Book Talks are designed to give UM faculty with a humanities focus an opportunity to share their recently published books with the community. Faculty generally present on their research and take questions from the audience. We're back @ Books & Books! (265 Aragon Ave, Coral Gables, FL 33134) Please join us for Book Talks this academic year! Please RSVP for the program to allow for set-up. Programs take place on Monday evenings, starting at 6:30pm. Associate Professor of Cinematic Arts and Associate Dean of Inclusion and Outreach Josephine Baker, the first Black woman to star in a major motion picture, was both liberated and delightfully undignified, playfully vacillating between allure and colonialist stereotyping. Terri Francis is Associate Professor of Cinematic Arts and Associate Dean of Inclusion and Outreach. Dr. Francis brings twenty years of experience in film exhibition to her role. In Miami, she plans to create events and discussions that explore archives and the moving image based on her explorations of global black film history. Dr. Francis is the author of Josephine Baker’s Cinematic Prism published by Indiana University Press in 2021. A scholar of Black film history and aesthetics, her writing and curating engages film archives, film feelings, and the vicissitudes of performance and representation within a global perspective. Currently, her introduction to “Josephine Baker, Queen of Paris” is streaming on the Criterion Channel. Dr. Francis has published her research on Jamaican nontheatrical films as “Sounding the Nation: Martin Rennalls and the Jamaica Film Unit, 1951-1961” in Film History. In 2013, she guest-edited a special section on Afrosurrealism in the journal Black Camera. Her critical essays appear in Transition, Another Gaze, and Salon.com, and she has provided film commentary for National Public Radio. Professor, Cinematic Arts, School of Communication The Holiday in His Eye: Stanley Cavell's Vision of Film and Philosophy Stanley Cavell is widely considered one of the most important modern American philosophers. From The World Viewed to Cities of Words, writing about movies was strand over strand with Stanley Cavell's philosophical work. Cavell was one of the first philosophers in the United States to make film a significant focus of his thought, and William Rothman has long been one of his most astute readers. The Holiday in His Eye collects Rothman's writings about Cavell—many of them previously unpublished—to offer a lucid, serious introduction to and overview of Cavell's work, the influence of which has been somewhat limited by both the intrinsic difficulty of his ideas and his challenging prose style. In these engaging and accessible yet philosophically serious and rigorously argued essays, Rothman presents an original, insightful, and compelling vision of the trajectory of Cavell's oeuvre, one that takes Cavell's kinship with Emerson as inextricably bound up with his ever-deepening thinking about movies. William Rothman is Professor of Cinema Arts. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard, where he was an Associate Professor in Visual and Environmental Studies (1976-84), and was Director of the International Honors Program on Film, Television and Social Change in Asia (1986-90). Dr. Rothman was the founding editor and Series Editor of Harvard University Press’s “Harvard Film Studies” series, and for many years was Series Editor of Cambridge University Press’s “Studies in Film.” His books include the landmark study Hitchcock—The Murderous Gaze (1982; expanded edition 2012), The “I” of the Camera (1988; expanded edition 2004); Documentary Film Classics (1997); A Philosophical Perspective on Film (2000); Cavell on Film (2005); Jean Rouch: A Celebration of Life and Film (2007); Three Documentary Filmmakers (2009); Must We Kill the Thing We Love? Emersonian Perfectionism and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock (2014); Looking with Robert Gardner (2016); Tuitions and Intuitions: Essays at the Intersection of Film and Philosophy (2019); and The Holiday in His Eye: Stanley Cavell’s Vision of Film and Philosophy (2021). He has also contributed chapters to more than sixty books and dozens of essays in the major film studies journals, and liner notes and visual essays to Criterion DVDs of classic films. He has given keynote addresses and special invited lectures in over thirty countries in the Americas, Europe, and Asia as well as Australia and New Zealand. With his wife, Kitty Morgan, Dr. Rothman wrote and co-produced (with the National Film Development Corporation of India) the 35mm feature film Unni (1990), directed by the distinguished Indian director G. Aravindan. Professor Emerita, English This book investigates early modern women’s interventions in politics and the public sphere during times of civil war in England and France. Taking this transcultural and comparative perspective, and the period designation “early modern” expansively, Antigone’s Example identifies a canon of women’s civil-war writings; it elucidates their historical specificity as well as the transhistorical context of civil war, a context which, it argues, enabled women’s participation in political thought. “A beautifully written book by one of the leading experts in the field, this is a major contribution on women’s political texts, one that raises vital questions about the history, genres, and chronologies of European political thought, and one that will shape future debate.”—Amanda Capern, editor, Routledge History of Women in Early Modern Europe “This is a major work of comparative literary and cultural history. Deeply researched, strikingly illustrated, and cogently argued, the book makes a compelling case for revising Giorgio Agamben’s influential notion of a “state of exception” in the light of women’s subaltern perspectives and persuasively argues for the importance of Machiavelli for women’s political writings. Suzuki’s book illuminates a rich set of women writers’ views of themselves as political counsellors who used their literary skills to evade censorship and thus speak truth to power.”—Margaret W. Ferguson, author, Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France “Expertly written and theoretically rich, this book fundamentally challenges the masculinity of political thought and deepens our understanding of the meaning and impact of civil war. Antigone’s Example is truly a field-defining book by its leading scholar.”