Faculty Authored and Edited Books & CDs

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Totality: Abstraction and Meaning in the Art of Barnett Newman

Michael Schreyach

Totality offers a deeply researched and thoughtful account of the art of Barnett Newman (1905–1970). While Newman’s paintings are widely regarded as among the most significant statements of abstract expressionism—and emblematic of modernism at midcentury—they pose distinct challenges to formal description and historical evaluation. With this book, Michael Schreyach guides readers toward a transformed understanding of Newman’s profound body of work.

Through a sequence of close readings, Schreyach examines six key terms—symbol, surface, self-evidence, space, standpoint, and scale—that illuminate the meaning of Newman’s claims for the “metaphysical” content of his art. Totality progresses from the meticulous analysis of the technical structure and visual appearance of specific works to critical and archivally documented arguments about Newman’s intentions. The result is an altogether original interpretation of the artist’s enterprise, as surprising as it is nuanced.
Jain Rāmāyaṇa Narratives: Moral Vision and Literary Innovation

Gregory M. Clines

Jain Rāmāyaṇa Narratives: Moral Vision and Literary Innovation traces how and why Jain authors at different points in history rewrote the story of Rāma and situates these texts within larger frameworks of South Asian religious history and literature.

The book argues that the plot, characters, and the very history of Jain Rāma composition itself served as a continual font of inspiration for authors to create and express novel visions of moral personhood. In making this argument, the book examines three versions of the Rāma story composed by two authors, separated in time and space by over 800 years and thousands of miles. The first is Raviṣeṇa, who composed the Sanskrit Padmapurāṇa (“The Deeds of Padma”), and the second is Brahma Jinadāsa, author of both a Sanskrit Padmapurāṇa and a vernacular (bhāṣā) version of the story titled Rām Rās (“The Story of Rām”). While the three compositions narrate the same basic story and work to shape ethical subjects, they do so in different ways and with different visions of what a moral person actually is. A close comparative reading focused on the differences between these three texts reveals the diverse visions of moral personhood held by Jains in premodernity and demonstrates the innovative narrative strategies authors utilized in order to actualize those visions.

The book is thus a valuable contribution to the fields of Jain studies and religion and literature in premodern South Asia.
To Be Honest: Voices on Donald Trump's Muslim Ban

Sarah Beth Kaufman, William G. Christ, and Habiba Noor

To Be Honest is a play script and series of essays reflecting on the ways Muslims are perceived and spoken of in America. With funding from a Mellon Foundation grant, several professors conducted more than two hundred hours of qualitative interviews in Texas with people across religious and political spectrums. Their conversations confirm expected polarizations and reveal new, troubling perspectives.

To Be Honest is a “documentary theater” script born from these interviews, which were used to help create monologues that give a face to the nuanced complexity of what is rarely said aloud. The monologues touch on non-Muslim millennials’ understandings of Islam, racism’s intersection with Islamophobia, the fatigue of “activist” Muslims, the impact of intervention in the Middle East on U.S. military veterans, feminist readings of the hijab, the Trump presidency, and more.

Six essays contextualize the script’s underlying themes and provide material for further study. In these polarizing times, To Be Honest illuminates the striking reality that Americans have vastly different experiences with Islam, from evangelicals who work to convert Muslims with the aim of “helping them achieve peace” to Muslim youth who struggle to make sense of why society dissects their religion.

Students, scholars, readers, and theatergoers will come away with insights that allow them to move beyond limited views of Islam by listening to and engaging with others. To Be Honest is an important script for staging and a valuable tool for dialogue across ideological perspectives.
Mortal Objects: Identity and Persistence Through Life and Death

Steven Luper

How might we change ourselves without ending our existence? What could we become, if we had access to an advanced form of bioengineering that allowed us dramatically to alter our genome? Could we remain in existence after ceasing to be alive? What is it to be human? Might we still exist after changing ourselves into something that is not human? What is the significance of human extinction? Steven Luper addresses these questions and more in this thought-provoking study. He defends an animalist account, which says that we are organisms, but claims that we are also material objects. His book goes to the heart of the most complex questions about what we are and what we might become. Using case studies from the life sciences as well as thought experiments, Luper develops a new way of thinking about the nature of life and death, and whether and how human extinction matters.
Queer Carnival: Festivals and Mardi Gras in the South

Amy L. Stone

Festivals like Mardi Gras and Fiesta have come to be annual events in which entire cities participate, and LGBTQ people are a visible part of these celebrations. In other words, the party is on, the party is queer, and everyone is invited. In Queer Carnival, Amy Stone takes us inside these colorful, eye-catching, and often raucous events, highlighting their importance to queer life in America’s urban South and Southwest.

