AMERICAN STUDIES
Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique by Robert F. Reid-Pharr (New York University Press; 255 pages; $28 paperback). Discusses Langston Hughes, Federico Garcia Lorca, and others in a study of interactions between African-American and Spanish anti-fascist intellectuals.
Brown Threat: Identification in the Security State by Kumarini Silva (University of Minnesota Press; 212 pages; $94.50 hardcover, $27 paperback). Focuses on representations of South Asians in the United States.
ANTHROPOLOGY
Moral Ecology of a Forest: The Nature Industry and Maya Post-Conservation by Jose E. Martinez-Reyes (University of Arizona Press; 200 pages; $55). Focuses on the conflict between Western conservationists and the Maya of the southeastern Mexican state of Quintana Roo.
Provisional Authority: Police, Order, and Security in India by Beatrice Jauregui (University of Chicago Press; 205 pages; $95 hardcover, $35 paperback). Examines daily life for police in rural Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state.
ART AND ARCHITECTURE
Bosch and Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life by Joseph Leo Koerner (Princeton University Press; 448 pages; $65). Traces affinities between the two northern Renaissance masters.
A House in the Sun: Modern Architecture and Solar Energy in the Cold War by Daniel A. Barber (Oxford University Press; 336 pages; $39.95). Explores the role of architecture in social changes through a study of experimentation in solar-heated homes from the 1940s to the late 50s.
Mirror Affect: Seeing Self, Observing Others in Contemporary Art by Cristina Albu (University of Minnesota Press; 303 pages; $105 hardcover, $30 paperback). A study of artwork since the 1960s that reflect the spectator via actual mirrors, video, and other elements; artists discussed include Joan Jonas, Dan Graham, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Olafur Eliasson, and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer.
Painting in a State of Exception: New Figuration in Argentina by Patrick Frank (University Press of Florida; 206 pages; $79.95). A study of four artists---Jorge de la Vega, Luis Felipe Noe, Romulo Maccio, and Ernesto Deira---central to the postwar movement known as Nueva Figuracion.
CLASSICAL STUDIES
History after Liberty: Tacitus on Tyrants, Sycophants, and Republicans by Thomas E. Strunk (University of Michigan Press; 232 pages; $65). Discusses the historian’s damning portrait of tyranny in first-century Rome and his suggestions, as a republican, toward restoring liberty.
COMMUNICATION
Canada before Television: Radio, Taste, and the Struggle for Cultural Democracy by Len Kuffert (McGill-Queen’s University Press; 352 pages; US$110 hardcover, US$34.95 paperback). Examines the early history of radio in Anglophone Canada, including issues of taste, British influences, the medium’s intimate power, and the presence of U.S. programming.
ECONOMICS
The Distribution of Wealth---Growing Inequality? by Michael Schneider, Mike Pottenger, and J.E. King (Edward Elgar Publishing; 232 pages; $120). Uses data on 21 countries to examine, among other things, Thomas Piketty’s claims about growing inequality.
Selling Power: Economics, Policy, and Electric Utilities Before 1940 by John L. Neufeld (University of Chicago Press; 328 pages; $60). Examines the economics that shaped and reshaped markets for electricity in the industry’s first several decades.
EDUCATION
Between Education and Catastrophe: The Battle Over Public Schooling in Postwar Manitoba by George Buri (McGill-Queen’s University Press; 277 pages; US$100). Sets debates over curricula, testing, rural schools, and other matters in the prairie province in the wider context of discourse on the social-welfare state and competing models of liberalism in 1950s Canada.
A Fight for the Soul of Public Education: The Story of the Chicago Teachers Strike by Steven K. Ashby and Robert Bruno (ILR Press/Cornell University Press; 328 pages; $35). Draws on interviews, participant-observation, union documents, and other sources in a study of the 2012 work action that shuttered the system for seven days.
ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES
Keeping Oregon Green: Livability, Stewardship, and the Challenges of Growth, 1960--1980 by Derek R. Larson (Oregon State University Press; 307 pages; $24.95). Topics include the revitalization of the Willamette River, preservation of public access to the state’s entire coastline, and a failed attempt to create an Oregon Dunes national park.