—Joanne Wright, author, Origin Stories in Political Thought: Discourses on Gender, Power, and Citizenship; coeditor, Feminist Interpretations of Thomas Hobbes. Mihoko Suzuki is Professor of English and Cooper Fellow in the Humanities, Emerita at the University of Miami. Her authored and edited books include Metamorphoses of Helen: Authority, Difference, and the Epic; Subordinate Subjects: Gender, the Political Nation, and Literary Form in England, 1588-1688; The Rule of Women in Early Modern Europe; and Debating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500-1700. She served as coeditor of Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal and currently coedits Renaissance Quarterly and a book series, New Transculturalisms, 1400-1800. Professor, Modern Languages and Literatures Jamón and Halal: Lessons in Tolerance from Rural Andalucía Contemporary Spain reflects broader patterns of globalization and has been the site of tensions between nationalists and immigrants. This case study examines a rural town in Spain’s Andalucía in order to shed light on the workings of coexistence. The town of Órgiva’s diverse population includes hippies from across Europe, European converts to Sufi Islam, and immigrants from North Africa. Christina Civantos combines the analysis of written and visual cultural texts with oral narratives from residents. In this book, we see that although written and especially televisual narratives about the town highlight tolerance and multiculturalism, they mask tensions and power differentials. Toleration is an ongoing negotiation and this book shows us how we can identify the points of contact that create robust, respect-based tolerance. Christina Civantos is in Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Miami. She is the author of Between Argentines and Arabs: Argentine Orientalism, Arab Immigrants, and the Writing of Identity (SUNY) and The Afterlife of al-Andalus: Muslim Iberia in Contemporary Arab and Hispanic Narratives (SUNY). Associate Professor, Modern Languages and Literatures Marginality Beyond Return: US Cuban Performances in the 1980s and 1990s Lillian Manzor analyzes early plays by Magali Alabau, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, María Irene Fornés, Eduardo Machado, Manuel Martín Jr., and Carmelita Tropicana as well as these playwrights’ participation in three foundational Latine theater projects --INTAR’s Hispanic Playwrights-in-Residence Laboratory in New York (1980-1991), Hispanic Playwrights Project at South Coast Repertory Theater in Costa Mesa, CA (1986-2004), and The Latino Theater Initiative at Center Theater Group's Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles (1992-2005). She also studies theatrical projects of reconciliation among Cubans on and off the island in the early 2000s. Demonstrating the foundational nature of these artists and projects, the book argues that US Cuban theater problematizes both the exile and Cuban-American paradigms. By investigating US Cuban theater, the author theorizes via performance, ways in which we can intervene in and reformulate political and representational positionings within the context of hybrid cultural identities. Lillian Manzor is an associate professor of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Miami's College of Arts and Sciences, Faculty lead for Latin American and Caribbean Research at the University of Miami Institute for Advanced Study of the Americas, USA, and founding director of the Cuban Theater Digital Archive. This program is co-sponsored by the Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries. Distinguished Professor and Cooper Fellow, College of Arts and Sciences Racism, Activism, and Integrity in College Football: The Bates Must Play Movement It was a front-page story in the New York Times that New York University decided to honor seven students who, sixty years earlier, the University disciplined and punished. The Bates 7, as the protest leaders became known, took constructive action when rumors spread in the fall of 1940 that black star running back Len Bates was going to be left behind when the football team ventured down to Columbia, Missouri to play the University of Missouri Tigers. They heard that Missouri invoked the gentlemen's agreement and would not allow an interracial sporting event in Columbia. The protests grew in size, eventually numbering thousands of protesters, and impacted collegiate athletics throughout the nation. The Bates 7 protest made a significant contribution to the national civil rights movement that would follow. This is the first and only book-length account of the protests that occurred at NYU that helped to change college sports forever. It is the story of Len Bates and the seven brave students who did not compromise in their fight against Jim Crow in college football. The study is based on extensive and exclusive interviews with Len Bates and the Bates 7 and in-depth research into the movement and the era. Donald Spivey is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Miami and Special Advisor to the President on Racial Justice. He is the author or editor of ten books, including the award winning If You Were Only White: The Life of Leroy "Satchel" Paige. Associate Professor, Modern Languages and Literatures Cantidades Hechizadas y Silogísticas del Sobresalto: La Secreta Ciencia de José Lezama Lima Arguably the most important Cuban writer of the twentieth century, José Lezama Lima (1910–1976) is well-known as a poet, essayist, cultural promoter, and novelist, but not as a scientist. In fact, there is no evidence of any concrete relationship between him and any pure science discipline. How then it is possible to establish connections between Lezama’s literary works and the disciplines of science? How are certain scientific discoveries and developments, such as the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, modern logic, thermodynamics, or the big bang theory, embraced in the cultural imaginary of Cuba during the first half of the twentieth century? And finally, how do those scientific discoveries and developments inform Lezama’s aesthetic production? Grounded in his disciplinary experience in both literary and mathematical studies, Vargas attempts to unearth the overlaps and connections between science and art, thus offering a new critical apparatus with which scholars can study Lezama’s works. In this book, he provides a close reading of Lezama´s narrative works, including his two novels—Paradiso and Oppiano Licario—as well as Lezama’s essays, press articles, and interviews. The author also examines the catalog of Lezama´s personal library, revealing that his poetics are based on an original and fascinating appropriation of concepts, problems, solutions, and rhetorical devices in science. Ómar Vargas is an assistant professor of Spanish in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Miami where he has been a faculty member since 2015. Vargas completed his PhD in Spanish American literature at the