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The global context of a feminist movement

The #MeToo movement is most famous for the US celebrities it took to task for sexual crimes—Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and Matt Lauer, to name a few. Mainstream representations of #MeToo frame it as a global feminist campaign that originated in the US and focused on high-profile American actors and executives. But the debates about gender-based violence that #MeToo catalyzed were felt worldwide. Despite the global uptick of the movement, there are very few feminist accounts of the transnational politics of #MeToo.

This anthology frames #MeToo as a movement with uneven itineraries, goals, and outcomes. The essays in this volume take a transnational and comparative feminist approach to #MeToo, focusing on the multiple ways that feminist voices from Argentina, Egypt, India, Pakistan, South Korea, the US, and the UK have pushed the boundaries of what counts as politics, justice, solidarity, violence, precarity, and vulnerability. In doing so, this volume shows how an engagement with #MeToo allows us to extend and sharpen the empirical, theoretical, and methodological parameters of transnational feminist thought. A blend of global activist and academic work, #MeToo and the Politics of Transnational Feminism offers a necessary transnational framing of the #MeToo movement.

How the historic resistance to racial desegregation in schools led to the over-punishment of students today

Every year, millions of public school students are suspended. This overused punishment removes students from the classroom, but it does not improve their behavior. Instead, suspension disrupts their education, harming the students, their families, and their schools. Black students suffer most within this broken system, experiencing a far greater risk of school punishment and the significant harms that accompany it. Many activists and scholars have considered how school punishment increases racial inequity, but few have thought to ask why. Why do we punish students the way we do, and why have we allowed this harmful practice to impact the lives of our nation’s children?

In Suspended Education, Aaron Kupchik takes readers to the root of the issue. Suspensions were not intended as a behavior management tool. Instead, they were designed to remove unwanted students from the classroom. Through statistical analysis and in-depth case studies of schools in Massachusetts and Delaware, Kupchik reveals how suspension rates skyrocketed after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, serving as an unofficial means of removing Black children from newly desegregated schools. His groundbreaking research traces the legacy of these segregationist movements, demonstrating that school districts with more desegregation-related legal battles from the 1950s onward suspend more Black students today. Combining expert analysis with compelling, accessible prose, Kupchik makes a powerful case for the end of suspension and other exclusionary punishments. The result is a revelatory explanation of a pressing problem facing all children, parents, and educators today.

How adventurous Jewish women’s travels upended Jewish norms

In 1922, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, first initiated the bat mitzvah as a rite-of-passage for Jewish girls. Characterized as a lifelong supporter of women’s rights, Kaplan’s family, including his wife and four daughters, played a role in shaping his ideas about women, culture, and Zionism. This was especially true of his second daughter, Hadassah Kaplan, who joined a small but influential cohort of American Jewish women who studied, worked, and volunteered in British Mandate Palestine.

Promised Lands provides a window into the lives of American Jewish women in both New York City’s Upper West Side and Palestine during the interwar period. By tracing Hadassah’s journey, the volume offers a sense of what drew this generation of adventurous women to Palestine, and helps us to understand their impact on American Jewry. Drawing on a rich personal archive of diary entries, photographs, and letters, Sharon Ann Musher displays how unconventional women like Hadassah Kaplan were able to challenge cultural norms and experiment with ideological commitments while still remaining “good” daughters, wives, and mothers. Their knowledge and experience in volunteering, philanthropy, and education within the United States helped them to build Jewish institutions and communities abroad, and to center Zionism in American Jewish education, institutions, and identity. Crafting a compelling portrait of an influential Jewish woman, Promised Lands showcases the legacy of Hadassah Kaplan and her fellow travelers on American Jewish life.

Lethal injection is nothing like what people think. This is its untold story.

In the popular imagination, lethal injection is a slight pinch and a swift nodding off to forever-sleep. It is performed by well-qualified medical professionals. It is regulated and carefully conducted. And it usually provides a “humane” death. In reality, however, not one of those things is true.

Secrets of the Killing State pulls back the curtain on this clandestine punishment practice, presenting a view of lethal injection that states have worked hard to hide. Botched executions are a part of this story, but they are just the tip of the iceberg. For all the suffering that we see, there is also suffering that we don’t see. Indeed, the story told here is even bigger than the executions themselves, for behind the scenes is where it unfolds. Fake science, torturous drugs, inept executioners, prison problems, and decades of state secrecy have created an execution method hard-wired to go wrong in countless ways.

The story of lethal injection is a story of gross incompetence, law breaking, torturous deaths, and a stunning indifference to the way in which human beings die at the hands of the state. These are the secrets of the killing state—all that we know from litigation files, scientific studies, investigative journalism, autopsy reports, interviews, and scholarship across a number of fields. Death penalty expert Corinna Barrett Lain uses this groundbreaking journey into the dark reality of lethal injection to shine a light on the American death penalty more broadly and show that the state at its most powerful moment is also the state at its worst.

We are now over 45 years into the lethal injection era, and most Americans still have no idea what states are doing in their name. It’s time they found out.

Reveals the Christian foundations of CrossFit

CrossFit in the United States has become increasingly popular, around which a fascinating culture has developed which shapes everyday life for the people devoted to it. CrossFit claims to be many things: a business, a brand, a tremendously difficult fitness regimen, a community, a way to gain salvation, and a method to survive the apocalypse. In The Cult of CrossFit, Katie Rose Hejtmanek examines how this exercise program is shaped by American Christian values and practices, connecting American religious ideologies to secular institutions in contemporary American culture.

Drawing upon years of immersing herself in CrossFit gyms in the United States and across six continents, this book illustrates how US CrossFit operates using distinctly American codes, ranging from its intensity and patriarchal militarism to its emphasis on (white) salvation and the adoration of the hero and vigilante. Despite presenting itself as a secular space, Hejtmanek argues that CrossFit is both heavily influenced by and deeply intertwined with American Christian values. She makes the case that the Christianity that shapes CrossFit is the Christianity that shapes much of America, usually in ways we do not even notice. Offering a new cross-cultural perspective for understanding a popular workout, The Cult of CrossFit provides a window into a particularly American rendition of a Christian plotline, lived out one workout at a time.

An overview of the new American Jewish landscape

American Jewry is currently experiencing conspicuous and dramatic change. While Jews first came to America almost 400 years ago, the turn of the twentieth century saw a widespread integration of Judaism into American culture. Yet, over the past few decades, several of its familiar features have changed, including its religious and organizational structure, the extent to which Jews of color are integrated into the community, how the relationship with Israel has evolved, and its approaches to gender roles and the LGBTQ+ community.

Featuring up-to-date and groundbreaking additions by a powerhouse group of experts on various aspects of contemporary Judaism, The State of American Jewry describes the current nature of American Jewish life. Jews have repeatedly seen themselves on the verge of disappearing, leading to innovative responses and adaptations to the changing world around them. This volume examines the increasing diversity of the Jewish people, the varied nature of Jewish religious practice, and the changing ways Jews affiliate with regard to denominations and charitable giving, as well as how they are confronting antisemitism. A seminal text on Judaism in the twenty-first century, The State of American Jewry provides evidence of a dynamic community’s adaptability in a period of substantial change.

How race and capitalism shape education

School choice programs—such as vouchers, education savings accounts, and tax credit scholarships—are surrounded by controversy, raising questions about their impact on student diversity and inequality. In this book, Ryane McAuliffe Straus takes up a core part of this divisive debate, exploring why charter schools are reshaping America’s education system—and democracy—for the worse.

Drawing on interviews with elected officials, policy entrepreneurs, parents, and activists in Albany, NY, Straus argues that charter schools are a poor alternative to failing public schools, ultimately worsening racial segregation under the guise of providing underprivileged students with access to better education. Taking a wide-ranging view, the author explores why parents, elected officials, and community activists may or may not choose to leave the public education system by enrolling their children in charter schools.

Straus finds that when families of color leave public schools in favor of charter schools this removes their democratic voice and participation, diminishing their political power in a high-stakes area of public policy. Divided by Choice highlights the fundamental flaws of one solution to public education inequalities, at a time when racial tensions are at an all-time high.

Evaluating Jewish donors over time


The American Jewish philanthropic enterprise is unparalleled in scope, dynamism, and the diversity of funders and the causes they support. Yet even as Jewish giving has been largely successful in responding with alacrity to emergencies, it has been subjected to severe criticism. What once was regarded as a point of pride has become the object of scorn and dismissal, with skepticism—if not harsh criticism—about its work rife both within and outside Jewish communal circles.

Based on 320 interviews with professionals at Jewish not-for-profits across the United States, principals of foundations and their top staff personnel, and also tax filings of major foundations, Jewish Giving provides readers with fresh perspectives to evaluate the efforts of Jewish donors, large and small. The book traces the evolution of Jewish giving from the colonial era to the present, charting the changing profile of those who give to Jewish causes and what funders have aimed to achieve through their largesse. It makes the case that philanthropy serves as a prism through which broader themes in communal life are illuminated. As society or politics change, the priorities of charitable giving adjust in response. These changes in targeted funding can help to sharpen our understanding of demographic and social patterns. Devoting much attention to twenty-first century developments in contemporary Jewish giving, the book pays special attention to the changing landscape of donors who are remaking Jewish philanthropy, including women, Orthodox Jews, Sephardi givers, and young funders.

How legal regulation of the body is practiced and justified


Regulating the Body examines the practice of legal regulation of the body and how it has been justified. The essays in this anthology trace the ideological, moral, and religious arguments for increasing the reach of regulation and authorizing punishment for infractions.

Bringing together leading scholars in the law and humanities, this volume examines the practices and discourses used to regulate the body, concentrating on scenarios where ethical and legal inconsistencies abound. The regulations examined herein range from the sale of gametes, parental rights over children’s genetic information, debates about masking, discourse regarding vaccines and abortion, anti-transgender legislation, and the control of inmates’ bodies on death row. These are situated within a cultural and political environment that values regulation and punishment over our long-standing constitutional protections. At a time where rhetoric around regulation of the body is becoming increasingly incendiary, Regulating the Body reveals worsening legal hypocrisies and unmasks the threats to both personal autonomy and the claims of law itself.

Proposes groundbreaking, fundamental reform for the adversarial legal system to keep innocent people from going to prison

We rely on the adversarial legal system to hold offenders accountable, ensure everyone is playing by the same rules, and keep our streets safe. Unfortunately, a grave condition lingers under the surface: at all times the imprisonment of possibly tens of thousands of innocent people.

The Plea of Innocence offers a fundamental reform of the adversarial system: plausibly innocent people may now plead innocent and require the government to search for exonerating facts; in return, they will be required to waive their right to remain silent, speak to government agents, and participate in a search for truth.

While almost all the participants within the system hope that only guilty people will be convicted, the unfortunate reality is that innocent people are convicted and imprisoned at an alarming rate. With the privatization of defense institutions, accused innocent people are themselves responsible for finding the facts that could exonerate them. Though the poor are represented by public defenders—in fact, almost no one who is charged with a crime has enough money to pay for a complete defense—it is still accused people, not public officials, who bear the entire burden of proving their innocence.

Tim Bakken believes that reform of the three-hundred-year-old adversarial system is long overdue, and that the government should be responsible for searching for truth—exonerating facts for innocent people—rather than being satisfied with due process. While it is improbable that all the facts in any case will ever be known, the essential point is that the acquisition of facts will almost always benefit an innocent person who has been accused of a crime. Featuring compelling evidence and concrete steps for reform, The Plea of Innocence is at once sensible and revolutionary, a must-read for anyone invested in restoring truth to the justice system.

