This book focuses on urban redevelopment and neighborhood gentrification in three global contexts: New York City (USA), London (UK) and Seoul (South Korea). It examines the processes and challenges that impact the various constituencies who live and work in these different global neighborhoods, in comparative contexts. In so doing, the authors explore the complexities wrought by our global economy through globalization and competition, and the rapid pace of urbanization, as they impact urban redevelopment and neighborhood gentrification in global cities. While all societies seek to advance, the volume’s recurring question is cui bono, who benefits from modern day urban redevelopment and neighborhood gentrification, irrespective of geographical setting, and raises the question, “But, where are the poor to live?”

Labor and race have shared a complex, interconnected history in America. For decades, key aspects of work—from getting a job to workplace norms to advancement and mobility—ignored and failed Black people. While explicit discrimination no longer occurs, and organizations make internal and public pledges to honor and achieve “diversity,” inequities persist through what Adia Harvey Wingfield calls the “gray areas”: the relationships, networks, and cultural dynamics integral to companies that are now more important than ever. The reality is that Black employees are less likely to be hired, stall out at middle levels, and rarely progress to senior leadership positions.

Wingfield has spent a decade examining inequality in the workplace, interviewing over two hundred Black subjects across professions about their work lives. In Gray Areas, she introduces seven of them: Alex, a worker in the gig economy; Max, an emergency medicine doctor; Constance, a chemical engineer; Brian, a filmmaker; Amalia, a journalist; Darren, a corporate vice president; and Kevin, who works for a nonprofit.

In this accessible and important antiracist work, Wingfield chronicles their experiences and blends them with history and surprising data that starkly show how old models of work are outdated and detrimental. She demonstrates the scope and breadth of gray areas and offers key insights and suggestions for how they can be fixed, including shifting hiring practices to include Black workers; rethinking organizational cultures to centralize Black employees’ experience; and establishing pathways that move capable Black candidates into leadership roles. These reforms would create workplaces that reflect America’s increasingly diverse population—professionals whose needs organizations today are ill-prepared to meet.

Rights and Resistance features ten essays by Christopher Heath Wellman on our moral rights, and the measures we may take to protect them. In addition to offering original accounts of various rights, in these essays Wellman considers how we may permissibly enforce our moral claims against others on both the individual and political levels. Virtually everyone agrees that we may defend our rights with only necessary and proportionate force, but should we accept these restrictions even when our resistance would be unnecessary or disproportionate only because a wrongdoer is employing overpowering force? What about citizens who endure political injustice.
Although it is no longer fashionable to insist that we must obey the laws of an illegitimate regime, most theorists remain reluctant to condone forcible resistance against a legitimate government. Given that states can be fully legitimate without being perfectly just, prohibiting resistance against legitimate regimes requires oppressed citizens to simply endure injustices at the hands of the state. How are we exhibiting fidelity to justice if we constrain innocent victims whose moral rights are being trampled in these ways?
This volume analyzes interpersonal issues alongside political questions in the hopes that if we begin with clear, intuitive ideas about interpersonal morality, we might make important progress tackling complex issues in political philosophy. Wellman argues that it is crucial to properly understand our pre-institutional rights and correlative duties. These rights leave space for institutions to create further rights and duties, but they place important limits on the kind of legitimate authority those institutions can possess. Even if conventions play an ineliminable role specifying the contours of our property rights, for instance, the moral dominion we enjoy over our self-regarding affairs restricts what states may do to and require of us. Ultimately, Rights and Resistance challenges us to reconsider the boundaries of moral and political resistance, urging a deeper understanding of the rights and duties that shape our interactions and the limits of state authority.

Composer Christopher Stark teams up with the New York based Unheard-of//Ensemble for Fire Ecologies, an expansive paean to the natural world as it faces crisis. Premiered in an immersive performance on the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, a superfund site that has been the focus of significant preservation efforts, Fire Ecologies has been presented in locations and contexts that underscore its mission to enhance climate awareness.

Medieval literature is full of strange moments when infants (even fetuses) speak. In Out of the Mouths of Babes, Julie Singer explores the unsettling questions raised by these events, including What is a person? Is speech fundamental to our humanity? And what does it mean, or what does it matter, to speak truth to power?

Singer contends that descriptions of baby talk in medieval French literature are far from trivial. Through treatises, manuals, poetry, and devotional texts, Singer charts how writers imagined infants to speak with an authority untainted by human experience. What their children say, then, offers unique insight into medieval hopes for universal answers to life’s deepest wonderings.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the government of Rwanda hired American and Singaporean design firms to transform the image of Kigali from a wounded city into a competitive destination for foreign investment. The firms produced promotional images of a post-conflict tabula rasa waiting to be rebuilt by foreign investors as an urban solution to climate change. However, to make this marketing image real, much of the actual city would need to be destroyed and its residents converted to consumers of green housing and service delivery systems.

Kigali is an ethnography of a city that is being destroyed so that it can be rebuilt for the end of the world. Drawing on years of ethnographic fieldwork with Kigali residents as they navigate the catastrophes induced by sustainable urbanism, this book offers a searing critique of capitalist solutions to climate change and an account of the city’s popular alternatives to sustainable urbanism.

Taco is a deep dive into the most iconic Mexican food from the perspective of a Mexico City native. In a narrative that moves from Mexico to the United States and back, Sánchez Prado discusses the definition of the taco, the question of the tortilla and the taco shell, and the existence of the taco as a modern social touchstone that has been shaped by history and geography.

Challenging the idea of centrality and authenticity, Sánchez Prado shows instead that the taco is a contemporary, transcultural food that has always been subject to transformation.

Faces, faces, faces – faces everywhere! Modernism was obsessed with the ubiquity of the human face. Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and, later, Kōbō Abe framed their literary projects around the question of the face, its dynamic of legibility and opacity. In literary modernism, the face functioned as a proxy for form, memory, intermediality, or difference — and combinations thereof. The old pseudoscience of physiognomy, which assumed faces to be sites of legible meaning, was in the process reconfigured. Modernist faces lost their connection to interiority, but remained surfaces of reading and interpretation. As such, they also became canvases for creative appropriation, what Mina Loy called auto-facial-construction. The modernist overinvestment in faces functions as a warning against the return of physiognomy in contemporary technologies of facial recognition. 

Contemporary Queer Modernism offers a fresh, interdisciplinary approach to the study of the intersections of queer studies and modernist studies.

The theoretical expansiveness and mutual overlapping of these still-growing fields is both introduced and complicated in the pages of this volume. Presenting a wide range of critical perspectives, the collection brings together original scholarship from both emerging and established scholars that, when read together, demonstrates the continued vitality of queer modernist studies. 