University of Texas at Austin and his undergraduate studies in mathematics at Universidad Nacional de Colombia. His research interests focus on the relationships between scientific discoveries and developments, and the narrative fiction of Latin America and the Caribbean in twentieth and twenty-first centuries, particularly in the cases of authors such as José Lezama Lima, Jorge Luis Borges, Salvador Elizondo, and Gabriel García Márquez. He is currently exploring the transition of the scientist to a writer in the case of Argentine author Ernesto Sábato. He has published in Latin American Literary Review, Ciberletras, The Borges Center, Revista Revolución y Cultura, Nueva Revista del Pacífico, and La Habana Elegante. Assistant Professor, English Botanical Poetics: Early Modern Plant Books and the Husbandry of Print During the middle years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, the number of books published with titles that described themselves as flowers, gardens, or forests more than tripled. During those same years, English printers turned out scores of instructional manuals on gardening and husbandry, retailing useful knowledge to a growing class of literate landowners and pleasure gardeners. Both trends, Jessica Rosenberg shows, reflected a distinctive style of early modern plant-thinking, one that understood both plants and poems as composites of small pieces—slips or seeds to be recirculated by readers and planters. Jessica Rosenberg is Associate Professor of English at the University of Miami. She specializes in early modern literature and culture, with a particular focus on the history of science and the history of the book. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Pennsylvania and MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge. Professor of African American & African Diaspora Studies, Columbia University (Previously Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Global Black Studies, University of Miami) There's a Disco Ball Between Us: A Theory of Black Gay Life In There’s a Disco Ball Between Us, Jafari S. Allen offers a sweeping and lively ethnographic and intellectual history of what he calls “Black gay habits of mind.” In conversational and lyrical language, Allen locates this sensibility as it emerged from radical Black lesbian activism and writing during the long 1980s. He traverses multiple temporalities and locations, drawing on research and fieldwork conducted across the globe, from Nairobi, London, and Paris to Toronto, Miami, and Trinidad and Tobago. In these locations and archives, Allen traces the genealogies of Black gay politics and cultures in the visual art, poetry, film, Black feminist theory, historiography, and activism of thinkers and artists such as Audre Lorde, Marsha P. Johnson, Essex Hemphill, Colin Robinson, Marlon Riggs, Pat Parker, and Joseph Beam. Throughout, Allen renarrates Black queer history while cultivating a Black gay method of thinking and writing. In so doing, he speaks to the urgent contemporary struggles for social justice while calling on Black studies to pursue scholarship, art, and policy derived from the lived experience and fantasies of Black people throughout the world. Jafari S. Allen is Professor of African American & African Diaspora Studies, Columbia University (Previously Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Global Black Studies at the University of Miami University of Miami) as well as author of ¡Venceremos? The Erotics of Black Self-making in Cuba, also published by Duke University PressBook Talks 2022-2023
Tuesday, September 6, 2022 at 6:30 PM
Books & Books, Coral Gables
Terri Francis
University of Miami Josephine Baker's Cinematic Prism
Nicknamed the "Black Venus," "Black Pearl," and "Creole Goddess," Baker blended the sensual and the comedic when taking 1920s Europe by storm. Back home in the United States, Baker's film career brought hope to the Black press that a new cinema centered on Black glamour would come to fruition. In Josephine Baker's Cinematic Prism, Terri Simone Francis examines how Baker fashioned her celebrity through cinematic reflexivity, an authorial strategy in which she placed herself, her persona, and her character into visual dialogue. Francis contends that though Baker was an African American actress who lived and worked in France exclusively with a white film company, white costars, white writers, and white directors, she holds monumental significance for African American cinema as the first truly global Black woman film star. Francis also examines the double-talk between Baker and her characters in Le Pompier de Folies Bergère, La Sirène des Tropiques, Zou Zou, Princesse Tam Tam, and The French Way, whose narratives seem to undermine the very stardom they offered. In doing so, Francis artfully illuminates the most resonant links between emergent African American cinephilia, the diverse opinions of Baker in the popular press, and African Americans' broader aspirations for progress toward racial equality.
Examining an unexplored aspect of Baker's career, Josephine Baker's Cinematic Prism deepens the ongoing conversation about race, gender, and performance in the African diaspora.
Monday, September 26, 2022 at 6:30 PM
Books & Books, Coral Gables
William Rothman
University of Miami
Monday, October 24, 2022 at 6:30 PM
Mihoko Suzuki
University of Miami Antigone's Example: Early Modern Women's Political Writing in Times of Civil War from Christine de Pizan to Helen Maria Williams
Monday, December 5, 2022 at 6:30 PM
Christina Civantos
University of Miami
Monday, January 30, 2023 at 6:30 PM
Lillian Manzor
University of Miami
Monday, Februrary 27, 2023 at 6:30 PM
Donald Spivey
University of Miami
Monday, March 20, 2023 at 6:30 PM
Omar Vargas
University of Miami
Monday, April 3, 2022 at 6:30 PM
Jessica Rosenberg
University of Miami
Botanical Poetics brings together studies of ecology, science, literary form, and the material text to explore how these developments transformed early modern conceptions of nature, poetic language, and the printed book. Drawing on little-studied titles in horticulture and popular print alongside poetry by Shakespeare, Spenser, and others, Rosenberg reveals how early modern print used a botanical idiom to anticipate histories of its own reading and reception, whether through replanting, uprooting, or fantasies of common property and proliferation. While our conventional narratives of English literary culture in this period see reading as an increasingly private practice, and literary production as more and more of an authorial domain, Botanical Poetics uncovers an alternate tradition: of commonplaces and common ground, of slips of herbs and poetry circulated, shared, and multiplied.