Drawing on five years of research, and over a hundred days at LGBTQ events in cities such as San Antonio, Santa Fe, Baton Rouge, and Mobile, Stone gives readers a front-row seat to festivals, carnivals, and Mardi Gras celebrations, vividly bringing these queer cultural spaces and the people that create and participate in them to life. Stone shows how these events serve a larger fundamental purpose, helping LGBTQ people to cultivate a sense of belonging in cities that may be otherwise hostile.

Queer Carnival provides an important new perspective on queer life in the South and Southwest, showing us the ways that LGBTQ communities not only survive, but thrive, even in the most unexpected places.
Observaciones y Evocaciones de un Letraherido : (Prosa Reunida)

Carlos X. Ardavín Trabanco

"Observaciones y evocaciones de un letraherido" reúne los cinco libros de prosa que Carlos X. Ardavín Trabanco publicó entre 2002 y 2016. Estos textos están vinculados por su común origen periodístico —excepto el último— y por la propuesta de elaborar el modesto archivo de un escritor herido por la memoria y la melancolía, marcado por la felicidad de los libros y el misterio de algunas ciudades.
Autour du Yiddish de Paris à Buenos Aires

Alan Astro

Cet ouvrage se penche sur des oeuvres littéraires en yiddish produites en France et en Amérique latine avant, durant et après la Shoah et nous fait entendre des échos de cette langue juive chez des écrivains d'expression française et espagnole. Le lecteur rencontrera des oeuvres de fiction d'auteurs immigrés de Pologne à Paris, notamment Wolf Wieviorka et Oser Warszawski, des nouvelles de Mordechai Alpersohn chroniquant la vie des colonies agricoles juives d'Argentine ainsi que certains noms familiers : Guillaume Apollinaire, Jorge Luis Borges et Élie Wiesel, qui ont tous intégré des motifs yiddish dans leur imaginaire.

[This book examines literary works in Yiddish produced in France and Latin America before, during and after the Shoah and makes us hear echoes of this Jewish language among French and Spanish-speaking writers. The reader will encounter works of fiction by immigrant authors from Poland in Paris, including Wolf Wieviorka and Oser Warszawski, short stories by Mordechai Alpersohn chronicling the life of the Jewish agricultural settlements in Argentina as well as certain familiar names: Guillaume Apollinaire, Jorge Luis Borges and Élie Wiesel, who all incorporated Yiddish motifs into their imaginations.]
Progress on Difference Equations and Discrete Dynamical Systems: 25th ICDEA, London, UK, June 24–28, 2019

Steve Baigent, Martin Bohner, and Saber Elaydi

This book comprises selected papers of the 25th International Conference on Difference Equations and Applications, ICDEA 2019, held at UCL, London, UK, in June 2019. The volume details the latest research on difference equations and discrete dynamical systems, and their application to areas such as biology, economics, and the social sciences. Some chapters have a tutorial style and cover the history and more recent developments for a particular topic, such as chaos, bifurcation theory, monotone dynamics, and global stability. Other chapters cover the latest personal research contributions of the author(s) in their particular area of expertise and range from the more technical articles on abstract systems to those that discuss the application of difference equations to real-world problems. The book is of interest to both Ph.D. students and researchers alike who wish to keep abreast of the latest developments in difference equations and discrete dynamical systems.
Get Feedback: Giving, Exhibiting, and Teaching Feedback in Special Education Teacher Preparation

Martha D. Elford, Heather Haynes Smith, and Susanne James

Perfect for special education teacher preparation faculty, coordinators, and administrators, GET Feedback: Giving, Exhibiting and Teaching Feedback in Special Education Teacher Preparation provides examples, activities, and support for integrating and aligning feedback instruction, demonstrating the importance of putting the adult learner, as the feedback recipient, at the center of every feedback opportunity. Written in an approachable, easy-to-read format, this text is the first book to specifically examine feedback for adult learners.

