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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.