2023 Faculty books

As a benchmark of unparalleled scholarship, research, and creative activity at a Research 1 (R1) university, in the past year 44 books have been published by 48 faculty members in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington. These books represent works authored or edited by members of 25 academic units across the College, ranging from Anthropology, to Chemistry, English, Folklore and Ethnomusicology, History, Mathematics, Physics, Religious Studies, to Spanish and Portuguese, among others.

"Our faculty's book publications this year are a testament to their commitment to advance knowledge in and across academic disciplines, expand human understanding, and inform and improve people's lives," said Rick Van Kooten, Executive Dean of the College and Professor of Physics. "Our faculty are groundbreaking scholars, innovative teachers, and devoted mentors, and these latest works benefit our University, our state, our nation, and the world."

This year's books by College faculty include:

Everything is Sampled: Digital and Print Mediations in African Arts and Letters

Akin Adesokan
Associate Professor, Comparative Literature
Associate Professor, Cinema and Media Studies, The Media School

Everything Is Sampled examines the shifting modes of production and circulation of African artistic forms since the 1980s, focusing on digital culture as the most currently decisive setting for these changes. Immersed in digital culture, African artists today are acutely aware of the media-saturated circumstances in which they work and actively bridge them by making ethical choices to shape those circumstances.

Pulp!

Marco Arnaudo
Professor, French and Italian

Pulp! is a scenario-driven skirmish wargame set during the interwar years of the early 20th Century. Players build teams of bold explorers, daring archaeologists, hardboiled detectives, and costumed avengers – or criminal masterminds and evil geniuses – and dive into a world of fortune, glory...and menace.

A Most Valuable Medium: The Remediation of Oral Performance on Early Commercial Recordings

Richard Bauman
Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Folklore
Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Anthropology

In A Most Valuable Medium, Richard Bauman explores the practical problems that producers and performers confronted when adapting familiar oral genres to this innovative medium of sound recording. He also examines how audiences responded to these modified and commoditized presentations.

The Cortex and the Critical Point

John Beggs
Professor, Physics

The claim that neurons in the cortex work best when they operate near the critical point is known as the criticality hypothesis. In The Cortex and the Critical Point, John Beggs—one of the pioneers of this hypothesis—offers an introduction to the critical point and its relevance to the brain.

Hre Lian Kio’s Animism in the Chin Hills

Kelly Berkson
Assistant Professor, Linguistics

Hre Lian Kio’s Animism in the Chin Hills is an edited version of the thesis originally submitted in 1971 to the faculty of theology at Burma Divinity School (now Myanmar Institute of Theology) in Yangon, Myanmar. The book provides unique historical insights into the pre-Christian religious practices and culture of the Chin people. In the current volume, which has been edited for clarity and fluency at the request of Hre Lian Kio and his family, several new sections and editorial footnotes have been added to provide contextual information or definitions that will be helpful for current readers. As out-migration from Chin State continues and diaspora communities grow, our dearest hope is that this book can provide an important link to the past for Chin youth who are interested in learning about the pre-Christian religion and culture of their ancestors.

A Logical Foundation for Potentialist Set Theory

Sharon Berry
Assistant Professor, Philosophy

Certain philosophical problems raise serious doubts about our acceptance of the axioms of set theory. In a detailed and original reassessment of these axioms, Sharon Berry uses a potentialist approach to develop a unified determinate conception of set-theoretic truth that vindicates many of our intuitive expectations regarding set theory.

Cinema Van, propagande et résistance en Afrique coloniale (1930-1960)

Vincent Bouchard
Associate Professor, French and Italian

The “Cinema Van”, a vehicle equipped with film screening equipment, was used by the British, Belgian and French governments to distribute their “educational” films in colonial Africa in the 1940s and 1950s. Bouchard takes a perceptive look at the workings of this apparatus used for propaganda and examines the influence the screenings had on the colonized African populations' understanding of the cinematic medium.

El cerebro narrativo: Lo que nuestras neuronas cuentan

Fritz Breithaupt
Provost Professor, Germanic Studies

Breithaupt sheds light on the sophisticated neural mechanisms that make the brain interpret the world through the stories it receives and those it creates. Breithaupt covers literature, sociology and our daily lives; he unravels the particularities of those narratives that reside in us almost instinctively, like those of the Brothers Grimm.