Monday, April 17, 2023 at 6:30 PM
Jafari Allen
Book Talks are designed to give UM faculty with a humanities focus an opportunity to share their recently published books with the community. Faculty generally present on their research and take questions from the audience. Under normal circumstances, Book Talks take place at Books & Books: 265 Aragon Ave, Coral Gables, FL 33134. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Book Talks will take place online. The link to join each Book Talk webinar will be posted below as they become available. Professor, History Although King John is remembered for his political and military failures, he also resided over a magnificent court. Power and Pleasure reconstructs life at the court of King John and explores how his court produced both pleasure and soft power. Hugh Thomas received his B.A. from Yale University in 1982 and stayed on there for his Ph.D., which he received in 1988. He specializes in the history of Medieval Europe and of England. His first book, Vassals, Crusaders, Heiresses, and Thugs: The Gentry of Angevin Yorkshire, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 1993, and his second, The English and the Normans: Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation and Identity after the Norman Conquest, 1066-c. 1220, by Oxford University Press in 2003. His third book, The Norman Conquest: England after William the Conqueror appeared in 2008, and is a textbook on the Norman Conquest and its impact. A fourth book, on the clergy in twelfth-century England, was published by Oxford University Press in 2014. He has also published a number of articles in various journals, including the English Historical Review, and is now working on a book on the social and cultural history of the court of King John, 1199-1216. He has received research fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania, the National Humanities Center, Oxford University, and the Shelby Cullom Davis Center at Princeton University. He has also received funding from the ACLS and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In fall, 2017 he had a Fulbright in the UK, where he was a visiting professor at King’s College, London. He has given numerous papers throughout the U.S. and abroad. Besides a variety of courses on the Middle Ages, Thomas teaches Western Civilization and a course on Religious War and Tolerance in the Western Religious Traditions. Since fall, 2018, he has been director of The Center for the Humanities at UM. Associate Professor, Religious Studies Conventional approaches to the Synoptic gospels argue that the gospel authors acted as literate spokespersons for their religious communities. Whether described as documenting intragroup “oral traditions” or preserving the collective perspectives of their fellow Christ-followers, these writers are treated as something akin to the Romantic Poets speaking for their Volk – a questionable framework inherited from nineteenth-century German Romanticism. In this book, Robyn Faith Walsh argues that the Synoptic gospels were written by elite cultural producers working within a dynamic cadre of literate specialists, including persons who may or may not have been professed Christians. Comparing a range of ancient literature, her groundbreaking study demonstrates that the gospels are creative works produced by educated elites interested in Judean teachings, practices, and paradoxographical subjects in the aftermath of the Jewish War and in dialogue with the literature of their age. Walsh’s study thus bridges the artificial divide between research on the Synoptic gospels and classics. Robyn Faith Walsh is Associate Professor of the New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of Miami, Coral Gables. An editor at the Database of Religious History, her articles have appeared in The Classical Quarterly and Jewish Studies Quarterly, among other publications. Assistant Professor, Modern Languages and Literatures This book takes a hemispheric approach to contemporary urban intervention, examining urban ecologies, communication technologies, and cultural practices in the twenty-first century. It argues that governmental and social regimes of control and forms of political resistance converge in speculation on disaster and that this convergence has formed a vision of urban environments in the Americas in which forms of play and imaginations of catastrophe intersect in the vertical field. Schifani explores a diverse range of resistant urban interventions, imagining the city as on the verge of or enmeshed in catastrophe. She also presents a model of ecocriticism that addresses aesthetic practices and forms of play in the urban environment. Tracing the historical roots of such tactics as well as mapping their hopes for the future will help the reader to locate the impacts of climate change not only on the physical space of the city, but also on the epistemological and aesthetic strategies that cities can help to engender. Allison Schifani is Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Miami. Her research and writing focus on the intersections of the urban, the literary, the technological, and the ecological. Her book Urban Ecology and Intervention and the 21st Century Americas was published by Routledge earlier this year. Her work has also appeared in Media Fields, The Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction and elsewhere. Allison Schifani Assistant Professor, English A timely, politically savvy examination of how impossible disasters shape the very real possibilities of our world Why would the normally buttoned-down national security state imagine lurid future scenarios like a zombie apocalypse? In Training for Catastrophe, author Lindsay Thomas shows how our security regime reimagines plausibility to focus on unlikely and even unreal events rather than probable ones. With an in-depth focus on preparedness (a pivotal, emergent national security paradigm since 9/11) she explores how fiction shapes national security. Thomas finds fiction at work in unexpected settings, from policy documents and workplace training manuals to comics and video games. Through these texts—as well as plenty of science fiction—she examines the philosophy of preparedness, interrogating the roots of why it asks us to treat explicitly fictional events as real. Thomas connects this philosophical underpinning to how preparedness plays out in contemporary politics, emphasizing how it uses aesthetic elements like realism, genre, character, and plot to train people both to regard some disasters as normal and to ignore others. Training for Catastrophe makes an important case for how these documents elicit consent and compliance. Thomas draws from a huge archive of texts—including a Centers for Disease Control comic about a zombie apocalypse, the work of Audre Lorde, and the political thrillers of former national security advisor Richard Clarke—to ask difficult questions about the uses and values of fiction. A major statement on how national security intrudes into questions of art and life, Training for Catastrophe is a timely intervention into how we confront disasters. Lindsay Thomas is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Miami. She is also a principal investigator for WhatEvery1Says, a large-scale digital humanities project that explores public discourse about the humanities. Lindsay Thomas Associate Professor, Modern Languages and Literatures This book provides readers with a study of the characteristics that make life unique for sexual minorities in Brazil while also viewing Brazil in relation to global LGBT sociopolitical movements. It critically assesses the complex relationship(s) between the visual arts and political activism, carefully analyzing artistic, cinematic, and photographic representations of LGBTQ identities. Brazil provides a useful case to example, with the cultivation of ambiguity in contemporary (re)constructions of queer life. In this book, the author conducts the first comprehensive discourse analysis of the dynamics and features of the largest LGBT Pride Parade in the world. This