Columbia University Press

One day in 1996, the neuroscientist Eric R. Kandel took a call from his program officer at the National Institute of Mental Health, who informed him that he had been awarded a key grant. Also, the officer said, he and his colleagues thought Kandel would win the Nobel Prize. “I hope not soon,” Kandel’s wife, Denise, said when she heard this. Sociologists had found that Nobel Prize winners often did not contribute much more to science, she explained.

In this book, Kandel recounts his remarkable career since receiving the Nobel in 2000—or his experience of proving to his wife that he was not yet “completely dead intellectually.” He takes readers through his lab’s scientific advances, including research into how long-term memory is stored in the brain, the nature of age-related memory loss, and the neuroscience of drug addiction and schizophrenia. Kandel relates how the Nobel Prize gave him the opportunity to reach a far larger audience, which in turn allowed him to discover and pursue new directions. He describes his efforts to promote public understanding of science and to put brain science and art into conversation with each other. Kandel also discusses his return to Austria, which he had fled as a child, and observes Austria’s coming to terms with the Nazi period. Showcasing Kandel’s accomplishments, erudition, and wit, There Is Life After the Nobel Prize is a candid account of the working life of an acclaimed scientist.

During the 1980s, as global antiapartheid sentiment grew, an international coalition of far-right activists arose to preserve racial hierarchy in South Africa and beyond. This groundbreaking book tells the story of how a transatlantic pro-apartheid movement attempted to defend white rule in South Africa—and forged enduring links between global conservatism and white power.

By mapping an international network of white supremacist organizations, Augusta Dell’Omo reveals a fundamental shift in far-right organizing in response to changing geopolitical realities. The pro-apartheid movement brought together a range of figures who sought to influence the conservative Western governments they saw as allies. As antiapartheid activism grew, the South African regime crumbled, and the post–Cold War order took shape, apartheid’s defenders adapted their ideology for a colorblind, human rights–centric, and neoliberal world. Their successes and failures shaped the antistatist trajectory of white supremacist organizing in the 1990s and beyond, planting the seeds for a global resurgence of the far right.

Saving Apartheid ranges from Reagan’s Oval Office to South Africa’s bantustans and from white women’s grassroots organizing to evangelical broadcasting, illuminating how an unlikely coalition reimagined white supremacy. Uncovering the surprising influence of apartheid’s defenders, this book offers a prehistory of the present.

Technology gets a bad rap. It is accused of being a dehumanizing force, a chief culprit in everything from mass commercialization to environmental crisis through the potential collapse of civilization. In Connection, Dan Turello reflects on the origins and limitations of such views. He offers a philosophical and literary meditation on what technology is and can be, arguing that it provides surprising ways to strengthen and deepen what makes us human.

Putting medieval Italian poets and Renaissance artists in conversation with contemporary philosophers and pop culture, this book traces the roots of our fascination with—and aversion to—technology. Turello shows how the moments that shaped Western views of technology offer perspective on our current predicaments, as figures such as St. Francis of Assisi and Dante grappled with problems that are strikingly reminiscent of the ones we face today. Challenging nostalgia for preindustrial innocence, he demonstrates that historically technology has enabled us to develop art, philosophy, religion, and culture. Today, technology can safeguard human creativity—if we choose self-awareness and community over consumption and exploitation. Wide-ranging and inviting, Connection makes a timely case for embodied experience in the age of AI.

While the United States was building the world’s largest prison system, Americans were reading crime novels. What did it mean to read crime fiction in a “tough-on-crime” era? How were fictional stories about crime linked to cultural narratives about criminality, class, and race? What did novels have to do with the making of mass imprisonment in America?

Theodore Martin offers a groundbreaking account of the ways that reading habits and crime politics intersected in the age of mass incarceration. He shows how the War on Crime was waged on the page, arguing that fiction made the policies and ideologies of crime control legible to diverse readerships. American Literature’s War on Crime analyzes dozens of novels—from best-sellers and prize winners to cult classics and forgotten mass-market paperbacks—by authors including Mary Higgins Clark, James Ellroy, Ralph Ellison, Donald Goines, Sue Grafton, Patricia Highsmith, Chester Himes, Stephen King, Walter Mosley, and Sister Souljah.

Rewriting the history of one of the past century’s most popular genres, this ambitious book reveals how the rise of mass incarceration transformed American crime fiction—and how crime fiction became a key battleground in the War on Crime.

Conventional journalistic norms discourage reporters from taking sides. They are supposed to remain neutral, impartial, and objective. Yet there is also a long tradition in journalism, dating back to the 1800s, that pursues truth by practicing solidarity for social justice.

Anita Varma offers a bold defense of reporting for social justice, showing what journalistic solidarity looks like in principle and in practice. She argues that solidarity is a longstanding yet unacknowledged journalistic norm that fosters truthful reporting when people’s basic dignity is at stake. Ethical journalism incorporates solidarity throughout the reporting process: deciding what is newsworthy, whom to include, how to approach them, what questions to ask, how to structure stories, and how to assess impact. Varma illustrates these practices through case studies of local and national reporting on homelessness, housing instability, and the cost of living.

Based on analysis of published journalism, in-depth interviews with journalists, and public engagement with people who aim to make journalism better, Solidarity in Journalism demonstrates how reporting can help society’s most vulnerable. Amid intense debate over the role of the media, this book makes an urgent case for solidarity in journalism as crucial for representing and addressing social division.

During the 1980s, as global antiapartheid sentiment grew, an international coalition of far-right activists arose to preserve racial hierarchy in South Africa and beyond. This groundbreaking book tells the story of how a transatlantic pro-apartheid movement attempted to defend white rule in South Africa—and forged enduring links between global conservatism and white power.

By mapping an international network of white supremacist organizations, Augusta Dell’Omo reveals a fundamental shift in far-right organizing in response to changing geopolitical realities. The pro-apartheid movement brought together a range of figures who sought to influence the conservative Western governments they saw as allies. As antiapartheid activism grew, the South African regime crumbled, and the post–Cold War order took shape, apartheid’s defenders adapted their ideology for a colorblind, human rights–centric, and neoliberal world. Their successes and failures shaped the antistatist trajectory of white supremacist organizing in the 1990s and beyond, planting the seeds for a global resurgence of the far right.

Saving Apartheid ranges from Reagan’s Oval Office to South Africa’s bantustans and from white women’s grassroots organizing to evangelical broadcasting, illuminating how an unlikely coalition reimagined white supremacy. Uncovering the surprising influence of apartheid’s defenders, this book offers a prehistory of the present.

While the United States was building the world’s largest prison system, Americans were reading crime novels. What did it mean to read crime fiction in a “tough-on-crime” era? How were fictional stories about crime linked to cultural narratives about criminality, class, and race? What did novels have to do with the making of mass imprisonment in America?

Theodore Martin offers a groundbreaking account of the ways that reading habits and crime politics intersected in the age of mass incarceration. He shows how the War on Crime was waged on the page, arguing that fiction made the policies and ideologies of crime control legible to diverse readerships. American Literature’s War on Crime analyzes dozens of novels—from best-sellers and prize winners to cult classics and forgotten mass-market paperbacks—by authors including Mary Higgins Clark, James Ellroy, Ralph Ellison, Donald Goines, Sue Grafton, Patricia Highsmith, Chester Himes, Stephen King, Walter Mosley, and Sister Souljah.

Rewriting the history of one of the past century’s most popular genres, this ambitious book reveals how the rise of mass incarceration transformed American crime fiction—and how crime fiction became a key battleground in the War on Crime.

Indigenous activism against telescope construction on Maunakea involves the deity of volcanoes and fire. In India, a village goddess is visited at her place of residence. Across Asia, ancestors are venerated at family shrines. In many places around the world, spiritual matters and practices are local and contextual. Yet philosophy of religion often takes universalizing monotheism as the norm and overlooks other traditions, which it categorizes with oversimplified terms such as polytheism and animism.

Leah Kalmanson offers a new approach to understanding the world’s varied religious traditions: a philosophy of spiritual diversity. Drawing on perspectives from Asian, Pacific, Indigenous American, and African traditions on engaging gods, ghosts, ancestors, and other types of spiritual agents and forces, Local Gods reimagines philosophy of religion from standpoints it typically neglects. A philosophy of spiritual diversity foregrounds the numinous, subtle, and supernormal factors that pervade many aspects of everyday life but slip through the cracks of discourse on religion. Instead of relying on theological frameworks, it turns to theories and methods that are internal to the traditions it considers. This radically plural philosophy highlights creativity and imagination while opening pathways for critique and political engagement. Exploring a vast range of approaches to spiritual matters, this book asks us to find ethical relations with not only the gods we might call our own but also the gods of others.

Technology gets a bad rap. It is accused of being a dehumanizing force, a chief culprit in everything from mass commercialization to environmental crisis through the potential collapse of civilization. In Connection, Dan Turello reflects on the origins and limitations of such views. He offers a philosophical and literary meditation on what technology is and can be, arguing that it provides surprising ways to strengthen and deepen what makes us human.

Putting medieval Italian poets and Renaissance artists in conversation with contemporary philosophers and pop culture, this book traces the roots of our fascination with—and aversion to—technology. Turello shows how the moments that shaped Western views of technology offer perspective on our current predicaments, as figures such as St. Francis of Assisi and Dante grappled with problems that are strikingly reminiscent of the ones we face today. Challenging nostalgia for preindustrial innocence, he demonstrates that historically technology has enabled us to develop art, philosophy, religion, and culture. Today, technology can safeguard human creativity—if we choose self-awareness and community over consumption and exploitation. Wide-ranging and inviting, Connection makes a timely case for embodied experience in the age of AI.

Indigenous activism against telescope construction on Maunakea involves the deity of volcanoes and fire. In India, a village goddess is visited at her place of residence. Across Asia, ancestors are venerated at family shrines. In many places around the world, spiritual matters and practices are local and contextual. Yet philosophy of religion often takes universalizing monotheism as the norm and overlooks other traditions, which it categorizes with oversimplified terms such as polytheism and animism.

Leah Kalmanson offers a new approach to understanding the world’s varied religious traditions: a philosophy of spiritual diversity. Drawing on perspectives from Asian, Pacific, Indigenous American, and African traditions on engaging gods, ghosts, ancestors, and other types of spiritual agents and forces, Local Gods reimagines philosophy of religion from standpoints it typically neglects. A philosophy of spiritual diversity foregrounds the numinous, subtle, and supernormal factors that pervade many aspects of everyday life but slip through the cracks of discourse on religion. Instead of relying on theological frameworks, it turns to theories and methods that are internal to the traditions it considers. This radically plural philosophy highlights creativity and imagination while opening pathways for critique and political engagement. Exploring a vast range of approaches to spiritual matters, this book asks us to find ethical relations with not only the gods we might call our own but also the gods of others.

Conventional journalistic norms discourage reporters from taking sides. They are supposed to remain neutral, impartial, and objective. Yet there is also a long tradition in journalism, dating back to the 1800s, that pursues truth by practicing solidarity for social justice.

Anita Varma offers a bold defense of reporting for social justice, showing what journalistic solidarity looks like in principle and in practice. She argues that solidarity is a longstanding yet unacknowledged journalistic norm that fosters truthful reporting when people’s basic dignity is at stake. Ethical journalism incorporates solidarity throughout the reporting process: deciding what is newsworthy, whom to include, how to approach them, what questions to ask, how to structure stories, and how to assess impact. Varma illustrates these practices through case studies of local and national reporting on homelessness, housing instability, and the cost of living.

Based on analysis of published journalism, in-depth interviews with journalists, and public engagement with people who aim to make journalism better, Solidarity in Journalism demonstrates how reporting can help society’s most vulnerable. Amid intense debate over the role of the media, this book makes an urgent case for solidarity in journalism as crucial for representing and addressing social division.

Classical Indian poetics prized the skillful use of alaṅkāras, or “ornaments”—literary figures of speech. Across more than a millennium, Sanskrit writers developed and elaborated an account of literary embellishment that is perhaps the world’s most complex and long-standing theory of figuration. Yet it remains the least studied of India’s major classical systems of thought.

An Alaṅkāra Reader is a groundbreaking panoramic overview of this tradition, presenting extensive and accessible translations of key works that span its history, from the sixth century CE to the eighteenth. These texts vividly show how Indian theorists analyzed simile, metaphor, allegory, and dozens of other figures that are distinctive to their world. Yigal Bronner’s commentary makes Sanskrit concepts of ornamentation approachable while placing them in historical context. He provides a new account of the history of Sanskrit poetics, showing how it underwent successive waves of theoretical revolutions and emerged as a prestigious field that attracted a variety of scholars in the early modern era.

Featuring many previously untranslated texts, An Alaṅkāra Reader is an essential resource for the study of classical Indian thought, the intellectual history of South Asia, and comparative literature. It reveals the depth and nuance of Sanskrit’s “science of ornaments” for anyone interested in poetic theory, figuration, and aesthetics across world traditions.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, prominent figures in the Black Arts Movement (BAM) converted to Islam and took new names. Poets such as Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Askia Muhammad Touré, and Marvin X incorporated Islamic words and expressions, references to the Qur’an, and Arabic script, as well as symbols like the crescent star and depictions of Islamic architecture and clothing. They connected places like Harlem, Chicago, Newark, and Oakland to locales in the Muslim world such as Timbuktu, Songhai, and Mecca. These artists also played a pivotal role in developing Black studies and creating alternatives to the Eurocentrism of the American educational system.