Drs. Martha D. Elford, Heather Haynes Smith, and Susanne James use the G.E.T. Model (give, exhibit, teach) to provide structure for feedback through four domains: specificity, immediacy, purposefulness, and constructiveness.

GET Feedback combines Adult Learning Theory with education research to provide a comprehensive, integrated framework to teach feedback in special education teacher preparation. This text will improve how special education teacher educators “GET” feedback across courses and programs.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Patrick Keating

An essential work of twenty-first-century cinema, Alfonso Cuarón’s 2004 film Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is an elegant exemplar of contemporary cinematic trends, including serial storytelling, the rise of the fantasy genre, digital filmmaking, and collaborative authorship. With craft, wonder, and wit, the film captures the most engaging elements of the novel while artfully translating its literary point of view into cinematic terms that expand on the world established in the book series and previous films.

In this book, Patrick Keating examines how Cuarón and his collaborators employ cinematography, production design, music, performance, costume, dialogue, and more to create the richly textured world of Harry Potter―a world filtered principally through Harry’s perspective, characterized by gaps, uncertainties, and surprises. Rather than upholding the vision of a single auteur, Keating celebrates Cuarón’s direction as a collaborative achievement that resulted in a family blockbuster layered with thematic insights.
La mirada opuesta: Voces de victimarios en la literatura latinoamericana contemporánea

Ana María Mutis and M. R. Jácome

La presente colección de ensayos ofrece un examen interdisciplinario del discurso del victimario en la literatura latinoamericana contemporánea con el propósito de aportar una nueva visión crítica y teórica de la violencia y de su representación textual en la región. Mediante el análisis de las voces de los victimarios en diversos discursos textuales y visuales que plasman la violencia en diferentes contextos históricos, políticos y sociales, esta colección expande y enriquece el estudio de la construcción de la memoria histórica del continente al ofrecer una perspectiva más integral a través de sus culturas.

This collection of essays offers an interdisciplinary examination of the perpetrator's discourse in contemporary Latin American literature with the aim of providing a new critical and theoretical vision of violence and its textual representation in the region. Through the analysis of the voices of the perpetrators in various textual and visual discourses that capture violence in different historical, political and social contexts, this collection expands and enriches the study of the construction of the historical memory of the continent by offering a more comprehensive perspective. across their cultures.
Hope, Form, and Future in the Work of James Joyce

David P. Rando

Hope and future are not the terms with which James Joyce has usually been read, but this book paints a picture of Joyce's fiction in which hope and future assume the primary colo(u)rs.

Rando explores how Joyce's texts, as early as Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, delineate a complex hope that is oriented toward the future with restlessness, dissatisfaction, and invention. He examines how Joyce envisions alternatives to the prevailing conventions of hope throughout his works and, in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, develops formal techniques of spatializing hope to contemplate it from all sides.

Casting fresh light on the ways in which hope animates key aspects of Joyce's approach to literary content and form, Rando moves beyond the limitations of negative critique and literary historicism to present a Joyce who thinks agilely about the future, politics, and possibility.
Sense and Creative Labor in Rainer Maria Rilke's Prose Works

Nicholas Carroll Reynolds

This book is an investigation of the role of creative labor and the five senses in Rainer Maria Rilke’s prose works, including his “Primal Sound” essay, the Stories of God, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and his monograph on Auguste Rodin. It is about several protagonists’ quest to achieve creative labor by reconnecting spirit or the unconscious to the hand. There are many difficulties in the way, however, illustrated by Rilke’s essays, tales, and monographs. In the process of overcoming these impediments, the five senses are expanded and refined. Rilke’s characters undergo a transformation that not only allows them to do true creative labor, but also brings them into a new relationship with themselves, the world around them and other people.
Old Style: Unoriginality and Its Uses in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature

Claudia Stokes

An aesthetic of unoriginality shaped literary style and reader taste for decades of the nineteenth century. While critics in the twentieth century and beyond have upheld originality and innovation as essential characteristics of literary achievement, they were not features particularly prized by earlier American audiences, Claudia Stokes contends. On the contrary, readers were taught to value familiarity, traditionalism, and regularity. Literary originality was often seen as a mark of vulgar sensationalism and poor quality.

