Faculty - Literature
South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation by
This is the story of a Black woman and native Alabaman returning to the region she has always called home and considering it with fresh eyes. Her journey is full of detours, deep dives, and surprising encounters with places and people. She renders Southerners from all walks of life with sensitivity and honesty, sharing her thoughts about a troubling history and the ritual humiliations and joys that characterize so much of Southern life.
I don't think I've ever seen such a euphoric reaction to the announcement of the National Book Award winners than I have this year. Imani Perry's speech is already an online legend, and I'm going to start my FWT reading with "South to America," which was inspired, at least in part, by Albert Murray’s 1971 travelogue “South to a Very Old Place.” Good preparation for my spring term class on Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man."
Director of Library Services
In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss by
Amy and Brian's world was changed forever with his diagnosis of early onset Alzheimer's. Forced to confront the daily frustrations and realities of the disease and its impact on their lives and marriage, Brian resolved not to let it dictate his life and instead asked himself: What makes life meaningful, and how do I want to live the rest of mine? His decision led them to learn about Dignitas and to fly to Zürich for a peaceful ending of Brian's life.
1971: a Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh by
The war of 1971 was the most significant geopolitical event in the Indian subcontinent since its partition in 1947. At one swoop, it led to the creation of Bangladesh, and it tilted the balance of power between India and Pakistan steeply in favor of India. The Line of Control in Kashmir, the nuclearization of India and Pakistan, the conflicts in Siachen Glacier and Kargil, the insurgency in Kashmir, the political travails of Bangladesh--all can be traced back to the intense nine months in 1971.
Provost
The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization by
Senge describes the strategies of learning organizations, in which new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, collective aspiration is set free, and people are continually learning how to create the results they truly desire.
Abandon Me: Memiors by
In her dazzling Abandon Me, Febos captures the intense bonds of love and the need for connection -- with family, lovers, and oneself.
If you know me, you know I think this exquisitely crafted, hard-won, heartening, and profoundly queer memoir is all that writing a life can be.
Groundglass by
Groundglass takes shape atop a polluted aquifer in Minnesota, beside trains that haul fracked crude oil, as Kathryn Savage confronts the transgressions of U.S. Superfund sites and brownfields against land, groundwater, neighborhoods, and people.
Poet Savage, a Minnesota daughter, writes of entwined environmental and personal tragedies, living and losing on stolen land catastrophically desecrated by Superfund pollution. If it sounds heavy, it is, but also brave and full of beauty; a book to mourn and learn with.
The Best American Essays 2022 by
Alexander Chee, an essayist of “virtuosity and power” (Washington Post), selects twenty essays out of thousands that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year.
With Chee editing, this year's collection is jaw-droppingly un-put-downable. It's also diverse in the many ways anything "American" should be. If you don't think essays are for you, something, and probably many somethings, in these pages will change your mind and stay with you forever.
Faculty - Visual Arts
Girlhood: Essays by
Blending investigative reporting, memoir, and scholarship, Febos charts how she and others like her have reimagined relationships and made room for the anger, grief, power, and pleasure women have long been taught to deny.
Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces by
An archival dive with fresh interpretations of the legendary New York gallery and cultural laboratory that catalyzed collaboration among Black artists and their counterparts of diverse backgrounds.
An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by
The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world. This book welcomes us into a previously unfathomable dimension--the world as it is truly perceived by other animals.
Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom by
In this book, the author shares her philosophy of the classroom, offering ideas about teaching that fundamentally rethink democratic participation. She writes about education as the practice of freedom. She advocates the process of teaching students to think critically and raises many concerns central to the field of critical pedagogy, linking them to feminist thought.
Faculty - Visual Arts
The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History by
Examines the history and culture of eighteenth-century France as it provides a view of the people of the cities, towns, and countryside during the Age of Enlightenment.
Chapter 1, "The Meaning of Mother Goose" is remarkable.
Visiting Faculty - Drama
The Art Spirit by
The Art Spirit represents the collected words, teachings, and letters of inspired artist and teacher Robert Henri.
Offers valuable self-defense advice for artists navigating educational institutions.
The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood by
The Empire of Trauma tells the story of how the traumatic victim became culturally and politically respectable, and how trauma itself became an unassailable moral category. Revealing how trauma has come to authenticate the suffering of victims, The Empire of Trauma provides critical perspective on some of the moral and political issues at stake in the contemporary world.