Ellen McLarney explores how BAM writers identified with Islam as integral to the African American cultural, spiritual, and intellectual heritage. Examining poetry, visual art, music, drama, and mixed-media collaborations, she traces the emergence of a new kind of Islamic art rooted in the African American experience. Their works protested scientific racism, police brutality, colonial domination, and economic oppression while resurrecting a suppressed Islamic past and sharing spiritual visions of a new kind of future. Based on interviews, fieldwork, archival research, and close analysis of key works, this book reveals how BAM redefined Black art, Islamic poetics, and Black Muslim aesthetics in the struggle for racial justice.

It is widely thought that confessions from perpetrators of state violence promote accountability, reconciliation, and justice. Performing Public Confessions offers a challenge to this view through a critical examination of perpetrators’ narratives, analyzing them as performances that shape public perceptions of state violence and responsibility. With a focus on Turkey, this book develops new insights into the performative aspects of confessions and what they reveal about the dominant social, moral, and political order.

Yeşim Yaprak Yıldız explores public confessions by Turkish state actors implicated in atrocities against Kurds during the 1990s, showing that their accounts often function to obscure rather than clarify responsibility. Through close readings of perpetrators’ rhetorical strategies, audience reactions, and media representations, she demonstrates that confessions are rarely straightforward admissions of guilt. Instead, they frequently perpetuate mechanisms of denial, silence, evasion, and disavowal, normalizing atrocities, reinforcing impunity, and masking the structural nature of state violence. Yıldız argues that perpetrators’ narratives, when placed in their social contexts, illuminate the underlying moral and political frameworks that govern Turkish society. Bringing together theoretical reflections with rich analysis of case studies, this book uncovers the political and ethical limitations of public confessions.

In postwar Japan, a writer meets a small-town innkeeper who is obsessed with a tale from the nineteenth century. He relates the saga of Enomoto Takeaki, an admiral in the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate who regained authority under the Meiji government. A former member of imperial Japan’s military police, the innkeeper dwells on the question of loyalty even as he struggles with his responsibility for the arrest and murder of his brother-in-law during the war. Later, he sends the writer a mysterious manuscript purporting to be the account of a peddler turned samurai whom Enomoto betrayed.

Part historical fiction, part detective story, The Traitor is a remarkable novel about navigating changing political landscapes by one of the most significant modern Japanese writers. In his only historical novel, Abe Kōbō turns to a pivotal moment in Japan’s past to explore profound questions about the nature of loyalty and the choices that people must make when they encounter forces beyond their control or understanding. Published in 1964, when a new generation had begun asking their parents about the war, Abe’s tale of betrayal sparked controversy across the political spectrum. The great writer’s most important previously untranslated novel, The Traitor displays Abe’s literary mastery from a new angle.

In postwar Japan, a writer meets a small-town innkeeper who is obsessed with a tale from the nineteenth century. He relates the saga of Enomoto Takeaki, an admiral in the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate who regained authority under the Meiji government. A former member of imperial Japan’s military police, the innkeeper dwells on the question of loyalty even as he struggles with his responsibility for the arrest and murder of his brother-in-law during the war. Later, he sends the writer a mysterious manuscript purporting to be the account of a peddler turned samurai whom Enomoto betrayed.

Part historical fiction, part detective story, The Traitor is a remarkable novel about navigating changing political landscapes by one of the most significant modern Japanese writers. In his only historical novel, Abe Kōbō turns to a pivotal moment in Japan’s past to explore profound questions about the nature of loyalty and the choices that people must make when they encounter forces beyond their control or understanding. Published in 1964, when a new generation had begun asking their parents about the war, Abe’s tale of betrayal sparked controversy across the political spectrum. The great writer’s most important previously untranslated novel, The Traitor displays Abe’s literary mastery from a new angle.

It is widely thought that confessions from perpetrators of state violence promote accountability, reconciliation, and justice. Performing Public Confessions offers a challenge to this view through a critical examination of perpetrators’ narratives, analyzing them as performances that shape public perceptions of state violence and responsibility. With a focus on Turkey, this book develops new insights into the performative aspects of confessions and what they reveal about the dominant social, moral, and political order.

Yeşim Yaprak Yıldız explores public confessions by Turkish state actors implicated in atrocities against Kurds during the 1990s, showing that their accounts often function to obscure rather than clarify responsibility. Through close readings of perpetrators’ rhetorical strategies, audience reactions, and media representations, she demonstrates that confessions are rarely straightforward admissions of guilt. Instead, they frequently perpetuate mechanisms of denial, silence, evasion, and disavowal, normalizing atrocities, reinforcing impunity, and masking the structural nature of state violence. Yıldız argues that perpetrators’ narratives, when placed in their social contexts, illuminate the underlying moral and political frameworks that govern Turkish society. Bringing together theoretical reflections with rich analysis of case studies, this book uncovers the political and ethical limitations of public confessions.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, prominent figures in the Black Arts Movement (BAM) converted to Islam and took new names. Poets such as Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Askia Muhammad Touré, and Marvin X incorporated Islamic words and expressions, references to the Qur’an, and Arabic script, as well as symbols like the crescent star and depictions of Islamic architecture and clothing. They connected places like Harlem, Chicago, Newark, and Oakland to locales in the Muslim world such as Timbuktu, Songhai, and Mecca. These artists also played a pivotal role in developing Black studies and creating alternatives to the Eurocentrism of the American educational system.

Ellen McLarney explores how BAM writers identified with Islam as integral to the African American cultural, spiritual, and intellectual heritage. Examining poetry, visual art, music, drama, and mixed-media collaborations, she traces the emergence of a new kind of Islamic art rooted in the African American experience. Their works protested scientific racism, police brutality, colonial domination, and economic oppression while resurrecting a suppressed Islamic past and sharing spiritual visions of a new kind of future. Based on interviews, fieldwork, archival research, and close analysis of key works, this book reveals how BAM redefined Black art, Islamic poetics, and Black Muslim aesthetics in the struggle for racial justice.

Does the lack of evidence mean that aliens don’t exist? Why does an unproven mathematical hypothesis have profound consequences? Are humans capable of grasping the nature of divinity? Is it ethical to give a patient a placebo? Why do people persist in demonstrably false beliefs like flat earth theory? Should someone want to know when they will die?

George G. Szpiro examines these questions and many others, offering an engaging and witty tour of what we can learn from ignorance. In a series of fast-paced chapters, he unravels problems ranging across science, mathematics, law, economics, politics, religion, psychology, and philosophy—some esoteric, others drawn from everyday life. Ignorance comes in many forms, Szpiro shows. Some questions are only temporarily unsolved; others are inherently unanswerable. Sometimes authorities keep answers from us, for good or ill. Often our assumptions and biases keep us from overcoming our ignorance, and occasionally we choose to remain ignorant—for surprisingly rational reasons.

Ultimately, Szpiro argues, ignorance is not purely negative. It can motivate the pursuit of learning and wisdom—as long as we acknowledge it. Presenting sophisticated topics in an accessible way, this book shows how ignorance sheds light on the nature of knowledge.

What would happen if you bought a handful of stocks and then left them alone for some time, like stashing valuables in a coffee can? If you picked the right ones, you might wake up one day with life-changing wealth.

Neeraj Khemlani introduces readers to this investing philosophy through the eye-opening story of a portfolio manager who has put it into practice. Matt Ankrum researched 100-baggers—stocks that have multiplied in value a hundred times over multiple decades—looking for what they have in common. Drawing on these clues, he hunts down and buys shares in what he thinks are tomorrow’s breakout companies, planning to gift his children a coffee can portfolio that could someday be worth half a billion dollars.

The Coffee Can Investor shares Ankrum’s process for identifying companies that can stand the test of time, as well as his stock picks. It explores the principles of long-term investing, emphasizing the power of compounding and why it pays to be patient. This book details the qualitative and quantitative aspects of 100-baggers, revealing that a surprising share are business-to-business companies, not just the business-to-consumer companies that typically grab headlines. Khemlani also recounts his own decision to make a coffee can of investments for his kids.

Engaging and fast-paced, this book is for anyone who wants to invest in enduring companies for the long term.

Around the 1960s, a musical revolution took place in the industrial landscapes of Cleveland and Detroit. Disenchanted with the strictures of bebop, musicians forged a new style—free jazz—that took inspiration from a vast range of sources, including figures such as Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and John Coltrane; African and Middle Eastern music; avant-garde modernism; and the politics and aesthetics of Black Power. How did this radical movement come about, and what explains its creativity and vitality?

Based on interviews with dozens of musicians, I Hear Freedom tells the story of free jazz and its connection to the broader Black experience. Cisco Bradley demonstrates that although this part of the free jazz movement arose in the Midwest, it is deeply rooted in the musical traditions and aesthetics that the Great Migration brought from the South. As postwar urban renewal projects fractured Black communities, musicians drew on this heritage to create new forms of expression. Figures such as Albert Ayler, Donald Ayler, Charles Tyler, Frank Wright, Bobby Few, Charles Moore, and Faruq Z. Bey developed distinct artistic visions, often influenced by their involvement in Black liberation movements. I Hear Freedom chronicles the Cleveland and Detroit free jazz scenes, and it follows musicians to New York, Los Angeles, Paris, and beyond. A revelatory oral history, this book shows that free jazz is a uniquely Black style shaped by mobility, community, and the struggle for freedom.

Stories about people and dogs saving one another are everywhere in US culture—on TV, in Hollywood movies, on social media, and even on bumper stickers. Yet these seemingly heartwarming stories of mutual rescue revolve around redemption through suffering, a narrative profoundly interwoven with Christian beliefs, white racial anxieties, and US national myths.

Katharine Mershon examines the unacknowledged religious underpinnings of stories about dogs, revealing deeply rooted cultural assumptions about who can be saved and how redemption ought to occur. She identifies the “canine redemption narrative” as the defining cultural script for the stories people in the United States tell about dogs and, in turn, the nation. Exposing unexamined assumptions about the relationships between people and dogs, Mershon sheds light on the central place of animals and religion in defining racial boundaries.

Dogs Save considers examples including the Michael Vick dogfighting case; Samuel Fuller’s controversial B-movie White Dog; the TV show The Dog Whisperer, from the celebrity dog trainer Cesar Millan; Laurie Anderson’s film Heart of a Dog; and Eileen Myles’s Afterglow (a dog memoir). Bringing together religious studies and animal studies, this book shows that redemption narratives shape who is allowed to survive and thrive in US society.

Around the 1960s, a musical revolution took place in the industrial landscapes of Cleveland and Detroit. Disenchanted with the strictures of bebop, musicians forged a new style—free jazz—that took inspiration from a vast range of sources, including figures such as Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and John Coltrane; African and Middle Eastern music; avant-garde modernism; and the politics and aesthetics of Black Power. How did this radical movement come about, and what explains its creativity and vitality?

Based on interviews with dozens of musicians, I Hear Freedom tells the story of free jazz and its connection to the broader Black experience. Cisco Bradley demonstrates that although this part of the free jazz movement arose in the Midwest, it is deeply rooted in the musical traditions and aesthetics that the Great Migration brought from the South. As postwar urban renewal projects fractured Black communities, musicians drew on this heritage to create new forms of expression. Figures such as Albert Ayler, Donald Ayler, Charles Tyler, Frank Wright, Bobby Few, Charles Moore, and Faruq Z. Bey developed distinct artistic visions, often influenced by their involvement in Black liberation movements. I Hear Freedom chronicles the Cleveland and Detroit free jazz scenes, and it follows musicians to New York, Los Angeles, Paris, and beyond. A revelatory oral history, this book shows that free jazz is a uniquely Black style shaped by mobility, community, and the struggle for freedom.

Stories about people and dogs saving one another are everywhere in US culture—on TV, in Hollywood movies, on social media, and even on bumper stickers. Yet these seemingly heartwarming stories of mutual rescue revolve around redemption through suffering, a narrative profoundly interwoven with Christian beliefs, white racial anxieties, and US national myths.

Katharine Mershon examines the unacknowledged religious underpinnings of stories about dogs, revealing deeply rooted cultural assumptions about who can be saved and how redemption ought to occur. She identifies the “canine redemption narrative” as the defining cultural script for the stories people in the United States tell about dogs and, in turn, the nation. Exposing unexamined assumptions about the relationships between people and dogs, Mershon sheds light on the central place of animals and religion in defining racial boundaries.

Dogs Save considers examples including the Michael Vick dogfighting case; Samuel Fuller’s controversial B-movie White Dog; the TV show The Dog Whisperer, from the celebrity dog trainer Cesar Millan; Laurie Anderson’s film Heart of a Dog; and Eileen Myles’s Afterglow (a dog memoir). Bringing together religious studies and animal studies, this book shows that redemption narratives shape who is allowed to survive and thrive in US society.

Over the past decade, social and political movements transformed the arts. From the streets of Chile and Iran to museums in Europe and the United States, and from questions of representation and repatriation to demands for equity and justice, protest and activism affected the creation, presentation, and interpretation of visual arts around the world.

Bringing together artists, scholars, activists, and museum professionals from varied fields and backgrounds, this book explores the intersections between visual art and social movements during the last tumultuous decade. Spanning themes of protest art, museum ethics, restitution, and institutional transformation, the collection considers how visual arts have both responded to and shaped politics and society. Contributors highlight the role of artists as catalysts for change and delve into how institutions grapple with their colonial pasts.

Featuring essays, case studies, and artist spotlights, this book not only documents a critical moment in the art world but also raises thought-provoking questions about its future. In the current moment of heightened global unrest and existential threats to the future of art institutions, it offers vital insight into art’s place in the politics of representation, memory, and resistance.

The field of palliative care promises support for a dying person’s physical, psychological, social, and spiritual needs, as well as the needs of family and community. Has this powerful vision been achieved? This state-of-the-field book argues that palliative care has drifted away from its transformative goals—and shows what to do about it.