Look Out is an exploration of long-distance mapping, aerial photography, and top-down and far-ranging perspectives—from pre–Civil War America to our vexed modern times of drone warfare, hyper-surveillance at home and abroad, and quarantine and protest. Blending history, reporting, personal experience, and accounts of activists, programmers, spies, astronauts, artists, inventors, and dreamers, Edward McPherson reveals that to see is to control—and the stakes are high for everyone.

The aerial view—a position known in Greek as the catascopos, or “the looker-down”—is a fundamentally privileged perspective, inaccessible to those left on the ground. To the earthbound, (in)sights from such rarified heights convey power and authority. McPherson casts light on our fetishization of distance as a path to truth and considers the awe and apocalypse of taking the long view.

A Beautiful Fight examines the potentials and limits of capoeira Angola to cohere a multiracial community committed to antiracist struggle. Capoeira, a musical fight-game that originated among enslaved Africans in Brazil, holds special significance for Black Brazilian activists as a spiritual and political practice that affirms the value of Black lives, thus countering anti-Black violence sanctioned by the Brazilian state. However, many capoeira groups count more white practitioners than Black, especially groups of the politicized, Afrocentric style capoeira Angola, raising debates about appropriation of Black culture that resonate across the Americas. A Beautiful Fight addresses these tensions.

Drawing on ethnographic research with a multiracial capoeira Angola group in Brazil’s Bahian sertão or backlands, Esther Viola Kurtz explores diverse group members’ understandings of capoeira’s spiritual and political meanings and considers how white participation impacts capoeira’s antiracist politics. A Beautiful Fight argues that white practitioners occupying space in capoeira divert attention from Black members’ concerns and reproduce racist and colonialist ideologies, albeit unintentionally. In this way, the book complicates claims that shared music and dance bridge differences and facilitate cross-racial unity, yet Kurtz proposes that capoeira still transmits knowledge and tools that, when used with intention, commitment, and care, can be wielded to collaboratively contest racism and imagine a more just world.

In 1492, the year that marked the start of Spain’s transatlantic expansion, the Spanish monarchs expelled their Jewish subjects and triggered a mass Jewish migration to the lands of the Ottoman Empire. But while the rise of these rival empires had tremendous impact on the Jewish population’s geography, the historical accounts of contemporary Jews have remained peripheral to the study of early modern imperialism.

In Empire from the Margins, Martin Jacobs seeks to understand how the history of empires appears through the lens of marginalized communities and to explore how Jews responded to Spanish and Ottoman imperial expansion. He approaches this history through the Hebrew chronicles of three sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Jewish authors. Elijah Capsali of Crete, Joseph ha-Kohen of Genoa, and Joseph Sambari of Cairo all lived in early modern hubs with global connections, and—in unusual detail for premodern Jewish historians—they described how the Spanish and Ottoman empires redrew the political, cultural, and religious map of the Mediterranean region while simultaneously transforming the transatlantic world.

As Jews, these writers belonged to an ethno-religious minority within the Mediterranean basin where the Spanish and Ottoman empires were centered, and from here they expressed marginalized views on the Spanish and Ottoman regimes. At the same time, these Jewish authors belonged to Jewish networks that transcended imperial boundaries, and they voiced conflicting loyalties between different authorities and cultures. And Jacobs shows that, in writing about the Spanish and Ottoman expansion, these authors also grappled with the Jews’ precarious position in their host societies and their own multilayered identities. Their shifting positionalities illuminate the divided allegiances of a Jewish diaspora living in and between competing empires.

Enveloping Worlds is a collection of essays that analyzes the phenomenon of immersive, participatory performance as it has developed in the US. As this collection demonstrates, immersive performance offers three-dimensional multisensory experiences, inviting audience members to be participants in the unfolding of the story, and challenging pre-existing ideas about the function of performance and entertainment. Enveloping Worlds questions audience agency and choice, the space and boundaries of performance, modes of immersion, empathy and engagement, and ethical considerations through fifteen essays.

Case studies in the volume include the Choctaw Cultural Center in Oklahoma and Choctaw sovereignty; a Black artist’s autoethnographic performance challenging White audiences’ entitlement to full inclusion; Immersive Van Gogh experiences and their scenographers; telephone performance during the COVID-19 lockdowns; Diane Paulus’s The Donkey Show; the Battle of Atlanta panorama; an antebellum-themed department store display from the 1920s; escape rooms; Disney Parks; remotely staged plays about aging and dementia; tiki bars; anachronistic costuming at Renaissance Festivals; the technologies that shape the boundaries of immersive worlds; and tabletop role-playing games. Taken together, these essays contribute a rich discussion of immersive performance across radically different contexts, offering analytical models and terminology with which to clarify and advance this emergent discourse.

Acting the Part offers a paradigm for understanding how audiences participate in immersive theater, from physical spaces like the Globe in London to digital spaces like social virtual reality. Reading across twenty-first century productions of ancient Greek tragedies and William Shakespeare’s plays, Hunter proposes the concept of “enactivity” to describe the positionality audiences inhabit when their participation is critical to the narrative but cannot alter its intended course. This positionality is that of the archetype, the enactment of which is shaped by four production conditions: a historically resonant site, a canonical source, an immersive space, and a production-specific economy that incentivizes some behaviors and discourages others. At the heart of Acting the Part is a framework for identifying how a production’s management of these conditions gives rise to a range of archetypes, such as worshiper, sleuth, cinematographer, and others. Against the backdrop of an ever-increasing push for audience participation, Acting the Part sheds new light on the many ways in which productions shape that participation in real time.

Shifting the focus of AIDS history away from the coasts to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, this impressive book uncovers how homonormative political strategies weaponized the AIDS crisis to fuel gentrification. During the height of the epidemic, white gay activists and politicians pursued social acceptance by assimilating to Midwestern cultural values. This approach, René Esparza argues, diluted radical facets of LGBTQ activism, rejected a politics of sexual dissidence, severed ties with communities of color, and ushered in the destruction of vibrant queer spaces.

Drawing from archival research, oral histories, and urban studies from the 1970s through the 1990s, Esparza illustrates how the onset of the AIDS epidemic provided a pretext for further criminalization of perceived sexual deviance, targeting sex workers, “promiscuous” gay men, and transgender women. More than the criminalization of people and behaviors, this time period also saw increased targeting of urban venues such as bathhouses, adult bookstores, and public parks where casual, anonymous encounters occurred. Cleansing the city of land uses that undermined gentrification became a protective measure against AIDS, and the most marginalized bore the brunt of the ensuing surveillance and displacement. From Vice to Nice illuminates how, despite purporting seemingly progressive values, LGBTQ Midwestern politics of conformity leveraged the AIDS crisis to further instigate racial and sexual exclusion and fundamentally alter the urban landscape.