The arduous, confusing and fraught journey that immigrants take through immigration court

Each year, hundreds of thousands of migrants are moved through immigration court. With a national backlog surpassing one million cases, court hearings take years and most migrants will eventually be ordered deported. The Slow Violence of Immigration Court sheds light on the experiences of migrants from the “Northern Triangle” (Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador) as they navigate legal processes, deportation proceedings, immigration court, and the immigration system writ large.

Grounded in the illuminating stories of people facing deportation, the family members who support them, and the attorneys who defend them, The Slow Violence of Immigration Court invites readers to question matters of fairness and justice and the fear of living with the threat of deportation. Although the spectacle of violence created by family separation and deportation is perceived as extreme and unprecedented, these long legal proceedings are masked in the mundane and are often overlooked, ignored, and excused. In an urgent call to action, Maya Pagni Barak deftly demonstrates that deportation and family separation are not abhorrent anomalies, but are a routine, slow form of violence at the heart of the U.S. immigration system.

Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2023

A close look at innovations in policing and the law that should govern them

A host of technologies—among them digital cameras, drones, facial recognition devices, night-vision binoculars, automated license plate readers, GPS, geofencing, DNA matching, datamining, and artificial intelligence—have enabled police to carry out much of their work without leaving the office or squad car, in ways that do not easily fit the traditional physical search and seizure model envisioned by the framers of the Constitution. Virtual Searches develops a useful typology for sorting through this bewildering array of old, new, and soon-to-arrive policing techniques. It then lays out a framework for regulating their use that expands the Fourth Amendment’s privacy protections without blindly imposing its warrant requirement, and that prioritizes democratic over judicial policymaking.

The coherent regulatory regime developed in Virtual Searches ensures that police are held accountable for their use of technology without denying them the increased efficiency it provides in their efforts to protect the public. Whether policing agencies are pursuing an identified suspect, constructing profiles of likely perpetrators, trying to find matches with crime scene evidence, collecting data to help with these tasks, or using private companies to do so, Virtual Searches provides a template for ensuring their actions are constitutionally legitimate and responsive to the polity.

An up-close account of policing during the Ferguson protests, providing insights from both police officers and members of the community

Policing Unrest presents the frontline experiences of police officers during the intense three weeks of protest, vigils, looting, violence, and large civil demonstrations in and around Ferguson, Missouri, following the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by a police officer. Looking closely at the lived experiences of police officers and community residents, Tammy Rinehart Kochel raises important questions about police-community relations and the role of police as peacekeepers in support of social justice.

Drawing on interviews with dozens of police personnel who policed the protests, Kochel offers insight into their shared experiences and provides compelling personal accounts of how they performed their jobs during the protest. The book covers a range of topics such as police-community relationships and community policing principles; how factors such as police subculture and organizational culture stacked up against social identity during this crisis; the role of an officer’s characteristics, especially an officer’s race, play in an officer’s self-legitimacy; and the implications for police recruitment and training. Kochel’s unique access allowed her to provide a balanced perspective on police officers’ cynicism and public protests against police that were rampant in the year following Ferguson against the need to restore police-community relations and police legitimacy through increased transparency, accountability, and procedural justice. Policing Unrest explains how the Ferguson protests ushered in an era of police reform and reveals what it is like being a police officer facing public unrest, particularly in the wake of widely publicized incidents of police brutality around the country.

2025 ACJS International Section Outstanding Book Award

How prisons around the world shape the social lives of their inhabitants

Prison Life offers a fresh appreciation of how people in prison organize their lives, drawing on case studies from Africa, Europe and the US. The book describes how order is maintained, how power is exercised, how days are spent, and how meaning is found in a variety of environments that all have the same function – incarceration – but discharge it very differently. It is based on an unusually diverse range of sources including photographs, drawings, court cases, official reports, memoirs, and site visits.

Ian O’Donnell contrasts the soul-destroying isolation of the federal supermax in Florence, Colorado with the crowded conviviality of an Ethiopian prison where men and women cook their own meals, seek opportunities to generate an income, elect a leadership team, and live according to a code of conduct that they devised and enforce. He explores life on wings controlled by the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland’s H Blocks, where men who saw the actions that led to their incarceration as politically-motivated moved as one, in perpetual defiance of the authorities. He shows how prisoners in Texas took to the courts to overthrow a regime that allowed their routine subjugation by violent men known as building tenders, who had been selected by staff to supervise and discipline their peers.

In each case study O’Donnell presents the life story of a man who was molded by, and in return molded, the institution that held him. This ensures that his reflections on law and policy as well as on theory and practice never lose sight of the human angle. Imprisonment is about pain after all, and pain is personal.

How diaspora activism in the Irish land movement intersected with wider radical and reform causes

The Irish Land War represented a turning point in modern Irish history, a social revolution that was part of a broader ideological moment when established ideas of property and land ownership were fundamentally challenged. The Land War was striking in its internationalism, and was spurred by links between different emigrant locations and an awareness of how the Land League’s demands to lower rents, end evictions, and abolish “landlordism” in Ireland connected with wider radical and reform causes.

Changing Land offers a new and original study of Irish emigrants’ activism in the United States, Argentina, Scotland, and England and their multifaceted relationships with Ireland. Niall Whelehan brings unfamiliar figures to the surface and recovers the voices of women and men who have been on the margins of, or entirely missing from, existing accounts. Retracing their transnational lives reveals new layers of radical circuitry between Ireland and disparate international locations, and demonstrates how the land movement overlapped with different types of oppositional politics from moderate reform to feminism to revolutionary anarchism. By including Argentina, which was home to the largest Irish community outside the English-speaking world, this book addresses the neglect of developments in non-Anglophone places in studies of the “Irish world.” Changing Land presents a powerful addition to our understanding of the history of modern Ireland and the Irish diaspora, migration, and the history of transnational radicalism.

Winner of the 2022-2023 New York City Book Awards!

SPECIAL MENTION, 2023 IASPM Book Prize, given by the International Association for the Study of Popular Music

SHORTLISTED, 2023 Ralph J. Gleason Book Award, given by the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame/Clive Davis Institute

Unearths the queer aesthetic origins of NYC hip hop

Hip Hop Heresies centers New York City as a space where vibrant queer, Black, and hip hop worlds collide and bond in dance clubs, schools, roller rinks, basketball courts, subways, and movie houses. Using this cultural nexus as the stage, Shanté Paradigm Smalls attends to the ways that hip hop cultural production in New York City from the 1970s through the early twenty-first century produced film, visual art, and music that offer queer articulations of race, gender, and sexuality.

To illustrate New York City as a place of experimental aesthetic collaboration, Smalls brings four cultural moments to the forefront: the life and work of the gay Chinese American visual and graffiti artist Martin Wong, who brokered the relationship between New York City graffiti artists and gallery and museum spaces; the Brooklyn-based rapper-singer-writer-producer Jean Grae, one of the most prolific and underrated emcees of the last two decades; the iconic 1980s film The Last Dragon, which exemplifies the experimental and queer Black masculinity possible in early formal hip hop culture; and finally queer- and trans-identified hip hop artists and groups like BQE, Deepdickollective, and Hanifah Walidah, and the documentary Pick Up the Mic.

Hip Hop Heresies transforms the landscape of hip hop scholarship, Black studies, and queer studies by bringing together these fields through the hermeneutic of aesthetics. Providing a guidepost for future scholarship on queer, trans, and feminist hip hop studies, Hip Hop Heresies takes seriously the work that New York City hip hop cultural production has done and will do, and advocates a form of hip hop that eschews authenticity in favor of performativity, bricolage, and pastiche.

Illuminates how the Rastafari movement managed to evolve in the face of severe biases

Misunderstood, misappropriated, belittled: though the Rastafari feature frequently in media and culture, they have most often been misrepresented, their political and religious significance minimized. But they have not been vanquished.

Charles Price’s Rastafari: The Evolution of a People and Their Identity reclaims the rich history of this relatively new world religion. Charting its humble and rebellious roots in Jamaica’s backcountry in the late nineteenth century to the present day, Price explains how Jamaicans’ obsession with the Rastafari wavered from campaigns of violence to appeasement and cooptation. Indeed, he argues that the Rastafari as a political, religious, and cultural movement survived the biases and violence they faced through their race consciousness and uncanny ability to ride the waves of anti-colonialism and Black Power.

This social movement traveled throughout the Caribbean, Africa, Central America, and the United States, capturing the heart and imagination of much of the African diaspora. Rastafari spans the movement’s struggle for autonomy, its multiple campaigns for repatriation to Africa, and its leading role in the Black consciousness movements of the twentieth century. Not satisfied with simply narrating the past, Rastafari also takes on the challenges of gender equality and the commodification of Rastafari culture in the twenty-first century without abandoning its message of equality and empowering the downpressed.

Rastafari shows how this cultural and political context helped to shape the development of a Black collective identity, demonstrating how Rastafarians confronted society-wide ridicule and oppression and emerged prouder and more united, steadfast in their conviction that they were a chosen people.

ASALH 2023 Book Prize Winner

A lively living history of anti-colonialist movements across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans

Oceania is a vast sea of islands, large scale political struggles and immensely significant historical phenomena. Pasifika Black is a compelling history of understudied anti-colonial movements in this region, exploring how indigenous Oceanic activists intentionally forged international connections with the African world in their fights for liberation.

Drawing from research conducted across Fiji, Australia, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, Britain, and the United States, Quito Swan shows how liberation struggles in Oceania actively engaged Black internationalism in their diverse battles against colonial rule. Pasifika Black features as its protagonists Oceania's many playwrights, organizers, religious leaders, scholars, Black Power advocates, musicians, environmental justice activists, feminists, and revolutionaries who carried the banners of Black liberation across the globe. It puts artists like Aboriginal poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal and her 1976 call for a Black Pacific into an extended conversation with Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka, the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific’s Amelia Rokotuivuna, Samoa’s Albert Wendt, African American anthropologist Angela Gilliam, the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins, West Papua’s Ben Tanggahma, New Caledonia’s Déwé Gorodey, and Polynesian Panther Will ‘Ilolahia. In so doing, Swan displays the links Oceanic activists consciously and painstakingly formed in order to connect Black metropoles across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans.

In a world grappling with the global significance of Black Lives Matter and state-sanctioned violence against Black and Brown bodies, Pasifika Black is a both triumphant history and tragic reminder of the ongoing quests for decolonization in Oceania, the African world, and the Global South.

Solutions to divorce abuse in Jewish societies


Jewish Marital Captivity centers on the experience of women encountering systemic disadvantage in rabbinic marriage and divorce throughout Jewish history and across the map of Jewish life. In rabbinic law, marriage is a unilateral act by the husband, making divorce, similarly, the husband’s sole prerogative, in which his conscious will is also sacrosanct. Abuse necessarily follows, and has been the case from earliest recorded history when husbands abandoned wives, perished on business trips or in war or criminal incidents, or maliciously refused wives a rabbinic writ of divorce (get), or extorted for one, leaving wives trapped in marriage, including to dead men. There is no time limit to this state. Women in such marital captivity, without a husband’s economic partnership, or divorce or death settlements, yet unfree to contract other marriages, suffered devastating social, economic, and psychological hardship, as did their children. Women’s marital captivity has been treated as an issue in rabbinic law but has not, until now, been studied as a problem in Jewish societies across time and place, with a focus on the predicament and behavior of women.

