This year has seen a bumper crop of books written, edited, and contributed to by Bryn Mawr's academic community with titles from across the disciplines. Here’s the impressive list:
Elizabeth Allen (Ed.), Before they were Titans: Essays on the Early Works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Academic Studies Press, 2015. In what amounts to composite portraits of two artists as young men, the 10 critical essays in this volume, written by leading specialists, give fresh, sophisticated readings to works by the titans of Russian literature, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.
Christine Koggel and Cynthia Bisman (eds.), Gender Justice and Development. Vol 1: Local and Global. Routledge, 2015. Contributors to this collection focus on the gendered aspects of the inequalities and injustices that have resulted from the popular policies of reducing, or even eliminating, social welfare programs over the past several decades.
Michelle Francl, The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, edited by Darra Goldstein.A sweeping collection of nearly 600 entries on all things sweet, written by 265 expert contributors, includes six entries by Bryn Mawr’s own Michelle Francl, who tackles chemical leaveners, food colorings, start, the biochemistry of sugar, sugar of lead, and yeast.
Homay King, Virtual Memory: Time-based Art and the Dream of Digitality. Duke University Press, 2015. Tracing the concept of the virtual through the philosophical works of Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, and Giorgio Agamben, King offers a new framework for thinking about film, video, and time-based contemporary art. By detaching the virtual from its contemporary associations with digitality, she shows that using its original meaning—which denotes a potential on the cusp of becoming—provides the means to reveal the "analog" elements in contemporary digital art.
Barbara Miller Lane, Houses for a New World; Builders and Buyers in American Suburbs, 1945-1965. Princeton University Press, 2015. The first comprehensive history of a uniquely American form of domestic architecture and urbanism and the 20th century’s most successful experiment in mass housing, this book tells the story the collaboration between the builders and buyers of the 13 million plus tract houses constructed between 1945 and 1965.
Maria Cristina Quintero (Ed.), Perspectives on Early Modern Women in Iberia and the Americas: Studies in Law, Society and Literature in Honor of Anne J. Cruz. New York: Escribana Books, 2015. Presented in honor of Professor Anne J. Cruz, this compilation of essays delves deeply into social and political history, law, literature, and art to yield provocative and revisionist readings of women, real and fictional, in early modern Iberia and the Americas
Lisa Saltzman, Daguerreotypes: Fugitive Subjects, Contemporary Objects. University of Chicago Press, 2015. Even now in the digital age, photography remains a stubbornly substantive form of evidence: referenced by artists, filmmakers, and writers as a powerful emblem of truth, photography has found its home in other media at precisely the moment of its own material demise. By examining this idea of photography as articulated in literature, film, and the graphic novel, Daguerreotypes demonstrates how photography secures identity for figures with an otherwise unstable sense of self.
J. C. Todd, Fubar, Lucia Press, 2016. A hybrid sonnet/flash fiction, FUBAR features a female physician and captain in the U.S. Air Force deployed in Iraq. Todd created this book in collaboration with MaryAnn Miller, a resident book artist at Lafayette College.
Elly Truitt, Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. In the Middle Ages, robots—in the form of talking statues, mechanical animals, and silent metal guardians—captivated Europe in imagination. Medieval Robots recovers the forgotten history of these fantastical, aspirational, and terrifying machines from their earliest appearances in the Latin West through centuries of mechanical and literary invention.
Jennifer Harford Vargas (Ed.), Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination, Duke University Press, 2016. The first sustained critical examination of the work of Dominican-American writer Junot Díaz, this interdisciplinary collection considers how his writing illuminates the world of Latino cultural expression and trans-American and diasporic literary history. Essays explore issues of narration, language, and humor in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the racialized constructions of gender and sexuality in Drown and This Is How You Lose Her, and the role of the zombie in the short story "Monstro."