700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
Although I insist that no particular way of making meaning is superior to the other—they are after all cultural constructs—I am most fond of the last chapter and the conclusion.In...
This book is based on the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA)—a project in which my coauthor Josipa Roksa and I followed several thousand students across 24 diverse U.S. four-year colleges and...
Bankers’ Trust: How Social Relations Avert Global Financial Collapse sits at the crossroads of international political economy, financial history, and the study of power and trust in global governance. It asks enduring questions: how do countries cooperate under pressure...
Obviously, this isn’t the first book about Starbucks. But Everything but the Coffee is first to examine the company’s rise and fall and look ahead to its uncertain future in...
The first two words of the book are Edward Said. His body of work continues to inspire debate within postcolonial studies almost 50 years after the publication of his 1978 hit, Orientalism. I’m less interested in that specific text than in the misunderstandings or scholarly lacunae it generated. A focus on Orientalism also obscures his incredible range, which included classical music...
Oddly, this book began with the history of New York City. In writing about the building of the United Nations headquarters site for my book on postwar urbanism in New...
This book is intentionally hybrid: it mixes literary criticism, commentary on teaching, reflections on the role of the Humanities, and personal memoir. This was a risky choice, on my end,...
In fact, I’d want the reader to really take a good look at the cover of the book. The photograph comes from a Stasi surveillance file of a groundbreaking art...
The book considers issues of class, politics and waiting through reference to a lower middle class of Jats in Meerut district, Uttar Pradesh, especially students from this caste studying in...
I can certainly imagine that parts of Bangladesh will flood and sea level rise may submerge parts of the nation. But I would be surprised if such dramatic changes could...
The migration of intellectuals and academics made refugees by the politics and wars of mid-twentieth-century Europe consolidated the emergence of comparative literature as a field in the American university system...
Can autistic people, across the spectrum, read literary fiction? Can they enjoy and profit from the experience? For years, experts have said no. A “triad of impairments”—in language, social understanding,...
The book is divided into three larger parts that stress the nature of lovesickness as a medical problem: “Anatomy,” “Diagnostics,” and “Therapy.” The introductory chapter, “Cases in History” offers a...
Why did I wrote the book? I was surprised to find that there is no published study of this stone industry, which is the largest private sector employer in the...
I’m what is known in my field as a “dirt archaeologist.” I’ve been excavating archaeological sites in various places for 43 years, and I’m not ready to quit. Why do...
The Toothpick is a technical and cultural history of what is arguably the simplest of manufactured things. A wooden toothpick consists of a single part made of a single material...
Under the Hammer begins by looking outward to non-Western practice, but very quickly turns inward to my own culture.I begin with the experience of horror the world shared as the...
Starving for Justice examines three hunger strikes that took place in the 1990s on university campuses. Twenty years ago, Chicana/o, Latina/o students at UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, and Stanford stopped...
People and dogs share thousands of years of co-evolution. The nature of their relationship has also evolved, moving largely from dogs as workmates to dogs as pets. Especially in contemporary...
I came to this book when I was finishing my first book, The Novel Art, which was about how early twentieth century American writers negotiated their relation to mass culture...
In recent years there has been growing attention to the social responsibility of business. With a focus on ethnic community support (i.e., philanthropy and sponsorships related to ethnoracial minorities), Black...
I began research on this project not so much because I was fascinated with truckers, trucking culture, or big rigs, but because I wanted to understand how transformations in rural...
I found Reischauer’s life to be profoundly interesting, and perhaps even tragic, as a human interest story.His younger sister, Felicia, was born deaf and mute, and Ed had to help...
I describe my experiences and observations over a career that has grown parallel to a field of scientific and practical interest that has grown from raw data collection to its...
In the section On Location, I recount the opening of the New Yorker Book Store with Pete Martin and Austen Laber. Pete was the co-founder, with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, of the...
Trained as an architect and an architectural historian, I was led to re-think destruction when I began to survey its remains in Kosovo for the International Criminal Tribunal for the...
The book offers a systematic explanation of the changes in role-expectations that scientists who participate in environmental policymaking will face. It is rocky terrain that, for some scientists, is difficult...
My book critiques Romantic ideas of authorship—for example, that a single creator is responsible for each work of art, and that art is primarily expressive—to argue instead that creation is...
Mainland Passage is a historical and cultural study of the Puerto Rican mass migration to New York City in the 1940s and how this migration ultimately created a Puerto Rican...
Culinary Nostalgia focuses on Shanghai and identifies the importance of regional food culture at pivotal moments in the city’s history. Taking foodways as a window onto urban change, the book...
There is a conundrum built into how we as a society have decided to organize public education. Schools exist to educate children. But public schools are governed through elections in...
Quarks to Culture involves a new, big picture perspective of the universe. Now, by universe I do not mean the astronomical cosmos that the word usually refers to. I mean...
I would want a casual reader to focus on the last chapter, “Being an Environmentalist: Decisive Uncertainty and the Future of American Environmentalism.”Here I explain that, without nature, environmentalism becomes...
I’m French. And I’m a sociologist. This book is about Silicon Valley. It’s the one I wanted to read when I started my field work in Northern California in 2015....
If a reader were to ask where to sample a page or two of A Brave Vessel, I would suggest turning to the beginning of chapter five. At that point...
Nobody truly trains to be a global historian. The field is too vast; the subject matter is impossible to master. I came to this project as a historian of European...
More than a traditional biography this book takes on the form of a popular science exploration, inviting the readers on a journey through the changing landscape of Earth science. Interwoven...
Although the inspiration for five novels, Annesley’s ordeal has attracted scant attention from historians, in part because the principal primary source associated with his abduction is a volume, first published...
Rethinking American Art: Collectors, Critics, and the Changing Canon is about the real history of art. Most books on art history are written from the point of view of the author…
“Conservative” means different things in different times and places. This book describes and explains the different types of conservatism in American history, from the Constitution to the end of the...
Empire for Liberty tells a story the broad outline of which will be familiar to many readers: the growth of the American empire from its inception to the present. But...
At Home in the Law argues that the past 40 years have witnessed important transformations in the legal idea of what the home is. For centuries the familiar adage, a...
It is a pretty twisted professional path that leads a cultural critic like me to become an expert on the history of the Army’s Civil Affairs division, fluent in the...
One of the biggest questions that has animated modernist studies in the last two decades has been, what were others (not just Woolf, Joyce, Eliot, Yeats, Conrad…) saying: who, where,...
The proliferation of biological weapons—BW for short—to states or terrorists is one of the most pressing security issues of the twenty-first century. At a time when the United States enjoys...
Hip-Hop Revolution explores the current cultural and political landscape of hip-hop by providing a broad based historical context for the art. Beginning with the emergence of popular culture in the...
During an early professional experience writing about artworks for a large public art museum, I had access to files containing fascinating correspondence between artists and the museum. I found diagrams,...
I hope Weather Matters is a book that can be opened to any of its many subheadings and engage the reader. The chapters are topical more than chronological, and my...
The book is highly relevant to contemporary life, in which forms of surveillance have become ubiquitous, although they differ from the ones I describe. It encourages readers to ask how...
The Future of Change uncovers the relationships between advances in communications technologies and the rise and success of some of the iconic social movements over the course of American history.Advances...
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