problematizes and analyzes the relationship between burgeoning critical socio-political movements and institutions and the language and new media discourses used to configure and conceptualize them. The aim of this project is to create a theoretical scholarly framework promoting linkages between political activism and academic scholarship and by using discourse analysis, the intricacies of terminology Brazilian sexual minorities adopt and adapt, illustrating the development of LGBTQ identities through performative language use. Steven F. Butterman is Associate Professor of Portuguese and Director of the Portuguese Language Program at the University of Miami, where he has also directed the Women's and Gender Studies program, served as coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Studies programs and developed the minor in LGBTQ Studies. Steve Butterman Associate Professor, History The Fiume Crisis recasts what we know about the birth of fascism, the rise of nationalism, and the fall of empire after World War I by telling the story of the three-year period when the Adriatic city of Fiume (today Rijeka, in Croatia) generated an international crisis. In 1919 the multicultural former Habsburg city was occupied by the paramilitary forces of the flamboyant poet-soldier Gabriele D’Annunzio, who aimed to annex the territory to Italy and became an inspiration to Mussolini. Many local Italians supported the effort, nurturing a standard tale of nationalist fanaticism. However, Dominique Kirchner Reill shows that practical realities, not nationalist ideals, were in the driver’s seat. Support for annexation was largely a result of the daily frustrations of life in a “ghost state” set adrift by the fall of the empire. D’Annunzio’s ideology and proto-fascist charisma notwithstanding, what the people of Fiume wanted was prosperity, which they associated with the autonomy they had enjoyed under Habsburg sovereignty. In these twilight years between the world that was and the world that would be, many across the former empire sought to restore the familiar forms of governance that once supported them. To the extent that they turned to nation-states, it was not out of zeal for nationalist self-determination but in the hope that these states would restore the benefits of cosmopolitan empire. Against the too-smooth narrative of postwar nationalism, The Fiume Crisis demonstrates the endurance of the imperial imagination and carves out an essential place for history from below. Dominique Kirchner Reill is Associate Professor in Modern European History at the University of Miami and author of the award-winning Nationalists Who Feared the Nation: Adriatic Multi-Nationalism in Habsburg Dalmatia, Trieste, and Venice. Dominique Reill Assistant Professor, Religious Studies Islam's fourth caliph, Ali, can be considered one of the most revered figures in Islamic history. His nearly universal portrayal in Muslim literature as a pious authority obscures centuries of contestation and the eventual rehabilitation of his character. In this book, Nebil Husayn examines the enduring legacy of the nawasib, early Muslims who disliked Ali and his descendants. The nawasib participated in politics and scholarly discussions on religion at least until the ninth century. However, their virtual disappearance in Muslim societies has led many to ignore their existence and the subtle ways in which their views subsequently affected Islamic historiography and theology. By surveying medieval Muslim literature across multiple genres and traditions including the Sunni, Mu'tazili, and Ibadi, Husayn reconstructs the claims and arguments of the nawasib and illuminates the methods that Sunni scholars employed to gradually rehabilitate the image of Ali from a villainous character to a righteous one. Nebil Husayn (PhD) teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Miami. His research explores authoritarianism in the Middle East, debates on the caliphate, and the development of Islamic thought. Husayn also serves as a Senior Research Advisor for Mipsterz, an arts and culture collective curating, enabling, and amplifying artists of marginalized backgrounds through illustration, film, and music. He is the recipient of a Fulbright award and the University of Miami Fellowship in the Arts and Humanities. Husayn obtained his Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University and an M.A. in Arabic and Islamic Studies from Harvard University. He is the author of Opposing the Imam (Cambridge University Press, 2021), which examines the history of early Muslims who were hostile to Islam's fourth caliph, Ali, and his descendants. Nebil Husayn Lecturer, English Composition Nathaniel Deyo's book offers close, detailed reading of well-known noirs, taking the full measure of their formal and stylistic achievements above and beyond their enactment of some pre-established understanding of what it means--formally or ideologically--to be a "film noir." The text also considers noir in the popular imaginations, as a fetish object for both online cinephile communities and a point of reference for decidely non-cinephile media objects. Expanding upon and challenging existing academic discourse surrounding noir, the author refuses to "flatten" the films under consideration into a single, homogenous text. Nathaniel Deyo is a Lecturer of English Composition and tutors students in the UM Writing Center. Deyo began working at the University of Miami in 2018 after receiving his PhD in English Language and Literature/Letters from the University of Florida. Nathaniel Deyo Professor, English Focusing on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Robinson and Mary Shelley, this book uses key concepts of androgyny, subjectivity and the re-creative as a productive framework to trace the fascinating textual interactions and dialogues among these authors. It crosses the boundary between male and female writers of the Romantic period by linking representations of gender with late Enlightenment upheavals regarding creativity and subjectivity, demonstrating how these interrelated concerns dismantle traditional binaries separating the canonical and the noncanonical; male and female; poetry and prose; good and evil; subject and object. Kathryn Freeman is Professor in English at the University of Miami who specializes in the fields of British Romanticism, Orientalism, Blake studies, and women't literature. Freeman received her PhD from Yale in 1990 and is the author of Blake’s Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in The Four Zoas (SUNY 1997); Women Writers and the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1785-1835: Re-Orienting Anglo-India (Ashgate 2014); related articles on Sydney Owenson’s The Missionary; on Phebe Gibbes’ Hartly House, Calcutta; and on the translations of William Jones and Charles Wilkins; and A Guide to William Blake (Routledge 2017). Rethinking the Romantic Era: Androgynous Subjectivity and the Re-creative in the Writings of Mary Robinson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Mary Shelley studies literary influence across gender and generation (Bloomsbury 2021). Her current book project, Nationalism, Gender, and Subjectivity in the Novels of Phebe Gibbes, charts the career of this overlooked writer whose incisive fiction gestures ahead to Wollstonecraft and Austen in its social commentary and subversion of the sentimental novel. Kathryn Freeman Professor, History; and Cooper Fellow, College of Arts and Sciences Location: Lakeside Pavilion, University of Miami Coral Gables Campus, 1280 Stanford Drive, Coral Gables, FL 33146. [See map below] In-person: Register here. | Virtual: Register here. For Florentines, the world seemed to be coming to an end. In 1348 the first wave of the Black Death swept across the Italian city, reducing its population from more than 100,000 to less than 40,000. The disease would eventually kill at least half of the population of Europe. Amid the devastation, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron was born. One of the masterpieces of world literature, the Decameron has captivated