Jewish Marital Captivity is a social history of this problem from the seventh century to the present across multiple Jewish communities, focusing on the interaction of law and social reality. Magnus documents a pattern of assertive and transgressive actions by pious and rebellious women in traditional Jewish societies to escape marital captivity, often, with the assistance of male kin, also probing why such behavior emerged in pre-modern, patriarchal societies. She charts women’s role in the emergence of reforms in the medieval era offering women significant protections in marriage and divorce, and rabbinic backlash against these advances. This backlash was codified and its legal rulings are enacted to this day in rabbinic courts in the US and other Diaspora communities and in Israel, which lacks civil marriage and divorce and where Jewish citizens can only get divorced in rabbinic courts. It combines a sweeping history of Jewish women’s marital captivity with an analysis of the problem’s systemic nature, however personally and individually women experience it, and with a critique of current policy as seeking to manage and thus, perpetuate, rather than end the abuse. It applies the lessons of the history uncovered to propose solutions to what Magnus presents not as an Orthodox or an Israeli problem, but a Jewish one.

The first biography of Ericka Huggins, a queer Black woman who brought spiritual self-care practices to the Black Panther Party.

In this groundbreaking biography, Mary Frances Phillips immerses readers in the life and legacy of Ericka Huggins, a revered Black Panther Party member, as well as a mother, widow, educator, poet, and former political prisoner. In 1969, the police arrested Ericka Huggins along with Bobby Seale and fellow Black Panther Party members, who were accused of murdering Alex Rackley. This marked the beginning of her ordeal, as she became the subject of political persecution and a well-planned FBI COINTELPRO plot.

Drawing on never-before-seen archival sources, including prison records, unpublished letters, photographs, FBI records, and oral histories, Phillips foregrounds the paramount role of self-care and community care in Huggins’s political journey, shedding light on Ericka’s use of spiritual wellness practices she developed during her incarceration. In prison, Huggins was able to survive the repression and terror she faced while navigating motherhood through her unwavering commitment to spiritual practices. In showcasing this history, Phillips reveals the significance of spiritual wellness in the Black Panther Party and Black Power movement.

Transcending the traditional male-centric study of the Black Panther Party, Black Panther Woman offers an innovative analysis of Black political life at the intersections of gender, motherhood, and mass incarceration. This book serves as an invaluable toolkit for contemporary activists, underscoring the power of radical acts of care as well as vital strategies to thrive in the world.

Winner, 2024 Greg Tate Prize, given by the International Association for the Study of Popular Music-US Branch

Winner, 2024 International Association for the Study of Popular Music Canada Book Prize

Honorable Mention, 2024 Alan Merriam Prize, given by the Society for Ethnomusicology

What does sovereignty sound like?

Sonic Sovereignty considers how contemporary Indigenous musicians champion self-determination through musical expression in Canada and the United States. The framework of “sonic sovereignty” connects self-definition, collective determination, and Indigenous land rematriation to the immediate and long-lasting effects of expressive culture. Liz Przybylski covers online and offline media spaces, following musicians and producers as they, and their music, circulate across broadcast and online networks.

Przybylski documents and reflects on shifts in both the music industry and political landscape over the course of a decade: as the ways in which people listen to, consume, and interact with popular music have radically changed, extensive public conversations have flourished around contemporary Indigenous culture, settler responsibility, Indigenous leadership, and decolonial futures.

Sonic Sovereignty encourages us to experiment with temporal possibilities of listening by detailing moments when a sample, lyric, or musical reference moves a listener out of normative time. Nonlinear storytelling practices from hip hop music and other North American Indigenous sonic practices inform these generative listenings. The musical readings presented in this book thus explore how musicians use tools to help listeners embrace rupture, and how out-of-time listening creates decolonial possibilities.

Honorable Mention, 2021 Edited Collection Book Award, given by the Association for the Study of Food and Society

How gentrification uproots the urban food landscape, and what activists are doing to resist it

From hipster coffee shops to upscale restaurants, a bustling local food scene is perhaps the most commonly recognized harbinger of gentrification. A Recipe for Gentrification explores this widespread phenomenon, showing the ways in which food and gentrification are deeply—and, at times, controversially—intertwined.

Contributors provide an inside look at gentrification in different cities, from major hubs like New York and Los Angeles to smaller cities like Cleveland and Durham. They examine a wide range of food enterprises—including grocery stores, restaurants, community gardens, and farmers’ markets—to provide up-to-date perspectives on why gentrification takes place, and how communities use food to push back against displacement.

Ultimately, they unpack the consequences for vulnerable people and neighborhoods. A Recipe for Gentrification highlights how the everyday practices of growing, purchasing and eating food reflect the rapid—and contentious—changes taking place in American cities in the twenty-first century.

Winner of the 2023-2024 CLAGS Fellowship Award

Illuminates an irreverent queer cultural strategy for grappling with and remaking abject histories of violence

Extravagant Camp takes as its point of critical departure the multiple valences of the word “camp”: the camp, as a geopolitical space and process of concentrating racialized populations, and the campy as a mode of queer expressiveness. Engaging its double meaning, Chris A. Eng explores how camp and encampment have contoured the figure of the Asian American.

The book follows campy performances that imaginatively restage the camps that have been central to dominant narratives of Asian American history: Chinese railroad labor, Japanese American incarceration, Vietnam War refugee resettlement, and counterinsurgency camps across US imperial entanglements in the Philippines. Illuminating an eclectic ensemble of performances that grapple with Asian American history—from classical works in the Asian American literary tradition to emerging works of theater and film—Extravagant Camp uncovers Asian American camp as a prevalent yet underappreciated cultural strategy for contesting accounts of Asian American racialization that overly rely on terms of abjection.

Theorizing Asian American camp as both a performance strategy and reading practice, Eng examines how artists drag up the maligned racial roles of the coolie, the internee, the refugee, and the diva to make different sense of these histories. Extravagant Camp shows how Asian American camp takes on queerness as a resource to enliven modes of joy, beauty, and pleasure within structures of constraint, revealing the types of power camp retrieves for racialized communities in the face of abjection. Geared toward the extravagant, Asian American camp demands a recognition of queer abjection not as the basis for our undoing, but rather the grounds for a more radical social remaking.

What queer modes of resilience and care can teach us about enduring environmental collapse

What does it mean to live at the end of life, the end of a family line, the end of a species, or the end of the future itself? When faced with unfurling catastrophes, environmentalists often limit the conversation by focusing on the future. Activists work for the welfare of future generations, while scientists labor over projections of future outcomes. In Queer Lasting, Sarah Ensor asks what this emphasis on the future makes unthinkable. She looks to queer scenes of futurelessness to consider what ecocriticism can learn from queer theory, which imagines and inhabits the immanent ethical possibilities of a terminal present. While living “at the last” is often a terrifying prospect, queer culture reminds us that “to last” is itself also one way to go on.

Defining queerness as a mode of collective life in which these paradigms of lasting—ending and persisting—are constitutively intertwined, Ensor turns to two periods of queer extinction for models of care, continuance, and collective action predicated on futurelessness: the 1890s, in which existing forms of erotic affiliation were extinguished through the binary of homo/heterosexuality, and the 1980s, in which the spread of the AIDS epidemic threatened the total loss of gay lives and of specific erotic ways of life. Through readings that trace unexpected formal resonances across the works of Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, Melvin Dixon, Essex Hemphill, Allen Barnett, and Samuel Delany, Queer Lasting maintains that queer writing, in its intimacy with death and loss, offers a rich archive for imagining new ways of thinking through environmental collapse. Whether confronting the epidemic contours of the AIDS crisis, theorizing the temporary encounters of cruising, or reckoning with the lives of non-reproductive subjects, this book about futurelessness is also a book about persistence. It demonstrates how, far from giving up in the face of the terminal paradigms that environmentalism fears, queer culture has instead predicated its living—and its lasting—upon them.

New results and interpretations challenging the notion of a uniform, macroregional collapse throughout the Late Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean

Ancient Western Asia Beyond the Paradigm of Collapse and Regeneration (1200–900 BCE) presents select essays originating in a two-year research collaboration between New York University and Paris Sciences et Lettres. The contributions here offer new results and interpretations of the processes and outcomes of the transition from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age in three broad regions: Anatolia, northern Mesopotamia, and the Levant. Together, these challenge the notion of a uniform, macroregional collapse throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, followed by the regeneration of political powers. Current research on newly discovered or reinterpreted textual and material evidence from Western Asia instead suggests that this transition was characterized by a diversity of local responses emerging from diverse environmental settings and culture complexes, as evident in the case studies collected here in history, archaeology, and art history. The editors avoid particularism by adopting a regional organization, with the aim of identifying and tracing similar processes and outcomes emerging locally across the three regions. Ultimately, this volume reimagines the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition as the emergence of a set of recursive processes and outcomes nested firmly in the local cultural interactions of western Asia before the beginning of the new, unifying era of Assyrian imperialism.

A comprehensive edition and commentary of 77 ostraka

Ostraka in the Collection of New York University is a comprehensive edition and commentary of 77 ostraka, or potsherds with ancient texts written on them, from Greco-Roman and late antique Egypt. Seventy-two of these ostraca are housed in NYU Special Collections, originally purchased by Caspar Kraemer in 1932, then the chair of the NYU Classics Department. Although Kraemer advertised the imminent publication of the texts in 1934 and later collaborated with the famed papyrologist Herbert Youtie, neither completed the project. The ostraka in this small collection span the 2nd century BCE to the 8th century CE and include both Greek and Coptic texts. The majority, however, form a coherent dossier of tax receipts related to mortuary activities in Upper Egypt during the reign of Augustus (texts 7-70, dated from roughly the last quarter of the 1st century BCE to 12 CE). The five ostraka published in this volume not held by NYU include one that had been part of Kraemer’s original purchase but was subsequently lost (thankfully preserved in a photograph in Youtie’s archive at the University of Michigan), and four ostraka now held by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The latter four texts were purchased separately and published previously, but clearly belong to the same group of texts. They are included in this volume both for the sake of completeness and because the present authors were able to improve the readings in light of the context provided by the dossier as a whole. In addition to the scholarly edition of these texts, the volume contains a full discussion of their provenance, the taxes involved, the taxpayers and tax-collectors, and a ceramological analysis of the sherds as media for these texts.


The book will be of interest primarily to specialists in papyrology and scholars who study the economic history of the ancient Mediterranean, Hellenistic Egypt, the Roman empire, and papyrology.

Frames restorative justice as a form of moral and spiritual practice with the capacity to transform injustice

In the United States “restorative justice” typically refers to small-scale measures that divert alleged wrongdoers from a standard path through the criminal justice system by funneling them into alternative justice programs. These aim not to punish the offender, but to constructively address the harm that wrongdoing may have caused to individuals or to the community, engaging with the wrongdoer to come to a response that might heal and repair the harm.

Yet restorative justice initiatives generally fail to challenge and transform the racist system of mass incarceration. This book argues that these initiatives have the potential to do so, but that we need to better understand what restorative justice is, and how it should be implemented. It claims that restorative justice can achieve its desired effect only insofar as it provides a mode of association between people that is, at its core, moral and spiritual. The book explores the ways in which restorative justice ethics and practices exhibit moral and spiritual dynamics, and what difference such “lived religious” dynamics can make for purposes of transforming structural violence.

Looking to Chicago’s restorative justice network as a model for developing these transformational and sustainable social changes, the volume showcases real-life examples of the kinds of practices and initiatives needed to shift the entrenched dynamics that fuel the prison-industrial complex across the United States.

An archaeological, historical, and art historical study of a remarkable early church excavated at Amheida in Egypt's Dakhla Oasis

Early Christianity at Amheida (Egypt’s Dakhla Oasis): A Fourth-Century Church. Volume 1: The Excavations is an archaeological, historical, and art historical study of a remarkable basilica-church excavated at Amheida in Dakhla Oasis. This church, excavated between 2012 and 2023, dates to the fourth century CE and therefore is among the earliest purpose-built churches in Egypt. It also contains one of the oldest, if not the oldest, excavated Christian funerary crypts in the country. The church at Amheida thus offers a wealth of new data on early Christianity in Egypt, particularly with respect to the earliest phases of Christian art and architecture and burial customs. Aravecchia presents a systematic treatment of the stratigraphy, building techniques, materials, features, architecture, decoration, and finds of the church, carefully contextualized in the early Christianity of the late antique Great Oasis and Egypt more broadly.