FILM STUDIES
Feasting Our Eyes: Food Films and Cultural Identity in the United States by Laura Lindenfeld and Fabio Parasecoli (Columbia University Press; 261 pages; $105 hardcover, $35 paperback). A study of food-linked feature and documentary films, including Big Night, Ratatouille, and Julie & Julia.
Queering the Shakespeare Film: Gender Trouble, Gay Spectatorship and Male Homoeroticism by Anthony Guy Patricia (Bloomsbury Academic; 286 pages; $114). Focuses on films of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Twelfth Night, and The Merchant of Venice.
FOLKLORE
Mother Goose Refigured: A Critical Translation of Charles Perrault’s Fairy Tales by Christine A. Jones (Wayne State University Press; 216 pages; $31.99). Combines essays on Perrault’s Contes (1697) with annotated retranslations of the tales that document their modern strategies.
GEOGRAPHY
Easy On, Easy Off: The Urban Pathology of America’s Small Towns by Jack Williams (University of Virginia Press; 320 pages; $70 hardcover, $30 paperback). Examines the struggles and lost cultural heritage of small-town America, bypassed by the interstate highway system.
HISTORY
Ancient Worlds: A Global History of Antiquity by Michael Scott (Basic Books; 448 pages; $29.99). Examines civilizations across three continents from 500 BC to AD 300.
The Aztecs at Independence: Nahua Culture Makers in Central Mexico, 1799--1832 by Miriam Melton-Villanueva (University of Arizona Press; 249 pages; $55). Uses previously untapped Nahuatl-language documents, primarily last wills and testaments, to examine indigenous communities’ experience of Mexico’s transition from the colonial to the postcolonial period.
Blue Texas: The Making of a Multiracial Democratic Coalition in the Civil Rights Era by Max Krochmal (University of North Carolina Press; 552 pages; $39.95). Draws on archival and oral-historical sources in a study of liberal activism in the state beginning in the 1930s.
Child Insanity in England, 1845-1907 by Steven Taylor (Palgrave Macmillan; 188 pages; $99.99). Examines the view and treatment of mental illness in children during the period, including regional and other differences.
Circulating Literacy: Writing Instruction in American Periodicals, 1880-1910 by Alicia Brazeau (Southern Illinois University Press; 216 pages; $40). Examines the role played by popular magazines in building literacy; focuses on Michigan Farmer, Ohio Farmer, and Maine Farmer as well as Harper’s Bazar and Ladies’ Home Journal.
The Cultural Revolution on Trial: Mao and the Gang of Four by Alexander C. Cook (Cambridge University Press; 277 pages; $99.99 hardcover, $34.99 paperback). Focuses on the 1980-81 trial of Mao’s widow and a group of radical cultural revolutionaries who fell from power after the Chairman’s death.
Defender: The Life of Daniel H. Wells by Quentin Thomas Wells (Utah State University Press; 508 pages; $39.95). A biography of a prominent adult convert to the Mormon church---in 1846--- who served in military, political, and other capacities.
The Extreme Right in the French Resistance: Members of the Cagoule and Corvignolles in the Second World War by Valerie Deacon (Louisiana State University Press; 240 pages; $45). Documents how elements of France’s extreme right joined the Resistance in the wake of the German occupation.
Finding Women in the State: A Socialist Feminist Revolution in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1964 by Wang Zheng (University of California Press; 400 pages; $85 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). Documents the maneuverings of socialist feminists behind the scenes in realms from high party politics to film production.
The First Victory: The Second World War and the East Africa Campaign by Andrew Stewart (Yale University Press; 336 pages; $38). Draws on previously untapped sources in a study of the victory of some 70,000 British and Commonwealth troops against an Italian force of nearly 300,000 in 1941.
Game of Queens: The Women Who Made Sixteenth-Century Europe by Sarah Gristwood (Basic Books; 351 pages; $28.99). Offers a collective biography of queens of Spain and the Habsburg Empire, France, England, and Scotland.
Military Service and American Democracy: From World War II to the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars by William A. Taylor (University Press of Kansas; 336 pages; $34.95). Covers the period from the first peacetime draft, instituted in 1940, to the all-volunteer army serving today.
Once Within Borders: Territories of Power, Wealth, and Belonging Since 1500 by Charles S. Maier (Harvard University Press; 387 pages; $29.95). Examines the ideas and forces that have shaped political borders over the past half millennium.