centuries of readers with its vivid tales of love, loyalty, betrayal, and sex. Despite the death that overwhelmed Florence, Boccaccio’s collection of novelle was, in Guido Ruggiero’s words, a “symphony of life." Love and Sex in the Time of Plague guides twenty-first-century readers back to Boccaccio's world to recapture how his work sounded to fourteenth-century ears. Through insightful discussions of the Decameron's cherished stories and deep portraits of Florentine culture, Ruggiero explores love and sexual relations in a society undergoing convulsive change. In the century before the plague arrived, Florence had become one of the richest and most powerful cities in Europe. With the medieval nobility in decline, a new polity was emerging, driven by Il Popolo--the people, fractious and enterprising. Boccaccio's stories had a special resonance in this age of upheaval, as Florentines sought new notions of truth and virtue to meet both the despair and the possibility of the moment. Guido Ruggiero is Professor of History and Cooper Fellow of the College of Arts and Sciences. He was born in Danbury, Connecticut and grew up in Webster, New York, a small rural town along the old shore line of Lake Ontario. After earning a B.A. with a heavy focus on ancient history and philosophy at the University of Colorado, he went on to UCLA where as a University of California Regent's Intern Fellow he earned an M.A. (1967) and a Ph.D. (1972). As a Regent's Fellow he began his long love affair with Venice and the Venetian Archives in 1970 and has been returning there for his research ever since. He makes his home in Treviso, Italy, when he is not teaching at UM. Exit Pavia Parking garage and turn left. You will continue straight until you reach the Lakeside Village courtyard. In the courtyard you will see signs directing you into the Lakeside Village Pavilion. Associate Professor, English Ireland’s Great Famine generated Western Europe’s most devastating social crisis of the nineteenth century, a crisis that created enormous and transformational upheaval. In Travel Narratives of the Irish Famine: Politics, Tourism, and Scandal, 1845-1853, author Catherine Nealy Judd proposes that a new literary genre emerged from the crucible of the Great Famine, that is, the Irish Famine travelogue. In her keenly argued and thoroughly researched book, Judd contends that previous scrutiny of Famine travel narratives has been overly broad, peripheral, or has tended to group Famine travelogues into an undi erentiated whole. Judd invites us to consider Famine-era travel narratives as comprising a unique subgenre within the larger discursive - eld of travel literature. Here Judd argues that the immensity of the Famine exerted great pressure on the form, topics, themes, and goals of Famine-era travelogues, and for this reason, Famine travel narratives deserve detailed and organized consideration, as well as critical recognition of their status as an unprecedented subgenre. Drawing on an extensive array of underutilized sources, Travel Narratives of the Irish Famine adumbrates the Irish Famine travelogue canon. Catherine Nealy Judd is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, where she researches and teaches Nineteenth-Century Irish, British, and American historical and literary topics. She earned her MA and PhD degrees from the University of California at Berkeley and is the author of Bedside Seductions: Nursing and the Literary Imagination, 1830-1880, as well as numerous articles and book chapters on such subjects as Henry James and the Civil War and Anthony Trollope’s Famine novel Castle Richmond. Catherine Nealy JuddBook Talks 2021-2022
Wednesday, September 29, 2021 at 8pm
Hugh Thomas
University of MiamiPower and Pleasure: Court Life Under King John, 1119-1216
Much work exists on courts of the late medieval and early modern periods, but the jump in record keeping under John allows a detailed reconstruction of court life for an earlier period. Power and Pleasure: Court Life under King John, 1199-1216 examines the many facets of John's court, exploring hunting, feasting, castles, landscapes, material luxury, chivalry, sexual coercion, and religious activities. It explains how John mishandled his use of soft power, just as he failed to exploit his financial and military advantages, and why he received so little political benefit from his magnificent court. John's court is viewed in comparison to other courts of the time, and in previous and subsequent centuries.
Wednesday, October 13, 2021 at 8:00 PM
Robyn Walsh
University of Miami The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture
Wednesday, October 27, 2021 at 8:00 PM
Allison Schifani
University of Miami Urban Ecology and Intervention in the 21st Century Americas: Verticality, Catastrophe, and the Mediated City
Wednesday, November 10, 2021 at 8:00 PM
Lindsay Thomas
University of Miami Training For Catastrophe:Fictions of National Security after 9/11
Wednesday, December 1, 2021 at 8:00 PM
Steve Butterman
University of Miami Queering and Querying the Paradise of Paradox: LGBT Language, New Media, and Visual Cultures in Modern-Day Brazil
Wednesday, January 26, 2022 at 8:00 PM
Dominique Reill
University of Miami The Fiume Crisis: Life in the Wake of the Habsburg Empire
Wednesday, February 9, 2022 at 8:00 PM
Nebil Husayn
University of Miami Opposing the Imam: The Legacy of the Nawasib in Islamic Literature
Wednesday, March 9, 2022 at 8:00 PM
Nathaniel Deyo
University of Miami Film Noir and the Possibilities of Hollywood
University of Miami
Wednesday, March 23, 2022 at 8:00 PM
Kathryn Freeman
University of Miami Rethinking the Romantic Era: Androgynous Subjectivity and the Recreative in the Writings of Mary Robinson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Mary Shelley
Through the convergences among the writings of Coleridge, Mary Robinson, and Mary Shelley, the book argues that each dismantles and reconfigures subjectivity as androgynous and amoral, subverting the centrality of the male gaze associated with canonical Romanticism. In doing so, it examines key works from each author's oeuvre, from Coleridge's “canonical” poems such as Rime of the Ancient Mariner, through Robinson's lyrical poetry and novels such as Walsingham, to Mary Shelley's fiction, including Frankenstein, Mathilda, and The Last Man.
Wednesday, April 13, 2022 at 8:00 PM
Guido Ruggiero
University of Miami Love and Sex in the Time of Plague | Recording here.
May: Judd
Wednesday, May 4, 2022 at 6:00 PM (updated time)
Catherine Judd
University of Miami Travel Narratives of the Irish Famine: Politics, Tourism, and Scandal, 1845-1853
Associate Professor, Department of Classics Watch to the recording here. Professor, Department of Philosophy Watch to the recording here. View this helpful handout to follow along with the lecture. Professor, Department of Cinema and Interative Media Watch to the recording here. Professor, Department of Musicology Watch to the recording here. Professor and Chair, Department of Philosophy Watch to the recording here. Senior Lecturer of Anthropology and Interim Director, Gender and Sexuality Studies Watch to the recording here. Associate Professor, Art History Watch to the recording here. Professor, Philosophy Watch to the recording here. Professor and Chair, Religious Studies Watch to the recording here. Associate Professor, Modern Languages and Literatures Watch to the recording here. Wednesday, September 16, 2020 at 8:00 PM
Jennifer Ferriss-Hill
University of MiamiTopographies of Caribbean Writing, Race, and the British Countryside
Wednesday, October 7, 2020 at 8:00 PM
Brit Brogaard
University of MiamiHatred: Understanding Our Most Dangerous Emotion
Wednesday, October 28, 2020 at 8:00 PM
Christina Lane
University of MiamiPhantom Lady: Hollywood Producer Joan Harrison, the Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock
Wednesday, November 18, 2020 at 8:00 PM
Melvin Butler
University of MiamiIsland Gospel: Pentecostal Music and Identity in Jamaica and the United States
Wednesday, December 9, 2020 at 8:00 PM
Mark Rowlands
University of MiamiCan Animals Be Persons?