Behind the Mask: Vernacular Culture in the Time of COVID

Ben Bridges
Ph.D. Candidate, Folklore and Anthropology

Exploring the nature and shape of vernacular responses to the ongoing public health crisis, Behind the Mask documents processes that are otherwise likely to be forgotten. Including different ethnographic presents, contributors capture moments during the pandemic rather than upon reflection, making the work important to students and scholars of folklore and ethnology, as well as general readers interested in the COVID pandemic.

Behind the Mask: Vernacular Culture in the Time of COVID

Ross Brillhart
Ph.D. Candidate, Ethnomusicology

The Future is in Your Hands: Portrait Photography from Senegal

Beth Buggenhagen
Associate Professor, Anthropology

The Future Is in Your Hands provides an expansive frame for photography to highlight the role of affect in portraiture practices. Moving from the colonial to the newly independent Senegal, Beth Buggenhagen combines museum, ethnographic, and archival research on photography's past with lens-based artists who address themes of separation, visibility, rupture, and repatriation through portraiture.

A Flame Called Indiana

Doug Case
Academic Specialist, English
Assistant Director, Creative Writing

A Flame Called Indiana features 65 writers of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry who have all had the pleasure of being Hoosiers at one time or another. Curated by the Indiana University Bloomington creative writing department, this diverse anthology features everything from the immigrant experience to the Indianapolis 500 to science fiction. Altogether, the work stands testament to the vibrancy and creativity of this Midwest state.

Americanitis

Doug Case
Academic Specialist, English
Assistant Director, Creative Writing

"Americanitis thrives on the nervous energy of quick living, alternately witty, ironic, vulnerable, and self-deprecating. Half long jumper, half linguistic acrobat, Case keeps showing us how “even in disappointment we can be beautiful.”"

— Bruce Snider, author of Fruit

Why Not Moderation? Letters to Young Radicals

Aurelian Craiutu
Professor, Political Science
Chair, Political Science

Moderation is often presented as a simple virtue for lukewarm and indecisive minds, searching for a fuzzy center between the extremes. Not surprisingly, many politicians do not want to be labelled 'moderates' for fear of losing elections. Why Not Moderation? challenges this conventional image and shows that moderation is a complex virtue with a rich tradition and unexplored radical sides.

The Gospel of Church: How Mainline Protestants Vilified Christian Socialism and Fractured the Labor Movement

Janine Drake
Clinical Assistant Professor, Department of History

In The Gospel of Church, Drake carefully traces the relationships which Protestant ministers built with labor unions and working class communities. Despite their heroic narratives of Christian social reform, Protestant reformers' efforts to assert their authority over industrial affairs directly undermined workers' efforts to bring about social democracy in the United States.

Turning Land into Capital: Development and Dispossession in the Mekong Region

Michael B. Dwyer
Assistant Professor, Geography

Turning Land into Capital examines the contradictions produced by superimposing twenty-first-century neoliberal projects onto diverse landscapes etched by decades of war and state socialism. Chapters in the book explore geopolitics, legacies of colonialism, ideologies of development, and strategies to achieve land justice in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam.

The Vortex That Unites Us: Versions of Totality in Russian Literature

Jacob Emery
Associate Professor, Comparative Literature
Associate Professor, Slavic & East European Languages and Cultures

The Vortex That Unites Us is a study of totality in Russian literature, from the foundation of the modern Russian state to the present day. Considering a diversity of texts that have in common chiefly their prominence in the Russian literary canon, Jacob Emery examines the persistent ambition in Russian literature to gather the whole world into an artwork.

Challenging Confinement: Mass Incarceration and the Fight for Equality in Women's Prisons

Bonnie Ernst
Assistant Professor, Criminal Justice

Drawing on prison grievance reports, oral histories, state archives, and private collections, Ernst tells the story of how women's movements, beginning in the 1920s and ending in the era of mass incarceration, infused prison activism in Michigan with new energy. Female prisoners and attorneys successfully persuaded the federal court to force state prisons to offer more programming and access to legal services.

The Abyss or Life is Simple: Reading Knausgaard, Writing Religion

Hannah Garvey
Graduate student, Religious Studies

In 2015, a group of scholars began meeting to discuss the peculiarly religious qualities of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle. The group wondered what reading these textures of religion in these volumes might say about our times, about writing, and about themselves. This book is the culmination of this collective endeavor—a collection of interlocking essays on ritual, beauty, and the end of the world.