Bringing together leading international scholars and practitioners, Well-Being at the End of Life demonstrates how contemporary palliative care has slowly but surely strayed from its original values and practices. The provision of palliative care now reflects institutional, medicalized, and health-service priorities. Increasingly, it has become solely clinical, confined and constrained by clinical service considerations and limitations. Those at the end of life are all too often viewed as patients to be treated instead of people with whom care providers must create collaboration, participation, and partnerships.

Contributors call for a paradigm shift in the values and priorities of palliative care to emphasize the importance of community to personal well-being. Drawing on the concept of health promotion, they advance a shared vision that merges the principles of public health with those of palliative care. Reimagining the field to foreground compassion and interdependence, Well-Being at the End of Life offers a new approach that puts community and professional partnerships at the heart of its practice.

Over the past decade, social and political movements transformed the arts. From the streets of Chile and Iran to museums in Europe and the United States, and from questions of representation and repatriation to demands for equity and justice, protest and activism affected the creation, presentation, and interpretation of visual arts around the world.

Bringing together artists, scholars, activists, and museum professionals from varied fields and backgrounds, this book explores the intersections between visual art and social movements during the last tumultuous decade. Spanning themes of protest art, museum ethics, restitution, and institutional transformation, the collection considers how visual arts have both responded to and shaped politics and society. Contributors highlight the role of artists as catalysts for change and delve into how institutions grapple with their colonial pasts.

Featuring essays, case studies, and artist spotlights, this book not only documents a critical moment in the art world but also raises thought-provoking questions about its future. In the current moment of heightened global unrest and existential threats to the future of art institutions, it offers vital insight into art’s place in the politics of representation, memory, and resistance.

The field of palliative care promises support for a dying person’s physical, psychological, social, and spiritual needs, as well as the needs of family and community. Has this powerful vision been achieved? This state-of-the-field book argues that palliative care has drifted away from its transformative goals—and shows what to do about it.

Bringing together leading international scholars and practitioners, Well-Being at the End of Life demonstrates how contemporary palliative care has slowly but surely strayed from its original values and practices. The provision of palliative care now reflects institutional, medicalized, and health-service priorities. Increasingly, it has become solely clinical, confined and constrained by clinical service considerations and limitations. Those at the end of life are all too often viewed as patients to be treated instead of people with whom care providers must create collaboration, participation, and partnerships.

Contributors call for a paradigm shift in the values and priorities of palliative care to emphasize the importance of community to personal well-being. Drawing on the concept of health promotion, they advance a shared vision that merges the principles of public health with those of palliative care. Reimagining the field to foreground compassion and interdependence, Well-Being at the End of Life offers a new approach that puts community and professional partnerships at the heart of its practice.

Between the Civil War and the Cold War, American literary modernism and philosophy both grappled with the challenge of novelty and the chance to make it new. Bringing together modern poetry’s aesthetic experimentation and modern philosophy’s attention to the problem of induction, Lyric Logic argues that poems use logical form as literary form. The modern poem can be characterized by its logic: details that appear fragmentary add up to sense-making.

Johanna Winant recasts the poetics of central figures as modeling and defending inductive reasoning: Walt Whitman makes lists, Emily Dickinson constructs analogies, Gertrude Stein presents facts, Marianne Moore investigates predictions, Elizabeth Bishop draws inferences, and Gwendolyn Brooks tests the limits of deduction. Winant offers in-depth close readings of canonical poems that show the sophistication of their philosophic logic. Although philosophers tend to see induction as flawed and unreliable, these poets display its strengths. Their work demonstrates how to make sense of the unpredictable modern world.

Between the Civil War and the Cold War, American literary modernism and philosophy both grappled with the challenge of novelty and the chance to make it new. Bringing together modern poetry’s aesthetic experimentation and modern philosophy’s attention to the problem of induction, Lyric Logic argues that poems use logical form as literary form. The modern poem can be characterized by its logic: details that appear fragmentary add up to sense-making.

Johanna Winant recasts the poetics of central figures as modeling and defending inductive reasoning: Walt Whitman makes lists, Emily Dickinson constructs analogies, Gertrude Stein presents facts, Marianne Moore investigates predictions, Elizabeth Bishop draws inferences, and Gwendolyn Brooks tests the limits of deduction. Winant offers in-depth close readings of canonical poems that show the sophistication of their philosophic logic. Although philosophers tend to see induction as flawed and unreliable, these poets display its strengths. Their work demonstrates how to make sense of the unpredictable modern world.

Contents

Yuliya Yurchuk: Introduction. Understanding the Ukrainian Spirit: Symbols and Narratives of Ukrainian Resistance and Resilience II

Olha Voznyuk: Symbols of Resistance and Resilience through the Prism of Contemporary Ukrainian Anthologies of War Writing.

Svitlana Kot, Alina Mozolevska, Olha Polishchuk and Yuliya Stodolinska: United for Ukraine: Representations of Civilian Resistance in Ukrainian Digital Popular Culture

Ada Krasenko, Tamara Martsenyuk, and Kateryna Dysa: "Girls, Let's Close the Sky*: Gendered Images of Witches in Ukrainian Media and Culture during the Russo-Ukrainian War



This special issue searches for the deeper roots of Ukrainian resistance as they are expressed in culture and folklore. During the first days of the invasion, one could witness the proliferation of both visual and narrative expressions of people’s emotions and feelings. Images, memes, poetry, songs portraying Ukrainians at war came in their hundreds in the very first days of the invasion. The scale of creativity seemed proportional to the scale of the shock and the horror that the war brought. With three years of atrocities, visuality became more focused on the documentary genre. The articles in this special issue both document and analyze the meanings that stand behind the symbols and narratives of Ukrainian resistance. As products of culture, these symbols and narratives reveal the key traits of the renegotiated identities of the Ukrainian society in the ongoing war.

Contents
Part I: Memory Politics in the Russian European North

Part II: Transborder Memory Politics: Russia and Norway

Featuring contributions by: Darya Aspøy; Håvard Bækken; Helge Blakkisrud; Stian Bones; Kristian Lundby Gjerde; Elena Kochetkova; Petia Mankova; Joakim Aalmen Markussen; Kari Aga Myklebost; Marianne Neerland Soleim; Artem Spirin

Over the past two decades, memory practices related to the Great Patriotic War have assumed an increasingly prominent position in Russian politics and identity-building, both in the domestic sphere and in the realm of foreign policy. Existing scholarship on Russian memory politics tends to concentrate overwhelmingly on the role of the Kremlin, while regional dynamics have received less attention. This special issue explores the Kremlin-driven politics of war memories as they unfold in the northernmost parts of Norway and European Russia, two regions that share not only a border but also a long history of interaction.
Across this border, we encounter two distinctly different social, cultural, and political contexts: on the one hand, Norway – a small, relatively homogenous, and stable welfare state; and on the other, Russia – a vast, complex, and increasingly authoritarian and neo-imperialist polity. By examining the construction and contestation of the past in a variety of regional and transborder settings, including museums, media, school curricula, libraries, and commemorative ceremonies, this issue explores the processes of negotiation, conflict, and adaptation among diverse mnemonic actors in the North.
The study of memory politics in this context sheds light on broader transformations within Russian politics, which has grown progressively more authoritarian while still remaining dependent on regional and local implementation. The cases discussed here further demonstrate how memory politics in Russia have become increasingly securitized over the past decades.

In the late 1970s, with relations between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China strained, the Carter administration saw an opening. The United States and its allies embarked on military and dual-use technology transfers to China as a counterweight to the USSR, transforming rapprochement into full-blown cooperation. Carter’s decision to pivot away from the United States’s traditional ally, the Republic of China on Taiwan, and embrace the People’s Republic redefined the Cold War from a struggle against communism to one against the Soviet Union. It not only complicated a variety of American objectives—from the security of Taiwan to US-Soviet détente—but also sowed the seeds of future tensions between China and the West.

This book is an international history of the Carter administration’s intricate relations with the two competing Chinese regimes, emphasizing the geopolitical significance and lasting implications of this crucial moment. Drawing extensively from previously untapped archives in several countries and languages, Sheng Peng uncovers the internal governmental debates across world capitals that affected Carter’s China policy. He examines how the Carter administration attempted to balance relations with both Chinese governments as well as how Chinese and Taiwanese leaders navigated global rivalries. Revealing how the Carter years profoundly reshaped the course of the Cold War, this book sheds new light on the strategic, technological, and ideological competition that continues today.

Jürgen Habermas is Germany’s most important postwar philosopher, the leading figure of the Frankfurt School in this period. He is best known for the concept of the public sphere, which forms the basis of his communicative understanding of democratic politics. Habermas has not only theorized the public sphere—he has also taken part in it through frequent commentary on current social, political, and cultural issues. Yet since Habermas’s extensive public-facing writings have been overlooked, his philosophy has often been criticized as apolitical.

This book transforms our understanding of Habermas by focusing on his work as a public intellectual, showing how he has shaped debates far beyond the ivory tower. Peter J. Verovšek argues that while Habermas maintains a strict separation between his academic and his public-facing writings, he has also ensured that these two aspects of his work are part of a consistent whole. The book highlights the development of Habermas’s views over time and the changing nature of his public interventions. His early political writings focused on questions tied to the particular situation of postwar West Germany, but since 1989 he has increasingly turned his attention to the future of Europe and global politics more broadly. Verovšek sheds light on the interrelationship between Habermas’s participation in the public sphere and his theoretical work, demonstrating that his political engagement is crucial to understanding his philosophy. In a moment when public debate is under threat, this book offers timely new insight into Habermas’s lifelong project of defending the public sphere—both in theory and in practice.

Jürgen Habermas is Germany’s most important postwar philosopher, the leading figure of the Frankfurt School in this period. He is best known for the concept of the public sphere, which forms the basis of his communicative understanding of democratic politics. Habermas has not only theorized the public sphere—he has also taken part in it through frequent commentary on current social, political, and cultural issues. Yet since Habermas’s extensive public-facing writings have been overlooked, his philosophy has often been criticized as apolitical.

This book transforms our understanding of Habermas by focusing on his work as a public intellectual, showing how he has shaped debates far beyond the ivory tower. Peter J. Verovšek argues that while Habermas maintains a strict separation between his academic and his public-facing writings, he has also ensured that these two aspects of his work are part of a consistent whole. The book highlights the development of Habermas’s views over time and the changing nature of his public interventions. His early political writings focused on questions tied to the particular situation of postwar West Germany, but since 1989 he has increasingly turned his attention to the future of Europe and global politics more broadly. Verovšek sheds light on the interrelationship between Habermas’s participation in the public sphere and his theoretical work, demonstrating that his political engagement is crucial to understanding his philosophy. In a moment when public debate is under threat, this book offers timely new insight into Habermas’s lifelong project of defending the public sphere—both in theory and in practice.

Leaders remain skeptical about the power of organizational culture even though extensive research shows that it is crucial to business success. Can a manager really influence an organization’s culture, or do executives just try to impose a culture on their employees? Is the concept of culture too vague to measure objectively and improve? What happens to valuable employees who feel left out by the prevailing culture? Even if a “good” culture makes team members happy, does it actually affect the bottom line?

This essential book answers the biggest questions about organizational culture, offering research-backed insights for leaders on shaping and managing an environment that spurs achievement. The management experts Jennifer A. Chatman and Glenn R. Carroll—a psychologist and a sociologist—draw on social-scientific findings to evaluate and debunk common misconceptions. They show how research on culture empowers managers to identify what really matters and deploy it productively. Chatman and Carroll also provide actionable levers to build and maintain organizational culture, from crafting a culture that supports strategic objectives to ensuring that it can adapt as conditions change.

Making Organizational Culture Great features compelling examples from companies and nonprofits including Apple, Genentech, Disney, Ford, Netflix, Maersk, Google, Cisco, Southwest Airlines, and many others. A practical guide for current and aspiring leaders, this book reveals how to manage culture consistently, comprehensively, and coherently.

In the late 1970s, with relations between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China strained, the Carter administration saw an opening. The United States and its allies embarked on military and dual-use technology transfers to China as a counterweight to the USSR, transforming rapprochement into full-blown cooperation. Carter’s decision to pivot away from the United States’s traditional ally, the Republic of China on Taiwan, and embrace the People’s Republic redefined the Cold War from a struggle against communism to one against the Soviet Union. It not only complicated a variety of American objectives—from the security of Taiwan to US-Soviet détente—but also sowed the seeds of future tensions between China and the West.

This book is an international history of the Carter administration’s intricate relations with the two competing Chinese regimes, emphasizing the geopolitical significance and lasting implications of this crucial moment. Drawing extensively from previously untapped archives in several countries and languages, Sheng Peng uncovers the internal governmental debates across world capitals that affected Carter’s China policy. He examines how the Carter administration attempted to balance relations with both Chinese governments as well as how Chinese and Taiwanese leaders navigated global rivalries. Revealing how the Carter years profoundly reshaped the course of the Cold War, this book sheds new light on the strategic, technological, and ideological competition that continues today.

Leaders remain skeptical about the power of organizational culture even though extensive research shows that it is crucial to business success. Can a manager really influence an organization’s culture, or do executives just try to impose a culture on their employees? Is the concept of culture too vague to measure objectively and improve? What happens to valuable employees who feel left out by the prevailing culture? Even if a “good” culture makes team members happy, does it actually affect the bottom line?

This essential book answers the biggest questions about organizational culture, offering research-backed insights for leaders on shaping and managing an environment that spurs achievement. The management experts Jennifer A. Chatman and Glenn R. Carroll—a psychologist and a sociologist—draw on social-scientific findings to evaluate and debunk common misconceptions. They show how research on culture empowers managers to identify what really matters and deploy it productively. Chatman and Carroll also provide actionable levers to build and maintain organizational culture, from crafting a culture that supports strategic objectives to ensuring that it can adapt as conditions change.

