings are invaluable historical documents, giving physical form to the children's experiences of air raids, brutality, destruction, and homelessness. These pictures also represent daily life in the colonies and preserve the children's clear memories of life before the war and their hope for life after it. They are supplemented by a smaller selection of drawings from later wars, showing that this problem is contemporary as well as historical.
Ruby Blondell (Classics)
The Play of Character in Plato's Dialogues
(Cambridge University Press, 2002)
Despite the recent explosions of interest in alternative ways of reading Plato, a gulf still exists between "literary" and "philosophical" interpretations. Ruby Blondell's new book, The Play of Character in Plato's Dialogues, attempts to bridge that division by focusing on Plato's use of characterization, which is both intrinsic to the "literary" questions raised by his use of dramatic form, and fundamental to his "philosophical" concern with moral character. Form and content are also reciprocally related through Plato's preoccupation with literary characterization on the discursive level. Two opening chapters examine the methodological issues involved in reading Plato "as drama," and other preliminary matters, including ancient Greek conceptions of "character," the figure of Sokrates qua "dramatic" hero, and their influence of literary characters on an audience. The rest of the book offers close readings of select dialogues, chosen to show the wide range of ways in which Plato uses his characters, with special attention to the kaleidoscope figure of Sokrates.
Marc Lange (Philosophy)
The Philosophy of Physics: Locality, Fields, Energy and Mass
(Blackwell Publishers, 2002)
Lange's book combines physics, history, and philosophy in a radical new approach to introducing the philosophy of physics. Accessible to readers with little background in physics or philosophy, this book allows the reader to wrestle with the metaphysical and conceptual problems that drove innovation in physics, from nineteenth-century electromagnetic field theory through relativity and quantum mechanics. Among the topics treated are action at a distance, the reality of electric fields, energy's character as "stuff" flowing through space, and the meaning of E=mc2.
Herbert Blau (English and Drama)
The Dubious Spectacle: Extremities of Theater, 1976-2000
Blau discussed his new book, a retrospective collection of essays that rehearse, in the movement of memory and cross-reflection, his extensive career in theater as a director, writer, theorist, and critic. He drew upon his fascinating experiences as co-founder and co-director of the Actor's Workshop in San Francisco co-director of the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center in New York, and artistic director of the experimental theater group KRAKEN. His talk underscored the idea that performance has moved across other genres and disciplines into fashion, politics, sexuality, and theory.
Leah Ceccarelli (Speech Communication)
Shaping Science with Rhetoric: The Cases of Dobzhansky, Schrödinger, and Wilson
Ceccarelli's talk addressed several timely issues in the sciences and humanities. How do scientists persuade colleagues from diverse fields to cross the disciplinary divide, risking their careers in new interdisciplinary research programs? Why do some attempts to inspire such research win widespread acclaim and support, while others do not?
Jin Di (Visiting Scholar, Simpson Center)
Shamrock and Chopsticks, James Joyce in China: A Tale of Two Encounters
Jin Di is a translator, teacher, and theoretician, whose Chinese translation of James Joyce's Ulysses is recognized as a monumental achievement and a work of art. Ulysses remained largely unknown to the Chinese readership for the first 64 years after its publication. Although there was never a formal ban, the de facto ban on the Western work regarded as "notoriously obscene" and filled with "bourgeois ideology" lasted for decades. Jin's new book, Shamrock and Chopsticks, traces the odyssey of Joyce's work, including the political and cultural obstacles to its translation and reception both prior to and during the Cultural Revolution. In his talk, Jin discussed the encounter between James Joyce and Chinese culture from various angles.
Stephen Sumida (American Ethnic Studies)
A Resource Guide to Asian American Literature
An informative and original collection of twenty-five essays, the Resource Guide to Asian American Literature offers background materials for the study of this expanding discipline and suggests strategies and ideas for teaching well-known Asian American works. This volume provides a fresh look at what "Asian American literature" means and serves as an introduction to the study and teaching of this flourishing field. It is an essential collection for students, teachers, and scholars of all American literatures.
Ann-Charlotte Gavel Adams (Scandinavian Studies)
August Strindberg's Legends
Gavel Adams discusses her work on August Strindberg's "Legends" and "Jacob Wrestles" as part of the most ambitious texual studies project ever undertaken in Sweden.
Caroline Chung Simpson (English)
An Absent Presence: Japanese Americans and the Making of Postwar American Culture, 1945-1960
The experiences of Japanese Americans during World War II, culminating in the incarceration of nearly their entire West Coast population, remains the touchstone of Japanese American identity and collective memory. While the events surrounding the internment are by now well established and the rationale for it discredited, how Americans remember this event is less fixed and also less studied. Caroline Chung Simpson's work provides a fascinating analysis of moments in American postwar history when the memory of the internment was implicated in public discussions that simultaneously silenced an analysis of its causes and costs. She deploys a Foucaldian framework to ground her analysis of this "absent presence," a strategy that functions well to ground her provocative argument that the internment posed a disturbing challenge to the nation's self-image as a pluralist progressive democracy. Moreover, the author argues this memory was vital to maintaining and defining this narrative during the postwar and Cold War periods.
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