In Old Style Stokes offers the first dedicated study of a forgotten nineteenth-century aesthetic, explicating the forms, practices, conventions, and uses of unoriginality. She focuses in particular on the second quarter of the century, when improvements in printing and distribution caused literary markets to become flooded with new material, and longstanding reading practices came under threat. As readers began to prefer novelty to traditional forms, advocates openly extolled unoriginality in an effort to preserve the old literary ways. Old Style examines this era of significant literary change, during which a once-dominant aesthetic started to give way to modern preferences.

If writing in the old style came to be associated with elite conservatism—a linkage that contributed to its decline in the twentieth century—it also, paradoxically provided marginalized writers—people of color, white women, and members of the working class—the literary credentials they needed to enter print. Writing in the old style could affirm an aspiring author's training, command of convention, and respectability. In dismissing unoriginality as the literary purview of the untalented or unambitious, Stokes cautions, we risk overlooking something of vital importance to generations of American writers and readers.
The Pointe of the Pen: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Balletic Imagination

Betsy Winakur Tontiplaphol

Originally a courtly art, ballet experienced dramatic evolution (but never, significantly, the prospect of extinction) as attitudes toward courtliness itself shifted in the aftermath of the French Revolution. As a result, it afforded a valuable model to poets who, like Wordsworth and his successors, aspired to make the traditionally codified, formal, and, to some degree, aristocratic art of poetry compatible with "the very language of men" and, therefore, relevant to a new class of readers. Moreover, as a model, ballet was visible as well as valuable. Dance historians recount the extraordinary popularity of ballet and its practitioners in the nineteenth century, and The Pointe of the Pen challenges literary historians' assertions - sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit - that writers were immune to the balletomania that shaped both Romantic and Victorian England, as well as Europe more broadly. The book draws on both primary documents (such as dance treatises and performance reviews) and scholarly histories of dance to describe the ways in which ballet's unique culture and aesthetic manifest in the forms, images, and ideologies of significant poems by Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Barrett Browning.
Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza

Ricardo F. Vivancos-Pérez and Norma Elia Cantú

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Latinx Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Edited by Ricardo F. Vivancos-Pérez and Norma Cantú. Rooted in Gloria Anzaldúa's experiences growing up near the U.S./Mexico border, BORDERLANDS/LA FRONTERA remaps our understanding of borders as psychic, social, and cultural terrains that we inhabit and that inhabit us all. Drawing heavily on archival research and a comprehensive literature review while contextualizing the book within her theories and writings before and after its 1987 publication, this critical edition elucidates Anzaldúa's complex composition process and its centrality in the development of her philosophy. It opens with two introductory studies; offers a corrected text, explanatory footnotes, translations, and four archival appendices; and closes with an updated bibliography of Anzaldúa's works, an extensive scholarly bibliography on Borderlands, a brief biography, and a short discussion of the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Papers.
The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture

Victoria Aarons and Phyllis Lassner

The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture reflects current approaches to Holocaust literature that open up future thinking on Holocaust representation. The chapters consider diverse generational perspectives―survivor writing, second and third generation―and genres―memoirs, poetry, novels, graphic narratives, films, video-testimonies, and other forms of literary and cultural expression. In turn, these perspectives create interactions among generations, genres, temporalities, and cultural contexts. The volume also participates in the ongoing project of responding to and talking through moments of rupture and incompletion that represent an opportunity to contribute to the making of meaning through the continuation of narratives of the past. As such, the chapters in this volume pose options for reading Holocaust texts, offering openings for further discussion and exploration. The inquiring body of interpretive scholarship responding to the Shoah becomes itself a story, a narrative that materially extends our inquiry into that history.
La Isla Subjetiva: (Obra Dominicana)