Traces the idea of psychic trauma from its emergence in the late 19th century to current day uses and abuses.
The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia by
For two thousand years the disparate groups that now reside in Zomia (a mountainous region the size of Europe that consists of portions of seven Asian countries) have fled the projects of the organized state societies that surround them—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare. This book, essentially an “anarchist history,” is the first-ever examination of the huge literature on state-making whose author evaluates why people would deliberately and reactively remain stateless.
Presents history from the perspective of stateless people, explores the pliability of ethnic identities and looks at state-making as a form of internal colonialism.
Associate Director of Academic and International Student Services.
Girlhood: Essays by
Blending investigative reporting, memoir, and scholarship, Febos charts how she and others like her have reimagined relationships and made room for the anger, grief, power, and pleasure women have long been taught to deny.
This book made me think and feeling deeply about what it means to come of age. It rattled by brain and my heart in the best way.
In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss by
Amy and Brian's world was changed forever with his diagnosis of early onset Alzheimer's. Forced to confront the daily frustrations and realities of the disease and its impact on their lives and marriage, Brian resolved not to let it dictate his life and instead asked himself: What makes life meaningful, and how do I want to live the rest of mine? His decision led them to learn about Dignitas and to fly to Zürich for a peaceful ending of Brian's life.
I listened to the audiobook version of this book and it made me sob in my car. I've loved Amy Bloom's books for decades, and I'm so grateful she gave voice to this story.
Inciting Joy: Essays by
Prizewinning poet and author Ross Gay considers the joy we incite when we care for each other, especially during life’s inevitable hardships. Throughout Inciting Joy, he explores how we can practice recognizing that connection, and also, crucially, how we can expand it.
Ross Gay gives voice to gratitude, joy, and abundance like no one else and I am fully here for it.
Faculty - Science and Mathematics
The Theory of Almost Everything: The Standard Model, the Unsung Triumph of Modern Physics by
There are two scientific theories that, taken together, explain the entire universe. The first, which describes the force of gravity, is widely known: Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. But the theory that explains everything else—the Standard Model of Elementary Particles—is virtually unknown among the general public.
Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by
With the singular goal of paying off her student loans, Katie heads out west to take advantage of Alberta’s oil rush. Katie encounters the harsh reality of life in the oil sands, where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet is never discussed. Beaton’s natural cartooning prowess is on full display as she draws colossal machinery and mammoth vehicles set against a sublime Albertan backdrop of wildlife, northern lights, and boreal forest.
Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity by Fantastic book on the phenomenon of autistic "masking" (subconsciously or consciously hiding one's autistic traits). An enlightening read for autistic and allistic people alike.
Faculty - Drama and Visual Arts
The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by
Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major book of nonfiction since In an Antique Land, Ghosh examines our inability--at the level of literature, history, and politics--to grasp the scale and violence of climate change.
Associate Registrar
Men We Reaped by Non-fiction memoir from an incredible author that chronicles the deaths of five young men, including her brother. Ward tackles identity, and how the places we are from ultimately affect the choices and opportunities we have in life.
The Good Nurse by
After his December 2003 arrest, registered nurse Charlie Cullen was quickly dubbed "The Angel of Death" by the media. But Cullen was no mercy killer, nor was he a simple monster. The author, a journalist, presents the whole story for the first time- chronicling Cullen's deadly career and efforts to stop him; it paints a vivid portrait of madness and offers a penetrating look inside America's medical system.
Harrowing true story of a nurse in NJ/PA that messed with patients' drugs and eventually ended up implicated in the deaths of more than 400 people. It's fascinating and frustrating to learn how he continued to get hired at hospital after hospital, and the bureaucracy that prevented him from being caught far earlier than he was.
Director of the Prison Education Initiative
Agincourt: Henry V and the Battle that Made England by
Drawing upon a wide range of sources, eminent scholar Juliet Barker casts aside the legend and shows us that the truth behind Agincourt is just as exciting, just as fascinating, and far more significant. She paints a gripping narrative of the October 1415 clash between outnumbered English archers and heavily armored French knights. But she also takes us beyond the battlefield into palaces and common cottages to bring into vivid focus an entire medieval world in flux.