Insect galls, time, memory systems, orgone energy, and a bookstore that doesn’t yet exist. These disparate topics have persistently fascinated scholar Jonathan P. Eburne, yet each defied his previous efforts at classification through scholarly writing, resulting in five essays suspended in process. In Exploded Views, Eburne returns to these essays with the metaphorical tool of the exploded-view diagram, expanding them into entirely new, hybrid forms that unpack their inspirations and trace the wayward paths they followed.

An experiment into the nature of inquiry that spelunks, rather than shies from, the rabbit holes of scholarly curiosity, each essay gives way to sidelights and dilations to reveal the palimpsest of knowledge hiding beneath the surface of the academic form. A book about process—the process of turning ideas into things, and vice versa, as well as the particular tendency for research, scholarly inquiry, and critical writing to come apart and go awry—Exploded Views is a refreshing exploration of how the tools of creative critical thinking work at their most basic level.

Reflecting on the methods of scholarly knowledge production and the contextual factors that shape new ideas, Eburne boldly replaces the seamlessness of the finished manuscript with the friction and even messiness of the incomplete, inviting readers to think in new and invigorating ways.

No sport has been more associated with America’s sense of itself, with its identity, than baseball. No sport has been so inextricably bound with America’s traditions—with its notions of democracy and fair play—than baseball. And no professional sport in America has been as dramatically connected to social change as Major League Baseball when it became racially integrated the moment Jackie Robinson took the field with the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947.

Play Harder comes at a time when the history of Black baseball has become especially relevant—following MLB’s recent recognition of the Negro Leagues as major leagues and the effort to incorporate statistics from the Negro Leagues into those for all players. Before Robinson, as Play Harder shows, Black athletes played baseball as far back as the 1800s even before the establishment of the Negro Leagues. But once founded in 1920, the Negro Leagues gave Black Americans an inroad to baseball that would be enduring and profound. The leagues were an instrument of community building during a time when discrimination separated Black people from all white enterprises, including baseball, and they paved the way for racial integration that Black players hoped would come.

Play Harder showcases the Black stars of the game—those from baseball’s early years such as Moses Fleetwood Walker and Rube Foster; Negro Leagues stars like Satchel Paige and Cool Papa Bell; Jackie Robinson and those who crossed the color line after him, like Hank Aaron and Willie Mays, followed by Frank Robinson and Curt Flood; and the stars who ushered in today’s game, such as Reggie Jackson, Dave Winfield, Barry Bonds, and Ken Griffey, Jr. Playing out against the cultural and political events of 150 years, the story bears witness to the richness of this country’s diversity while remaining clear-eyed about the racial injustice endured by Black Americans. In the end, Play Harder celebrates the triumph of some of baseball’s greatest players and their remarkable contributions to the game we know and love today.

Branson, Missouri, the Ozark Mountain mecca of wholesome entertainment, has been home to countless stage shows espousing patriotism and Christianity, welcoming over ten million visitors a year. Some consider it “God’s Country” and others “as close to Hell as anything on Earth.” For Joanna Dee Das, Branson is a political, religious, and cultural harbinger of a certain enduring dream of what America is. She takes Branson more seriously than the light-hearted fun it advertises—and maybe we should too.

For Das, Branson’s performers offer visions of the American Dream that embody a set of values known as the three Fs: faith, family, and flag. Branson boosters insist that these are universal values that welcome all people; the city aims to capture as many tourists as possible. But over the past several decades, faith, family, and flag have become markers of contemporary conservatism. The shows and culture of Branson, for all their fun and laughter, have been a galvanizing political force for white, working- and middle class, Christian Americans. For social and economic conservatives alike, Branson is practically proof-of-concept for America as they want it to be.

Faith, Family, and Flag is a comprehensive history of the Branson entertainment industry, within the context of America’s long culture wars. Das reveals how and why a town known for popular entertainment, a domain associated most often with the political left (“Hollywood liberals”), came to be so important to the political right and its vision for America.

At its founding, the United States was an overwhelmingly Protestant country. However, over the last 250 years, it has become increasingly diverse with tens of millions of Catholics, millions of Latter-day Saints, Muslims, Hindus, and Jews, alongside a rapidly increasing share of Americans who claim no religious affiliation at all.

The American Religious Landscape uses an in-depth statistical analysis of large datasets to answer foundational questions about this diversity, such as: How many Hindus are there in the US? Which state has the highest concentration of Muslims? Are atheists more highly educated than the general population? How many Roman Catholics attend Mass weekly? It focuses on the overall size, geographic distribution, and demographic composition of twelve different religious groups in short and accessible chapters that, taken together, serve as a basic introduction to the state of religion in America. Through dozens of charts, graphs, and maps—designed for readability and clarity—readers will be left with a solid understanding of the contours of contemporary American religion and what it could look like in the future.

We live in time, and so we love in time. Our beloveds change, and we change beside them. Sometimes we change apart, but it is this very changeableness, the braving of an unknown future together, that endears us to our lovers. Far from an ideal of constancy and commitment, then, love is an endeavor fraught with uncertainty.

In this book, Fannie Bialek sketches a view of love that does not ignore the vagaries of life but embraces them. In contrast to philosophical and religious attempts to secure love against finitude, Bialek’s love embraces its susceptibility to change and accepts the ethical challenges such change introduces. Attentive to our deepest vulnerabilities, Bialek develops a fresh ethics of love grounded by our humility before time.

Longing and Belonging investigates the lives of Jews among Muslims in the modern age, both inside and outside the Ottoman Empire and after its demise. Here, modern Jewish protagonists are revealed as active participants in an expansive Islamic civilization, reflecting a mutuality and cross-fertilization in the region that raises new lines of inquiry and which offers enduring lessons for the world today. This collection both foregrounds the experiences of Jewish communities that have long been relegated to the margins of historical and literary studies and, critically, uses these experiences to complicate prevailing narratives from both Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies. By following communities from the coffeeshops of Cairo to the villages of Yemen, from the local marriage market in Izmir to the global commerce of the Sassoons, readers gain intimate insight into a world that resists a simple understanding of the modern Islamic world and of the place of Jews within it. Just as much as the Sephardi and Mizrahi experience complicates prevailing paradigms in the study of Jewish modernity, so too does it enrich understandings of modernity across Muslim societies. The volume tells a story of longing, belonging, and longing to belong, of multiple affinities in a world that no longer exists.