Making Organizational Culture Great features compelling examples from companies and nonprofits including Apple, Genentech, Disney, Ford, Netflix, Maersk, Google, Cisco, Southwest Airlines, and many others. A practical guide for current and aspiring leaders, this book reveals how to manage culture consistently, comprehensively, and coherently.

In one common view, the mind is immaterial, internal, and invisible. From this perspective, the mind is inherently individual and isolated: It is unknowable from the outside, separated from the world and from other minds. Anthony Chemero—both a philosopher and a cognitive scientist—offers a powerful challenge to this theory of mind. Bringing together philosophical insight and empirical data, he develops a new understanding of the mind that centers embodiment and social interaction.

According to Chemero, the mind is intertwined with the world: It depends on the body, the surrounding environment, and the people with whom an individual interacts. He shows that cutting-edge research in cognitive science provides striking experimental evidence for this concept of the intertwined self. Chemero explores the philosophical, moral, and political implications of the claim that the self is necessarily interwoven with the world and with others, drawing connections to phenomenology, critical theory, and feminist political theory. Deeply interdisciplinary and engagingly written, Intertwined Creatures makes an urgent case for seeing the self as social—especially in the age of AI—with radical consequences for ethics and politics.

In one common view, the mind is immaterial, internal, and invisible. From this perspective, the mind is inherently individual and isolated: It is unknowable from the outside, separated from the world and from other minds. Anthony Chemero—both a philosopher and a cognitive scientist—offers a powerful challenge to this theory of mind. Bringing together philosophical insight and empirical data, he develops a new understanding of the mind that centers embodiment and social interaction.

According to Chemero, the mind is intertwined with the world: It depends on the body, the surrounding environment, and the people with whom an individual interacts. He shows that cutting-edge research in cognitive science provides striking experimental evidence for this concept of the intertwined self. Chemero explores the philosophical, moral, and political implications of the claim that the self is necessarily interwoven with the world and with others, drawing connections to phenomenology, critical theory, and feminist political theory. Deeply interdisciplinary and engagingly written, Intertwined Creatures makes an urgent case for seeing the self as social—especially in the age of AI—with radical consequences for ethics and politics.

One of the most pressing issues in development today is the employment challenge in low- and middle-income countries. As more young people enter the labor force—and as structural transformation unfolds amid deindustrialization, technological disruption, and global competition—the question of how to create sufficient decent jobs has become central to the economic future of the Global South. Although this is a shared challenge across developing regions, it is particularly acute in Africa, where rapid demographic change and urbanization are colliding with limited industrial expansion.

Bringing together leading international scholars, The Future of Work in Developing Countries examines the employment problem from multiple perspectives. Early chapters develop conceptual frameworks around corporations and the global hierarchy of production. Subsequent contributions investigate the dynamics of structural transformation, the role of firms in linking production and labor to surplus, and the design of industrial and technology policies. Later chapters turn to detailed case studies—especially from Africa—that illustrate the possibilities and limits of different growth paths, and comparative insights from Asia and Latin America provide further perspective.

By combining rigorous theoretical analysis with grounded empirical research, this book demonstrates that employment creation is not an automatic byproduct of growth but a political and institutional project. It offers fresh insights for scholars of development, political economy, and economic history, as well as for policy makers seeking strategies to promote inclusive transformation in Africa and beyond.

Our ideas about Confucius come from the stories told about him. He often appears as the great sage of ancient China, handing down timeless moral precepts to his disciples and to posterity. Yet over the course of twenty-five centuries, Confucius has meant many different things to different people, representing varied views on political order, ethical behavior, and personal well-being.

This book explores enduring narratives about Confucius, shedding light on his role as a symbol of cultural ideals and a fulcrum of ideological debates across eras. Wai-yee Li translates and provides commentary on a wide range of key texts, examining how Confucius’s legacy was interpreted in different historical moments. Beginning with the canonical account by the historian Sima Qian, she canvasses Daoist and Legalist writings from the Warring States, a ballad about a homicidal Confucius from the Tang dynasty, an eighteenth-century anthology of jokes, modern writers such as Lu Xun, and contemporary rap music, among others. Focusing on how these stories are told, Li identifies continuities, ruptures, and unexpected connections in the representations of Confucius and considers the questions they raise. Suitable for a range of courses, this book offers new ways to understand Chinese cultural and intellectual history through Confucius and his transformations.

Our ideas about Confucius come from the stories told about him. He often appears as the great sage of ancient China, handing down timeless moral precepts to his disciples and to posterity. Yet over the course of twenty-five centuries, Confucius has meant many different things to different people, representing varied views on political order, ethical behavior, and personal well-being.

This book explores enduring narratives about Confucius, shedding light on his role as a symbol of cultural ideals and a fulcrum of ideological debates across eras. Wai-yee Li translates and provides commentary on a wide range of key texts, examining how Confucius’s legacy was interpreted in different historical moments. Beginning with the canonical account by the historian Sima Qian, she canvasses Daoist and Legalist writings from the Warring States, a ballad about a homicidal Confucius from the Tang dynasty, an eighteenth-century anthology of jokes, modern writers such as Lu Xun, and contemporary rap music, among others. Focusing on how these stories are told, Li identifies continuities, ruptures, and unexpected connections in the representations of Confucius and considers the questions they raise. Suitable for a range of courses, this book offers new ways to understand Chinese cultural and intellectual history through Confucius and his transformations.

Climate change is not only an environmental crisis but also a catalyst for worsening socioeconomic inequalities, leading to widespread calls for “climate justice.” Even though this term has become increasingly common, there remains no universally accepted definition. This challenge is compounded by the limitations of traditional scholarly frameworks, which struggle to encompass the dynamic and pervasive impact of the climate crisis across global, national, and local levels. The scope of the crisis requires ethical, social, and political considerations alongside scientific and environmental insights in order to shape equitable responses by states and societies.

This multidisciplinary book offers a comprehensive exploration of debates on climate justice across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Synthesizing these divergent approaches, it develops a new conceptual framework that transcends disciplinary divides, providing a deeper and richer understanding of climate justice. Contributors make an urgent case that climate justice must be centered within and across disciplines, creating a roadmap for multidisciplinary research and pedagogy on the climate crisis. Featuring a wide range of voices and actionable recommendations, this timely book illuminates how scholarship on climate change can become a call to action.

Climate change is not only an environmental crisis but also a catalyst for worsening socioeconomic inequalities, leading to widespread calls for “climate justice.” Even though this term has become increasingly common, there remains no universally accepted definition. This challenge is compounded by the limitations of traditional scholarly frameworks, which struggle to encompass the dynamic and pervasive impact of the climate crisis across global, national, and local levels. The scope of the crisis requires ethical, social, and political considerations alongside scientific and environmental insights in order to shape equitable responses by states and societies.

This multidisciplinary book offers a comprehensive exploration of debates on climate justice across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Synthesizing these divergent approaches, it develops a new conceptual framework that transcends disciplinary divides, providing a deeper and richer understanding of climate justice. Contributors make an urgent case that climate justice must be centered within and across disciplines, creating a roadmap for multidisciplinary research and pedagogy on the climate crisis. Featuring a wide range of voices and actionable recommendations, this timely book illuminates how scholarship on climate change can become a call to action.

Forests in fiction are often understood simply as settings, symbols, or remnants of a premodern past. Yet many African novelists have turned to the forest to experiment with worldbuilding and to imagine new futures. This groundbreaking book explores the life of the forest in African fiction, showing how writers have used it to reinvent the novel’s formal, aesthetic, and political possibilities.

Ainehi Edoro argues that forests in African fiction are laboratories for unmaking and remaking the world, where writers break apart familiar forms to test alternate forms of life, knowledge, and power. Instead of treating the forest as a backdrop, these writers imagine it as a living structure: a space where politics, history, myth, violence, technology, the magical, and creativity animate fictional worlds. Spanning indigenous African narratives and contemporary science fiction, Forest Imaginaries traces the lineage of forest worlds in African literature: Chinua Achebe’s evil forest, the cosmic forest in Wọle Ṣóyínká’s mythic imagination, Thomas Mofolo’s forest of imperial dreams, Amos Tutuola’s endless fractal forest, and Nnedi Okorafor’s aquatic forest of new ecological futures. This book rethinks African literary history by showing how African writers draw on the forest—and the wealth of Indigenous ideas about time, space, and storytelling it conjures—to transform the novel’s aesthetic, political, and philosophical horizons.

Forests in fiction are often understood simply as settings, symbols, or remnants of a premodern past. Yet many African novelists have turned to the forest to experiment with worldbuilding and to imagine new futures. This groundbreaking book explores the life of the forest in African fiction, showing how writers have used it to reinvent the novel’s formal, aesthetic, and political possibilities.

Ainehi Edoro argues that forests in African fiction are laboratories for unmaking and remaking the world, where writers break apart familiar forms to test alternate forms of life, knowledge, and power. Instead of treating the forest as a backdrop, these writers imagine it as a living structure: a space where politics, history, myth, violence, technology, the magical, and creativity animate fictional worlds. Spanning indigenous African narratives and contemporary science fiction, Forest Imaginaries traces the lineage of forest worlds in African literature: Chinua Achebe’s evil forest, the cosmic forest in Wọle Ṣóyínká’s mythic imagination, Thomas Mofolo’s forest of imperial dreams, Amos Tutuola’s endless fractal forest, and Nnedi Okorafor’s aquatic forest of new ecological futures. This book rethinks African literary history by showing how African writers draw on the forest—and the wealth of Indigenous ideas about time, space, and storytelling it conjures—to transform the novel’s aesthetic, political, and philosophical horizons.

An Indigenous hunter laments the decline in the flying squirrel population and reflects on how animals perceive the world. In a drought-stricken cyberpunk anytown, kids revolt against the grown-ups only to face off with stray dogs over water. During late-night diving sessions, a researcher encounters a mysterious group of ocean-dwelling people with gills. In an overpopulated future, marrying an AI spouse will raise a human’s credit score. A man follows the trail of an extinct leopard, seeking to unravel a metafictional mystery left behind by his late wife.

This anthology showcases cutting-edge works on ecological themes by essential and emerging Taiwanese authors, revealing the vitality of their engagements with environmental crises. Taiwan is a biodiversity hotspot and geopolitical flashpoint, home to both Indigenous peoples and settlers. The pieces collected in A Taiwanese Ecoliterature Reader give voice to this human and more-than-human diversity, telling tales that are disturbing yet hopeful, serious yet sensuous, speculative yet grounded, down to earth yet spanning the seas. They span Indigenous eco-writing, oceanic hybrid narratives, ecological sci-fi, and speculative Indigenous fiction. Together, these stories navigate the landscapes of Taiwanese ecoliterature, illuminating its past and pointing toward its future.

An Indigenous hunter laments the decline in the flying squirrel population and reflects on how animals perceive the world. In a drought-stricken cyberpunk anytown, kids revolt against the grown-ups only to face off with stray dogs over water. During late-night diving sessions, a researcher encounters a mysterious group of ocean-dwelling people with gills. In an overpopulated future, marrying an AI spouse will raise a human’s credit score. A man follows the trail of an extinct leopard, seeking to unravel a metafictional mystery left behind by his late wife.

This anthology showcases cutting-edge works on ecological themes by essential and emerging Taiwanese authors, revealing the vitality of their engagements with environmental crises. Taiwan is a biodiversity hotspot and geopolitical flashpoint, home to both Indigenous peoples and settlers. The pieces collected in A Taiwanese Ecoliterature Reader give voice to this human and more-than-human diversity, telling tales that are disturbing yet hopeful, serious yet sensuous, speculative yet grounded, down to earth yet spanning the seas. They span Indigenous eco-writing, oceanic hybrid narratives, ecological sci-fi, and speculative Indigenous fiction. Together, these stories navigate the landscapes of Taiwanese ecoliterature, illuminating its past and pointing toward its future.

Throughout 1905, an amateur photographer dedicated himself to capturing Broadway, from the bottom of Manhattan to the top. In sun, rain, and snow, at dawn and late at night, C. G. Hine depicted buildings that were threatened by rapid development: outmoded stores, hotels, and theaters, as well as workshops and shanties. His survey also foregrounded the street’s other holdouts against change, such as sex workers, pushcart vendors, horses, and the trees and wildflowers of upper Manhattan. Hine ultimately assembled more than three hundred photographs, along with numerous newspaper clippings and a typed essay, into a three-volume album, titled “From the Sky Scraper to the Wild Flower.”

Presenting striking images from Hine’s album, this book offers a rare glimpse into the transformation of New York’s built environment at the turn of the twentieth century. Nick Yablon explores Hine’s connections to—and divergences from—movements and trends of the time, such as historic preservation, Pictorialist photography, botany, and bicycling. He curates a selection of Hine’s photographs and investigates how they reveal deeper conflicts and tensions about urban development. From the Skyscraper to the Wildflower guides readers up Broadway block by block, casting light on New York’s changing landscape, where signs of the modern clashed with vestiges of earlier eras.

Healthcare is broken—but we can fix it. Our current system is plagued by staggering costs, inadequate outcomes, and pervasive inequities. How can we deliver long-overdue change and make this system work for everyone?

In this groundbreaking book, Halle Tecco provides an insider’s guide to transforming our healthcare system through innovation. Drawing from her extensive experience as an entrepreneur, investor, and professor, she delivers a practical roadmap for addressing the most pressing challenges. Combining personal narratives, compelling case studies, and actionable frameworks, Tecco explores how to identify opportunities for meaningful change and build sustainable, scalable solutions that align profit with purpose. She acknowledges the difficulties—such as regulatory hurdles, misaligned incentives, and resistance to change—but shows how entrepreneurs can turn obstacles into their competitive advantage.