The Book of (More) Delights

Ross Gay
Professor, English

In this spirited second collection of short, lyrical, genre-defying essays, again written daily over a year, one of America’s most original and observant voices celebrates the ordinary, helping us see our extraordinary world anew. Delights: Book II is a record of the small wonders we so often overlook in our busy lives.

Non-Binary Family Configurations: Intersections of Queerness and Homonormativity

Brian Joseph Gilley
Professor, Anthropology

Non-Binary Family Configurations provides a close look at the ways in which LGBTQ2 people form familial bonds. It brings together stories from non-binary families across continents and cultures and recenters care as a foundational value for creating familial ties. This volume therefore addresses a gap in the literature concerning non-binary family configurations by going beyond the legal battle for non-binary partnership rights.

Folk Art: Continuity, Creativity, and the Brazilian Quotidian

Henry H. Glassie
College Professor Emeritus, Folklore

Listen to the artists of the Brazilian Northeast. Their work, they say, comes of continuity and creativity. Continuity runs along lines of learning toward social coherence. Creativity brings challenges and deep personal satisfaction. What they say and do in Brazil aligns with ethnographic evidence from New Mexico and North Carolina; from Ireland, Portugal, and Italy; from Nigeria, Turkey, India, and Bangladesh; from China and Japan.

Risk Work: Making Art and Guerilla Tactics in Punitive America, 1967-1987

Faye R. Gleisser
Associate Professor, Art History
Affiliate, Cultural Studies Program
Affiliate, Critical Race and Postcolonial Studies

Risk Work tells the story of how artists’ experimentation with physical and psychological interference from the late 1960s through the late 1980s reveals the complex and enduring relationship between contemporary art, state power, and policing.

Behind the Mask: Vernacular Culture in the Time of COVID

Diane Goldstein
Professor Emerita, Folklore and Ethnomusicology

Caribbean American Narratives of Belonging

Vivian Nun Halloran
Professor of English

In Caribbean American Narratives of Belonging, Vivian Nun Halloran analyzes memoirs, picture books, comic books, young adult novels, musicals, and television shows through which Caribbean Americans recount and celebrate their contributions to contemporary politics, culture, and activism in the United States.

The Abyss or Life is Simple: Reading Knausgaard, Writing Religion

M. Cooper Harris
Associate Professor, Religious Studies
Adjunct Professor, Folklore and Ethnomusicology
Adjunct Professor, Comparative Literature

In 2015, a group of scholars began meeting to discuss the peculiarly religious qualities of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle. The group wondered what reading these textures of religion in these volumes might say about our times, about writing, and about themselves. The Abyss or Life Is Simple is the culmination of this collective endeavor—a collection of interlocking essays on ritual, beauty, and the end of the world.

The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist

Sarah Imhoff
Professor, Religious Studies
Professor, Borns Jewish Studies Program
Affiliated Faculty, Gender Studies
Adjunct Faculty, History

In The Lives of Jessie Sampter, Sarah Imhoff tells the story of Jessie Sampter, who was best known for her Course in Zionism (1915). By charting how Sampter’s life did not neatly line up with her own religious and political ideals, Imhoff highlights the complicated and at times conflicting connections between the body, queerness, disability, religion, and nationalism.

Homeward

Angela Jackson-Brown
Associate Professor, English

Georgia, 1962. Rose Perkins Bourdon returns home to Parsons, GA, without her husband and pregnant with another man’s baby. After tragedy strikes her husband in the war overseas, a numb Rose is left with pieces of who she used to be and is forced to figure out what she is going to do with the rest of her life.

L'antisémitisme contemporain en France. Rémanences ou émergences?

Günther Jikeli
Erna B. Rosenfeld Associate Professor, Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism
Associate Director, Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism
Associate Professor, Borns Jewish Studies Program
Associate Professor, Germanic Studies

Against all expectations, anti-Semitism has once again become a current political and social phenomenon in France. Beyond a simple persistence of old prejudices, it has been embodied since the end of the 1939-1945 war in an unprecedented expansion of anti-Jewish violence, ranging from insults to murder.