Mary Jo Bang’s translation of Paradiso completes her groundbreaking new version of Dante’s masterpiece, begun with Inferno and continued with Purgatorio. In Paradiso, Dante has been purified by his climb up the seven terraces of Mount Purgatory, and now, led by the luminous Beatrice, he begins his ascent through the nine celestial spheres of heaven toward the Empyrean, the mind of God. Along the way, we meet the souls of the blessed—those at various proximities to God, but all existing within the bliss of heaven’s perfect order. Philosophically rich, spiritually resonant, Paradiso is a reckoning with justice and morality from a time of ethical questioning and political division much like our own.

Bang’s translation is a revelation in its artistry, readability, and faithfulness to Dante’s ambition for an epic poem that dares to employ language and references recognizable to its readers. In her lyric style and her illuminating and generous notes, Bang has made The Divine Comedy for the twenty-first century.

“Domingo Sarmiento is a rhetorical and political giant whose garrulous, colorful, and troubling ideas about race, violence, politics, and literature have fascinated Spanish-language readers for over a hundred and fifty years. Thanks to William Acree's brilliant selection of writings and annotations, the sparkling translations of John Charles Chasteen, and Oscar Chamosa's excellent critical Introduction, readers of English can finally encounter this larger-than-life writer who was deeply committed to documenting his historical moment and assessing social and political ills. This book is a major—and long overdue—contribution to Latin American Studies.”

— Christopher B. Conway, University of Texas at Arlington

With a stirring narrative and remarkable collage artwork, When the Dark Clouds Come draws on the lessons of the natural world to assure readers that, although tough times and difficult emotions may appear suddenly like a stormy sky, the sun is never far behind. Drawing on her background in clinical psychology, Danielle Ridolfi utilizes color shifts, sprawling landscapes, and lyrical text to show readers the beauty and relatability of nature.

When the Dark Clouds Come is ideal for reading aloud and is a book kids and caregivers will turn to again and again for comfort.

New Belrussian translation

Parker has only one week. A friend, a political veteran in Schleswig-Holstein, has invited him to Kiel to assist the young, promising politician Mahler as a media consultant and speechwriter. Parker needs success, a contract, the money. And he needs a fresh start. Thanks to a bestselling book on coaching, Parker became an internationally renowned rhetoric expert who even contributed to Obama's presidential campaign. But that was a long time ago. Parker has also reached a turning point in his personal life. Having fled his roots and past in Hamburg for the USA as a student, this globally connected work nomad constantly avoids intimacy in his private life as well. His last girlfriend kicked him out for it. And now in Kiel, Anneli Schneider, the ambitious and battle-tested employee of his client Mahler, presents him with one challenge after another. In his new novel, Matthias Göritz tells a gripping and profound story of a perfidious intrigue, of power and love, of the irresistible allure of advancement and its price.

New Turkish translation

The young American Lee, restless and recently separated, travels to Istanbul in search of her grandmother’s past. Helene Bischoff, a German Jew, had sought refuge there in the 1930s from persecution by the Nazi regime. At that time, Kemal Atatürk generously offered asylum to Jews in Turkey, primarily targeting intellectuals, engineers, doctors, and lawyers who were to help drive the radical modernization of Turkey.

In Istanbul, this historically rich and sprawling megacity between East and West, Lee discovers that her grandmother’s former companion and one-time lover, the journalist and agent Georg Naumann, is still alive, well over a hundred years old. What connects him to Helene, and perhaps even to her, Lee? In this gripping, multifaceted novel, we experience the violence of history, the power of love, and Istanbul as both a labyrinth and a refuge. Informative and sensual—the great new novel by Matthias Göritz.

Faculty Fellow, Spring 2015

The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction examines texts that portray the inner experience of Holocaust perpetrators and thus transform them from archetypes of evil into complex psychological and moral subjects. Employing relevant methodological tools of narrative theory, Erin McGlothlin analyzes these unsettling depictions, which manifest a certain tension regarding the ethics of representation and identification. Such works, she asserts, endeavor to make transparent the mindset of their violent subjects, yet at the same time they also invariably contrive to obfuscate in part its disquieting character.

The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction contains two parts. The first focuses on portraits of real-life perpetrators in nonfictional interviews and analyses from the 1960s and 1970s. These works provide a nuanced perspective on the mentality of the people who implemented the Holocaust via the interventional role of the interviewer or interpreter in the perpetrators’ performances of self-disclosure. In part two, McGlothlin investigates more recent fictional texts that imagine the perspective of their invented perpetrator-narrators. Such works draw readers directly into the perpetrator’s experience and at the same time impede their access to the perpetrator’s consciousness by retarding their affective connection. Demonstrating that recent fiction featuring perpetrators as narrators employs strategies derived from earlier nonfictional portrayals, McGlothlin establishes not only a historical connection between these two groups of texts, whereby nonfictional engagement with real-life perpetrators gradually gives way to fictional exploration, but also a structural and aesthetic one.

The book bespeaks new modes of engagement with ethically fraught questions raised by our increasing willingness to consider the events of the Holocaust from the perspective of the perpetrator. Students, scholars and readers of Holocaust studies and literary criticism will appreciate this closer look at a historically taboo topic.

Faculty Fellow, Spring 2019

Well before she married Robert Schumann, Clara Schumann was already an internationally renowned pianist, and she concertized extensively for several decades after her husband’s death. Despite being tied professionally to Robert, Clara forged her own career and played an important role in forming what we now recognize as the culture of classical music.

Becoming Clara Schumann guides readers through her entire career, including performance, composition, edits to her husband’s music, and teaching. Alexander Stefaniak brings together the full run of Schumann’s concert programs, detailed accounts of her performances and reception, and other previously unexplored primary source material to illuminate how she positioned herself within larger currents in concert life and musical aesthetics. He reveals that she was an accomplished strategist, having played roughly 1,300 concerts across western and central Europe over the course of her six-decade career, and she shaped the canonization of her husband’s music. Extraordinary for her time, Schumann earned success and prestige by crafting her own playing style, selecting and composing her own concerts, and acting as her own manager.

By highlighting Schumann’s navigation of her musical culture’s gendered boundaries, Becoming Clara Schumann details how she cultivated her public image in order to win over audiences and embody some of her field’s most ambitious aspirations for musical performance.

Faculty Fellow, Spring 2020

A rebellious Indian proclaiming noble ancestry and entitlement, a military lieutenant foreshadowing the coming of revolution, a blasphemous Creole embroiderer in possession of a bundle of sketches brimming with pornography. All shared one thing in common. During the late eighteenth century, they were deemed to be mad and forcefully admitted to the Hospital de San Hipólito in Mexico City, the first hospital of the New World to specialize in the care and custody of the mentally disturbed.