Oriental Neighbors: Middle Eastern Jews and Arabs in Mandatory Palestine by Abigail Jacobson and Moshe Naor (Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England; 286 pages; $95). Traces relations between Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews with their Arab neighbors during the British Mandate period.
Out in the Rural: A Mississippi Health Center and Its War on Poverty by Thomas J. Ward (Oxford University Press; 189 pages; $34.95). A study of the physician H. Jack Geiger and the Tufts-Delta Health Center, a rural clinic he opened in Mound Bayou, Miss., in 1966.
Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800--1850 by Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford (Harvard University Press; 282 pages; $39.95). Discusses a 50-year period marked by major efforts to reform law across the empire.
Raphael Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide by Douglas Irvin-Erickson (University of Pennsylvania Press; 320 pages; $59.95). An intellectual biography of the lawyer who coined the word “genocide” and led a campaign to outlaw it.
The Sanitation of Brazil: Nation, State, and Public Health, 1889-1930 by Gilberto Hochman, translated by Diane Grosklaus Whitty (University of Illinois Press; 216 pages; $95 hardcover, $25 paperback). First English translation of the influential 1998 work on the formation and expansion of public-health efforts in Brazil.
A Time of Scandal: Charles R. Forbes, Warren G. Harding, and the Making of the Veterans Bureau by Rosemary Stevens (Johns Hopkins University Press; 408 pages; $34.95). Draws on previously untapped sources in a revisionist study of the scandal that followed President Harding’s appointment of his friend Forbes as the first director of what would become the Department of Veterans Affairs; disputes the claim that Forbes defrauded the government.
Toxic Exposures: Mustard Gas and the Health Consequences of World War II in the United States by Susan L. Smith (Rutgers University Press; 256 pages; $29.95). Draws on previously classified U.S. and Canadian records in a study of how America and its allies intentionally subjected their own soldiers to mustard gas experiments, including trials designed to compare the vulnerability of different races; documents the health and environmental consequences of the effort.
Willis Duke Weatherford: Race, Religion, and Reform in the American South by Andrew McNeill Canady (University Press of Kentucky; 337 pages; $50). Explores constraints on white Southern liberalism through a biography of the educator and reformer (1875-1970).
HISTORY OF SCIENCE
Rebel Genius: Warren S. McCulloch’s Transdisciplinary Life in Science by Tara H. Abraham (MIT Press; 305 pages; $40). A biography of the American neurophysiologist and cybernetician (1898-1969), who also pursued work in philosophy, poetry, and other realms.
LITERATURE
The Birth of the Imagination: William Carlos Williams on Form by Bruce Holsapple (University of New Mexico Press; 415 pages; $59.95). A developmental study of form, structure, and content in Williams’ poetry from Poems (1909) to The Wedge (1944).
Damning Words: The Life and Religious Times of H. L. Mencken by D.G. Hart (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing; 259 pages; $26). A biography of Mencken that describes the journalist and famed agnostic’s relationship to Christianity as simultaneously antagonistic and symbiotic, framing much of his ideas and career.
George Sword’s Warrior Narratives: Compositional Processes in Lakota Oral Tradition by Delphine Red Shirt (University of Nebraska Press; 376 pages; $65). Examines patterns of Lakota style thought a study of the composition and structure of narratives composed by Sword in Lakota using the English alphabet.
Little Magazine, World Form by Eric Bulson (Columbia University Press; 333 pages; $60). Examines how the form of the “little magazine,” familiar to American and European modernism, has extended its reach to Africa, the West Indies, Japan, and other settings.
Narratives from the Sephardic Atlantic: Blood and Faith by Ronnie Perelis (Indiana University Press; 192 pages; $55). A study of three autobiographical narratives by descendants of Jews forced to convert to Christianity in Spain or Spanish America.
Private Lives Made Public: The Invention of Biography in Early Modern England by Andrea Walkden (Duquesne University Press; 206 pages; $70). Documents how a boom in life writing after the 1649 trial and execution of Charles I figured in English political culture; works discussed include Izaak Walton’s Lives, John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, and Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier.