Designing Effective Language Learning Materials for Less Commonly Taught Languages

Amber Kent
Language Instructional Specialist, Center for Languages of the Central Asian Region

Many teachers of less commonly taught languages, or LCTLs, find themselves in the position of needing access to quality language teaching and learning materials where none exist, or where those that do are extremely outdated. This book is a concise guide for language instructors or anyone with an interest in developing language learning materials.

Mesquite Pods to Mezcal: 10,000 Years of Oaxacan Cuisines

Stacie King
Professor, Anthropology
Chair, Anthropology
Associate Faculty, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies

Among the richest culinary traditions in Mexico are those of the “eight regions” of the state of Oaxaca. Mesquite Pods to Mezcal brings together some of the most prominent scholars in Oaxacan archaeology and related fields to explore the evolution of the area’s world-renowned cuisines. This volume is the first to address food practices across Oaxaca through a long-term historical lens.

The Coup and the Palm Trees: Agrarian Conflict and Political Power in Honduras

Andrés Léon Araya
Assistant Professor, International Studies

The Coup and the Palm Trees interrogates the Honduran present, through an exploration of the country’s spatiotemporal trajectory of agrarian change since the mid-twentieth century. It tells the double history of how the Aguán region went from a set of “empty” lands to the centerpiece of the country’s agrarian reform in the 1980s and a central site for the palm oil industry and drug trade, while a militarized process of state formation took place between the coups of 1963 and 2009.

Companion to Erasmus

Eric MacPhail
Professor, French and Italian
Adjunct Professor, Comparative Literature

The new Companion to Erasmus in the Renaissance Society of America's Texts and Studies Series draws on the insights of an international team of distinguished experts whose contributions are arrayed in eleven chapters followed by a detailed chronological catalogue of Erasmus' works and an up-to-date bibliography of secondary sources.

At the Crossroads of Music and Social Justice

David McDonald
Associate Professor, Folklore and Ethnomusicology
Associate Professor, Media School
Chair, Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology
Director, Ethnomusicology Institute

A strong collection of essays, At the Crossroads of Music and Social Justice studies the meaning of music within a community to investigate the intersections of sound and race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and differing abilities. Ethnographic work from a range of theoretical frameworks uncovers and analyzes the successes and limitations of music's efficacies in resolving conflicts, easing tensions, reconciling groups, promoting unity, and healing communities.

An Introduction to Mesoamerican Philosophy

Alexus McLeod
Professor, Religious Studies

The philosophy of Mesoamerica – the indigenous groups of precolonial North-Central America – is rich and varied but relatively little-known. In this ground-breaking book, Alexus McLeod introduces the philosophical traditions of the Maya, Nahua (Aztecs), Mixtecs, Zapotecs, and others, focussing in particular on their treatment of language, truth, time, creation, personhood, knowledge, and morality.

The Vice President's Black Wife: The Untold Story of Julia Chinn

Amrita Myers
Ruth N. Halls Associate Professor, Department History
Ruth N. Halls Associate Professor, Gender Studies
Affiliate Faculty, Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies
Affiliate Faculty, Department of American Studies

Award-winning historian Amrita Chakrabarti Myers has recovered the riveting, troubling, and complicated story of Julia Ann Chinn (ca. 1796–1833), the enslaved wife of Richard Mentor Johnson, owner of Blue Spring Farm, veteran of the War of 1812, and US vice president under Martin Van Buren.

An English-Efutu Dictionary

Samuel Obeng
Distinguished Professor, Linguistics
Adjunct Professor, African American and African Diaspora Studies
Adjunct Professor, Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures
Affiliate Professor, African Studies Program

Even though Awutu is more geographically widespread than Efutu and Senya, the term Efutu is used to refer to the group of languages in general because the city of Winneba, where Efutu is spoken, is politically more important because they have the paramountcy chiefdom. Winneba, where Efutu is spoken, is also educationally more prominent given that it has a university with three big campuses in the same town and six other campuses spread across Ghana. It also has many K-12 schools.

Topics in West African Discourse Pragmatics

Language use in African communicational contexts is not merely a contest between linguistic and communicative competence. It is a contest of wits, of speaking without saying, of avoiding blame by circumventing the obvious and engaging in obliqueness and implicitness. It involves the use of implicatures, assumptions and entailments, engaging in double-voicedness and double wordedness (to give credence to what is said).