Christina Ramos reconstructs the history of this overlooked colonial hospital from its origins in 1567 to its transformation in the eighteenth century, when it began to admit a growing number of patients transferred from the Inquisition and secular criminal courts. Drawing on the poignant voices of patients, doctors, friars, and inquisitors, Ramos treats San Hipólito as both a microcosm and a colonial laboratory of the Hispanic Enlightenment—a site where traditional Catholicism and rationalist models of madness mingled in surprising ways. She shows how the emerging ideals of order, utility, rationalism, and the public good came to reshape the institutional and medical management of madness. While the history of psychiatry’s beginnings has often been told as seated in Europe, Ramos proposes an alternative history of madness’s medicalization that centers colonial Mexico and places religious figures, including inquisitors, at the pioneering forefront.

Faculty Fellow, Fall 2019

Many visitors to Mexico City’s 1886 Electricity Exposition were amazed by their experience of the event, which included magnetic devices, electronic printers, and a banquet of light. It was both technological spectacle and political messaging, for speeches at the event lauded President Porfirio Díaz and bound such progress to his vision of a modern order.

Diana J. Montaño explores the role of electricity in Mexico’s economic and political evolution, as the coal-deficient country pioneered large-scale hydroelectricity and sought to face the world as a scientifically enlightened “empire of peace.” She is especially concerned with electrification at the social level. Ordinary electricity users were also agents and sites of change. Montaño documents inventions and adaptations that served local needs while fostering new ideas of time and space, body and self, the national and the foreign. Electricity also colored issues of gender, race, and class in ways specific to Mexico. Complicating historical discourses in which Latin Americans merely use technologies developed elsewhere, Electrifying Mexico emphasizes a particular national culture of scientific progress and its contributions to a uniquely Mexican modernist political subjectivity.

Faculty Fellow, Spring 2019

In Cutting Words: Polemical Dimensions of Galen’s Anatomical Experiments, Luis Alejandro Salas offers a new account of Galen’s medical experiments in the context of the high intellectual culture of second-century Rome. The book explores how Galen’s written experiments operate alongside their live counterparts. It argues that Galen’s experimental writing reperforms the licensing functions of his live demonstrations, acting as a surrogate for their performance and in some cases an improvement upon it. Cutting Words focuses on the philosophical targets and theoretical stakes of four case studies: Galen’s experiments on voice production, the bladder, the heart, and the femoral artery. It ends over a millennium later with Vesalius, who adapted his Greek predecessor’s writing in his own anatomical work, framing himself as a new Galen and so securing Galen’s legacy of writing.

Faculty Fellow, Fall 2018

Early twentieth-century African American men in northern urban centers like New York faced economic isolation, segregation, a biased criminal justice system, and overt racial attacks by police and citizens. In this book, Douglas J. Flowe interrogates the meaning of crime and violence in the lives of these men, whose lawful conduct itself was often surveilled and criminalized, by focusing on what their actions and behaviors represented to them. He narrates the stories of men who sought profits in underground markets, protected themselves when law enforcement failed to do so, and exerted control over public, commercial, and domestic spaces through force in a city that denied their claims to citizenship and manhood. Flowe furthermore traces how the features of urban Jim Crow and the efforts of civic and progressive leaders to restrict their autonomy ultimately produced the circumstances under which illegality became a form of resistance.

Drawing from voluminous prison and arrest records, trial transcripts, personal letters and documents, and investigative reports, Flowe opens up new ways of understanding the black struggle for freedom in the twentieth century. By uncovering the relationship between the fight for civil rights, black constructions of masculinity, and lawlessness, he offers a stirring account of how working-class black men employed extralegal methods to address racial injustice.

Faculty Fellow, 2012–13

Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane studies the poetry and polemics of one of the greatest of early modern writers, a poet of immense lyric talent and political importance. The book situates these writings and this writer within the patronage networks and political upheavals of mid seventeenth-century England. Derek Hirst and Steven Zwicker track Marvell’s negotiations among personalities and events; explores his idealizations, attachments, and subversions, and speculate on the meaning of the narratives that he told of himself within his writings—what they call his “imagined life.” Hirst and Zwicker draw the figure of an imagined life from the repeated traces Marvell left of lyric yearning and satiric anger, and suggest how these were rooted both in the body and in the imagination.

The book sheds new light on some of Marvell’s most familiar poems—“Upon Appleton House,” “The Garden,” “To His Coy Mistress,” and “Horatian Ode”—but at its centre is an extended reading of Marvell’s “The unfortunate Lover,” his least familiar and surely most mysterious lyric, and his most sustained narrative of the self. By attending to the lyric, the polemical, and the parliamentary careers together, this book offers a reading, for the first time, of Marvell and his writings as an interpretable whole.

Faculty Fellow, 2006-07

Late nineteenth-century Spanish fiction is populated by adulteresses, prostitutes, seduced women, and emasculated men—indicating an almost obsessive interest in gender deviance. In Marginal Subjects, Akiko Tsuchiya shows how the figure of the deviant woman—and her counterpart, the feminized man—revealed the ambivalence of literary writers towards new methods of social control in Restoration Spain.

Focusing on works by major realist authors such as Benito Pérez Galdós, Emilia Pardo Bazán, and Leopoldo Alas (Clarín), as well as popular novelists like Eduardo López Bago, Marginal Subjects argues that these archetypes were used to channel collective anxieties about sexuality, class, race, and nation. Tsuchiya also draws on medical and anthropological texts and illustrated periodicals to locate literary works within larger cultural debates. Marginal Subjects is a riveting exploration of why realist and naturalist narratives were so invested in representing gender deviance in fin-de-siècle Spain.

Faculty Fellow, Spring 2015

Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian and the Dachau concentration camp had an organic herb garden. Vegetarianism, organic farming, and other such practices have enticed a wide variety of Germans, from socialists, liberals, and radical anti-Semites in the nineteenth century to fascists, communists, and Greens in the twentieth century. Corinna Treitel offers a fascinating new account of how Germans became world leaders in developing more “natural” ways to eat and farm. Used to conserve nutritional resources with extreme efficiency at times of hunger and to optimize the nation’s health at times of nutritional abundance, natural foods and farming belong to the biopolitics of German modernity. Eating Nature in Modern Germany brings together histories of science, medicine, agriculture, the environment, and popular culture to offer the most thorough and historically comprehensive treatment yet of this remarkable story.

