700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
Early in my graduate school career I was exposed to an increasingly popular theory of political parties as “extended networks”. Proponents argue that we need to move beyond formal party...
Despite the prevalence of name changing in American Jewish culture, few historians have studied the actual practice of name changing in the United States. A Rosenberg by Any Other Name...
Cuba in the American Imagination examines the emergence of the idea of Cuba in the United States from the early nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth. The book...
In an 1852 Punch cartoon, a middle-aged man looks in a mirror and says, “Good gracious! Is it possible?—No! Yes! No!—Yes! Yes, by Jupiter, it's a grey hair in my...
The Idealist is the story of one man, a world-circling journey, and an influential book. But it is more than that, too. It’s a story about an idea and a...
The intentional destruction of cultural heritage in peace and war, the looting of artifacts and their trafficking by criminal networks, as well as contests over the ownership, function, and meaning...
In the wake of 1968, Herbert Marcuse and, by extension, his former colleagues from the Frankfurt School became forever linked with the student protests of that era. While most of...
For people who leaf through Tropes of Transport, I would want to bribe the goddess of chance to let the pages part at one of the points where I discuss...
The preface provides a perspective for the book, as well as an explanation of the structure of each chapter, so that might be the appropriate place to start browsing.The prologue...
The book, Veblen, is about intellectual innovation, and how originality is shaped by the accumulation of schooling experiences. It examines a great American original, Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929), a heterodox economist...
I became interested in this topic because of previous research I had done on postcolonial theory. The book engages deeply with postcolonial theory and the interest in that discipline in...
Page one of the book invites the reader into the actual “Night Café” on Tuesday evening, September 4,1888, when Vincent Van Gogh set up his easel to spend three nights...
Emancipation After Hegel provides an introduction to Hegel that reimagines Hegel’s project and at the same time engages in contemporary political debates. When I started thinking about the book, I...
Towards the end of the book I put forward four myths about climate change. I would hope people may recognise the truths about our relationship with climate change that each...
Although it engages directly with the fields of architectural history, gender studies, and urban history this book is really for anyone who has ever gone swimming, or played a game...
If the random reader encountered the book in a bookstore, I suppose I’d most want them to glance through one (or all) of three chapters:Chapter Four describes the Framers’ deliberations...
Based on an idea originally proposed by Charles Darwin, Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods argues that the emergence of gods was an incidental consequence of several evolutionary factors. Using data ranging...
I’ve always had an affinity for older people. My first job as a teenager was working in a nursing home where I met a woman who had what was then...
My book joins an ongoing debate about how we should think about reason.In recent decades, literary scholars have been somewhat skeptical about the high value nineteenth-century intellectuals placed on different...
This book started out as a reflection on why it is that in the past two decades a re-veiling trend has swept over the Muslim world and Muslim communities in...
One of the main goals of this book is to narrow the divide that exists between the study of religion in the late ancient Mediterranean and the study of Islamic...
Juan Francisco Elso’s “Por América” is one of the many remarkable works that I write about. An effigy of José Martí, it is an exquisitely painful portrait, depicting the Cuban...
What the book is all about is right there in the title! Well, sort of.The book isn’t about the scientific method—since it starts by pointing out that there’s no such...
The first chapter of the book articulates the necessity to think the categories of citizenship and disaster together. What conditions prevent photos of horror of certain type of governed from...
I would hope your “just browsing” readers would read the introduction first. In the first seven pages they will encounter both the main puzzle of the book, and the personal...
The Embattled Vote shows how the right to vote grounds participation in the decision-making of America’s democratic republic. Extreme disparities in income and wealth are embedded in today’s America. But...
The idea of Snake Detection actually took me by surprise. I wasn’t looking for it. I was instead pursuing answers to questions that were more consistent with my academic background...
After years of teaching courses about immigration and administrative law and thinking out loud with my students about the structure of the executive branch, I could not explain why the...
Unsilencing belongs to the global conversation about how societies remember—or refuse to remember—state violence. It speaks to the legacy of the gulag but also to the aftermath of authoritarianism everywhere,...
I recently gave a book talk at a salon held on the first Sunday of every month at the Cornelia Street Café, in New York. (Great jazz there, by the...
Normalization of the right is the term that I develop to capture the twin phenomena of the electoral surge of the European right and the mainstreaming of nationalist ideas and...
The idea that the meaning of art may not be exhausted by its visual manifestations and the desire to look is examined as a response to the pressures of commodification...
This book examines the history of the relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood—the world’s most important Islamist movement—and the Western powers that have dominated the Middle East over the last century—the...
Perfect Communities tells the story of Levittown, America’s iconic postwar suburb. It’s really the story of Levittowns, plural, because there were four in the United States, eight in France, and...
Ethicists, philosophers, historians, communication scholars and therapists have had primacy in the study of family secrets. Few sociologists have joined in. But family secrets are important to understanding family life...
That’s a very hard question to answer! It’s tempting to direct your browsing reader to, say, the middle section of Chapter 3, pages 46-56, because the argument there gets at...
No matter where Americans live, their risk of being murdered is higher than it is in any other first-world democracy.From 1965 to 1992, the homicide rate in the United States...
The first chapter of the book is only 19 pages—but it provides a useful introduction the topic and complete overview of the book.The chapter first documents the magnitude of the...
The chapter entitled “Ground Zero in Focus” examines several documentaries composed of candid, amateur footage shot by witnesses in Manhattan and New Jersey as the World Trade Center burned and...
I like to think of Andean Cocaine as a hidden chapter in the history of globalization. Today, cocaine, as part of a colossal global criminal enterprise, is the most valuable...
It is sometimes hard to fully appreciate the way in which the sports industry has grown, both organically and systematically—and how the business parlays fans’ insatiable appetite for sports into...
I was always interested in science. I am a very curious person, and most importantly, I am a very visual person. And so, I have always asked myself the question...
Oscar Wilde—the subject of my concluding chapter—is the true hero of the book. Were a reader to read only one chapter, it should probably be my chapter on Wilde, for...
I hope a reader who stumbles across this book might initially be drawn to the visual richness of this art and then engaged by their cross-cultural narratives. These images are...
I hold that to be ignored and rejected by others means psychological death. Around page 225 in the book, I illustrate this idea by what I understand to be the...
In Dangerous Economies, I explain a shocking moment in eighteenth-century America. 250 years ago, New York was gripped by a terrible fear: that resident slaves were conspiring to torch the...
My own engagement with Cuban art began in 1985, the result of a happy accident. I was immediately fascinated by the work that my peers in Havana were making: it...
There is a section in the book that many readers might find particularly amusing, on the relation between occultism and spiritualism concerning Atlantis. One of the primary characters involved here...
I first became interested in pseudo-history during the late 1980s when I was a faculty member at Lamar University. The five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas...
My motivations for writing this book were largely historical and aesthetic. I wanted to explain the proliferation of various tropes of play in Victorian literary representations of modern life. Even...
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