Carlos X. Ardavín Trabanco

La isla subjetiva reúne una muestra representativa de la labor crítica realizada por Carlos X. Ardavín Trabanco entre los años 2000 y 2020: reseñas y entrevistas —sobre todo—, pero también prólogos, notas, semblanzas y estudios. Estos textos pretenden resaltar el papel de la crítica literaria en la formación del gusto estético, el debate intelectual y la educación ética. El título, La isla subjetiva, proviene de los versos iniciales de «Trópico íntimo», poema de Franklin Mieses Burgos.
Pasajero de la Literatura (1944-2000): Antonio Fernández Spencer

Carlos X. Ardavín Trabanco

Los trabajos de Antonio Fernández Spencer (1922-1999) reunidos en a Pasajeros de la literatura fueron publicados entre 1944 y 2000: medio siglo de sostenida escritura y penetrantes indagaciones en torno a la poesía, sin desdeñar la disquisición filosófica o histórica. Con su diversidad de formatos el reconocido poeta y ensayista realiza un largo inventario de la poesía y el pensamiento, dominicano y contemporáneo. De Fernández Spencer ya hemos publicado en Ediciones Cielonaranja A orillas del filosofar, Ensayos sobre historia y letras dominicanas y El gallo y la veleta. [Ensayos últimos]. Esta edición ha sido realizada por el Dr. Carlos X. Ardavín Trabanco, crítico y profesor de literatura española en la Universidad de Trinity, San Antonio, Tejas; autor de una serie de libros entre los que se destacan La pasión meditabunda, La torre de los panoramas y Diccionario personal de literatura dominicana.
Asian Religious Responses to Darwinism: Evolutionary Theories in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and East Asian Cultural Contexts

C. Mackenzie Brown

This volume brings together diverse Asian religious perspectives to address critical issues in the encounter between tradition and modern western evolutionary thought. Such thought encompasses the biological theories of Charles Darwin, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Earnest Haeckel, Thomas Huxley, and later “neo-Darwinians,” as well as the more sociological evolutionary theories of thinkers such as Herbert Spencer, Pyotr Kropotkin, and Henri Bergson. The essays in this volume cover responses from Hindu, Jain, Buddhist (Chinese, Japanese, and Indo-Tibetan), Confucian, Daoist, and Muslim traditions. These responses come from the decades immediately after publication of The Origin of Species up to the present, with attention being paid to earlier perspectives and teachings within a tradition that have affected responses to Darwinism and western evolutionary thought in general.

The book focuses on three critical issues: the struggle for survival and the moral implications read into it; genetic variation and its seeming randomness as related to the problems of meaning and purpose; and the nature of humankind and human exceptionalism. Each essay deals with one or more of the three issues within the context of a specific tradition.
Teaching Gloria E. Anzaldúa: Pedagogy and Practice for Our Classrooms and Communities

M. Cantú-Sánchez, C. de León-Zepeda, and Norma E. Cantu

Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa—theorist, Chicana, feminist—famously called on scholars to do work that matters. This pronouncement was a rallying call, inspiring scholars across disciplines to become scholar-activists and to channel their intellectual energy and labor toward the betterment of society. Scholars and activists alike have encountered and expanded on these pathbreaking theories and concepts first introduced by Anzaldúa in Borderlands/La frontera and other texts.

Teaching Gloria E. Anzaldúa is a pragmatic and inspiring offering of how to apply Anzaldúa’s ideas to the classroom and in the community rather than simply discussing them as theory. The book gathers nineteen essays by scholars, activists, teachers, and professors who share how their first-hand use of Anzaldúa’s theories in their classrooms and community environments.