Faculty Fellow, Fall 2014

This year marks the golden anniversary of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the flagship band of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Formed in 1966 and flourishing until 2010, the Art Ensemble distinguished itself by its unique performance practices—members played hundreds of instruments on stage, recited poetry, performed theatrical sketches, and wore face paint, masks, lab coats, and traditional African and Asian dress. The group, which built a global audience and toured across six continents, presented their work as experimental performance art, in opposition to the jazz industry’s traditionalist aesthetics.

In Message to Our Folks, Paul Steinbeck combines musical analysis and historical inquiry to give us the definitive study of the Art Ensemble. In the book, he proposes a new theory of group improvisation that explains how the band members were able to improvise together in so many different styles while also drawing on an extensive repertoire of notated compositions. Steinbeck examines the multimedia dimensions of the Art Ensemble’s performances and the ways in which their distinctive model of social relations kept the group performing together for four decades. Message to Our Folks is a striking and valuable contribution to our understanding of one of the world’s premier musical groups.

Faculty Fellow, Spring 2015

Strategic Occidentalism examines the transformation, in both aesthetics and infrastructure, of Mexican fiction since the late 1970s. During this time a framework has emerged characterized by the corporatization of publishing, a frictional relationship between Mexican literature and global book markets, and the desire of Mexican writers to break from dominant models of national culture.

In the course of this analysis, Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado engages with theories of world literature, proposing that “world literature” is a construction produced at various levels, including the national, that must be studied from its material conditions of production in specific sites. In particular, he argues that Mexican writers have engaged in a “strategic Occidentalism” in which their idiosyncratic connections with world literature have responded to dynamics different from those identified by world-systems or diffusionist theorists.

Strategic Occidentalism identifies three scenes in which a cosmopolitan aesthetics in Mexican world literature has been produced: Sergio Pitol’s translation of Eastern European and marginal British modernist literature; the emergence of the Crack group as a polemic against the legacies of magical realism; and the challenges of writers like Carmen Boullosa, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Ana García Bergua to the roles traditionally assigned to Latin American writers in world literature.

Faculty Fellow, Fall 2016

It’s impossible, now, to think of modernism without thinking about gender, sexuality, and the diverse movers and shakers of the early twentieth century. But this was not always so. The Passion Projects examines biographical projects that modernist women writers undertook to resist the exclusion of their friends, colleagues, lovers, and companions from literary history. Many of these works were vibrant efforts of modernist countermemory and counterhistory that became casualties in a midcentury battle for literary legitimacy, but that now add a new dimension to our appreciation of such figures as Radclyffe Hall, Gertrude Stein, Hope Mirrlees, and Sylvia Beach, among many others.

Melanie Micir explores an extensive body of material, including Sylvia Townsend Warner’s carefullly annotated letters to her partner Valentine Ackland, Djuna Barnes’s fragmented drafts about the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Margaret Anderson’s collection of modernist artifacts, and Virginia Woolf’s joke biography of her friend and lover Vita Sackville-West, the novel Orlando. Whether published in encoded desire or squirreled away in intimate archives, these “passion projects” recorded life then in order to summon an audience now, and stand as important predecessors of queer and feminist recovery projects that have shaped the contemporary understanding of the field.

Arguing for the importance of biography, The Passion Projects shows how women turned to this genre in the early twentieth century to preserve their lives and communities for future generations to discover.

Faculty Fellow, Spring 2015

In The Construction of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and Its Outtakes, editors Erin McGlothlin, Brad Prager, and Markus Zisselsberger gather contributions on how Shoah (1985) fundamentally changed the nature and use of filmed testimony and laid the groundwork for how historians and documentarians regard and understand the history of the Holocaust. Critics have taken long note of Shoah’s innovative style and its place in the history of documentary film and in cultural memory, but few scholars have touched on its extensive outtakes and the reams of documentation archived at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and at Yad Vashem, or the release of five feature-length documentaries based on the material in those outtakes.

The Construction of Testimony, which contains thirteen essays by some of the most notable scholars in Holocaust film studies, reexamines Lanzmann’s body of work, his film, and the impact of Shoah through this trove—over 220 hours—of previously unavailable and unexplored footage. Responding to the need for a sustained examination of Lanzmann’s impact on historical and filmic approaches to testimony, this volume inaugurates a new era of scholarship, one that takes a critical position vis-à-vis the filmmaker’s posturing, stylization, and editorial sleight-of-hand. The volume’s contributors engage with a range of dimensions central to Lanzmann’s filmography and the outtakes, including the dynamics of gender in his work, his representation of Nazi perpetrators, and complex issues of language and translation.

In light of Lanzmann’s invention of a radically new form of witnessing and remembrance, Shoah laid the framework for the ways in which subsequent filmmakers have represented the Holocaust cinematically; at the same time, the outtakes complicate this framework by revealing new details about the filmmaker’s complex editorial choices. Scholars and students of film studies and Holocaust studies will value this close analysis.

Faculty Fellow, 2005–06

In studies of Holocaust representation and memory, scholars of literature and culture traditionally have focused on particular national contexts. At the same time, recent work has brought the Holocaust into the arena of the transnational, leading to a crossroads between localized and global understandings of Holocaust memory. Further complicating the issue are generational shifts that occur with the passage of time, and which render memory and representations of the Holocaust ever more mediated, commodified, and departicularized. Nowhere is the inquiry into Holocaust memory more fraught or potentially more productive than in German Studies, where scholars have struggled to address German guilt and responsibility while doing justice to the global impact of the Holocaust, and are increasingly facing the challenge of engaging with the broader, interdisciplinary, transnational field.

Persistent Legacy connects the present, critical scholarly moment with this long disciplinary tradition, probing the relationship between German Studies and Holocaust Studies today. Fifteen prominent scholars explore how German Studies engages with Holocaust memory and representation, pursuing critical questions concerning the borders between the two fields and how they are impacted by emerging scholarly methods, new areas of inquiry, and the changing place of Holocaust memory in contemporary Germany.

Faculty Fellow, 2005-06

Among historical events of the 20th century, the Holocaust is unrivaled as the subject of both scholarly and literary writing. Literary responses include not only thousands of autobiographical and fictional texts written by survivors, but also, more recently, works by writers who are not survivors but nevertheless feel compelled to write about the Holocaust. Writers from what is known as the second generation have produced texts that express their feeling of being powerfully marked by events of which they have had no direct experience. This book expands the commonly-used definition of second-generation literature, which refers to texts written from the perspective of the children of survivors, to include texts written from the point of view of the children of Nazi perpetrators. With its innovative focus on the literary legacy of both groups, it investigates how second-generation writers employ similar tropes of stigmatization to express their troubled relationships to their parents' histories. Through readings of nine American, German, and French literary texts, Erin McGlothlin demonstrates how an anxiety with signification is manifested in the very structure of second-generation literature, revealing the extent to which the literary texts themselves are marked by the continuing aftershocks of the Holocaust.