A detailed archaeological study of life in Egypt's Eastern desert during the Roman period by a leading scholar

Rome in Egypt’s Eastern Desert is a two-volume set collecting Hélène Cuvigny’s most important articles on Egypt’s Eastern Desert during the Roman period. The excavations she directed uncovered a wealth of material, including tens of thousands of texts written on pottery fragments (ostraca). Some are administrative texts, but many more are correspondence, both official and private, written by and to the people (mostly but not all men) who lived and worked in these remote and harsh environments, supported by an elaborate network of defense, administration, and supply that tied the entire region together. The contents of Rome in Egypt’s Eastern Desert have all been published earlier in peer-reviewed venues, but most appear here for the first time in English. All of the contributions have been checked or translated by the editor and brought up to date with respect to bibliography, and some have been significantly rewritten by the author, in order to take account of the enormous amount of new material discovered since the original publications. A full index makes this body of work far more accessible than it was before. This book assembles into one collection thirty years of detailed study of this material, conjuring in vivid detail the lived experience of those who inhabited these forts—often through their own expressive language—and the realia of desert geography, military life, sex, religion, quarry operations, and imperial administration in the Roman world.

Innovative essays that explore how men perform femininity and what femininity looks like without women

What counts as “male femininity”? Is it simply men behaving in effeminate ways or is it the absence of masculinity? Male Femininities presents a nuanced, critical collection of essays that highlight the extent to which male femininities are neither an imitation of femaleness nor an emptying of masculinity. These innovative essays focus on both gay and straight men, and transmasculine and genderqueer people in their construction and performance of femininity, thereby revealing the possibilities that open up when we critically examine femininity without women. Male Femininities asks, What does femininity look like for men?

The contributors—highly regarded scholars and rising stars—cover a range of topics, including drag queens, cosmetic enhancements, trans fertility, and gender-non-conforming childhoods. Male Femininities illuminates what happens when we decouple femininity from female bodies and how even the smallest cracks and fissures in the normative order can disrupt, challenge, and in some cases reaffirm our existing sex-gender regime. This volume pluralizes the concept of male femininities and leads readers through an exploration of how gender, sex, and sexuality are manifested in the United States today.

Sufism through the eyes of a legal scholar

In The Requirements of the Sufi Path, the renowned North African historian and jurist Ibn Khaldūn applies his analytical powers to Sufism, which he deems a bona fide form of Islamic piety. Ibn Khaldūn is widely known for his groundbreaking work as a sociologist and historian, in particular for the Muqaddimah, the introduction to his massive universal history. In The Requirements of the Sufi Path, he writes from the perspective of an Islamic jurist and legal scholar. He characterizes Sufism and the stages along the Sufi path and takes up the question of the need for a guide along that path. In doing so, he relies on the works of influential Sufi scholars, including al-Qushayrī, al-Ghazālī, and Ibn al-Khaṭīb. Even as Ibn Khaldūn warns of the extremes to which some Sufis go—including practicing magic—his work is essentially a legal opinion, a fatwa, asserting the inherent validity of the Sufi path.

The Requirements of the Sufi Path incorporates the wisdom of three of Sufism’s greatest voices as well as Ibn Khaldūn’s own insights, acquired through his intellectual encounters with Sufism and his broad legal expertise. All this he brings to bear on the debate over Sufi practices in a remarkable work of synthesis and analysis.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

How video transformed policing and security

Video cameras are everywhere: attached to buildings, drones, and dashboards; embedded in smartphones, laptops, and doorbells; worn on police uniforms and sunglasses. In Targeted, Kelly Gates argues that the resulting avalanche of video has transformed the landscape of policing and security in the twenty-first century. Video production, analysis, and archival management are now central to the ways police power is exercised, criminal law enforced, and spaces of human habitation securitized.

Gates examines the primacy of video in four key areas of policing and security: the field of digital multimedia forensics, private video surveillance infrastructure development, police body-worn camera systems, and video analytics for automated surveillance (Video AI). Case studies of two companies illustrate the role of corporations in these far-reaching media-technological changes. Target Corporation has integrated its retail security operations with law enforcement, expanding its surveillance beyond its stores and parking lots and into the criminal legal system. Axon Enterprise is leveraging the growing volume of police body-cam video to build a large-scale proprietary platform for policing.

Targeted reveals the role of video infrastructure development in the increasingly entangled relationship between the modern police and the modern corporation, in the long wake and ruins of neoliberalism.

Scattered through the vast expanse of stone and sand that makes up Egypt’s Western Desert are several oases. These islands of green in the midst of the Sahara owe their existence to springs and wells drawing on ancient aquifers. In antiquity, as today, they supported agricultural communities, going back to Neolithic times but expanding greatly in the millennium from the Saite pharaohs to the Roman emperors. New technologies of irrigation and transportation made the oases integral parts of an imperial economy.

Amheida, ancient Trimithis, was one of those oasis communities. Located in the western part of the Dakhla Oasis, it was an important regional center, reaching a peak in the Roman period before being abandoned. Over the past decade, excavations at this well-preserved site have revealed its urban layout and brought to light houses, streets, a bath, a school, and a church. The only standing brick pyramid of the Roman period in Egypt has been restored. Wall-paintings, temple reliefs, pottery, and texts all contribute to give a lively sense of its political, religious, economic, and cultural life. This book presents these aspects of the city’s existence and its close ties to the Nile valley, by way of long desert roads, in an accessible and richly illustrated fashion.

The fourth volume in the Amheida series, ‘Ain el-Gedida: 2006-2008 Excavations of a Late Antique Site in Egypt's Western Desert (Amheida IV) presents the systematic record and interpretation of the archaeological evidence from the excavations at ‘Ain el-Gedida, a fourth-century rural settlement in Egypt's Dakleh Oasis uniquely important for the study of early Egyptian Christianity and previously known only from written sources.

Nicola Aravecchia (Washington University), the Deputy Field Director of NYU's Amheida Excavations, offers a history of the site and its excavations, followed by an integrated topographical and archaeological interpretation of the site and its significance for the history of Christianity in Egypt. In the second half of the volume a team of international experts presents catalogs and interpretations of the archaeological finds, including ceramics (Delphine Dixneuf, CRNS), coins (David M. Ratzan, NYU), ostraca and graffiti (Roger S. Bagnall, NYU and Dorota Dzierzbicka, University of Warsaw), small finds (Dorota Dzierzbicka, University of Warsaw), and zooarcheological remains (Pamela J. Crabtree, NYU and Douglas Campana).

A comprehensive edition and commentary of a late antique codex

Mathematics, Metrology, and Model Contracts is a comprehensive edition and commentary of a late antique codex. The codex contains mathematical problems, metrological tables, and model contracts. Given the nature of the contents, the format, and quality of the Greek, the editors conclude that the codex most likely belonged to a student in a school devoted to training business agents and similar professionals.

The editors present here the first full scholarly edition of the text, with complete discussions of the provenance, codicology, and philology of the surviving manuscript. They also provide extensive notes and illustrations for the mathematical problems and model contracts, as well as historical commentary on what this text reveals about late antique numeracy, literacy, education, and vocational training in what we would now see as business, law, and administration.

The book will be of interest to papyrologists and scholars who are interested in the history and culture of late antiquity, the history of education, literacy, the ancient economy, and the history of science and mathematics.

Explores ways faith communities offer protection and services for Latina/o communities

The New Sanctuary Movement is a network of faith-based organizations committed to offering safe haven to those in danger, often in churches, often outside the law, and often at risk to themselves. The practice of sanctuary, with its capacity to provide safety, shelter, and protection to society's most vulnerable, gained significant prominence after the 2016 presidential election and the ushering in of particularly harsh anti-immigration policies.

Since 2017, Ohio has had some of the highest numbers of public sanctuary cases in the nation. Sanctuary People explores these sanctuary practices in Ohio and locates them in broader local and national efforts to provide refuge and care in the face of the challenges facing Latina/o communities in a moment of increased surveillance, migrant detention, displacement, and economic and social marginalization. Pérez argues for a conceptualization of sanctuary that is capacious, placing support of Puerto Ricans displaced in the wake of Hurricane Maria within the broader practices of sanctuary and expanding our understandings of the movement that addresses the precarious conditions of Latinas/os beyond migration status.

Based on four years of ethnographic research and interviews at the local, state, and national levels, Sanctuary People offers a compelling exploration of the ways in which faith communities are creating new activist strategies and enacting new forms of solidarity, working within the sometimes conflicting ideological space between religion and activism to answer the call of justice and live their faith.

Sufism through the eyes of a legal scholar

In The Requirements of the Sufi Path, the renowned North African historian and jurist Ibn Khaldūn applies his analytical powers to Sufism, which he deems a bona fide form of Islamic piety. Ibn Khaldūn is widely known for his groundbreaking work as a sociologist and historian, in particular for the Muqaddimah, the introduction to his massive universal history. In The Requirements of the Sufi Path, he writes from the perspective of an Islamic jurist and legal scholar. He characterizes Sufism and the stages along the Sufi path and takes up the question of the need for a guide along that path. In doing so, he relies on the works of influential Sufi scholars, including al-Qushayrī, al-Ghazālī, and Ibn al-Khaṭīb. Even as Ibn Khaldūn warns of the extremes to which some Sufis go—including practicing magic—his work is essentially a legal opinion, a fatwa, asserting the inherent validity of the Sufi path.

The Requirements of the Sufi Path incorporates the wisdom of three of Sufism’s greatest voices as well as Ibn Khaldūn’s own insights, acquired through his intellectual encounters with Sufism and his broad legal expertise. All this he brings to bear on the debate over Sufi practices in a remarkable work of synthesis and analysis.

An English-only edition.

An in-depth archaeological report
featuring graffiti found during a recent excavation at the Ancient Greek city
of Smyrna.

The graffiti published in this richly-illustrated volume were discovered during an excavation of the Roman basilica in the Ancient Greek city of Smyrna, known today as Izmir, which is situated on the Aegean coast of modern Turkey. The project, which began in 2003, has unearthed a multitude of graffiti and drawings encompassing a wide range of subjects and interests, including local politics, nautical vessels, sex, and wordplay.

Each graffito artifact holds the potential for vast historical and cultural data, rescued in this volume from the passage of time and razing ambitions of urban development. Given the city’s history, the potential wealth of knowledge to be gleamed from these discoveries is substantial: Smyrna has an uninterrupted history of settlement since the Neolithic–Copper ages, and remains today a major city and Mediterranean seaport at the crossroads of key trade routes.

The present volume provides comprehensive editions of the texts, descriptions of the drawings, and an extensive introduction to the subjects of the graffiti, how they were produced, and who was responsible for them. A complete set of color photographs is included.

2024 Outstanding Academic Title, given by Choice Reviews

How the scientific community overlooked, ignored, and denied the catastrophic fallout of decades of nuclear testing in the American West

In December of 1950, President Harry Truman gave authorization for the Atomic Energy Commission to conduct weapons tests and experiments on a section of a Nevada gunnery range. Over the next eleven years, more than a hundred detonations were conducted at the Nevada Test Site, and radioactive debris dispersed across the communities just downwind and through much of the country. In this important work, James C. Rice tells the hidden story of nuclear weapons testing and the negligence of the US government in protecting public health.