The collection is divided into three main parts, according to the ways the text has been used: “Curriculum Design,” “Pedagogy and Praxis,” and “Decolonizing Pedagogies.” As a pedagogical text, Teaching Gloria E. Anzaldúa also offers practical advice in the form of lesson plans, activities, and other suggested resources for the classroom. This volume offers practical and inspiring ways to deploy Anzaldúa’s transformative theories with real and meaningful action.
Media Literacy in a Disruptive Media Environment

William G. Christ and B. S. De Abreu

This book, part of the BEA Electronic Media Research Series, brings together top scholars researching media literacy and lays out the current state of the field in areas such as propaganda, news, participatory culture, representation, education, social/environmental justice, and civic engagement.

The field of media literacy continues to undergo changes and challenges as audiences are reconceptualized and reconfigured, media industries are transformed and replaced, and the production of media texts is available to anyone with a smartphone. The book provides an overview of these. It offers readers specific examples and recommendations to help others as they develop their own teaching and research agendas.

Media Literacy in a Disruptive Media Environment will be of great interest to scholars and graduate students studying media literacy through the lens of broadcasting, communication studies, media and cultural studies, film, and digital media studies.
Faculty as Global Learners: Off-Campus Study at Liberal Arts Colleges

J. Gillespie, Lisa Jasinski, and D. Gross

This co-authored collection offers valuable insights about the impact of leading off-campus study on faculty leaders’ teaching, research, service, and overall well-being. Recognizing that faculty leaders are themselves global learners, the book addresses ways that liberal arts colleges can more effectively achieve their strategic goals for students' global learning by intentionally anticipating and supporting the needs of faculty leaders, as they grow and change. Faculty as Global Learners offers key findings and recommendations to stimulate conversations among administrators, faculty, and staff about concrete actions they can explore and steps they can take on their campuses to both support faculty leaders of off-campus programs and advance strategic institutional goals for global learning. This collection includes transferrable pedagogical insights and the perspectives of faculty members who have led off-campus study programs in a variety of disciplines and geographic regions.
The Invisible City: Travel, Attention, and Performance

Kyle Gillette

The Invisible City explores urban spaces from the perspective of a traveller, writer, and creator of theatre to illuminate how cities offer travellers and residents theatrical visions while also remaining mostly invisible, beyond the limits of attention.

The book explores the city as both stage and content in three parts. Firstly, it follows in pattern Italo Calvino's novel Invisible Cities, wherein Marco Polo describes cities to the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, to produce a constellation of vignettes recalling individual cities through travel writing and engagement with artworks. Secondly, Gillette traces the Teatro Potlach group and its ongoing immersive, site-specific performance project Invisible Cities, which has staged performances in dozens of cities across Europe and the Americas. The final part of the book offers useful exercises for artists and travellers interested in researching their own invisible cities.

Written for practitioners, travellers, students, and thinkers interested in the city as site and source of performance, The Invisible City mixes travelogue with criticism and cleverly combines philosophical meditations with theatrical pedagogy.
Sugarcane & Rum: The Bittersweet History of Labor and Life on the Yucatan Peninsula

John R. Gust and Jennifer P. Mathews

While the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico may conjure up images of vacation getaways and cocktails by the sea, these easy stereotypes hide a story filled with sweat and toil. The story of sugarcane and rum production in the Caribbean has been told many times. But few know the bittersweet story of sugar and rum in the jungles of the Yucatán Peninsula during the nineteenth century. This is much more than a history of coveted commodities. The unique story that unfolds in John R. Gust and Jennifer P. Mathews’s new history Sugarcane and Rum is told through the lens of Maya laborers who worked under brutal conditions on small haciendas to harvest sugarcane and produce rum.

Gust and Mathews weave together ethnographic interviews and historical archives with archaeological evidence to bring the daily lives of Maya workers into focus. They lived in a cycle of debt, forced to buy all of their supplies from the company store and take loans from the hacienda owners. And yet they had a certain autonomy because the owners were so dependent on their labor at harvest time. We also see how the rise of cantinas and distilled alcohol in the nineteenth century affected traditional Maya culture and that the economies of Cancún and the Mérida area are predicated on the rum-influenced local social systems of the past. Sugarcane and Rum brings this bittersweet story to the present and explains how rum continues to impact the Yucatán and the people who have lived there for millennia.