Faculty Fellow, 2011–12

Few institutions seem more opposed than African American literature and J. Edgar Hoover’s white-bread Federal Bureau of Investigation. But behind the scenes the FBI’s hostility to black protest was energized by fear of and respect for black writing. Drawing on nearly 14,000 pages of newly released FBI files, F.B. Eyes exposes the Bureau’s intimate policing of five decades of African American poems, plays, essays, and novels. Starting in 1919, year one of Harlem’s renaissance and Hoover’s career at the Bureau, secretive FBI “ghostreaders” monitored the latest developments in African American letters. By the time of Hoover’s death in 1972, these ghostreaders knew enough to simulate a sinister black literature of their own. The official aim behind the Bureau’s close reading was to anticipate political unrest. Yet, as William J. Maxwell reveals, FBI surveillance came to influence the creation and public reception of African American literature in the heart of the twentieth century.

Taking his title from Richard Wright’s poem “The FB Eye Blues,” Maxwell details how the FBI threatened the international travels of African American writers and prepared to jail dozens of them in times of national emergency. All the same, he shows that the Bureau’s paranoid style could prompt insightful criticism from Hoover’s ghostreaders and creative replies from their literary targets. For authors such as Claude McKay, James Baldwin, and Sonia Sanchez, the suspicion that government spy-critics tracked their every word inspired rewarding stylistic experiments as well as disabling self-censorship.

Illuminating both the serious harms of state surveillance and the ways in which imaginative writing can withstand and exploit it, F.B. Eyes is a groundbreaking account of a long-hidden dimension of African American literature.

Faculty Fellow, Fall 2014

From 1937 to 1949, Beijing was in a state of crisis. The combined forces of Japanese occupation, civil war, runaway inflation, and reformist campaigns and revolutionary efforts wreaked havoc on the city’s economy, upset the political order, and threatened the social and moral fabric as well. Women, especially lower-class women living in Beijing’s tenement neighborhoods, were among those most affected by these upheavals. Delving into testimonies from criminal case files, Zhao Ma explores intimate accounts of lower-class women’s struggles with poverty, deprivation, and marital strife. By uncovering the set of everyday tactics that women devised and utilized in their personal efforts to cope with predatory policies and crushing poverty, this book reveals an urban underworld that was built on an informal economy and conducted primarily through neighborhood networks. Where necessary, women relied on customary practices, hierarchical patterns of household authority, illegitimate relationships, and criminal entrepreneurship to get by. Women’s survival tactics, embedded in and reproduced by their everyday experience, opened possibilities for them to modify the male-dominated city and, more importantly, allowed women to subtly deflect, subvert, and “escape without leaving” powerful forces such as the surveillance state, reformist discourse, and revolutionary politics during and beyond wartime Beijing.

Faculty Fellow, 2011–12

Women Pre-Scripted explores the way ideas about women and their social roles changed during Korea’s transformation into a modern society. Drawing on a wide range of materials published in periodicals — ideological debates, cartoons, literary works, cover illustrations, letters and confessions–the author shows how at different times between 1896 and 1934, the idea of modern womanhood transforms from virgin savior to mother of the nation to manager of modern family life and, finally, to an embodiment of the capitalist West, fully armed with sexuality and glamour.

Each chapter examines representative periodicals to explore how their content on a range of women’s issues helped formulate and prescribe women’s roles, defining what would later become appropriate knowledge for women in the new modern context. Lee shows how in various ways this prescribing was gendered, how it would sometimes promote the “modern” and at other times critique it. She offers a close look at primary sources not previously introduced in English, exploring the subject and genre of each work, the script used, and the way it categorized or defined a given women's issue. By identifying and dissecting the various agendas and agents behind the scenes, she is able to shed light on the complex and changing relationship between domesticity, gender, and modernity during Korea's transition to a modern state and its colonial occupation.

Women Pre-Scripted contributes to the swell of research on Asian women in recent years and expands our picture of a complex period. It will be of interest to scholars of Korean literature and history, East Asian literature, and others interested in women and gender within the context of colonial modernity.

Faculty Fellow, 2013

In his sixteen verse Satires, Juvenal explores the emotional provocations and pleasures associated with social criticism and mockery. He makes use of traditional generic elements such as the first-person speaker, moral diatribe, narrative, and literary allusion to create this new satiric preoccupation and theme. Juvenal defines the satirist figure as an emotional agent who dramatizes his own response to human vices and faults, and he in turn aims to engage other people’s feelings. Over the course of his career, he adopts a series of rhetorical personae that represent a spectrum of satiric emotions, encouraging his audience to ponder satire’s proper emotional mode and function. Juvenal first offers his signature indignatio with its associated pleasures and discomforts, then tries on subtler personae that suggest dry detachment, callous amusement, anxiety, and other affective states.

As Keane shows, the satiric emotions are not only found in the author's rhetorical performances, but they are also a major part of the human farrago that the Satires purport to treat. Juvenal’s poems explore the dynamic operation of emotions in society, drawing on diverse ancient literary, rhetorical, and philosophical sources. Each poem uniquely engages with different texts and ideas to reveal the unsettling powers of its emotional mode. Keane also analyzes the “emotional plot” of each book of Satires and the structural logic of the entire series with its wide range of subjects and settings. From his famous angry tirades to his more puzzling later meditations, Juvenal demonstrates an enduring interest in the relationship between feelings and moral judgment.

Faculty Fellow, 2005-06

William Clark, co-captain of the famous Lewis and Clark Expedition, devoted his adult life to describing the American West. But this task raised a daunting challenge: how best to bring an unknown continent to life for the young republic? Through Clark's life and career, this book explores how the West entered the American imagination. While he never called himself a writer or an artist, Clark nonetheless drew maps, produced books, drafted reports, surveyed landscapes, and wrote journals that made sense of the West for a new nation fascinated by the region’s potential but also fearful of its dangers. William Clark’s World presents a new take on the manifest destiny narrative and on the way the West took shape in the national imagination in the early nineteenth century.

Faculty Fellow, 2006-07

Identity: The Necessity of a Modern Idea is the first comprehensive history of identity as the answer to the question, “who, or what, am I?” It covers the century from the end of World War I, when identity in this sense first became an issue for writers and philosophers, to 2010, when European political leaders declared multiculturalism a failure just as Canada, which pioneered it, was hailing its success. Along the way the book examines Erik Erikson's concepts of psychological identity and identity crisis, which made the word famous; the turn to collective identity and the rise of identity politics in Europe and America; varieties and theories of group identity; debates over accommodating collective identities within liberal democracy; the relationship between individual and group identity; the postmodern critique of identity as a concept; and the ways it nonetheless transformed the social sciences and altered our ideas of ethics.

