This year has seen a bumper crop of books by Bryn Mawr faculty and staff, with titles from across the disciplines. Here’s the impressive list:
Cynthia Bisman (GSSWSR): Recognizing that targeted practice with individuals is the key to successful outcomes, Social Work: Value-Guided Practice for a Global Society (Columbia University Press) equips today's practitioners with the values, skills, and knowledge necessary for social work practice in a globalized world.
Ignacio Gallup-Diaz (History) with Andrew Shankman and David J. Silverman: Anglicizing America (University of Pennsylvania Press) revisits the theory of Anglicization, considering its application to the history of the Atlantic world, from Britain to the Caribbean to the western wildernesses.
Martin Gaspar (Spanish): La condición traductora: Sobre los nuevos protagonistas de la literatura latinoamericana (Beatriz Viterbo Editora) is a historical and formal study of the rise of translator-heroes and narrators in Latin American fiction since the 1990s.
Carol Hager (Political Science) with Mary Alice Haddad: Drawing on case studies from around the globe, NIMBY Is Beautiful (Berghahn Books) demonstrates that NIMBY protests, although always arising from a local concern in a particular community, often result in broader political, social, and technological change.
David Karen and Robert Washington (Sociology): Sociological Perspectives on Sport (Routledge) offers students analytical skills and the application of theoretical perspectives that deepen their awareness and understanding of social processes linking sports to the larger social world.
Rudy Le Menthéour (French and Francophone Studies): editor. This edition of Charles-Augustin Vandermonde’s Essai sur la manière de perfectionner l’espèce humaine (Classiques Garnier) presents the 18th-century treatise that was situated within the French-led medical movement of meliorism, meant to increase public health by boosting the medical arrangement of marriages from all strata of society.
Peter Magee (Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology): Focusing on the Arabian peninsula, one of the last great unexplored regions of the ancient world, The Archaeology of Prehistoric Arabia (Cambridge University Press) argues that a unique social system, which relied on social cohesion and resisted hierarchical structures, emerged during the Neolithic period and continued to contour society for millennia.
Gary McDonogh (Cities) with Cindy Isenhour: Presents ethnographic studies from cities in 11 countries and six continents, Sustainability in the Global City (Cambridge University Press) highlights the universalized assumptions underlying interpretations of urban sustainability while elucidating the diverse and contradictory ways in which people understand, incorporate, advocate for, and reject sustainability in the course of their daily lives.
Nguyen Tan Hoang (English). Examining portrayals of Asian and Asian American men in Hollywood cinema, European art film, gay pornography, and experimental documentary, A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation (Duke University Press) offers a major critical reassessment of male effeminacy and its racialization in visual culture.
Robin Parks (Communications): Showing a distinctly un-glamorous side of Southern California, the stories in Egg Heaven (Shade Mountain Press) are set in run-down diners and neighborhood eateries with names that range from the prosaic (Breakfast) to the whimsical (Egg Heaven). In one place they offer only chicken pot pie, all day, every day. In another, they serve you what they think you need—order pancakes, you might get a BLT.
Nicholas Patruno and Roberta Ricci (Italian): Approaches to the Teaching of Primo Levi (Modern Language Association) provides an overview of the editions, anthologies, and translations of the work of the Holocaust survivor and memoirist Primo Levi; identifies useful classroom aids (films, music, and online resources); and includes contributions that describe different approaches to teaching Levi's work.
Michael T. Rock (Economics) with Michal A. Toman: China's Technological Catch-Up Strategy (Oxford University Press) traces the impact of China’s “grasp the large, let go the small” industrial development strategy on technological catch-up, energy use, and CO2 emissions.
Joel Schlosser (Political Science): What Would Socrates Do? (Cambridge University Press) shows the promise of Socrates’ philosophy to empower citizens and non-citizens alike by drawing them into collective practices of dialogue and reflection, while keeping a distance from the democratic status quo through its commitment to interrogation.
Benjamin Stevens (Greek, Latin and Classical Studies): As it makes its way through the eras of science fiction—from classical antiquity and the past 400 years of science fiction, Classical Traditions in Science Fiction (Oxford University Press) exposes the many levels on which the genre engages the ideas of the ancient world, from minute matters of language and structure to larger thematic and philosophical concerns.
Daniel Torday (Creative Writing): A memoir within a memoir within a novel, The Last Flight of Poxl West (St. Martin’s Press) tells the fictional story of a late 20th century teenage boy, Elijah Goldstein, who recounts the story of his uncle, Poxl West, who has recounted the story of his years as an RAF pilot during WWII.
Marianne Weldon (Special Collections) with Michael Hauser: Twentieth Century Retailing in Downtown Grand Rapids (Arcadia) chronicles the heyday of western Michigan’s vibrant shopping mecca (with three homegrown department stores, several chain department stores, five-and-dime stores, and scores of retailers) and its fate with the arrival of the regional shopping mall.