Reading America: Citizenship, Democracy, and Cold War Literature by Kristin L. Matthews (University of Massachusetts Press; 288 pages; $90 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Focuses on works by J.D. Salinger, Ralph Ellison, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and Maxine Hong Kingston.
The Reception of Alfred Tennyson in Europe edited by Leonee Ormond (Bloomsbury Academic; 424 pages; $244). Writings on the 19th-century British poet’s reception by readers and critics on the Continent as well as his influence on artists and musicians.
The Religion of Empire: Political Theology in Blake’s Prophetic Symbolism by G.A. Rosso (Ohio State University Press; 291 pages; $69.95). Topics include the figure of Rahab as key to William Blake’s political theology.
Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner by Mark Ford (Harvard University Press; 280 pages; $27.95). A study of the writer’s life, in his words, as “half a Londoner,” moving between the capital and Dorset.
MUSIC
Beyond Reason: Wagner contra Nietzsche by Karol Berger (University of California Press; 522 pages; $65). Focuses on Der Ring des Nibelungen, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, and Parsifal.
PHILOSOPHY
As Wide as the World Is Wise: Reinventing Philosophical Anthropology by Michael Jackson (Columbia University Press; 259 pages; $35). Draws on fieldwork in Australia and West Africa in a discussion of how philosophy and anthropology can combine for greater understanding.
German Idealism’s Trinitarian Legacy by Dale M. Schlitt (State University of New York Press; 445 pages; $95). Discusses the Trinitarian thought of Hegel and Schelling and its legacy in the work of such figures as Philipp Marheineke, Isaak August Dorner, Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov, Karl Barth, Karl Rahner, and Wolfhart Pannenberg.
Zhuangzi’s Critique of the Confucians: Blinded by the Human by Kim-chong Chong (State University of New York Press; 195 pages; $80). A study of the ancient Chinese thinker that examines his criticisms of pre-Qin Confucians using metaphorical inversion and parody.
POLITICAL SCIENCE
Between the Rule of Law and States of Emergency: The Fluid Jurisprudence of the Israeli Regime by Yoav Mehozay (State University of New York Press; 205 pages; $80). A study of Israel’s use of emergency powers, some dating from British Mandate rule of Palestine and some originating with the Jewish state; documents how these powers reach far beyond the “war on terror.”
Democracy in Iran: Why It Failed and How It Might Succeed by Misagh Parsa (Harvard University Press; 416 pages; $45). Offers a sociological perspective on Iran’s Green reformist movement and its prospects; argues ultimately that gradual institutional reforms in Iran will not result in real change and that what is needed is another revolution.
RELIGION
Moses: A Human Life by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg (Yale University Press; 225 pages; $25). Applies psychoanalytic and other perspectives in a study of the Hebrew prophet.
Sin in the Sixties: Catholics and Confession 1955-1975 by Maria C. Morrow (Catholic University of America Press; 336 pages; $65). Links a changing notion of sin to a decline in confession by the end of Vatican II as well as other penitential practices such as meatless Fridays and Lenten fasting.
The Story of Reason in Islam by Sari Nusseibeh (Stanford University Press; 260 pages; $95 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Topics include how the fortunes of the classical Arabic language figured in a shift from prizing reason to legalism in Islamic thought.
Teaching Bodies: Moral Formation in the Summa of Thomas Aquinas by Mark D. Jordan (Fordham University Press; 256 pages; $100 hardcover, $28 paperback). Focuses on the structure of the middle portion of the Summa and its use of classical exhortations.
RHETORIC
Textual Curation: Authorship, Agency, and Technology in Wikipedia and Chambers “Cyclopaedia” by Krista Kennedy (University of South Carolina Press; 176 pages; $49.99). Compares Wikipedia today with a similar approach to publicly submitted information in the second edition of Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopaedia nearly 300 years ago.
THEATER
Stage for Action: U.S. Social Activist Theatre in the 1940s by Chrystyna Dail (Southern Illinois University Press; 194 pages; $40). A study of Stage for Action, a short-lived theater group founded in New York in 1943.
WOMEN’S STUDIES
The Woman Fantastic in Contemporary American Media Culture edited by Elyce Rae Helford and others (University Press of Mississippi; 256 pages; $65). Essays on Wonder Woman, Sansa, and other heroines in television, film, comic books, and literature.
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