At the same time the book is an argument for the validity and indispensability of identity, properly understood. Identity was not a concept before the twentieth century because it was taken for granted. The slaughter of World War I undermined the honored identities of prewar Europe and, as a result, the idea of identity as something objective and stable was thrown into question at the same time that people began to sense that it was psychologically and socially necessary. We can't be at home in our bodies, act effectively in the world, or interact comfortably with others without a stable sense of who we are. Gerald Izenberg argues that, while it is a mistake to believe that our identities are givens that we passively discover about ourselves, decreed by God, destiny, or nature, our most important identities have an objective foundation in our existential situation as bodies, social beings, and creatures who aspire to meaning and transcendence, as well as in the legitimacy of our historical particularity.

Faculty Fellow, 2008-09

In the wake of 9/11, many Americans have deplored the dangers to liberty posed by a growing surveillance state. In this book, Andrea Friedman moves beyond the standard security/liberty dichotomy, weaving together often forgotten episodes of early Cold War history to reveal how the obsession with national security enabled dissent and fostered new imaginings of democracy. 

The stories told here capture a wide-ranging debate about the workings of the national security state and the meaning of American citizenship. Some of the participants in this debate — women like war bride Ellen Knauff and Pentagon employee Annie Lee Moss — were able to make their own experiences compelling examples of the threats posed by the national security regime. Others, such as Ruth Reynolds and Lolita Lebrón, who advocated an end to American empire in Puerto Rico, or the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, who sought to change the very definition of national security, were less successful. Together, however, they exposed the gap between democratic ideals and government policies.

Friedman traverses immigration law and loyalty boards, popular culture and theoretical treatises, U.S. court-rooms and Puerto Rican jails, to demonstrate how Cold War repression made visible in new ways the unevenness and limitations of American citizenship. Highlighting the ways that race and gender shaped critiques and defenses of the national security regime, she offers new insight into the contradictions of Cold War political culture.

Faculty Fellow, Spring 2017

As both an activist and the dynamic editor of Negro Digest, Hoyt Fuller stood at the nexus of the Black Arts Movement and the broader black cultural politics of his time. Jonathan Fenderson uses historical snapshots of Fuller’s life and achievements to rethink the period and establish Fuller’s important role in laying the foundation for the movement. In telling Fuller’s story, Fenderson provides provocative new insights into the movement's international dimensions, the ways the movement took shape at the local level, the impact of race and other factors, and the challenges — corporate, political, and personal — that Fuller and others faced in trying to build black institutions.

An innovative study that approaches the movement from a historical perspective, Building the Black Arts Movement is a much-needed reassessment of the trajectory of African American culture over two explosive decades.

Faculty Fellow, 2010–11

Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical tells the full story of the making and remaking of the most important musical in Broadway history. Drawing on exhaustive archival research and including much new information from early draft scripts and scores, this book reveals how Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern created Show Boat in the crucible of the Jazz Age to fit the talents of the show's original 1927 cast. After showing how major figures such as Paul Robeson and Helen Morgan defined the content of the show, the book goes on to detail how Show Boat was altered by later directors, choreographers, and performers up to the end of the twentieth century. All the major New York productions are covered, as are five important London productions and four Hollywood versions.

Again and again, the story of Show Boat circles back to the power of performers to remake the show, winning appreciative audiences for over seven decades. Unlike most Broadway musicals, Show Boat put black and white performers side by side. This book is the first to take Show Boat’s innovative interracial cast as the defining feature of the show. From its beginnings, Show Boat juxtaposed the talents of black and white performers and mixed the conventions of white-cast operetta and the black-cast musical. Bringing black and white onto the same stage — revealing the mixed-race roots of musical comedy — Show Boat stimulated creative artists and performers to renegotiate the color line as expressed in the American musical. This tremendous longevity allowed Show Boat to enter a creative dialogue with the full span of Broadway history. Show Boat’s voyage through the twentieth century offers a vantage point on more than just the Broadway musical. It tells a complex tale of interracial encounter performed in popular music and dance on the national stage during a century of profound transformations.

Fred Astaire: one of the great jazz artists of the twentieth century? Astaire is best known for his brilliant dancing in the movie musicals of the 1930s, but in Music Makes Me, Todd Decker argues that Astaire’s work as a dancer and choreographer — particularly in the realm of tap dancing — made a significant contribution to the art of jazz. Decker examines the full range of Astaire’s work in filmed and recorded media, from a 1926 recording with George Gershwin to his 1970 blues stylings on television, and analyzes Astaire’s creative relationships with the greats, including George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, and Johnny Mercer. He also highlights Astaire’s collaborations with African American musicians and his work with lesser known professionals — arrangers, musicians, dance directors, and performers.

Faculty Fellow, 2006–07

Between the mid-1930s and the late ’40s, the center of the jazz world was a two-block stretch of 52nd Street in Manhattan. Dozens of crowded basement clubs between Fifth and Seventh avenues played host to legends such as Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker, as well as to innumerable professional musicians whose names aren’t quite so well known. Together, these musicians and their audiences defied the traditional border between serious art and commercial entertainment—and between the races, as 52nd Street was home to some of the first nightclubs in New York to allow racially integrated bands and audiences. Patrick Burke argues that the jazz played on 52nd Street complicated simplistic distinctions between musical styles such as Dixieland, swing, and bebop. And since these styles were defined along racial lines, the music was itself a powerful challenge to racist ideology.

Come In and Hear the Truth uses a range of materials, from classic photographs to original interviews with musicians, to bring the street’s vibrant history to life and to shed new light on the interracial contacts and collaborations it generated.

Faculty Fellow Fall 2016

Winner, 2020 Best Book Award from the 19th Century Section of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA)

Swashbuckling tales of valiant gauchos roaming Argentina and Uruguay were nineteenth-century Latin American bestsellers. But when the stories jumped from the page to the circus stage and beyond, their cultural, economic, and political influence revolutionized popular culture and daily life.

In this expansive and engaging narrative William Acree guides readers through the deep history of popular entertainment before turning to circus culture and rural dramas that celebrated the countryside on stage. More than just riveting social experiences, these dramas were among the region’s most dominant attractions on the eve of the twentieth century. Staging Frontiers further explores the profound impacts this phenomenon had on the ways people interacted and on the broader culture that influenced the region. This new, modern popular culture revolved around entertainment and related products, yet it was also central to making sense of social class, ethnic identity, and race as demographic and economic transformations were reshaping everyday experiences in this rapidly urbanizing region.