Bridging the gap between Silicon Valley dynamism and healthcare’s evidence-based approach, Massively Better Healthcare offers a realistic yet optimistic view of what’s possible. Written for everyone from seasoned professionals to aspiring innovators, this book shares an inspiring and attainable vision of a better healthcare system and equips readers with the essential tools to succeed.

Throughout 1905, an amateur photographer dedicated himself to capturing Broadway, from the bottom of Manhattan to the top. In sun, rain, and snow, at dawn and late at night, C. G. Hine depicted buildings that were threatened by rapid development: outmoded stores, hotels, and theaters, as well as workshops and shanties. His survey also foregrounded the street’s other holdouts against change, such as sex workers, pushcart vendors, horses, and the trees and wildflowers of upper Manhattan. Hine ultimately assembled more than three hundred photographs, along with numerous newspaper clippings and a typed essay, into a three-volume album, titled “From the Sky Scraper to the Wild Flower.”

Presenting striking images from Hine’s album, this book offers a rare glimpse into the transformation of New York’s built environment at the turn of the twentieth century. Nick Yablon explores Hine’s connections to—and divergences from—movements and trends of the time, such as historic preservation, Pictorialist photography, botany, and bicycling. He curates a selection of Hine’s photographs and investigates how they reveal deeper conflicts and tensions about urban development. From the Skyscraper to the Wildflower guides readers up Broadway block by block, casting light on New York’s changing landscape, where signs of the modern clashed with vestiges of earlier eras.

Since the earliest days of the United States, some parents have felt moved to capture their political moment in their children’s names. A Massachusetts child received the name Federal Constitution in 1790. The nineteenth century saw the name States Rights crop up across the South. A younger brother of a boy called McKinley in the early twentieth century was disproportionately likely to be named Roosevelt. Residents of areas that supported Reagan were prone to choose the spelling “Meagan” over “Megan.” The name Hillary surged in popularity after the Clintons emerged on the political scene—then crashed just as dramatically. What do trends like these tell us about political identities and enthusiasms in the United States?

R. Urbatsch explores the politics of naming across American history, revealing the surprising ways parents’ choices shed light on public opinion past and present. He argues that naming is a weathervane for political attitudes: Names touch on every sort of identity, from race and gender to nationalism and religion. Tracing the rise and fall of names that evoked the leaders, ideas, and issues that fired political imaginations of their times, Urbatsch opens new windows onto a wide range of historical questions. By analyzing when politics-tinged names gained or lost popularity, this book offers an unconventional and illuminating new perspective on identity, public sentiment, and political behavior in the United States.

Since the earliest days of the United States, some parents have felt moved to capture their political moment in their children’s names. A Massachusetts child received the name Federal Constitution in 1790. The nineteenth century saw the name States Rights crop up across the South. A younger brother of a boy called McKinley in the early twentieth century was disproportionately likely to be named Roosevelt. Residents of areas that supported Reagan were prone to choose the spelling “Meagan” over “Megan.” The name Hillary surged in popularity after the Clintons emerged on the political scene—then crashed just as dramatically. What do trends like these tell us about political identities and enthusiasms in the United States?

R. Urbatsch explores the politics of naming across American history, revealing the surprising ways parents’ choices shed light on public opinion past and present. He argues that naming is a weathervane for political attitudes: Names touch on every sort of identity, from race and gender to nationalism and religion. Tracing the rise and fall of names that evoked the leaders, ideas, and issues that fired political imaginations of their times, Urbatsch opens new windows onto a wide range of historical questions. By analyzing when politics-tinged names gained or lost popularity, this book offers an unconventional and illuminating new perspective on identity, public sentiment, and political behavior in the United States.

This exhibition catalog presents a collaborative work of Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, scholar and artist, and the key Ukrainian and Jewish writers, art scholars, politicians, educators, journalists, and poets, who unravel the visual mysteries of his artwork on display at the Ukrainian Institute of America in the fall of 2025. Together they address in real time the catastrophic events of nowadays, including ideological brainwashing, imperial aggression, political hypocrisy, cultural genocide, and the immensity of human suffering. The artworks and essays ponder the question of resilience and survival of a nation-in-the making in the situation of a global crisis of humanity.

The volume’s contributors are Alex Averbuch, Rory Finnin, Amelia Glaser, Olena Grozovska, Anna Gruver, Borys Gudziak, Yuriy Gurzhy, Tamara Hundorova, Rodger Kamenetz, Mykola Kniazhytsky, Serhii Kvit, Oksana Lutsyshyna, Vasyl Makhno, Oleksandra Matviichuk, Joel Mokyr, Myroslava Mudrak, Mykhailo Nazarenko, Oxana Pachlovska, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, Katja Petrowskaya, Ilia Rodov, Edward Serotta, Anastasiia Simferovska, Benjamin Sloan, Edjan Westerman, and Marcin Wodzinski.

Building an effective civil service is crucial for public service delivery and good governance, but reforming bureaucratic institutions is notoriously difficult. This book takes a fresh perspective on this challenge by documenting and analyzing the implementation of more than one hundred reforms initiated by six African countries over the last thirty years.

Martin J. Williams shows that these efforts largely fell short of their goals because they typically approached organizational change as a matter of changing formal structures and processes through one-off projects. Some did yield positive changes, however, when they were able to create opportunities for civil servants to discuss performance and how to improve it. Drawing on this evidence, Williams develops a new theory of how systemic reforms can lead to meaningful change—not by trying to force it through top-down interventions but by catalyzing an ongoing and decentralized process of continuous improvement.

Reform as Process makes theoretical and empirical contributions to research on organizational performance, civil service reform, and public service delivery, and it shares practical insights and strategies to help reformers around the world achieve meaningful change in their organizations.

Since the Middle Passage, the intellectual and physical freedom of Black women in the United States and the Caribbean has been constrained. Yet Black women writers, artists, choreographers, and performers have contested pervasive political, cultural, and discursive silencing by drawing on the traditions and creative visions of multiple Souths: the Southern United States and the Caribbean, as well as Africa.

In The Souths in Her—a phrase borrowed from Ntozake Shange—Nicole M. Morris Johnson shows how key Black women artists transformed the enclosing narrative frames imposed on them, developing new forms of creative expression informed by the lived experiences and submerged histories of women across the Africana southern world. She analyzes the intertwined relationship between movement and writing in the works of Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Dunham, Dianne McIntyre, Maryse Condé, and Shange, among others. Morris Johnson demonstrates that although the central role of motion reinforced perceptions of primitivity that relegated Black women and the South to a space outside modernity, it was in fact crucial to their formal innovations. For these writers and choreographers, unexpected encounters with unfamiliar traditions and creative visions of multiple Souths catalyzed formal experimentation and movements for liberation. Considering the violence routinely inflicted on Black women alongside their artistic innovations, this book reveals a transmuted South that is rich in techniques for weaving liberatory works. Illuminating Black women’s singular contributions to Black modernity, The Souths in Her offers new frames for understanding their embodied and textual creative expression.

Building an effective civil service is crucial for public service delivery and good governance, but reforming bureaucratic institutions is notoriously difficult. This book takes a fresh perspective on this challenge by documenting and analyzing the implementation of more than one hundred reforms initiated by six African countries over the last thirty years.

Martin J. Williams shows that these efforts largely fell short of their goals because they typically approached organizational change as a matter of changing formal structures and processes through one-off projects. Some did yield positive changes, however, when they were able to create opportunities for civil servants to discuss performance and how to improve it. Drawing on this evidence, Williams develops a new theory of how systemic reforms can lead to meaningful change—not by trying to force it through top-down interventions but by catalyzing an ongoing and decentralized process of continuous improvement.

Reform as Process makes theoretical and empirical contributions to research on organizational performance, civil service reform, and public service delivery, and it shares practical insights and strategies to help reformers around the world achieve meaningful change in their organizations.

Since the Middle Passage, the intellectual and physical freedom of Black women in the United States and the Caribbean has been constrained. Yet Black women writers, artists, choreographers, and performers have contested pervasive political, cultural, and discursive silencing by drawing on the traditions and creative visions of multiple Souths: the Southern United States and the Caribbean, as well as Africa.

In The Souths in Her—a phrase borrowed from Ntozake Shange—Nicole M. Morris Johnson shows how key Black women artists transformed the enclosing narrative frames imposed on them, developing new forms of creative expression informed by the lived experiences and submerged histories of women across the Africana southern world. She analyzes the intertwined relationship between movement and writing in the works of Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Dunham, Dianne McIntyre, Maryse Condé, and Shange, among others. Morris Johnson demonstrates that although the central role of motion reinforced perceptions of primitivity that relegated Black women and the South to a space outside modernity, it was in fact crucial to their formal innovations. For these writers and choreographers, unexpected encounters with unfamiliar traditions and creative visions of multiple Souths catalyzed formal experimentation and movements for liberation. Considering the violence routinely inflicted on Black women alongside their artistic innovations, this book reveals a transmuted South that is rich in techniques for weaving liberatory works. Illuminating Black women’s singular contributions to Black modernity, The Souths in Her offers new frames for understanding their embodied and textual creative expression.

In recent decades, self-proclaimed “independent bookstores” have arisen across China. In the West, such retailers represent an alternative to corporations and chains. In China, by contrast, they differentiate themselves from not only the state-owned Xinhua Bookstore but also other privately owned shops through an emphasis on intellectual independence and the free exchange of ideas.

Cultural Mavericks takes readers inside the world of independent bookselling in China, showing how a wide range of figures navigate the challenges of book retailing in the digital age amid rapidly shifting social, political, and economic dynamics. Drawing on more than a decade of immersive research—including interviews, observations, and extensive documentary analysis—Zheng Liu unveils how these bookstores carve out a unique identity and market position. She develops the concept of “culturally adapted strategy” to explain how independent bookstores—as both dedicated cultural institutions and resilient business enterprises—balance economic imperatives with a deep commitment to intellectual autonomy. Liu challenges the tendency to understand nonstate cultural institutions in China in terms of resistance, arguing that independent bookstores engage with politics as a strategic means of differentiation from the competition.

Richly detailed and compellingly written, Cultural Mavericks sheds new light on the interplay among culture, commerce, and politics in China, offering timely insights into the evolving dynamics of China’s book industry and wider cultural economy.

In recent decades, self-proclaimed “independent bookstores” have arisen across China. In the West, such retailers represent an alternative to corporations and chains. In China, by contrast, they differentiate themselves from not only the state-owned Xinhua Bookstore but also other privately owned shops through an emphasis on intellectual independence and the free exchange of ideas.

Cultural Mavericks takes readers inside the world of independent bookselling in China, showing how a wide range of figures navigate the challenges of book retailing in the digital age amid rapidly shifting social, political, and economic dynamics. Drawing on more than a decade of immersive research—including interviews, observations, and extensive documentary analysis—Zheng Liu unveils how these bookstores carve out a unique identity and market position. She develops the concept of “culturally adapted strategy” to explain how independent bookstores—as both dedicated cultural institutions and resilient business enterprises—balance economic imperatives with a deep commitment to intellectual autonomy. Liu challenges the tendency to understand nonstate cultural institutions in China in terms of resistance, arguing that independent bookstores engage with politics as a strategic means of differentiation from the competition.

Richly detailed and compellingly written, Cultural Mavericks sheds new light on the interplay among culture, commerce, and politics in China, offering timely insights into the evolving dynamics of China’s book industry and wider cultural economy.

Many companies claim to prize innovation but struggle to support it in practice. CEOs call innovation their number-one priority in surveys, yet their employees say they are frequently frustrated in their efforts to create change. The biggest reason for this disconnect? Playing it safe. Leaders and organizations want to implement new ideas, but too often they are held back by the fear of failure, even though setbacks are intrinsic to the innovation process.

In No Fear, No Failure, Lorraine H. Marchand shows readers how to overcome the status quo that stifles creative thinking and to create a culture that encourages innovation. She provides a framework for sustained growth built on the “5 Cs”: Customer First, Culture, Collaboration, Change, and Chance. Drawing on more than 120 interviews with leaders across industries, real-world case studies, and firsthand experience, Marchand demonstrates how to spark lasting transformation. She shares field-tested strategies, tactics, and tools that practitioners can use to embed creativity within organizational cultures, leverage innovation to ensure better results, and future-proof a company for the long haul. Practical and inspiring, No Fear, No Failure is a step-by-step guide for organizations of every type and size to drive growth by fostering a culture of innovation.

As national governments and global institutions fail to address climate change, an increasing number of cities have committed to major sustainability and climate strategies. Why do some cities take bold action while others remain on the sidelines?

Christof Brandtner shows that city climate action is not simply a matter of political will: It is an organizational problem. Cities do not act alone. They are embedded within both a broad institutional superstructure of professional networks and peer cities as well as a deep organizational infrastructure of civil society organizations, public agencies, and socially responsible firms. This dual embeddedness shapes cities’ capacity to plan, learn, lead, and scale sustainability solutions. Drawing on comparative research spanning fifteen years and thousands of cities around the world, Brandtner traces how environmental strategies, sustainability practices, and green building initiatives emerge, diffuse, and take hold. He uncovers the structural conditions that enable and inhibit meaningful climate action, revealing why it varies so widely across cities.

By combining lenses from urban theory and organizational sociology, Cities in Action sheds light on how cities navigate their social and institutional environments to meet the climate challenge. This book offers a novel perspective for scholars, policy makers, and practitioners seeking not just to explain but also to empower city action.