Downwind of the Atomic State focuses on the key decisions and events shaping the Commission’s mismanagement of radiological contamination in the region, specifically on how the risks of fallout were defined and redefined, or, importantly, not defined at all, owing to organizational mistakes and the impetus to keep atomic testing going at all costs. Rice shows that although Atomic Energy Commission officials understood open-air detonations injected radioactive debris into the atmosphere, they did not understand, or seem to care, that the radioactivity would irrevocably contaminate these communities.

The history of the atomic Southwest should be a wake-up call to everyone living in a world replete with large, complex organizations managing risky technological systems. The legacy of open-air detonations in Nevada pushes us to ask about the kinds of risks we are unwittingly living under today. What risks are we being exposed to by large organizations under the guise of security and science?

A detailed archaeological study of life in Egypt's Eastern desert during the Roman period by a leading scholar

Rome in Egypt’s Eastern Desert is a two-volume set collecting Hélène Cuvigny’s most important articles on Egypt’s Eastern Desert during the Roman period. The excavations she directed uncovered a wealth of material, including tens of thousands of texts written on pottery fragments (ostraca). Some are administrative texts, but many more are correspondence, both official and private, written by and to the people (mostly but not all men) who lived and worked in these remote and harsh environments, supported by an elaborate network of defense, administration, and supply that tied the entire region together. The contents of Rome in Egypt’s Eastern Desert have all been published earlier in peer-reviewed venues, but most appear here for the first time in English. All of the contributions have been checked or translated by the editor and brought up to date with respect to bibliography, and some have been significantly rewritten by the author, in order to take account of the enormous amount of new material discovered since the original publications. A full index makes this body of work far more accessible than it was before. This book assembles into one collection thirty years of detailed study of this material, conjuring in vivid detail the lived experience of those who inhabited these forts—often through their own expressive language—and the realia of desert geography, military life, sex, religion, quarry operations, and imperial administration in the Roman world.

A comprehensive archaeological study of the ceramic finds from a house in Amheida

The House of Serenos: Part I: The Pottery (Amheida V) is a comprehensive full-color catalog and analysis of the ceramic finds from the late antique house of a local notable and adjacent streets in Amheida. It is the fifth book in the Amheida series.

Amheida is located in the western part of the Dakhla oasis, 3.5 km south of the medieval town of El-Qasr. Known in Hellenistic and Roman times as Trimithis, Amheida became a polis by 304 CE and was a major administrative center of the western part of the oasis for the whole of the fourth century. The home’s owner was one Serenos, a member of the municipal elite and a Trimithis city councillor, as we know from documents found in the house. His house is particularly well preserved with respect to floor plan, relationship to the contemporary urban topography, and decoration, including domestic display spaces plastered and painted with subjects drawn from Greek mythology and scenes depicting the family that owned the house. The archaeology from the site also reveals the ways in which the urban space changed over time, as Serenos’s house was built over and expanded into some previously public spaces. The house was probably abandoned around or soon after 370 CE. The pottery analyzed in this volume helps to refine the relationship of the archaeological layers belonging to the élite house and the layers below it; it also sheds light on the domestic and economic life of the household and region, from cooking and dining to the management of a complex agricultural economy in which ceramics were the most common form of container for basic commodities.

The book will be of interest to specialists interested in ceramology, Roman Egypt, and the material culture, social history, and economy of late antiquity.

This volume presents 455 inscribed pottery fragments, or ostraka,
found during NYU’s excavations at Amheida in the western desert of Egypt. The
majority date to the Late Roman period (3rd to 4th century AD), a time of rapid
social change in Egypt and the ancient Mediterranean generally. Amheida was a
small administrative center, and the full publication of these brief texts
illuminates the role of writing in the daily lives of its inhabitants. The
subjects covered by the Amheida ostraka include the distribution of food, the
administration of wells, the commercial lives of inhabitants, their education,
and other aspects of life neglected in literary sources. The authors provide a
full introduction to the technical aspects of terminology and chronology, while
also situating this important evidence in its historical, social and regional
context.





Online edition available as part of the NYU Library's Ancient World Digital Library and in partnership with the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW).

The transformative impact of new reproductive technologies over the past half century

Both fertility and infertility are commonly depicted as individual, biological, and choice dependent conditions that can be mediated by technology. In contrast, The New Reproductive Order documents the complex material, historical, and political forces that both enable and limit human reproductivity, while also arguing that both fertility and infertility have become condensed symbols of wider changes to family forms, national political agendas, global economies, and local environments.

Combining anthropological, sociological, and intersectional feminist research from across the globe, this landmark volume reveals how changing perceptions of fertility and infertility are altering how people imagine, pursue, and experience reproductivity both individually and collectively. Using a comparative global methodology based on detailed case studies, The New Reproductive Order persuasively argues that changing perceptions of fertility and infertility are giving rise to a distinctive reproductive politics based on new models of reproductive cause and effect. This groundbreaking and sophisticated volume opens new horizons of scholarship on the relationship between fertility, infertility, reproductive technologies, and social change, as well as new thinking on policy, practice, and activism in the twenty-first century’s new reproductive order.

The unsung heroes who defend the accused from the ultimate punishment

What motivates someone to make a career out of defending some of the worst suspected killers of our time? In Capital Defense, Jon B. Gould and Maya Pagni Barak give us a glimpse into the lives of lawyers who choose to work in the darkest corner of our criminal justice system: death penalty cases. Based on in-depth personal interviews with a cross-section of the nation’s top capital defense teams, the book explores the unusual few who voluntarily represent society’s “worst of the worst.”

With a compassionate and careful eye, Gould and Barak chronicle the experiences of American lawyers, who—like soldiers or surgeons—operate under the highest of stakes, where verdicts have the power to either “take death off the table” or put clients on “the conveyor belt towards death.” These lawyers are a rare breed in a field that is otherwise seen as dirty work and in a system that is overburdened, under-resourced, and overshadowed by social, cultural, and political pressures.

Examining the ugliest side of our criminal justice system, Capital Defense offers an up-close perspective on the capital litigation process and its impact on the people who participate in it.

This archaeological report provides a comprehensive study of the excavations carried out at Amheida House B2 in Egypt's Dakhleh Oasis between 2005 and 2007, followed by three study seasons between 2008 and 2010. The excavations at Amheida in Egypt's western desert, begun in 2001 under the aegis of Columbia University and sponsored by NYU since 2008, are investigating all aspects of social life and material culture at the administrative center of ancient Trimithis. The excavations so far have focused on three areas of this very large site: a centrally located upper-class fourth-century AD house with wall paintings, an adjoining school, and underlying remains of a Roman bath complex; a more modest house of the third century; and the temple hill, with remains of the Temple of Thoth built in the first century AD and of earlier structures. Architectural conservation has protected and partly restored two standing funerary monuments, a mud-brick pyramid and a tower tomb, both of the Roman period.

This is the second volume of ostraka from the excavations Amheida (ancient Trimithis) in Egypt. It adds 491 items to the growing corpus of primary texts from the site. In addition to the catalog, the introductory sections make important contributions to understanding the role of textual practice in the life of a pre-modern small town. Issues addressed include tenancy, the administration of water, governance, the identification of individuals in the archaeological record, the management of estates, personal handwriting, and the uses of personal names. Additionally, the chapter "Ceramic Fabrics and Shapes” by Clementina Caputo breaks new ground in the treatment of these inscribed shards as both written text and physical object. This volume will be of interest to specialists in Roman-period Egypt as well as to scholars of literacy and writing in the ancient world and elsewhere.

The Constitution is the cornerstone of American government, hailed as one of the greatest contributions of the Western Enlightenment. While many seem content simply to celebrate it, those most familiar with the document invariably find it wanting in at least some aspects.
This unique volume brings together many of the country's most esteemed constitutional commentators and invites them to answer two questions: First, what is the stupidest provision of the Constitution? "Stupid" need not mean evil. Thus, a second, related question is whether the scholar-interpreter would be forced to reach truly evil results even if applying his or her own favored theory of constitutional interpretation.
The contributors include Lawrence Alexander, Akhil Reed Amar, Jack Balkin, Philip Bobbitt, Gerard Bradley, Rebecca Brown, Steven Calabresi, Lief Carter, Christopher Eisgruber, Lawrence Sager, Marie Failinger, Daniel Farber, James Fleming, Mark Graber, Stephen Griffin, Gary Jacobsohn, Randall Kennedy, Lewis LaRue, Theodore Lowi, Earl Maltz, Michael McConnell, Matthew Michael, Robert Nagel, Daniel Ortiz, Pamela Karlen, Michael Paulsen, Robert Post, Lucas Powe, Dorothy Roberts, Jeffrey Rosen, Frederick Schauer, Michael Seidman, Suzanna Sherry, David Strauss, Laurence Tribe, Mark Tushnet, and John Yoo.

The transformative impact of new reproductive technologies over the past half century

Both fertility and infertility are commonly depicted as individual, biological, and choice dependent conditions that can be mediated by technology. In contrast, The New Reproductive Order documents the complex material, historical, and political forces that both enable and limit human reproductivity, while also arguing that both fertility and infertility have become condensed symbols of wider changes to family forms, national political agendas, global economies, and local environments.

Combining anthropological, sociological, and intersectional feminist research from across the globe, this landmark volume reveals how changing perceptions of fertility and infertility are altering how people imagine, pursue, and experience reproductivity both individually and collectively. Using a comparative global methodology based on detailed case studies, The New Reproductive Order persuasively argues that changing perceptions of fertility and infertility are giving rise to a distinctive reproductive politics based on new models of reproductive cause and effect. This groundbreaking and sophisticated volume opens new horizons of scholarship on the relationship between fertility, infertility, reproductive technologies, and social change, as well as new thinking on policy, practice, and activism in the twenty-first century’s new reproductive order.

An extensively researched account of the infamous Benedict Arnold, framed in Martin's biography as a hero rather than a traitor

Benedict Arnold stands as one of the most vilified figures in American history. Stories of his treason have so come to define him that his name, like that of Judas, is virtually synonymous with treason.

Yet Arnold was one of the most heroic and remarkable men of his time, indeed in all of American history. A brilliant military leader of uncommon bravery, Arnold dedicated himself to the Revolutionary cause, sacrificing family life, health, and financial well-being for a conflict that left him physically crippled, sullied by false accusations, and profoundly alienated from the American cause of liberty. By viewing Arnold's life backward through the prism of his treason, we invariably succumb to the demonizations that arose only after his abandonment of the rebel forces. We thereby overlook his critical role as one of the influential actors in the American Revolution.

Distinguished historian James Kirby Martin's landmark biography, the result of a decade's labor, stands as an invaluable antidote to this historical distortion. Careful not to endow the Revolutionary generation with mythical proportions of virtue, Martin shows how self-serving, venal behavior was just as common in the Revolutionary era as in our own time. Arnold, a deeply committed patriot, suffered acutely because of his lack of political savvy in dealing with those who attacked his honor and reputation. Tracing Arnold's life, from his difficult childhood through his grueling winter trek across the howling Maine wilderness, his valiant defense of Lake Champlain, and his crucial role in the Quebec and Saratoga campaigns, Martin has given us an entirely new perspective on this dramatic and exceptional life, set against the tumultuous background of the American Revolution.

Category Winner, 2025 PROSE Awards: Psychology and Applied Social Work

How the US asylum process fails to protect against claims of gender-based violence

Through eyewitness accounts of closed-court proceedings and powerful testimony from women who have sought asylum in the United States because of severe assaults and death threats by intimate partners and/or gang members, Private Violence examines how immigration laws and policies shape the lives of Latin American women who seek safety in the United States. Carol Cleaveland and Michele Waslin describe the women’s histories prior to crossing the border, and the legal strategies they use to convince Immigration Judges that rape and other forms of “private violence” should merit asylum – despite laws built on Cold War era assumptions that persecution occurs in the public sphere by state actors.