Designing Effective Language Learning Materials for Less Commonly Taught Languages

Öner Özçelik
Chair, Central Eurasian Studies
Associate Professor, Central Eurasian Studies

Geometry of Holomorphic Mappings

Sergey Pinchuk
Professor, Mathematics

This monograph explores the problem of boundary regularity and analytic continuation of holomorphic mappings between domains in complex Euclidean spaces. Many important methods and techniques in several complex variables have been developed in connection with these questions, and the goal of this book is to introduce and demonstrate how they can be used in the context of boundary properties of holomorphic maps.

Who Should Pay? Higher Education, Responsibility, and the Public

Brian Powell
James H. Rudy Professor, Sociology

Who Should Pay? draws on a decade’s worth of public opinion surveys analyzing public attitudes about whether parents, students, or the government should be primarily responsible for funding higher education. The authors find increased public endorsement of shared responsibility between individuals and the government in paying for higher education.

Comprehensive Computational Chemistry - Volume: Advanced Electronic Structure Methods and Multireference Methods

Krishnan Raghavachari
Distinguished Professor, Chemistry

Comprehensive Computational Chemistry is an authoritative publication, comprising over 150 chapters that encompass the entire spectrum of the field. It delves into the foundational principles of theoretical methods, the development of algorithms and software packages, and their extensive applications in various domains, including atmospheric chemistry, biochemistry, materials science, and medicinal chemistry.

Race, Sex and Segregation in Colonial Latin America

Olimpia E. Rosenthal
Associate Professor, Spanish and Portuguese

Rosenthal's book traces the emergence and early development of segregationist practices and policies in Spanish and Portuguese America - showing that the practice of resettling diverse indigenous groups in segregated "Indian towns" influenced the material reorganization of colonial space, shaped processes of racialization, and contributed to the politicization of reproductive sex.

The Return of Resentment: The Rise and Decline and Rise Again of a Political Emotion

Robert A. Schneider
Professor, History

Drawing on a wide range of writers, thinkers, and historical experiences, Schneider illustrates how resentment has morphed across time, coming to express a collective sentiment felt by people and movements across the political spectrum. In this history, we discover resentment’s modernity and its ambiguity—how it can be used to dismiss legitimate critique and explain away violence, but also convey a moral stance that demands recognition.

Folk Art: Continuity, Creativity, and the Brazilian Quotidian

Pravina Shukla
Provost Professor, Folklore and Ethnomusicology

Living English, Moving Literacies

Katherine Silvester
Associate Professor, English

This book demonstrates how researchers and practitioners in writing and rhetoric studies can engage in story work across differences in culture, language, locations, and experience. Based on an ethnographic study in Nepal spanning a decade, Katie Silvester speaks with and to the stories of Bhutanese women in diaspora learning English later in life during resettlement and in the context of waves of social change brought on by the end of their asylum.

My Name is Iris

Brando Skyhorse
Associate Professor, English
Director, Creative Writing

After years of drifting apart Iris Prince and her husband are going through a surprisingly drama-free divorce. It feels like her life is finally exactly what she wants it to be. Then, one beautiful morning, she looks outside her kitchen window—and sees that a wall has appeared in her front yard overnight. Where did it come from? What does it mean? And why does it seem to keep growing?

The Abyss or Life is Simple: Reading Knausgaard, Writing Religion

Winnifred Sullivan
Provost Professor, Religious Studies

Imperial Colors: The Roman Portrait Busts of Septimius Severus and Julia Domna. The Eskenazi Museum of Art

Julie Van Voorhis
Associate Professor, Art History
Chair, Art History
Adjunct Associate Professor, Classical Studies

Imperial Colors focuses on the paired busts of Emperor Septimius Severus (r. 193-211) and his wife, Empress Julia Domna in the Eskenazi Museum of Art, two of the finest known examples of later Roman portrait sculpture. This book presents innovative multidisciplinary research that is accessible both to specialists and generalists.

Sonia Velázquez
Associate Professor, Religious Studies
Associate Professor, Comparative Literature

Sonia Velázquez thinks with Saint Mary of Egypt about the relationship between beauty and holiness. Drawing on an archive spanning Spanish medieval poetry, Baroque paintings, seventeenth-century hagiography, and Balzac’s Le chef-d’œuvre inconnu, Velázquez argues for the importance of the senses on the surface of religious texts on her way to revealing why the legend of Saint Mary of Egypt still matters today.

2023 Faculty books