Why has the turn of the twenty-first century been rocked by a new religious rebellion? From al Qaeda to Christian militias to insurgents in Iraq, a strident new religious activism has seized the imaginations of political rebels around the world. With his new book, Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State, from Christian Militias to al Qæda, Mark Juergensmeyer provides an up-to-date road map through this complex new religious terrain. He has been a frequent commentator in the news media, including CNN, NBC, CBS, BBC, NPR, Fox News, ABC's Politically Incorrect, and CNBC's Dennis Miller Show.

“Is religion the problem, or is religion the solution?
Is religion a harm to global ethics, or does it provide a healing touch?”
— Mark Juergensmeyer

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Art Basel Miami Beach powerfully represents the phenomenal expansion of contemporary art fairs since they began in 1967. While the first of the modern fairs was a small, cooperative venture, today's international art fairs profoundly influence cultural tourism and the business of buying and selling contemporary art. "Art Basel Miami Beach and the Culture of the Art Fair" looks at the artists and the galleries as they have been, as they are at this year's ABMB, and as they are likely to be in the future.

Laura Knott develops and manages exhibitions at the MIT Museum and teaches "Money and Ethics in the Contemporary Art World" at Tufts University. She holds a Master's degree from MIT in Visual Studies. Ms. Knott's career as an artist includes presentations at the documenta exhibition, online, and on public television. She is the editor of a book about Sky Art and the author of articles about contemporary art and museum practice.

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Temple Grandin is one of the world’s most accomplished and well known adults with autism. In 2010, she was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of the Year. She lectures to parents and teachers throughout the U.S. on her experiences with autism.

“Every school, large or small, with the responsibility of educating children with autism or Asperger’s
needs the guidance this book [The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism and Asperger's] offers...”
— Ruth Christ Sullivan, former president
of the Autism Society of America

Dr. Grandin is the author of four books, including the national bestsellers Thinking in Pictures and Animals in Translation. Her most recent book is The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism and Asperger’s. The 2010 HBO movie based on her life, starring Claire Danes, received seven Emmy Awards.

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A Caribbean Accent to Shakespeare’s Voice is a book of quotations, stories, “translations” of many of Shakespeare’s famous utterances and topics—from love and friendship to the supernatural—embellished by riveting Caribbean characters and scenes.

Born in Montserrat and having grown up in Antigua, Dr. Delpha Charles coined the word AfroCaro to describe herself and Caribbean natives of African descent. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Miami; she received her M.A. from NYU and her B.A. from Howard. She was a Professor of English for twenty years at Miami-Dade College and a Professor of English at Oakwood College, Huntsville.

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King Lear is replete with arresting stage tableaux: the aged king himself and his Fool, the naked body of Edgar disguised as Poor Tom of Bedlam, the mad Lear buffeted by the storm, Lear holding the dead body of Cordelia.

The 10,000 digitized Shakespeare images of the Folger picture archive provide an illustrated history of interpretation and reception including many examples from King Lear. What these images show us, however, is that in their efforts to render a true portrait of Shakespeare's Lear, every theatrical age ends up representing itself.

Gail Kern Paster was Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library from 2002 to 2011. The Folger houses the world’s largest collection of Shakespeare materials; as director, Paster made the Folger's materials more accessible to the public and strengthened its educational mission. She is the author of The Idea of the City and the Age of Shakespeare and Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage; she served as president of the Shakespeare Association of America and editor of Shakespeare Quarterly.

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In her provocative book, Brunelleschi's Egg: Nature, Art and Gender in Renaissance Italy, Mary D. Garrard brings an art historical perspective to the transition that was underway during the Renaissance in the idea of nature —the physical universe and its operations — from an organism imbued with a mind or a soul to a "scientific" conception of the world as a machine that lacks intelligence. This transition was accompanied and assisted by the metaphorical equation of nature with the female, lending rational support to the objectification and exploitation of nature. Taking her examples from the works of the major artists of Florence, Rome, and Venice, such as Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Titian, Garrard shows that the elevation of male-dominated visual arts and the idea of art and culture as masculine spheres depended upon the representation of nature as a female Other to be overcome.

“Brunelleschi’s Egg is an immensely stimulating, thought-provoking book that represents a major contribution to Renaissance studies.”
—Renaissance Quarterly

Professor Garrard is best known for her groundbreaking feminist scholarship that has illuminated art of the Italian Renaissance-Baroque period. Her publications include two books and other writings on Artemisia Gentileschi, work that pioneered modern scholarship on a major 17th-century Italian artist. With Norma Broude, she co-edited four books on feminism and art history that have become basic texts in American universities. Garrard has lectured extensively on Renaissance art and feminist issues in universities, colleges and museums across the country.

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Focusing on Macbeth, Professor Stimpson will discuss how the humanities are crucial in arriving at complex understandings of war in its multifarious manifestations. Wars inspire documentation, invention, and creativity; and historical and literary analysis as well as interdisciplinary and transdiscplinary work in Trauma Studies — bringing together psychoanalysis and psychology, history, law, and medicine — helps us in healing the wounds of war. With new tools of research and communication — e.g., electronic and digital — the practitioners of the liberal arts are more prepared than ever to explore, describe, and explain war, as well as to widely distribute the resulting ideas and information, enabling us to arrive at a deeper awareness of history and self-recognition through such endeavors.

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Amitav Ghosh is one of India's best-known writers. Born in Calcutta, he studied in Delhi, Alexandria, and Oxford, where he earned a doctorate in Anthropology. Ghosh’s books include The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, Incendiary Circumstances, The Hungry Tide, as well as Sea of Poppies and The River of Smoke which are the first two volumes of the Ibis trilogy.

Among the awards that Amitav Ghosh’s books have received are India’s Sahitya Akademi Award, the Ananda Puraskar, the IndiaPlaza Golden Quill Award, and the Crossword Book Award, Britain’s Arthur C. Clarke Award as well as France’s Prix Médicis.

“...a writer with a historical awareness and an appetite for polyphony that are equal to the immense demands of the material he seeks to illuminate...”
— Chandrahas Choudhury,
The New York Times Book Review

Amitav Ghosh’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages. His essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New Republic and The New York Times. He has taught in many universities in India and the USA, including Delhi University, Columbia, Harvard, and Queens College. He was the recipient of a Dan David Award for 2010, which recognizes achievements that shape and enrich society today.

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Anthony Grafton is Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University. His special interests lie in the cultural history of Renaissance Europe, the history of books and readers, the history of scholarship and education in the West from antiquity to the 19th century, and the history of science from antiquity to the Renaissance.

“...Anthony Grafton is the acknowledged master
of his craft. We look to him to set standards for
the rest of us to follow.”
— Keith Thomas, The New York Review of Books

Professor Grafton is the author of ten books and the coauthor, editor, coeditor, or translator of nine others. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1989), the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (1993), the Balzan Prize for History of Humanities (2002), and the Mellon Foundation’s Distinguished Achievement Award (2003), and is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the British Academy. In 2011 he served as President of the American Historical Association.