Private Violence provides much-needed recommendations for incorporating a gender-based lens in the asylum process. The authors demonstrate how policy changes across Presidential administrations have made it difficult for survivors of “private violence” to qualify for asylum. Private Violence paints a damning portrait of America’s broken asylum system. This volume illustrates the difficulties experienced by Latin American women who rely on this broken system for protection in the United States. It also illuminates women’s resilience and the determination of immigration attorneys to reshape asylum law.

Winner of the 2023 Ángel David Nieves Book Award, given by the American Studies Association

The internet origins of the American transgender movement

The Two Revolutions explores how the rise of the internet shaped transgender identity and activism from the 1980s to the present. Through extensive archival research and media archeology, Avery Dame-Griff reconstructs the manifold digital networks of transgender activists, cross-dressing computer hobbyists, and others interested in gender nonconformity who incited the second revolution of the title: the ascendance of “transgender” as an umbrella identity in the mid-1990s.

Dame-Griff argues that digital communications sparked significant momentum within what would become the transgender movement, but also further cemented existing power structures. Covering both a historical period that is largely neglected within the history of computing, and the poorly understood role of technology in queer and trans social movements, The Two Revolutions offers a new understanding of both revolutions—the internet’s early development and the structures of communication that would take us to today’s tipping point of trans visibility politics. Through a history of how trans people online exploited different digital infrastructures in the early days of the internet to build a community, The Two Revolutions tells a crucial part of trans history itself.

2024 Outstanding Academic Title, given by Choice Reviews

Celebrates the life and legacy of Bayard Rustin, the civil rights leader behind the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

While we can all recall images of Martin Luther King Jr. giving his “I Have a Dream” speech in front of a massive crowd at Lincoln Memorial, few of us remember the man who organized this watershed nonviolent protest in eight short weeks: Bayard Rustin.

This was far from Rustin’s first foray into the fight for civil rights. As a world-traveling pacifist, he brought Gandhi’s protest techniques to the forefront of US civil rights demonstrations, helped build the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, led the fight for economic justice, and played a deeply influential role in the life of Dr. King by helping to mold him into an international symbol of nonviolent resistance. Rustin’s legacy touches many areas of contemporary life—from civil resistance to violent uprisings, democracy to socialism, and criminal justice reform to war resistance.

Despite these achievements, Rustin was often relegated to the background. He was silenced, threatened, arrested, beaten, imprisoned, and fired from important leadership positions, largely because he was an openly gay man in a fiercely homophobic era. With expansive, searching, and sometimes critical essays from a range of esteemed writers—including Rustin’s own partner, Walter Naegle—this volume draws a full picture of Bayard Rustin: a gay, pacifist, socialist political radical who changed the course of US history and set a precedent for future civil rights activism, from LGBTQ+ Pride to Black Lives Matter.

With What ʿĪsā ibn Hishām Told Us, the Library of Arabic Literature brings readers an acknowledged masterpiece of early twentieth-century Arabic prose. Penned by the Egyptian journalist Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī, this exceptional title was first introduced in serialized form in his family’s pioneering newspaper Miṣbāḥ al-Sharq (Light of the East), on which this edition is based, and later published in book form in 1907. Widely hailed for its erudition and its mordant wit, What ʿĪsā ibn Hishām Told Us was embraced by Egypt’s burgeoning reading public and soon became required reading for generations of Egyptian school students.

Bridging classical genres and the emerging tradition of modern Arabic fiction, What ʿĪsā ibn Hishām Told Us is divided into two parts, the second of which was only added to the text with the fourth edition of 1927. Sarcastic in tone and critical in outlook, the book relates the excursions of its narrator ʿĪsā ibn Hishām
and his companion, the Pasha, through a rapidly Westernized Cairo at the height of British occupation, providing vivid commentary of a society negotiating—however imperfectly—the clash of imported cultural values and traditional norms of conduct, law, and education. The “Second Journey” takes the narrator to Paris to visit the Exposition Universelle of 1900, where al-Muwayliḥī casts the same relentlessly critical eye on European society, modernity, and the role of Western imperialism as it ripples across the globe.

Paving the way for the modern Arabic novel, What ʿĪsā ibn Hishām Told Us is invaluable both for its sociological insight into colonial Egypt and its pioneering role in Arabic literary history.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

Reveals the history of Black Fundamentalists during the early part of the twentieth century

As the modernist-fundamentalist controversy came to a head in the early twentieth century, an image of the “fighting fundamentalist” was imprinted on the American cultural consciousness. To this day, the word “fundamentalist” often conjures the image of a fire-breathing preacher—strident, unyielding in conviction . . . and almost always white. But did this major religious perspective really stop cold in its tracks at the color line?

Black Fundamentalists challenges the idea that fundamentalism was an exclusively white phenomenon. The volume uncovers voices from the Black community that embraced the doctrinal tenets of the movement and, in many cases, explicitly self-identified as fundamentalists. Fundamentalists of the early twentieth century felt the pressing need to defend the “fundamental” doctrines of their conservative Christian faith—doctrines like biblical inerrancy, the divinity of Christ, and the virgin birth—against what they saw as the predations of modernists who represented a threat to true Christianity. Such concerns, attitudes, and arguments emerged among Black Christians as well as white, even as the oppressive hand of Jim Crow excluded African Americans from the most prominent white-controlled fundamentalist institutions and social crusades, rendering them largely invisible to scholars examining such movements.

Black fundamentalists aligned closely with their white counterparts on the theological particulars of “the fundamentals.” Yet they often applied their conservative theology in more progressive, racially contextualized ways. While white fundamentalists were focused on battling the teaching of evolution, Black fundamentalists were tying their conservative faith to advocacy for reforms in public education, voting rights, and the overturning of legal bans on intermarriage. Beyond the narrow confines of the fundamentalist movement, Daniel R. Bare shows how these historical dynamics illuminate larger themes, still applicable today, about how racial context influences religious expression.

2023 C. Wright Mills Award Finalist

How race and racism shape middle-class families’ decisions to homeschool their children

While families of color make up 41 percent of homeschoolers in America, little is known about the racial dimensions of this alternate form of education. In The Color of Homeschooling, Mahala Dyer Stewart explores why this percentage has grown exponentially in the past twenty years, and reveals how families’ schooling decisions are heavily shaped by race, class, and gender.

Drawing from almost a hundred interviews with Black and white middle-class homeschooling and nonhomeschooling families, Stewart’s findings contradict many commonly held beliefs about the rationales for homeschooling. Rather than choosing to homeschool based on religious or political beliefs, many middle-class Black mothers explain their schooling choices as motivated by their concerns of racial discrimination in public schools and the school-to-prison pipeline. Indeed, these mothers often voiced concerns that their children would be mistreated by teachers, administrators, or students on account of their race, or that they would be excessively surveilled and policed. Conversely, middle-class white mothers had the privilege of not having to consider race in their decision-making process, opting for homeschooling because of concerns that traditional schools would not adequately cater to their child's behavioral or academic needs. While appearing nonracial, these same decisions often contributed to racial segregation.

The Color of Homeschooling is a timely and much-needed study on how homeschooling serves as a canary in the coal mine, highlighting the perils of school choice policies for reproducing, rather than correcting, long-standing race, class, and gender inequalities in America.

How sociologists can approach memoir in their writing, research, and in the classroom

Memoirs attract millions of readers with their compelling life stories, vivid details, and often startling revelations. Beyond entertainment value, however, Margaret K. Nelson argues that memoirs hold potential as powerful resources for sociologists to engage with, analyze, and teach. Sociology Meets Memoir is a short and accessible guide to the significance of memoirs for the field of sociology, from their many possible uses to the numerous challenges they pose.

This guide enables sociologists to learn about the different ways memoirs have been used as a medium through which to exercise and encourage the “sociological imagination.” Nelson offers clear definitions of the various and nuanced terms associated with memoir and examples of how different types of stories have been effectively integrated into scholarly research. Readers will gain an understanding of the immense power of memoirs as sociological resources, offering unique access to voices from the past as well as voices from the present which are traditionally marginalized. Nelson also focuses on the genre’s limitations and the difficult methodological questions that accompany their use in scholarly endeavors.

Sociology Meets Memoir is a vital tool for all sociologists interested in this growing genre. By reading this guide, students and teachers alike will gain an understanding of how they might approach the current outpouring of memoirs and incorporate them into their teaching, learning, writing, and research.

Moves the discussion of American civil religion into the twenty-first century

Civil Religion, a term made popular by sociologist Robert Bellah a little over fifty years ago, describes how people might share in a sacred sense of their nation. While hotly debated, the idea continues to enjoy wide application among academics and journalists. Bellah used civil religion to make sense of the turmoil of the 1960s, especially moral debates provoked by the Vietnam War. Now, a half-century later, American society is again riven by conflict over immigration, economic inequality, racial oppression, and “culture wars” issues. Is Bellah's hopeful assessment still useful for understanding contemporary America? If not, how should we think of it differently?

Civil Religion Today reassesses the term to take stock of its usefulness after fifty years of engagement in the field. Looking both at the concept and at ground-level studies of how we might find civil religion in practice, this book aims to push the conversation forward, considering how and in what ways it is helpful in our current social and political context, evaluating which parts are worth keeping, which can be reformulated, and which can now be usefully discarded. It suggests we go “beyond Bellah” in theory and practice, thinking about American society in a new century.

Uncovers how the Civil Rights Movement and Vatican II affected African American Catholics in Atlanta

The history and practices of African American Catholics has been vastly understudied, and Black Catholics are often written off as a fringe sector of the religious population. Yet, Catholics of African descent have been a part of Catholicism since the early days of European exploration into the New World.

In the Shadow of Ebenezer examines how the Civil Rights Movement and the Second Vatican Council affected African American Catholics in Atlanta, Georgia, focusing on the historic Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church in the Old Fourth Ward. Our Lady of Lourdes is a neighbor of major historic Black Protestant churches in the city, including Ebenezer Baptist Church, a block away, which during the Civil Rights era was the pulpit of Martin Luther King Jr. Featuring archival and oral history sources, the book examines the religious and cultural life of the parishioners of Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church, showing how this Black Catholic congregation fit into the overall religious ecology of the neighborhood. Examining Our Lady of Lourdes in relation to these larger Black Protestant congregations helps to illuminate whether and how they were shaped by their place at a center of the civil rights struggle, and how religious change and social change intersect.

What video games teach us about building a more inclusive world

What does it mean to build a world? Worldbuilding is traditionally understood as an expression of storytelling across media forms. Yet, as video games show us, worldbuilding does not necessarily need to center narrative elements. Instead, new worlds can allow us to reimagine existing structures, conventions, and constants. Doing so gives us the tools to queer the world around us.

How to Queer the World argues that video games provide us with keen insight into worldbuilding. With these insights come a new understanding of the ever-elusive ideals of queer worldmaking. Video games challenge us to address how worlds are built through underlying systems rather than surface-level representation. They also offer opportunities to envision alternate and queer ways of living, loving, desiring, and being. Each of the chapters in this book presents a close reading of a video game that illustrates one way of building worlds and encoding them with meaning, focusing on elements of digital media often overlooked as technical rather than cultural.

From the design of game mechanics and user interfaces to the use of graphics software and physics simulations, Bo Ruberg argues that these aspects of video games represent a critical toolkit for seeing the work of worldbuilding differently—in video games and beyond. Simultaneously, each of these video games models an approach to what Ruberg terms “queer worldbuilding.” Queer worldbuilding radically remakes the world by destabilizing the fundamental logics of our own universe: who we are, what we can do, how our bodies move, and how we exist within time and space.