As national governments and global institutions fail to address climate change, an increasing number of cities have committed to major sustainability and climate strategies. Why do some cities take bold action while others remain on the sidelines?

Christof Brandtner shows that city climate action is not simply a matter of political will: It is an organizational problem. Cities do not act alone. They are embedded within both a broad institutional superstructure of professional networks and peer cities as well as a deep organizational infrastructure of civil society organizations, public agencies, and socially responsible firms. This dual embeddedness shapes cities’ capacity to plan, learn, lead, and scale sustainability solutions. Drawing on comparative research spanning fifteen years and thousands of cities around the world, Brandtner traces how environmental strategies, sustainability practices, and green building initiatives emerge, diffuse, and take hold. He uncovers the structural conditions that enable and inhibit meaningful climate action, revealing why it varies so widely across cities.

By combining lenses from urban theory and organizational sociology, Cities in Action sheds light on how cities navigate their social and institutional environments to meet the climate challenge. This book offers a novel perspective for scholars, policy makers, and practitioners seeking not just to explain but also to empower city action.

Over the centuries, from the transatlantic slave trade to voluntary mass migrations through the digital era, African cultural practices have taken root and transformed in the Americas. Even though Afro-Brazilians make up a large share of the global Black diaspora, and Brazilian culture in turn has been deeply shaped by African influences, their particular contributions remain overlooked.

Imagining the Past, Remembering the Future investigates the interlinked art, history, religion, philosophy, and cosmology of oral traditions across the Afro-Brazilian diaspora, arguing that these varied cultural expressions together constitute distinctive forms of knowledge. Through case studies of sacred and secular performances, Isis Barra Costa shows how Afro-Brazilian concepts and practices preserve and renew an ever-changing diasporic philosophy. Ranging across parades of Black royal courts, Carnaval performing groups, oracular literature, “spirit-dictated” novels, and many other forms, she illuminates the survival and transformation of African cosmologies, epistemologies, and poetics in the Americas. Foregrounding oral narratives, Barra Costa sheds light on the nonhegemonic protagonists and canons of the Black Atlantic: the spaces and beings, kingdoms and heroes, philosophers and historians that orient Afro-Brazilian memory and imagination. By tracing forms of knowledge across the global African diaspora, this deeply interdisciplinary book reveals the transformative potential of Afro-Brazilian philosophical paradigms.

The United States’s superpower status is often associated with its industrial, financial, and military might. Yet its global power after the Second World War hinged in part on something often seen as backward: agriculture. In contrast to Britain, the predominant global power of the nineteenth century, which depended on its current and former colonies for food and raw materials, the United States produced vast agricultural surpluses. During the 1950s, an era of decolonization and rising Cold War competition, the United States became the dominant exporter of food staples to industrializing nations in the Third World through its massive food aid program.

Through the lens of food and agriculture, this book offers new ways to understand the roots of the post–Second World War global order and the US position in it. Samantha Iyer traces how two former British territories and agricultural competitors of the United States, India and Egypt, became two of the largest importers of US food aid. She investigates the origins and consequences of the US-centric postwar food regime by examining changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of agricultural surpluses from the late nineteenth century to the early 1970s. Bringing together life in villages, towns, and cities with national, imperial, and international affairs, Iyer demonstrates that food aid was the expression of a changed political, economic, and ecological world that the United States did not create alone. Drawing on sources in Arabic, French, Urdu, and English, Agrarian Superpower is a groundbreaking comparative history of food, agriculture, and development.

The United States’s superpower status is often associated with its industrial, financial, and military might. Yet its global power after the Second World War hinged in part on something often seen as backward: agriculture. In contrast to Britain, the predominant global power of the nineteenth century, which depended on its current and former colonies for food and raw materials, the United States produced vast agricultural surpluses. During the 1950s, an era of decolonization and rising Cold War competition, the United States became the dominant exporter of food staples to industrializing nations in the Third World through its massive food aid program.

Through the lens of food and agriculture, this book offers new ways to understand the roots of the post–Second World War global order and the US position in it. Samantha Iyer traces how two former British territories and agricultural competitors of the United States, India and Egypt, became two of the largest importers of US food aid. She investigates the origins and consequences of the US-centric postwar food regime by examining changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of agricultural surpluses from the late nineteenth century to the early 1970s. Bringing together life in villages, towns, and cities with national, imperial, and international affairs, Iyer demonstrates that food aid was the expression of a changed political, economic, and ecological world that the United States did not create alone. Drawing on sources in Arabic, French, Urdu, and English, Agrarian Superpower is a groundbreaking comparative history of food, agriculture, and development.

Over the centuries, from the transatlantic slave trade to voluntary mass migrations through the digital era, African cultural practices have taken root and transformed in the Americas. Even though Afro-Brazilians make up a large share of the global Black diaspora, and Brazilian culture in turn has been deeply shaped by African influences, their particular contributions remain overlooked.

Imagining the Past, Remembering the Future investigates the interlinked art, history, religion, philosophy, and cosmology of oral traditions across the Afro-Brazilian diaspora, arguing that these varied cultural expressions together constitute distinctive forms of knowledge. Through case studies of sacred and secular performances, Isis Barra Costa shows how Afro-Brazilian concepts and practices preserve and renew an ever-changing diasporic philosophy. Ranging across parades of Black royal courts, Carnaval performing groups, oracular literature, “spirit-dictated” novels, and many other forms, she illuminates the survival and transformation of African cosmologies, epistemologies, and poetics in the Americas. Foregrounding oral narratives, Barra Costa sheds light on the nonhegemonic protagonists and canons of the Black Atlantic: the spaces and beings, kingdoms and heroes, philosophers and historians that orient Afro-Brazilian memory and imagination. By tracing forms of knowledge across the global African diaspora, this deeply interdisciplinary book reveals the transformative potential of Afro-Brazilian philosophical paradigms.

To be successful as an investor, one needs a framework. And no investing framework works without numbers. Although quantitative methods can be intimidating, they provide a major boost to the quality of analysis. Written for readers without a technical background, Finding Value in Numbers is an engaging and practical guide to how thoughtful investors can use numbers—not just for the sake of crunching data but for making better decisions.

Using a value investing perspective, Ehsan Ehsani shows how to deploy quantitative tools to identify and analyze investment prospects, demystifying the math that points to overlooked opportunities in the stock market, other securities, and beyond. Numbers help us grasp what a company is worth and why: the quality of a business, the durability of its competitive edge, and the reasonableness of its price. Combining practical frameworks with real-world examples, Ehsani walks readers through key concepts that enable robust analysis while explaining how to spot red flags. Along the way, he reveals how a disciplined, numbers-based approach can support both conviction and patience—two traits every successful investor needs. Blending quantitative insight with timeless investing wisdom, Finding Value in Numbers is an essential book for aspiring and professional investors looking to hone their skills as well as curious readers drawn to the inner workings of markets.

The 2006 United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities differs markedly from other forms of international human rights law: it not only protects the rights of individuals but also addresses interpersonal relations and social structures. How did the convention attain this broad reach, and what does it tell us about the histories of human rights and disability law?

Progress from the Margins is an international history of the struggle for recognition of disability rights at the global level. Paul van Trigt chronicles how people with disabilities and their allies developed their own understanding of human rights, from the emergence of disability activism in the late 1960s through the negotiation of the convention. He traces the unexpected paths by which international recognition of disability human rights emerged, showing that it is not a story of linear progress but rather one of a decades-long series of discontinuous advances. Challenging accounts that criticize the limited scope of human rights in recent decades, van Trigt highlights how disabled people and their allies transformed human rights law by emphasizing social dimensions. He foregrounds the agency of disabled people from the Global South as well as the Global North, demonstrating how they shaped their own human rights. A groundbreaking account of disability internationalism, Progress from the Margins also reflects on the prospects for a world that embraces disability.

Increasing bacterial resistance to antibiotics is one of today’s greatest threats to public health. Yet a possible solution has emerged from a surprising source. Phage therapy deploys viruses called bacteriophages, “bacteria eaters,” to treat bacterial infections. What concerns—both biological and social—arise from using viruses in this way? What does phage therapy reveal about the links between humans and microbes?

In Our Viral Futures, Charlotte Brives examines the development and implications of this therapy, providing new ways to understand our interconnections with the microbial world. Considering patients seeking treatment for chronic infections, the establishment of new regulatory frameworks, and the complex processes of laboratory research and clinical trials, she highlights the complexity and variety of the relationships among humans, phages, and bacteria. Brives places phage therapy in the context of the widespread use of antibiotics under industrial capitalism, which has deployed these treatments in order to enable ecologically devastating forms of mass production and consumption. She argues that the connections between human societies and microbial communities defy the usual categories through which science and medicine understand the world, giving rise to new moral and political questions. Interdisciplinary and nuanced, Our Viral Futures poses a provocative challenge: Instead of continuing to assert that we can control and master microbes, we must learn to coexist with them.

The early sixteenth century saw the rise of two Mediterranean empires—the Christian Habsburgs, based in Spain and Austria, and the Muslim Ottomans, centered in the Balkans and Anatolia—with strikingly similar ambitions. Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (1500–1558) and Sultan Süleyman (1495–1566) each pursued grand universalist visions, seeking to unite Islam and Christendom under a universal monarchy that would resolve wars and conflicts, dissolve religious divisions, and usher in an age of peace, unity, and justice.

Drawing on a wide range of Ottoman and European sources, Ebru Turan explores the emergence of these empires and the early phase of their rivalry within the broader Mediterranean world. She argues that the late medieval crusading movement, which aimed to conquer Islamic lands and convert Muslims to Christianity, was infused with apocalyptic and messianic expectations in both the Latin West and the Ottoman Empire. While Charles V was hailed as a prophesied figure destined to conquer the Islamic East and restore the ancient Roman Empire, Süleyman contested these claims by positioning himself as the rightful heir to the Roman Caesars. Like his rival, he embraced a messianic identity, aspiring to conquer Christendom and unite the world under Islamic rule.

Innovative in its approach and provocative in its conclusions, The Race for Universal Monarchy transcends traditional East and West dichotomies, highlighting both empires’ efforts to build a global community of peace and harmony.

In a deeply unequal world, numerous categories of people have been consigned to disadvantaged positions. Are those on society’s fringes doomed to remain there, or might marginality offer potential pathways toward a more equitable future?

This groundbreaking book reimagines marginality as a transformative force, interweaving personal narratives with cultural, literary, and philosophical analysis to reveal how perspectives from the margins can catalyze social change. Drawing on her own experiences as an Asian American female philosopher specializing in non-Western thought within an academic world dominated by white male–centered Western traditions, Jin Y. Park argues that personal stories are essential to philosophical inquiry. Ranging across non-Western philosophy, South Korean literature, and Asian American and African American voices as well as Western philosophy, she invites readers to examine their own feelings of marginality, reflecting on how lived experiences shape the search for meaning and values.

Bridging theoretical insights and real-world issues, Marginality offers fresh perspective on contemporary challenges such as violence, social discrimination, and economic inequality. Urging a radical rethinking of how we understand power, community, and social justice, this book calls on readers to embrace the solidarity of the margins to drive positive change.

The 2006 United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities differs markedly from other forms of international human rights law: it not only protects the rights of individuals but also addresses interpersonal relations and social structures. How did the convention attain this broad reach, and what does it tell us about the histories of human rights and disability law?

Progress from the Margins is an international history of the struggle for recognition of disability rights at the global level. Paul van Trigt chronicles how people with disabilities and their allies developed their own understanding of human rights, from the emergence of disability activism in the late 1960s through the negotiation of the convention. He traces the unexpected paths by which international recognition of disability human rights emerged, showing that it is not a story of linear progress but rather one of a decades-long series of discontinuous advances. Challenging accounts that criticize the limited scope of human rights in recent decades, van Trigt highlights how disabled people and their allies transformed human rights law by emphasizing social dimensions. He foregrounds the agency of disabled people from the Global South as well as the Global North, demonstrating how they shaped their own human rights. A groundbreaking account of disability internationalism, Progress from the Margins also reflects on the prospects for a world that embraces disability.

In a deeply unequal world, numerous categories of people have been consigned to disadvantaged positions. Are those on society’s fringes doomed to remain there, or might marginality offer potential pathways toward a more equitable future?

This groundbreaking book reimagines marginality as a transformative force, interweaving personal narratives with cultural, literary, and philosophical analysis to reveal how perspectives from the margins can catalyze social change. Drawing on her own experiences as an Asian American female philosopher specializing in non-Western thought within an academic world dominated by white male–centered Western traditions, Jin Y. Park argues that personal stories are essential to philosophical inquiry. Ranging across non-Western philosophy, South Korean literature, and Asian American and African American voices as well as Western philosophy, she invites readers to examine their own feelings of marginality, reflecting on how lived experiences shape the search for meaning and values.

Bridging theoretical insights and real-world issues, Marginality offers fresh perspective on contemporary challenges such as violence, social discrimination, and economic inequality. Urging a radical rethinking of how we understand power, community, and social justice, this book calls on readers to embrace the solidarity of the margins to drive positive change.

Gianni Vattimo (1936–2023) was among the most significant Italian philosophers of the last fifty years. A controversial figure both at home and abroad, he sometimes described himself paradoxically as a “nihilist” and as a “communist Catholic.” Despite his provocations—and unusually for an academic philosopher—he served two terms in the European Parliament. For decades, Vattimo was at the forefront of developments in continental philosophy, spanning hermeneutics, postmodernity, and the “return to religion.” Drawing on the work of figures such as Heidegger, Marx, Nietzsche, Gadamer, Rorty, and Kuhn, Vattimo constructed his signature concept of “weak thought,” a way of approaching the persistent problems of ideology, violence, and social division after the so-called end of metaphysics.