Wednesday, Januay 20, 2021 at 8:00 PM
Claire Oueslati-Porter
University of MiamiGender, Textile Work, and Tunisian Women’s Liberation: Deviating Patterns
Wednesday, February 10, 2021 at 8:00 PM
Heather Diack
University of MiamiDocuments of Doubt: The Photographic Conditions of Conceptual Art
Wednesday, March 3, 2021 at 8:00 PM
Michael Slote
University of MiamiBetween Psychology and Philosophy: East-West Themes and Beyond
Wednesday, March 24, 2021 at 8:00 PM
David Kling
University of MiamiA History of Christian Conversion
Wednesday, April 14, 2021 at 8:00 PM
Logan Connors
University of MiamiThe Emergence of a Theatrical Science of Man in France, 1660-1740
Director of Writing, Department of English Listen to the recording here. Professor of Cinema and Interactive Media Assistant Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures Assistant Professor of Religious Studies Assistant Professor of History Purdue UniversityWednesday, September 11, 2019 at 8:00 PM
Joanna Johnson
University of MiamiTopographies of Caribbean Writing, Race, and the British Countryside
Wednesday, October 23, 2019 at 8:00 PM
Otávio Bueno
Professor and Chair of Philosophy
University of Miami
Applying Mathematics: Immersion, Inference, Interpretation
Wednesday, November 13, 2019 at 8:00 PM
William Rothman
University of MiamiTuitions and Intuitions: Essays at the Intersection of Film Criticism and Philosophy
Wednesday, December 4, 2019 at 8:00 PM
Alexandra Perisic
University of MiamiPrecarious Crossings: Immigration, Neoliberalism, and the Atlantic
Wednesday, January 22, 2020 at 8:00 PM
Catherine Newell
University of MiamiDestined for the Stars: Faith, the Future, and America's Final Frontier
Wednesday, February 19, 2020 at 8:00 PM
Silvia Mitchell
Queen, Mother, & Stateswoman: Mariana of Austria and the Government of Spain
Martin Nesvig (History) Promiscuous Power: An Unorthodox History of New Spain Wednesday, September 5, 2018 Herns Marcellin (Anthropology) and Toni Cela Les jeunes Haïtiens dans les Amériques/ Haitian Youth in the Americas Wednesday, October 10, 2018 Caleb Everett (Anthropology) Numbers and the Making of Us: Counting and the Course of Human Cultures Wednesday, November 7, 2018 Scott Heerman (History) The Alchemy of Slavery: Human Bondage and Emancipation in the Illinois Country, 1730-1865 Wednesday, December 5, 2018 Tim Watson (English) Culture Writing: Literature and Anthropology in the Midcentury Atlantic World Wednesday, February 6, 2019 Justin Ritzinger (Religious Studies) Anarchy in the Pure Land: Reinventing the Cult of Maitreya in Modern Chinese Buddhism Wednesday, March 6, 2019 Viviana Diaz-Balsera (Spanish) Guardians of Idolatry: Gods, Demons, and Priests in Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón’s Treatise on the Heathen Superstitions Wednesday, April 3, 2019
Nathan Timpano (Art & Art History) Wednesday, August 30, 2017 Simon Evnine (Philosophy) Wednesday, October 4, 2017 Christina Civantos (Modern Languages & Literatures) Wednesday, December 6, 2017 Chrissy Arce (Modern Languages & Literatures) Wednesday, January 24, 2018 Pamela Geller (Anthropology) Wednesday, February 21, 2018 Karen Rose Mathews (Art & Art History) Wednesday, March 28, 2018 Rebecca Doran (Modern Languages & Literatures) Wednesday, April 11, 2018
Constructing the Viennese Modern Body: Art, Hysteria, and the Puppet Listen to the Podcast
Making Objects and Events: A Hylomorphic Theory of Artifacts, Actions, and Organisms Listen to the Podcast
The Afterlife of Al-Andalus: Muslim Iberia in Contemporary Arab and Hispanic Narratives
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México’s Nobodies: The Cultural Legacy of the Soldadera and Afro-Mexican Women
The Bioarchaeology of Socio-Sexual Lives: Queering Common Sense About Sex, Gender, and Sexuality
Conflict, Commerce, and an Aesthetic of Appropriation in the Italian Maritime Cities, 1000-1150
Transgressive Typologies: Constructions of Gender & Power in Early Tang China
Kunal Parker (Law) Wednesday, September 7, 2016Watch Livestream Video Carlos Aguirre (Art & Art History) Wednesday, October 26, 2016Watch Livestream Video Stephen Halsey (History) Wednesday, November 2, 2016Watch Livestream Video John Funchion (English) Wednesday, November 9, 2016Watch Livestream Video Kenneth Goodman (UM Bioethics Program) Wednesday, December 7, 2016 Frank Palmeri (English) Wednesday, January 25, 2017Listen to the Podcast Robin Bachin (History) Wednesday, March 8, 2017Listen to the Podcast Bryan Page (Anthropology) Wednesday, April 5, 2017
Making Foreigners: Immigration and Citizenship Law in America, 1600-2000
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Saynatakuna: Máscaras y Transfiguraciones en Paukartambo
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Quest for Power: European Imperialism and the Making of Chinese Statecraft
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Novel Nostalgias: The Aesthetics of Antagonism in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature
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Ethics, Medicine, and Information Technology: Intelligent Machines and the Transformation of Health Care
State of Nature, Stages of Society: Enlightenment Conjectural History and Modern Social Discourse
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Big Bosses: A Working Girl’s Memoir of Jazz Age America
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The Social Value of Drug Addicts: Uses of the Useless
Karl Gunther (History) Wednesday, September 9, 2015 Jennifer Ferriss-Hill (Classics) Wednesday, October 21, 2015 Kathryn Freeman (English) Wednesday, November 11, 2015 Traci Ardren (Anthropology) Wednesday, December 2, 2015 Mary Lindemann (History) Wednesday, January 20, 2016 Amie L. Thomasson (Philosophy) Wednesday, February 10, 2016 Nicholas N. Patricios (Architecture) Wednesday, March 16, 2016 Berit Brogaard (Philosophy) Wednesday, April 13, 2016
Reformation Unbound: Protestant Visions of Reform in England, 1525–1590