Faculty - Writing
A Girlhood: A Letter to My Transgender Daughter by
A parent’s love letter to a daughter who has always known exactly who she is.
I've Had to Think up a Way to Survive: On Trauma, Persistence, and Dolly Parton by
When everything fell apart for Lynn Melnick, she went to Dollywood. It was perhaps an unusual refuge. The theme park, partly owned by and wholly named for Dolly Parton, celebrates a country music legend who grew up in church and in poverty in rural Tennessee. Yet Dollywood is exactly where Melnick—a poet, urbanite, and daughter of a middle-class Jewish family—needed to be. Because Melnick, like the musician she adores, is a survivor.
Winner of the International Booker Prize 2022!
Visiting Faculty - Visual Arts
Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic by
An anthology of Black resilience and reclamation, bringing together the voices of those most harshly affected by the intersecting pandemics of Covid-19 and systemic racism, Bigger Than Bravery explores comfort and compromise, challenge and resilience.
Ornamentalism by
Focusing on the cultural and philosophic conflation between the "oriental" and the "ornamental," Ornamentalism offers an original and sustained theory about Asiatic femininity in western culture. This study pushes our vocabulary about the woman of color past the usual platitudes about objectification and past the critique of Orientalism in order to formulate a fresher and sharper understanding of the representation, circulation, and ontology of Asiatic femininity.
Blockchain Chicken Farm by
In Blockchain Chicken Farm, the technologist and writer Xiaowei Wang explores the political and social entanglements of technology in rural China. Their discoveries force them to challenge the standard idea that rural culture and people are backward, conservative, and intolerant. Instead, they find that rural China has not only adapted to rapid globalization but has actually innovated the technology we all use today.
FORTHCOMING 2023 Selections to look forward to...
Raving (Practices) by 
BTS: A Critical Reader by Faculty - Visual Arts
The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century by
A work of nonfiction by philosopher Amia Srinivasan that upends the way we discuss-or avoid discussing-the problems and politics of sex.
Brown Neon: Essays by
Part butch memoir, part ekphrastic travel diary, part queer family tree, Raquel Gutiérrez’s debut essay collection, Brown Neon, gleans insight from the sediment of land and relationships. For Gutiérrez, terrain is essential to understanding that no story, no matter how personal, is separate from the space where it unfolds.
Formulations: Architecture, Mathematics, Culture by
A history of the relationship between architecture and mathematics, with a special focus on the transition in the postwar period between analogue to digital design.
Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation by
Taking laughter’s revelatory capacity as a starting point, and rooted in Nuar Alsadir’s experience as a poet and psychoanalyst, Animal Joy seeks to recover the sensation of being present and embodied.
Technical Instructor in Printmaking
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by
Living at the border between life and non-life, fungi help create soil, they send out networks of tubes that enmesh roots and link plants together in the "Wood Wide Web." Fungi also drive many long-standing human fascinations: from yeasts that cause bread to rise and orchestrate the fermentation of sugar into alcohol; to psychedelic fungi; to the mold that produces penicillin and revolutionized modern medicine.
Underland: A Brief Time Journal by
An exploration of the Earth's underworlds as they exist in myth, literature, memory, and the land itself - from the birth of the universe to a post-human future, from the prehistoric art of Norwegian sea caves to the depths of the Greenland ice cap, from Bronze Age funeral chambers to the catacomb labyrinth below Paris, and from the underground fungal networks through which trees communicate to a deep-sunk "hiding place" where nuclear waste will be stored for 100,000 years.
The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution by
A classic and impassioned account of the first revolution in the Third World. This powerful, intensely dramatic book is the definitive account of the Haitian Revolution of 1794-1803, a revolution that began in the wake of the Bastille but became the model for the Third World liberation movements from Africa to Cuba.
The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by
Macfarlane’s journeys take him from the chalk downs of England to the bird islands of the Scottish northwest, from Palestine to the sacred landscapes of Spain and the Himalayas. He matches strides with the footprints made by a man five thousand years ago near Liverpool, sails an open boat far out into the Atlantic at night, and commingles with walkers of many kinds, discovering that paths offer a means not just of traversing space but also of feeling, knowing, and thinking.