In this book, Thomas Jared Farmer provides a groundbreaking examination of Vattimo’s life and work. He considers the distinctive contributions that Vattimo made to postmodern thought as well as to recent debates in political philosophy and religion. This book provides an accessible introduction to Vattimo’s overall philosophical project while also contextualizing it through discussions of important intellectual figures, key events in Italian history, and details about his personal trajectory. Authoritative and comprehensive, it is an indispensable companion to the works of one of the most original thinkers to emerge in the second half of the twentieth century.

In recent years, China has played an increasingly significant role in international affairs, wielding its economic and political strength to solidify its position as a global power. Within its immediate neighborhood, however, Chinese influence is not new. Chinese actions have affected how the Indian and Pakistani states have perceived and responded to domestic governance and security challenges since the early days of independence.

Connecting international politics with domestic security, Harrison Akins shows how India and Pakistan’s engagement with China has shaped the two governments’ policies toward their strategic frontiers over the past seventy years. He focuses on northeastern India and Pakistan’s Balochistan Province, peripheries that have been at the center of both countries’ relationships with China and that continue to present pressing security and development challenges. In contrast to the conventional focus on state-to-state relations, Akins emphasizes frontiers and their ties to central governments. He demonstrates that China’s presence spurred the Indian and Pakistani governments to assert their sovereignty over these border regions, exacerbating conditions that led to the outbreak of antistate violence. Featuring comprehensive research and keen analysis, Adversary and Ally offers new insights into the pressures confronting South Asian governments and the limits of China’s reach.

In recent years, China and the United States have each turned economic interdependence into an instrument of coercion, using their dominant positions in international trade to push states and firms to comply with their political goals. What is distinctive about this form of economic pressure, and how can other countries fight back?

This groundbreaking book explores the weaponization of economic interdependence and its implications for the international order through a wealth of new and original data on China’s economic statecraft. Victor D. Cha, Ellen Kim, and Andy Lim examine how and in what ways the United States and China have deployed economic coercion, focusing on China’s extensive use of this tactic over the past three decades. They analyze a vast data set that includes more than 600 cases of China’s economic bullying of states, companies, and individuals in North America, Asia, and Europe. Cha, Kim, and Lim propose a multilateral strategy of “collective resilience” to counter intimidation, showing how targeted states can band together, leverage trading relationships, and threaten retaliation.

Synthesizing new insights from unique trade data with international security expertise, this timely book sheds new light on how China exercises economic power—and it provides a playbook to deter bullies and rebalance the global order.

In recent years, China and the United States have each turned economic interdependence into an instrument of coercion, using their dominant positions in international trade to push states and firms to comply with their political goals. What is distinctive about this form of economic pressure, and how can other countries fight back?

This groundbreaking book explores the weaponization of economic interdependence and its implications for the international order through a wealth of new and original data on China’s economic statecraft. Victor D. Cha, Ellen Kim, and Andy Lim examine how and in what ways the United States and China have deployed economic coercion, focusing on China’s extensive use of this tactic over the past three decades. They analyze a vast data set that includes more than 600 cases of China’s economic bullying of states, companies, and individuals in North America, Asia, and Europe. Cha, Kim, and Lim propose a multilateral strategy of “collective resilience” to counter intimidation, showing how targeted states can band together, leverage trading relationships, and threaten retaliation.

Synthesizing new insights from unique trade data with international security expertise, this timely book sheds new light on how China exercises economic power—and it provides a playbook to deter bullies and rebalance the global order.

In recent years, China has played an increasingly significant role in international affairs, wielding its economic and political strength to solidify its position as a global power. Within its immediate neighborhood, however, Chinese influence is not new. Chinese actions have affected how the Indian and Pakistani states have perceived and responded to domestic governance and security challenges since the early days of independence.

Connecting international politics with domestic security, Harrison Akins shows how India and Pakistan’s engagement with China has shaped the two governments’ policies toward their strategic frontiers over the past seventy years. He focuses on northeastern India and Pakistan’s Balochistan Province, peripheries that have been at the center of both countries’ relationships with China and that continue to present pressing security and development challenges. In contrast to the conventional focus on state-to-state relations, Akins emphasizes frontiers and their ties to central governments. He demonstrates that China’s presence spurred the Indian and Pakistani governments to assert their sovereignty over these border regions, exacerbating conditions that led to the outbreak of antistate violence. Featuring comprehensive research and keen analysis, Adversary and Ally offers new insights into the pressures confronting South Asian governments and the limits of China’s reach.

Gianni Vattimo (1936–2023) was among the most significant Italian philosophers of the last fifty years. A controversial figure both at home and abroad, he sometimes described himself paradoxically as a “nihilist” and as a “communist Catholic.” Despite his provocations—and unusually for an academic philosopher—he served two terms in the European Parliament. For decades, Vattimo was at the forefront of developments in continental philosophy, spanning hermeneutics, postmodernity, and the “return to religion.” Drawing on the work of figures such as Heidegger, Marx, Nietzsche, Gadamer, Rorty, and Kuhn, Vattimo constructed his signature concept of “weak thought,” a way of approaching the persistent problems of ideology, violence, and social division after the so-called end of metaphysics.

In this book, Thomas Jared Farmer provides a groundbreaking examination of Vattimo’s life and work. He considers the distinctive contributions that Vattimo made to postmodern thought as well as to recent debates in political philosophy and religion. This book provides an accessible introduction to Vattimo’s overall philosophical project while also contextualizing it through discussions of important intellectual figures, key events in Italian history, and details about his personal trajectory. Authoritative and comprehensive, it is an indispensable companion to the works of one of the most original thinkers to emerge in the second half of the twentieth century.

Classical Indian poetics prized the skillful use of alaṅkāras, or “ornaments”—literary figures of speech. Across more than a millennium, Sanskrit writers developed and elaborated an account of literary embellishment that is perhaps the world’s most complex and long-standing theory of figuration. Yet it remains the least studied of India’s major classical systems of thought.

An Alaṅkāra Reader is a groundbreaking panoramic overview of this tradition, presenting extensive and accessible translations of key works that span its history, from the sixth century CE to the eighteenth. These texts vividly show how Indian theorists analyzed simile, metaphor, allegory, and dozens of other figures that are distinctive to their world. Yigal Bronner’s commentary makes Sanskrit concepts of ornamentation approachable while placing them in historical context. He provides a new account of the history of Sanskrit poetics, showing how it underwent successive waves of theoretical revolutions and emerged as a prestigious field that attracted a variety of scholars in the early modern era.

Featuring many previously untranslated texts, An Alaṅkāra Reader is an essential resource for the study of classical Indian thought, the intellectual history of South Asia, and comparative literature. It reveals the depth and nuance of Sanskrit’s “science of ornaments” for anyone interested in poetic theory, figuration, and aesthetics across world traditions.

Increasing bacterial resistance to antibiotics is one of today’s greatest threats to public health. Yet a possible solution has emerged from a surprising source. Phage therapy deploys viruses called bacteriophages, “bacteria eaters,” to treat bacterial infections. What concerns—both biological and social—arise from using viruses in this way? What does phage therapy reveal about the links between humans and microbes?

In Our Viral Futures, Charlotte Brives examines the development and implications of this therapy, providing new ways to understand our interconnections with the microbial world. Considering patients seeking treatment for chronic infections, the establishment of new regulatory frameworks, and the complex processes of laboratory research and clinical trials, she highlights the complexity and variety of the relationships among humans, phages, and bacteria. Brives places phage therapy in the context of the widespread use of antibiotics under industrial capitalism, which has deployed these treatments in order to enable ecologically devastating forms of mass production and consumption. She argues that the connections between human societies and microbial communities defy the usual categories through which science and medicine understand the world, giving rise to new moral and political questions. Interdisciplinary and nuanced, Our Viral Futures poses a provocative challenge: Instead of continuing to assert that we can control and master microbes, we must learn to coexist with them.

The early sixteenth century saw the rise of two Mediterranean empires—the Christian Habsburgs, based in Spain and Austria, and the Muslim Ottomans, centered in the Balkans and Anatolia—with strikingly similar ambitions. Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (1500–1558) and Sultan Süleyman (1495–1566) each pursued grand universalist visions, seeking to unite Islam and Christendom under a universal monarchy that would resolve wars and conflicts, dissolve religious divisions, and usher in an age of peace, unity, and justice.

Drawing on a wide range of Ottoman and European sources, Ebru Turan explores the emergence of these empires and the early phase of their rivalry within the broader Mediterranean world. She argues that the late medieval crusading movement, which aimed to conquer Islamic lands and convert Muslims to Christianity, was infused with apocalyptic and messianic expectations in both the Latin West and the Ottoman Empire. While Charles V was hailed as a prophesied figure destined to conquer the Islamic East and restore the ancient Roman Empire, Süleyman contested these claims by positioning himself as the rightful heir to the Roman Caesars. Like his rival, he embraced a messianic identity, aspiring to conquer Christendom and unite the world under Islamic rule.

Innovative in its approach and provocative in its conclusions, The Race for Universal Monarchy transcends traditional East and West dichotomies, highlighting both empires’ efforts to build a global community of peace and harmony.

This special issue proposes to approach Ukrainian resistance from the cultural studies perspective. It brings together scholars from different disciplines who address different aspects of resilience and resistance focusing on gender, humor, literature, visual representations, and memes. The authors approach these widely circulated images and narratives as expressions of deep cultural structures that produce meanings. They are rooted in history, past lived experiences, and societal structures that govern human activities and interactions. These images and narratives signal changes in the self-perception of people and shifts in worldviews shattered by war. Although the material analyzed by the authors is very different, they all come to the main overarching conclusion: Ukrainians at time of war actively renegotiate their identities and recalibrate their understanding of history and the place of Ukraine in the world.

Overall, the special issue contributes to the discussions on Ukrainian resistance relying on the evidence found in the grassroots local context. The articles collected here shed light on the deeper structures that enable production of images and narratives that we see on the surface. These structures are rooted in history, cultural memory, gender regimes, and politics. These structures too undergo renegotiations, transformation, and recalibration. To a certain extent, the articles not only analyze but also document and archive the cultural products created by Ukrainian society in the first years of the full-fledged invasion. As such, they will be also valuable as historical sources to be used by researchers in the future.

Google is typically thought of as a tech giant and the world’s largest search engine, but it was also among the first tech companies to invest in news. After 9/11, the company recognized the economic and social value of up-to-the-minute information and began to incorporate news into its business. Google News—built on automation, algorithms, aggregation, and the unbundling and rebundling of news—and Google’s other news-related initiatives went on to play a major role in shaping the information ecosystem of the twenty-first century.

In The Tech-Media Hybrid, Qun Wang examines Google’s engagement with news across more than two decades, tracing the company’s complicated relationship with the news industry. She shows how Google developed a push-and-pull relationship with the media sector, boosting its visibility while also competing against it and establishing new norms. What the company calls the “Google way” of experiencing news has exerted a profound influence on traditional media; Google’s news ambitions, in turn, have been shaped by the global news industry’s actions and reactions at every step. Shedding new light on the vast transformations of the past quarter century, this multimethod interdisciplinary book also offers insight into how the news environment might evolve in the era of AI.

Google is typically thought of as a tech giant and the world’s largest search engine, but it was also among the first tech companies to invest in news. After 9/11, the company recognized the economic and social value of up-to-the-minute information and began to incorporate news into its business. Google News—built on automation, algorithms, aggregation, and the unbundling and rebundling of news—and Google’s other news-related initiatives went on to play a major role in shaping the information ecosystem of the twenty-first century.

In The Tech-Media Hybrid, Qun Wang examines Google’s engagement with news across more than two decades, tracing the company’s complicated relationship with the news industry. She shows how Google developed a push-and-pull relationship with the media sector, boosting its visibility while also competing against it and establishing new norms. What the company calls the “Google way” of experiencing news has exerted a profound influence on traditional media; Google’s news ambitions, in turn, have been shaped by the global news industry’s actions and reactions at every step. Shedding new light on the vast transformations of the past quarter century, this multimethod interdisciplinary book also offers insight into how the news environment might evolve in the era of AI.

In the late seventeenth century, Japan’s cities were sites of vast diversity and dynamism. Following decades of explosive urbanization, individuals of different occupations and economic strata came to rethink their relationships with other members of the urban community and old modes of local affiliation gave way to newly capacious forms of urban identity. These emergent social imaginaries were inextricably intertwined with the commercial circulation of woodblock-printed texts. This interplay of the social, the spatial, and the textual gave shape to a new social type: the Tokugawa townsman.

In this innovative and interdisciplinary book, Thomas Gaubatz offers a fresh approach to understanding the literature of the Tokugawa townspeople. Ranging across history, literature, and print culture—including richly contextualized close readings of the works of Ihara Saikaku and Ejima Kiseki—he shows that popular fiction made sense of the urban world by modeling how individuals could refashion themselves through the performance of shared norms. Challenging the assumption that townsman literature was a voice of resistance to official ideology and warrior authority, Gaubatz argues that print fiction functioned to articulate new identities, legitimate emerging forms of social power, and symbolically contain the tensions and hierarchies within the urban community—and the contradictions within the townsman self. Through this vision of textual self-fashioning, The Textual Townsman develops a radically new account of the politics of popular fiction in Tokugawa status society.

In the late seventeenth century, Japan’s cities were sites of vast diversity and dynamism. Following decades of explosive urbanization, individuals of different occupations and economic strata came to rethink their relationships with other members of the urban community and old modes of local affiliation gave way to newly capacious forms of urban identity. These emergent social imaginaries were inextricably intertwined with the commercial circulation of woodblock-printed texts. This interplay of the social, the spatial, and the textual gave shape to a new social type: the Tokugawa townsman.