How Coptic Christian migrants reshape religious identity through the imagination of US empire

Coptic Orthodox Christians comprise the largest Christian community in the Middle East and are among the oldest Christian communities in the world. While once the objects of American missionary efforts, in recent years Copts have been in the spotlight for their Christianity. A spate of ISIS-related bombings and attacks have garnered worldwide attention, leading to a series of efforts from US politicians, think tanks, and NGOs to re-channel their efforts into “saving” these Middle Eastern Christians from Muslims. The increased targeting of Copts has also contributed to the moral imaginary of the “Persecuted Church,” particularly among American evangelicals, which embraces the idea that Christians around the globe are currently being persecuted more than any other time in history.

Drawing on years of extensive fieldwork among Coptic migrants between Egypt and the United States, Martyrs and Migrants examines how American religious imaginaries of global Christian persecution have remapped Coptic collective memory of martyrdom. Transnational Copts have navigated the sociopolitical conditions in Egypt and the global consequences of the US “war on terror” by translating their suffering into the ambiguous forms of religious and political visibility. Candace Lukasik argues that the commingling of American conservatives and Copts has shaped a new kind of Christian kinship in blood, operating through a double movement between glorification and racialization. Occupying a position between threat and victim, Copts from the Middle East have been subject to anti-terror surveillance in the US even as they have leveraged their roles as “persecuted Christians.” Through Lukasik’s careful examination of the everyday processes shaping Coptic communal formation, Martyrs and Migrants broadly reveals how ideologies of spiritual kinship are forged through theological histories of martyrdom and of blood, demonstrating the global dynamics and imperial politics of contemporary Christianity.

The risk of closure and repression in schools

In the last two decades, education officials have closed a rising number of public schools nationwide related to low performance. These schools are mainly located in neglected neighborhoods with high concentrations of poverty. Despite this credible threat of closure, relatively few individual schools threatened with closure for low performance in the United States are actually shut down. Yet, as Erin Michaels argues, the looming threat is ever present. Test, Measure, Punish critically shifts the focus from school shutdowns to the more typical situation within these strained public schools: operating under persistent risk of closure.

Many K-12 schools today face escalating sanctions if they do not improve according to repressive state mandates, which, in turn, incentivize schools to put into place nonstop test drills and strict student conduct rules. Test, Measure, Punish traces how threats of school closure have distorted education to become more punitive which disproportionately impacts—even targets—Black and Latinx communities and substantially hurts student social development. This book addresses how these new punitive schooling conditions for troubled schools reproduce racial inequalities.

Michaels centers her research in a suburban upstate New York high school serving mainly working-class Black and Latinx students. She reveals a new model of schooling based on testing and security regimes that expands the carceral state, making the students feel dejected, criminalized, and suspicious of the system, their peers, and themselves. Test, Measure, Punish offers a new theory of schooling inequality and shows in vivid detail why state-led school reforms represent a new level of racialized citizenship in an already fragmented public education system.

The convergence of the politics of representation and Black fan cultures

Boldly going where few fandom scholars have gone before, Fandom for Us, by Us breaks from our focus on white fandom to center Black fandoms. Alfred L. Martin, Jr., engages these fandoms through what he calls the “four C’s”: class, clout, canon, and comfort.

Class is a key component of how Black fandom is contingent on distinctions between white, nationally recognized cultural productions and multicultural and/or regional cultural productions, as demonstrated by Misty Copeland’s ascension in American Ballet Theatre. Clout refers to Black fans’ realization of their own consumer spending power as an agent for industrial change, reducing the precarity of Blackness within historically white cultural apparatuses and facilitating the production of Black blockbusters like 2018’s Black Panther. Canon entails a communal fannish practice of sharing media objects, like the 1978 film The Wiz, which lead them to take on meanings outside of their original context. Comfort describes the nostalgic and sentimental affects associated with beloved fan objects such as the television show, Golden Girls, connected to notions of Black joy and signaling moments wherein Black people can just be themselves.

Through 75 in-depth interviews with Black fans, Fandom for Us, by Us argues not only for the importance of studying Black fandoms, but also demonstrates their complexities by both coupling and decoupling Black reception practices from the politics of representation. Martin highlights the nuanced ways Black fans interact with media representations, suggesting class, clout, canon, and comfort are universal to the study of all fandoms. Yet, for all the ways these fandoms are similar and reciprocal, Black fandoms are also their own set of practices, demanding their own study.

The rise of moderate Orthodox Judaism in Israel and the key role of Americans in its emergence

The conservative ultra-Orthodox and redemptive "Kook" camps hold sway over religious matters in Israel. Yet from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, a small cadre of American immigrants arrived in Israel and established or led a range of educational institutions that trained thousands of advanced students and laid the ideological foundations for an Israeli moderate religious stream. In Agents of Change, Adam S. Ferziger highlights the parts played by these Americans in promoting the rise of a transnational community of moderate Jewish Orthodoxy.

Analyzing the novel outlooks that have found expression in central areas of debates, from women’s engagements in religious and public life and approaches to the gay and lesbian community to interactions with non-Orthodox denominations and attitudes toward academic Jewish studies, Ferziger illuminates both shifting religious dynamics in Israel as a result of this rise in moderate Orthodoxy, as well as the changing relationship between Israeli and American Judaisms, challenging current understandings which see the Jewish co­mmunities of the two nations as drifting apart. Though a minority in Israel, this vocal Orthodox community with a more moderate take on key issues is significant in potentially paving the way for social change. Increasingly, their influence is being felt. Shedding light on the impact of American migration in forming a burgeoning moderate religious direction in Israeli life that has challenged the hegemony of the long dominant direction within Religious Zionism, Agents of Change offers a fresh perspective on the multifaceted collaboration of ideas and practices that exists between Israel and America.

How Black women’s visual work functions in an era of new racial and gender meaning

In the wake of contemporary art’s post-Black turn and the mainstreaming of intersectionality, Undesirability and Her Sisters charts a new genealogy of Black women’s art that exposes the unfinished project of racial and gender empowerment in the twenty-first century. Tiffany Barber argues that Black women’s social positions at the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and class are inherently queer, thus spurring unexpected aesthetic strategies that throw into high relief the ethical terrain of what it means to be Black and a woman now.

Undesirability and Her Sisters collates what Barber terms “undesirable” representations of Black female bodies in recent American sculpture, collage, photography, and dance-based performance art by Kara Walker, Wangechi Mutu, Xaviera Simmons, and Narcissister. These works not only engage the visual senses but also incorporate olfactory, haptic, and sonic experiences that challenge traditional interpretations of Blackness and womanhood in art history, Black Studies, feminist and gender studies, dance and performance studies, and queer studies. Instead of transcendental beauty, wholeness, and individual and collective becoming, the perverse Black female figures profiled here eschew sublimation and synthesis as necessary responses to racial and gender subjugation in the past, present, and future.

Through its unique, groundbreaking analysis, this book contributes to the ongoing discussions on the ethics of representation—the capacity to speak and act for oneself, to have significance and impact, and ultimately, to reject acknowledgment.

An Immigration and labor history of the Russian Orthodox Church in the US

At the turn of the twentieth century, thousands of immigrants from the borderlands of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires built a transnational church in North America. The community that church leaders called American Orthodox Rus’ was created by and for working people, and transformed believers’ identities as Eastern European migrants, as Orthodox Christians, and as American workers.

Given how strongly the Russian Orthodox Christian community was tied to working class industrial life, this book makes the case that we cannot understand the scope of working class and immigrant religion in the United States without understanding American Orthodox Rus’. The work Russian Orthodox immigrants did in the Progressive Era United States occurred in factories, foundries, and mines; they lived mainly in industrial cities and mining towns; and they almost immediately got caught up in the most pivotal—and sometimes violent—political and social crises of their times, both nationally and internationally. To address their needs in these contexts, the Russian Orthodox Church expanded its missionary efforts in North America, forming a network of social and material aid for working-class believers. This book traces the rapid growth of this transnational religious world, then explores its unexpected collapse under the weight of the First World War, a global pandemic, and the transnational reach of revolutionary political change in Russia. A story of challenge and resilience, Orthodoxy on the Line complicates dominant paradigms in the study of labor and North American Religions.

Why the death penalty is in decline across the United States

Across the country, the death penalty is dying. Twenty-two states have abandoned state-sanctioned executions, including nine in the last fifteen years. Of the twenty-eight states that still have the death penalty, eight have not had an execution in over a decade. And public support for the death penalty has declined from 80% of the surveyed population in the early 1990s to approximately 50% today.

As the death penalty slowly withers away, Todd C. Peppers, Jamie Almallen, and Mary Welek Atwell bring together a number of distinguished death-penalty scholars, activists, and attorneys to take an accounting of the damage inflicted by the machinery of death. Contributors to the book point to a range of different pathologies which have caused politicians and voters to turn against capital punishment, from unacceptable rates of false convictions and racially motivated prosecutions, to a clemency process poisoned by political factors.

Essay topics include various dimensions of the death penalty, including racial and gender bias; economic costs; the conviction of juveniles, the mentally ill, and the factually innocent; Supreme Court decisions; and the failure of the death penalty to serve as a deterrent against crime. This important volume is an up-to-date accounting of the current state and, as the contributors argue, the future demise of the death penalty.

Surprising insights into the worldviews of oil and gas financiers

It is no secret that the fossil fuel industry, whose products power modern America both physically and financially, inflicts immense destruction to our environment. The past, present, and future of US energy have been determined not just by engineers, but by financiers, an under-studied group of energy investors.

Drawing on four years of ethnographic work in Houston, Texas, the financial center of the oil industry, Carbon Capital explores how oil financiers decide what a good investment is, and how they incorporate ethics into their decision making. While many who are concerned about climate change see those involved in the gas and oil industries as immoral profit chasers who do not care about the environment, the author finds that this is not the case. His interviews and observations demonstrate that the people who finance the energy industries are actually deeply concerned with ethics. They grapple with questions about climate change and what it means to do the right thing, but the choices they make are ultimately guided by a combination of how they perceive the historical context in which they operate, their faith, which is largely religious Christian; their financial interests; plus the capitalist system in which they are running, all of which come together to shape their moral understandings about what a good energy future looks like. While the worldview of oil financiers may not align with our own, the author argues that given their importance in shaping environmental approaches, it is crucial that we understand what drives their ethical sensibilities.

A new perspective on women’s Black Power leadership legacies

Academics and popular commentors have expressed common sentiments about the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s—that it was male dominated and overrun with autocratic leaders. Yet women’s strategizing, management, and sustained work were integral to movement organizations’ functioning, and female advocates of cultural nationalism often exhibited a unique service-oriented, collaborative leadership style.

Essential Soldiers documents a variety of women Pan-African nationalists’ experiences, considering the ways they produced a distinctive kind of leadership through their devotion and service to the struggle for freedom and equality. Relying on oral histories, textual archival material, and scholarly literature, this book delves into women’s organizing and resistance efforts, investigating how they challenged the one-dimensional notions of gender roles within cultural nationalist organizations. Revealing a form of Black Power leadership that has never been highlighted, Kenja McCray explores how women articulated and used their power to transform themselves and their environments. Through her examination, McCray argues that women’s Pan-Africanist cultural nationalist activism embodied a work-centered, people-centered, and African-centered form of service leadership. A dynamic and fascinating narrative of African American women activists, Essential Soldiers provides a new vantage point for considering Black Power leadership legacies.