Roman Satire and the Old Comic Tradition
British Women Writers and the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1785-1835
Social Identities in the Classic Maya Northern Lowlands: Gender, Age, Memory, and Place
The Merchant Republics: Amsterdam, Antwerp, and Hamburg, 1648–1790
Ontology Made Easy
Heaven on Earth: Byzantine Church Architecture and Art
Superhuman Mind
William Rothman (Communications) Wednesday, September 3, 2014 Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado (Religious Studies) Wednesday, October 1, 2014 Anne J. Cruz (MLL) Wednesday, November 5, 2014 Pamela S. Hammons (English) Wednesday, November 5, 2014 Viviana Díaz Balsera (MLL) and Rachel A. May (co-editor) Wednesday, December 3, 2014 Guido Ruggiero (History) Wednesday, January 21, 2015 Wilson Shearin (Classics) Wednesday, February 11, 2015 Amanullah De Sondy (Religious Studies) Wednesday, March 18, 2015 Hugh Thomas (History) Wednesday, April 15, 2015
Must We Kill the Thing We Love? Emersonian Perfectionism and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock
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A Critical Introduction to Religion in the Americas: Bridging the Liberation Theology and Religious Studies Divide
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The Life and Writings of Luisa de Caravajal
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Katherine Austen's Book M: A London Widow’s Life Writings
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La Florida: Five Hundred Years of Hispanic Presence
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The Renaissance in Italy: A Social and Cultural History of the Rinascimento
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The Language of Atoms: Performativity and Politics in Lucretius' De rerum natura
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The Crisis of Islamic Masculinities
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The Secular Clergy in England 1066-1216
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Donald Spivey (History) Friday, September 6, 2013 Tracy Devine Guzmán (MLL) Wednesday, September 25, 2013 Mark Rowlands (Philosophy) Wednesday, November 13, 2013 David Ikard (English) Wednesday, January 22, 2014 Donald Jones (Law) Fear of a Hip-Hop Planet: America's New Dilemma Wednesday, January 22, 2014 Susanne Woods (English) Milton and the Poetics of Freedom Wednesday, February 26, 2014
"If You Were Only White": The Life of Leroy "Satchel" Paige
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Native and National in Brazil: Indigeneity after Independence
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Running with the Pack: Thoughts from the Road on Meaning and Mortality
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Blinded by the Whites: Why Race Still Matters in 21st Century America
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Casey Klofstad (Political Science) Friday, September 7, 2012 Joel Nickels (English) Wednesday, October 3, 2012 Michael B. Miller (History) Wednesday, November 7, 2012 Brenna Munro (English) Wednesday, November 28, 2012
Civic Talk: Peers, Politics, and the Future of Democracy
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The Poetry of the Possible: Spontaneity, Modernism, and the Multitude
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Europe and the Maritime World: A Twentieth-Century History
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South Africa and the Dream of Love to Come: Queer Sexuality and the Struggle for Freedom
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Jan Nijman (Geography and Regional Studies) September 2, 2011 Kunal Parker (Law) Monday, September 19, 2011 Kate Ramsey (History) Wednesday, October 12, 2011 Barbara Woshinsky (Modern Languages and Literatures) Tuesday, October 25, 2011 Eduardo Elena (History) Tuesday, April 3, 2012
Miami: Mistress of the AmericasFriday,
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Common Law, History and Democracy in America, 1790-1900
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The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti
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Imagining Women’s Conventual Spaces in France, 1600-1800
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Dignifying Argentina: Peronism, Citizenship, and Mass Consumption
Ashli White (History) Hermann Beck (History) Pamela Hammons (English) Michael Bernath (History) Michael Slote (Philosophy)
Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic
The Fateful Alliance - German Conservatives and Nazis in 1933: The Machtergreifung in a New Light
Gender, Sexuality, and Material Objects in English Renaissance Verse
Confederate Minds: The Struggle for Intellectual Independence in the Civil War South
Moral Sentimentalism
Anne J. Cruz (Modern Languages and Literatures) David Luis-Brown (English) Martin Nesvig (History) Maria Galli Stampino Laura Giannetti (Modern Languages and Literatures)
Mihoko Suzuki (English)
The Rule of Women in Early Modern Europe
Waves of Decolonization: Discourses of Race and Hemispheric Citizenship in Cuba, Mexico, and the U.S.
Ideology and Inquisition: The World of the Censors in Early Mexico
(Modern Languages and Literatures)
Enrico; Or, Byzantium Conquered: A Heroic Poem
Lelia’s Kiss: Imagining Gender, Sex, and Marriage in Italian Renaissance Comedy
Mary Lindemann (History) Gema Pérez-Sánchez (Modern Languages and Literatures) Mark Rowlands (Philosophy) Patricia J. Saunders (English) Tim Watson (English)
Liaisons dangereuses: Sex, Law, and Diplomacy in the Age of Frederick the Great
Queer Transitions in Contemporary Spanish Culture: From Franco to La Movida
The Philosopher and the Wolf (interviewed by Frank Palmeri, English)
Alien-Nation and Repatriation: Translating Identity in Anglophone Caribbean Literature
Caribbean Culture and British Fiction in the Atlantic World, 1780-1870