In this innovative and interdisciplinary book, Thomas Gaubatz offers a fresh approach to understanding the literature of the Tokugawa townspeople. Ranging across history, literature, and print culture—including richly contextualized close readings of the works of Ihara Saikaku and Ejima Kiseki—he shows that popular fiction made sense of the urban world by modeling how individuals could refashion themselves through the performance of shared norms. Challenging the assumption that townsman literature was a voice of resistance to official ideology and warrior authority, Gaubatz argues that print fiction functioned to articulate new identities, legitimate emerging forms of social power, and symbolically contain the tensions and hierarchies within the urban community—and the contradictions within the townsman self. Through this vision of textual self-fashioning, The Textual Townsman develops a radically new account of the politics of popular fiction in Tokugawa status society.

Today, macaroni and cheese is the ultimate comfort food, a staple of weeknight dinners, family gatherings, and Soul Food restaurants. Humble though the dish may seem, its history is filled with surprising twists and turns. Renaissance cardinals and popes dined on elaborate pasta-and-cheese concoctions laced with costly spices. In the eighteenth century, wealthy young Englishmen made macaroni a symbol of continental sophistication. Black women, whose contribution has long been overshadowed, played a crucial role in establishing the dish as an American tradition from the nation’s founding through the Civil Rights Movement.

This book is a delectable history of macaroni and cheese, tracing an extraordinary journey of cultural exchange and social change. Karima Moyer-Nocchi reveals the religious, political, and industrial forces that shaped its evolution alongside stories of the unsung figures who crafted the dish as we know it today: enslaved cooks who preserved and adapted traditions, immigrant chefs who introduced new variations, and practical homemakers looking to nourish their families with an affordable meal. She emphasizes the adaptability of macaroni and cheese, which in different times has served as both an indulgence on the elite table and sustenance to those struggling to survive, crossing borders, social classes, and cultural divides. Deeply researched and rich with enticing details, this book uncovers the creativity and resilience that brought a beloved food to our tables. The Epic History of Macaroni and Cheese also shares centuries of recipes—from ancient Roman authors to celebrity chefs, reworked for modern kitchens—that provide a hands-on way to experience the evolution of this iconic dish.

Women’s songs of the grind mill are among the oldest oral traditions in South Asia. They have been sung to accompany a daily household labor, making flour using a stone hand mill, for many centuries. Even today, grind mill songs are still well known in Maharashtra, testifying to the endurance of a remarkable genre. Yet these songs have long been understood through sociological or anthropological lenses, treated as entirely separate from literary culture.

This groundbreaking book shows that women’s songs of the grind mill played a foundational role in the vernacular turn to making literature in Marathi between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries. Madhuri Deshmukh demonstrates that women’s songs developed alongside and in intimate conversation with Marathi written literature, shaping the poetic structures and motifs of the bhakti tradition. Drawing on aesthetic categories from the songs themselves, she calls for understanding these artfully crafted compositions as oral poetry in a lyric mode, underscoring that women describe their songs as an “unraveling of the heart” while they compare written poetry to weaving. Deshmukh argues that women poets, Mahadaise and Janabai, were at the forefront of vernacularization, challenging common literary-historical narratives that neglect the role of communities excluded by elite regimes of writing. Considering what songs say about texts and what texts say about songs, The Unraveling Heart offers new insight into the importance of labor and gender to aesthetics and develops a novel approach to the concept of the literary.

Women’s songs of the grind mill are among the oldest oral traditions in South Asia. They have been sung to accompany a daily household labor, making flour using a stone hand mill, for many centuries. Even today, grind mill songs are still well known in Maharashtra, testifying to the endurance of a remarkable genre. Yet these songs have long been understood through sociological or anthropological lenses, treated as entirely separate from literary culture.

This groundbreaking book shows that women’s songs of the grind mill played a foundational role in the vernacular turn to making literature in Marathi between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries. Madhuri Deshmukh demonstrates that women’s songs developed alongside and in intimate conversation with Marathi written literature, shaping the poetic structures and motifs of the bhakti tradition. Drawing on aesthetic categories from the songs themselves, she calls for understanding these artfully crafted compositions as oral poetry in a lyric mode, underscoring that women describe their songs as an “unraveling of the heart” while they compare written poetry to weaving. Deshmukh argues that women poets, Mahadaise and Janabai, were at the forefront of vernacularization, challenging common literary-historical narratives that neglect the role of communities excluded by elite regimes of writing. Considering what songs say about texts and what texts say about songs, The Unraveling Heart offers new insight into the importance of labor and gender to aesthetics and develops a novel approach to the concept of the literary.

Growing up in Bulgaria, Julia Kristeva was warned by her father not to read Dostoyevsky. “Of course, and as usual,” she recalls, “I disobeyed paternal orders and plunged into Dosto. Dazzled, overwhelmed, engulfed.” Kristeva would go on to become one of the most important figures in European intellectual life—and she would return over and over again to Dostoyevsky, still haunted and enraptured by the force of his writing.

In this book, Kristeva embarks on a wide-ranging and stimulating inquiry into Dostoyevsky’s work and the profound ways it has influenced her own thinking. Reading across his major novels and shorter works, Kristeva offers incandescent insights into the potent themes that draw her back to the Russian master: God, otherness, violence, eroticism, the mother, the father, language itself. Both personal and erudite, the book intermingles Kristeva’s analysis with her recollections of Dostoyevsky’s significance in different intellectual moments—the rediscovery of Bakhtin in the Thaw-era Eastern Bloc, the debates over poststructuralism in 1960s France, and today’s arguments about whether it can be said that “everything is permitted.” Brilliant and vivid, this is an essential book for admirers of both Kristeva and Dostoyevsky. It also features an illuminating foreword by Rowan Williams that reflects on the significance of Kristeva’s reading of Dostoyevsky for his own understanding of religious writing.

In this absorbing, suspenseful novel Julia Kristeva combines social satire, medieval history, philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, and autobiography within a gruesome murder mystery. Murder in Byzantium deftly moves from eleventh-century Europe, wracked by the turbulence of the First Crusade, to the sun-dappled, cultural wasteland of present-day Santa Varvara, threatened by religious cults, gangs, and a serial killer on the loose.

This killer is murdering members of a dubious religious sect, the New Pantheon, and leaving a mysterious figure eight drawn on their corpses. Meanwhile, Sebastian Chrest-Jones, a noted professor of human migrations, clandestinely writing a novel about the Byzantine princess-historian Anna Comnena, disappears on a quest to learn more about an ancestor who roamed across Europe to Byzantium during the First Crusade. Kristeva's recurring characters, detective Northrop Rilsky and the French journalist Stephanie Delacour, step in and desperately try to piece together the two-part mystery in the midst of their unexpected love affair.

In the tradition of Umberto Eco, Susan Sontag, and Ian McEwan, Kristeva skillfully weaves philosophical and critical ideas into her fiction. Peering into the mores, obsessions, and excesses of contemporary society, Kristeva offers an engrossing portrait of Santa Varvara, a paradoxical place of sunshine and pollution where skeletons lurk in the closets of politicians and oil company executives. Her descriptions of the First Crusade and the Byzantine Empire vividly evoke a distant past while speaking to such contemporary concerns as immigration, fundamentalism, terrorism, and the East-West divide. Murder in Byzantium is also the only work in which Kristeva explores her Bulgarian roots. In the midst of this rich, multilayered historical novel, Kristeva also presents three stunning, closely observed, and interlocking portraits of characters struggling with loss and emptiness in their personal histories and day-to-day lives.

In the Palace of Versailles there is a fabulous golden clock, made for Louis XV by the king’s engineer, Claude-Siméon Passemant. The astronomical clock shows the phases of the moon and the movements of the planets, and it will tell time—hours, minutes, seconds, and even sixtieths of seconds—until the year 9999. Passemant’s clock brings the nature of time into sharp focus in Julia Kristeva’s intricate, poetic novel The Enchanted Clock.

Nivi Delisle, a psychoanalyst and magazine editor, nearly drowns while swimming off the Île de Ré; the astrophysicist Theo Passemant fishes her out of the water. They become lovers. While Theo wonders if he is descended from the clockmaker Passemant, Nivi’s son Stan, who suffers from occasional comas, develops a passion for the remarkable clock at Versailles. Soon Nivi is fixated on its maker. But then the clock is stolen, and when a young writer for Nivi’s magazine mysteriously dies, the clock is found near his body. The Enchanted Clock combines past and present, jumping back and forth between points of view and across eras from eighteenth-century Versailles to the present day. Its stylistically inventive narrative voices bring both immediacy and depth to our understanding of consciousness. Nivi’s life resembles her creator’s in many respects, coloring Kristeva’s customary erudition with autobiographical poignancy. Part detective mystery, part historical fiction, The Enchanted Clock is a philosophically and linguistically multifaceted novel, full of poetic ruminations on memory, love, and the transcendence of linear time. It is one of the most illuminating works of one of France’s great writers and thinkers.

Mixing fiction, history, psychoanalysis, and personal fantasy, Teresa, My Love turns a past world into a modern marvel, following Sylvia Leclercq, a French psychoanalyst, academic, and incurable insomniac, as she falls for the sixteenth-century Saint Teresa of Avila and becomes consumed with charting her life. Traveling to Spain, Leclercq, Julia Kristeva's probing alter ego, visits the sites and embodiments of the famous mystic and awakens to her own desire for faith, connection, and rebellion.

One of Kristeva's most passionate and transporting works, Teresa, My Love interchanges biography, autobiography, analysis, dramatic dialogue, musical scores, and images of paintings and sculpture to engage the reader in Leclercq's—and Kristeva's—journey. Born in 1515, Teresa of Avila outwitted the Spanish Inquisition and was a key reformer of the Carmelite Order. Her experience of ecstasy, which she intimately described in her writings, released her from her body and led to a complete realization of her consciousness, a state Kristeva explores in relation to present-day political failures, religious fundamentalism, and cultural malaise. Incorporating notes from her own psychoanalytic practice, as well as literary and philosophical references, Kristeva builds a fascinating dual diagnosis of contemporary society and the individual psyche while sharing unprecedented insights into her own character.

The nineteenth century in the United States witnessed the end of slavery and the expansion of another form of confinement: the asylum. How did enslaved and free Black people encounter psychiatric institutions? How were notions of mental disability used to reinforce slavery and Jim Crow? And how did Black people express alternative ideas about individual and communal mental health?

Diana Martha Louis explores Black experiences and views of mental disability in the nineteenth century, shedding light on the lives and struggles of the “colored insane.” She demonstrates how psychiatric discourses made Blacks “mad” both by inflicting real psychological harm within asylums, plantations, jails, and society writ large and by constructing mental disorders according to prevailing notions of race, class, gender, and sanity. Yet even as white medical professionals pathologized the enslaved as suffering from “drapetomania” (runaway slave syndrome), portrayed slavery as beneficial to Black mental health, or cast African-derived spiritual beliefs and practices as signs of madness, Black people developed their own complex perspectives on mental disability.

Louis considers the lives and writings of Black intellectuals and cultural figures including James McCune Smith, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Tubman, and Charles Chesnutt, as well as a group of Black women who were incarcerated in Georgia Lunatic Asylum, showing how mental disability was entangled with questions of freedom, spirituality, and self-determination. Combining literary and historical analysis, Colored Insane is a rich account of nineteenth-century Black Americans’ experiences of mental illness and wellness.

The nineteenth century in the United States witnessed the end of slavery and the expansion of another form of confinement: the asylum. How did enslaved and free Black people encounter psychiatric institutions? How were notions of mental disability used to reinforce slavery and Jim Crow? And how did Black people express alternative ideas about individual and communal mental health?

Diana Martha Louis explores Black experiences and views of mental disability in the nineteenth century, shedding light on the lives and struggles of the “colored insane.” She demonstrates how psychiatric discourses made Blacks “mad” both by inflicting real psychological harm within asylums, plantations, jails, and society writ large and by constructing mental disorders according to prevailing notions of race, class, gender, and sanity. Yet even as white medical professionals pathologized the enslaved as suffering from “drapetomania” (runaway slave syndrome), portrayed slavery as beneficial to Black mental health, or cast African-derived spiritual beliefs and practices as signs of madness, Black people developed their own complex perspectives on mental disability.

Louis considers the lives and writings of Black intellectuals and cultural figures including James McCune Smith, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Tubman, and Charles Chesnutt, as well as a group of Black women who were incarcerated in Georgia Lunatic Asylum, showing how mental disability was entangled with questions of freedom, spirituality, and self-determination. Combining literary and historical analysis, Colored Insane is a rich account of nineteenth-century Black Americans’ experiences of mental illness and wellness.

John Dewey is among history’s most celebrated thinkers on democracy and education, yet he has often been underappreciated and misunderstood as a philosopher. This book paints a fresh portrait of Dewey as not only a reformer of schooling but also a profound theorist of human development, whose vision of the centrality of education to democracy, philosophy, and flourishing can still inspire us today.

What can we learn from this great thinker as we face challenges such as widespread drudgery and disaffection, estrangement among individuals and groups, and a crisis of democracy? This book supplies the answers, offering a bold new account of Dewey as an educational theorist who is essential for our troubled times.

Revealing the true scope of Dewey’s educational vision, this book provides a new perspective on a neglected aspect of the philosophical tradition. Growing People presents an alternative canon—running from Plato to Rousseau to Du Bois—that recasts philosophy in terms of education and, in so doing, opens new pathways for social critique and the liberation of human potential.