Challenges the definition of humanitarian aid

Aside from being one of the most important migration corridors in the world, Mexico is becoming an immigrant destination itself, with more and more migrants deciding or needing to stay in the country after failing to enter the United States. In the absence of state aid, migrant shelters have emerged as an informal welfare system for migrants, asylum seekers, refugees, and deportees in Mexico. Largely run by faith-based humanitarian organizations, these shelters have grown significantly in recent years.

Humanitarianism from Below examines the significance of these casas de migrantes (migrant shelters) in the migration process in Mexico. The book also reviews the role of faith-based humanitarian organizations, whose engagement with migrants is perceived more as charity work than professional humanitarian work. The volume argues that faith-based humanitarian organizations’ work challenges traditional understandings of what counts as humanitarian aid. It makes the case that in order to understand the full ecology of migration, we need to understand not only how large organizations like the Red Cross work, but also how these smaller and local entities with fewer resources interact with migrants on their journeys. Most migration research tends to focus on its impact within home countries or in destination contexts, rarely focusing on the actual migration process, including the interactions that influence the course of the migration journey itself. In conducting this research, Alejandro Olayo-Méndez traveled along migrant routes several times in order to gain knowledge about how migrants move and how they interact with the migrant shelters. He offers a detailed look at the experiences and challenges of casas de migrantes in Mexico, situating these faith-based shelters as an integral part of Mexico’s humanitarian ecosystem.

Winner, 2024 George Freedley Memorial Award, given by the Theatre Library Association
Winner, Labriola National American Indian Data Center 2025 National Book Award
Winner, 2025 Outstanding Book Award (for Scholarly Achievement), given by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education
Finalist, 2025 John W. Frick Book Award, given by the American Theatre and Drama Society

Considers the character of the “Stage Indian” in American theater and its racial and political impact

Redface unearths the history of the theatrical phenomenon of redface in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Like blackface, redface was used to racialize Indigenous peoples and nations, and even more crucially, exclude them from full citizenship in the United States. Arguing that redface is more than just the costumes or makeup an actor wears, Bethany Hughes contends that it is a collaborative, curatorial process through which artists and audiences make certain bodies legible as “Indian.” By chronicling how performances and definitions of redface rely upon legibility and delineations of race that are culturally constructed and routinely shifting, this book offers an understanding of how redface works to naturalize a very particular version of history and, in doing so, mask its own performativity.

Tracing the “Stage Indian” from its early nineteenth-century roots to its proliferation across theatrical entertainment forms and turn of the twenty-first century attempts to address its racist legacy, Redface uses case studies in law and civic life to understand its offstage impact. Hughes connects extensive scholarship on the “Indian” in American culture to the theatrical history of racial impersonation and critiques of settler colonialism, demonstrating redface’s high stakes for Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike. Revealing the persistence of redface and the challenges of fixing it, Redface closes by offering readers an embodied rehearsal of what it would mean to read not for the “Indian” but for Indigenous theater and performance as it has always existed in the US.

Explores the sexual world of the one of the most fabled and romanticized characters in history—the pirate

From Blackbeard to Captain Hook, pirates have been the subject of countless movies, books, children's tales, and even a world-famous amusement park ride. In Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition, B.R. Burg looks beyond the myth to analyze the social and sexual world of sea rovers. Through his innovative analysis of archival materials, he uncovers the queer history of piracy.

Burg makes the groundbreaking argument that buccaneer sexuality differed widely from that of other all-male institutions such as prisons. Instead of existing within a regimented structure of rule, regulations, and oppressive supervision, buccaneers operated in a society in which widespread tolerance of homosexuality was the norm and conditions encouraged its practice.

Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition has helped to reshape the figure of the pirate for a new century. In Burg’s introduction, he discusses the controversy that surrounded the book when it was published in 1983 and how our perspectives on all-male societies have since changed. Creating an indelible impact on our culture, the book was even read by Johnny Depp in preparation for his role of Captain Jack Sparrow. In a time when we are rethinking conventional historical narratives, Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition offers an essential, alternative perspective on the centuries-old figure of the pirate.

Answers the question: Why are women freezing their eggs?

Why are women freezing their eggs in record numbers? Motherhood on Ice explores this question by drawing on the stories of more than 150 women who pursued fertility preservation technology. Moving between narratives of pain and empowerment, these nuanced personal stories reveal the complexity of women’s lives as they struggle to preserve and extend their fertility.

Contrary to popular belief, egg freezing is rarely about women postponing fertility for the sake of their careers. Rather, the most-educated women are increasingly forced to delay childbearing because they face a mating gap—a lack of eligible, educated, equal partners ready for marriage and parenthood. For these women, egg freezing is a reproductive backstop, a technological attempt to bridge the gap while waiting for the right partner. But it is not an easy choice for most. Their stories reveal the extent to which it is logistically complicated, physically taxing, financially demanding, emotionally draining, and uncertain in its effects.

In this powerful book, women share their reflections on their clinical encounters, as well as the immense hopes and investments they place in this high-tech fertility preservation strategy. Race, religion, and the role of men in the lives of single women pursuing this technology are also explored. A distinctly human portrait of an understudied and rapidly growing population, Motherhood on Ice examines what is at stake for women who take comfort in their frozen eggs while embarking on their quests for partnership, pregnancy, and parenting.

A harrowing political history of Kurdish Iraq told through the extraordinary rags-to-riches story of a childhood refugee

In the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against his own people, the Iraqi Kurds. Five thousand people died in what became known as the Halabja Massacre, which has been deemed the worst chemical attack in history. Nicole F. Watts, a former journalist and now professor of political science, has spent over a decade researching the struggles of the Kurdish people in Iraq, and in vivid, lyrical prose, she tells their story through the eyes of Peshawa, a young Muslim Kurd whose family barely survived the bombing and then fled for their lives.

Republic of Dreams is a harrowing portrait of Iraqi Kurdistan and its history, as it weathers Hussein’s genocidal campaign against the Kurds, a civil war, the US invasion of Iraq, the Arab Spring, and the sustained neglect of the city of Halabja. Throughout the book, the thread of Peshawa’s story immerses readers in the everyday and extraordinary world of Iraqi Kurds between the late 1980s and 2022, exploring the meaning of home and dislocation in the wake of war and genocide.

Based on over a hundred in-depth interviews with Iraqi Kurdish activists, journalists, elected officials, and community organizers, and hundreds of hours of conversations with Peshawa and his family, Republic of Dreams brings to vivid life the story of modern Kurdistan, and the Kurdish national dream to have their own homeland.

How gallows humor can bolster us to confront global warming

We’ve all seen the headlines: oceans rising, historic heat waves, mass extinctions, climate refugees. It feels overwhelming, like nothing can make a difference in combating this ongoing global catastrophe. How can we mobilize to save the world when we feel this depressed?

Stay Cool enjoins us to laugh our way forward. Human beings have used comedy to cope with difficult realities since the beginning of recorded time—the more dismal the news, the darker the humor. Using this rich tradition of dark comedy to investigate climate change, Aaron Sachs makes the case that gallows humor, a mainstay of African Americans and Jews facing extraordinary oppression, can cultivate endurance, persistence, and solidarity in the face of calamity.

Sachs surveys the macabre tradition of laughing during great suffering, from the Black Plague to the San Francisco earthquake of 1906—and offers some of the earliest examples of superlative dark comedy. He also explores how a new generation of activists and comedians are deploying dark humor to great effect, by poking fun at older people’s apathy about climate catastrophes, lambasting oil corporations’ “eco” rebranding, and even producing an off-Broadway dystopian comedy called “Sea Level Rise.” Sachs offers suggestions for how environmentalists can use dark comedy first to boost their own morale, and then to reframe their activism in more energizing and relatable ways.
Environmentalism is probably the least funny social movement that’s ever existed. Stay Cool seeks to change that. Will comedy save the world? Not by itself, no. But it can put people in a decent enough mood to get them started on a rescue mission.

A unique insider perspective of daily life in New York City’s most notorious house of correction

While most people behind bars at Rikers Island are detainees awaiting the settlement of their cases, a smaller population have already been convicted and are serving sentences deemed too short for the state prison system. These stints are called “city time.” The sentences range from a few days to a year, and are generally served within large, open dormitories lacking in privacy and sanitation. Within these spaces, incarcerated people reproduce an elaborate set of rules, rituals, and relationships, as a means both of survival and of giving meaning to the time taken from them.

Written by David Campbell and Jarrod Shanahan, who both served sentences at Rikers, City Time reflects its authors’ personal experiences and observations of short-stay incarceration to present a nuanced and vivid account of a social world kept locked away from the public eye. The authors reconstruct the daily realities of sanitation, nourishment, recreation, work, and other necessary activities, and emphasize the complex interpersonal relationships that emerge in response to city time. Simultaneously, they paint a grim and urgent picture of structural racism, class violence, and the disastrous lack of mental health and substance abuse resources for poor New Yorkers, who are shuttled in and out of city time sentences as “frequent flyers.”

Beginning with the authors’ own processes of intake, and ending with the ritual of late-night release, City Time takes readers behind the splashy headlines to depict, in intimately human terms, the rich and variegated social world unfolding, at this very moment, on Rikers Island.

WINNER, 2024 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award- Social Sciences, Anthropology, and Folklore Category, given by the Association for Jewish Studies

An intimate account of Orthodox family planning amid shifting state policies in Israel

In recent years, Israeli state policies have attempted to dissuade Orthodox Jews from creating large families, an objective that flies in the face of traditional practices in their community. As state desires to cultivate a high-income, tech-centered nation come into greater conflict with common Orthodox familial practices, Jewish couples are finding it increasingly difficult to actualize their reproductive aims and communal expectations.

In The State of Desire, Lea Taragin-Zeller provides an intimate examination of the often devastating effects of Israel’s steep cutbacks in child benefits, which are aimed at limiting the rapid increase in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish population. Taragin-Zeller takes the reader beyond Orthodox taboos, capturing how cracks in religious convictions engender a painful process of re-orientating desires to reproduce amidst shrinking public support, feminism, and new ideals of romance, intimacy and parenting. Paying close attention to ethical dilemmas, the book explores not just pro-ceptive but also contraceptive desires around family formation: when to have children, how many, and at what cost.

The volume offers a rare look at issues of contraception in the Orthodox context, and notably includes interviews with men, making the case that we cannot continue to study reproductive choice solely through the perspectives of women. The State of Desire is a groundbreaking anthropological approach to the study of religion and reproduction, and a remarkably intimate account of the delicate balance between personal desires and those of the state.

The Sword of Ambition belongs to a genre of religious polemic written for the rulers of Egypt and Syria between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries. Unlike most medieval Muslim polemic, the concerns of this genre were more social and political than theological. Leaving no rhetorical stone unturned, the book’s author, an unemployed Egyptian scholar and former bureaucrat named 'Uthman ibn Ibrahim al-Nabulusi (d. 660/1262), poured his deep knowledge of history, law, and literature into the work. Now edited in full and translated for the first time, The Sword of Ambition opens a new window onto the fascinating culture of elite rivalry in the late-medieval Islamic Middle East. It contains a wealth of little-known historical anecdotes, unusual religious opinions, obscure and witty poetry, and humorous cultural satire. Above all, it reveals that much of the inter-communal animosity of the era was conditioned by fierce competition for scarce resources that were increasingly mediated by an ideologically committed Sunni Muslim state. This insight reminds us that seemingly timeless and inevitable “religious” conflict must be considered in its broader historical perspective.

The Sword of Ambition is both the earliest and most eclectic of several independent works composed in medieval Egypt against the employment of Coptic and Jewish officials, and is vivid testimony to the gradual integration of Islamic scholarship and state administration that was well underway in its day.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.