Join Linda Galloway, Elsevier Customer Consultant, to learn about SciVal, Elsevier’s analytics solution. SciVal provides access to the comprehensive research performance of over 19,000 research institutions and their associated researchers from 230 nations worldwide. SciVal allows you to visualize your research performance, benchmark relative to peers, develop strategic partnerships, identify and analyze new, emerging research trends, and create uniquely tailored reports. SciVal is fully supported by the Scholarly Impact department in the UI Libraries. All workshops will be recorded.
Date
URL
SciVal Topic
Wed, July 21
3pm Central
Join us to learn about SciVal, an analytics and benchmarking tool. You will discover how to navigate the modules, where the data comes from, explore entity types and learn how to export charts and data. Session duration: 60 minutes.
In this session we will discuss key institutional metrics, begin to explore areas of research focus, and learn how to identify areas of research excellence. Session duration: 60 minutes.
U of Iowa SciVal: Institutional Insights, Workshop 2
Wed, Aug 18
3pm Central
With more than 35 metrics included, SciVal opens up new ways of characterizing research impact. Join us to learn about the most popular metrics, how to ethically apply metrics and where to go for more information. We will also introduce Topic Prominence. Session duration: 60 minutes.
U of Iowa SciVal: Research Impact Metrics, Workshop 3
Thurs, Sept 2
11:30am Central
SciVal’s Benchmarking Module offers great flexibility in analyzing research performance and impact. We will take an in-depth look at this very useful module including re-purposing the data and visualizations in other systems. Session duration: 60 minutes.
U of Iowa SciVal: Performance is relative: Benchmarking, Workshop 4
Wed, Sept 15
3pm Central
Collaborations further academic research and can lead to a highly productive environment. Find out how collaborations influence research impact, learn how to explore current collaborations and foster new connections. Session duration: 60 minutes.
U of Iowa SciVal: Facilitating Collaborations, Workshop 5
Thurs, Sept 30
11:30am Central
In our final workshop session, we will take a deep dive into the Trends module. Find out what type of information you can glean from Trends and learn how to use pre-existing research areas and create bespoke research areas. Session duration: 60 minutes.
In addition to the live workshops, we invite you to register for the free SciVal Certification online training program. Would you like to improve your SciVal skills and take on more challenging tasks? Or perhaps you wish to expand your understanding and use of SciVal to train and support others at your organization? This free, asynchronous, six-module course is designed to be completed in six weeks. Each module takes about 1.5 hours to complete.
Register here for Cohort 3, running from Sept 6 – Oct 13, or place yourself on the waiting list for Cohort 4, running from Nov 1 – Dec 10, 2021. We will contact you prior to the class to confirm your spot.
If you have any problems registering or questions about SciVal, please contact Sara Scheib, Head of the Scholarly Impact department in the UI Libraries.
Welcome to the Library’s virtual New Book Shelf. Here we will present new titles for you to browse and check out. Titles listed here will be monographs published in the current year. If you see a title you would like to borrow, please click the link below the item and sign in with your Hawk ID and Password to request a loan.
Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick revolutionized Hollywood with movies like Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange, and electrified audiences with The Shining and Full Metal Jacket. David Mikics takes listeners on a deep dive into Kubrick’s life and work, illustrating his intense commitment to each of his films.
Kubrick grew up in the Bronx, a doctor’s son. From a young age he was consumed by photography, chess, and, above all else, movies. He was a self-taught filmmaker and self-proclaimed outsider, and his films exist in a unique world of their own outside the Hollywood mainstream. Kubrick’s Jewishness played a crucial role in his idea of himself as outsider. Obsessed with rebellion against authority, war, and male violence, Kubrick was himself a calm, coolly masterful creator and a talkative, ever-curious polymath immersed in friends and family.
Drawing on interviews and new archival material, Mikics for the first time explores the personal side of Kubrick’s films.
Is George Orwell the most influential writer who ever lived? Yes, according to John Rodden’s provocative book about the transformation of a man into a myth. Rodden does not argue that Orwell was the most distinguished man of letters of the last century, nor even the leading novelist of his generation, let alone the greatest imaginative writer of English prose fiction. Yet his influence since his death at midcentury is incomparable. No writer has aroused so much controversy or contributed so many incessantly quoted words and phrases to our cultural lexicon, from “Big Brother” and “doublethink” to “thoughtcrime” and “Newspeak.” Becoming George Orwell is a pathbreaking tour de force that charts the astonishing passage of a litterateur into a legend.
Rodden presents the author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four in a new light, exploring how the man and writer Orwell, born Eric Arthur Blair, came to be overshadowed by the spectral figure associated with nightmare visions of our possible futures.
Rodden opens with a discussion of the life and letters, chronicling Orwell’s eccentricities and emotional struggles, followed by an assessment of his chief literary achievements. The second half of the book examines the legend and legacy of Orwell, whom Rodden calls “England’s Prose Laureate”, addressing his influence on everything ranging from cyberwarfare to “fake news.” The closing chapters address both Orwell’s enduring relevance to burning contemporary issues and the multiple ironies of his popular reputation, showing how he and his work have become confused with the very dreads and diseases that he fought against throughout his life.
The Ethics of Engagement: Media, Conflict and Democracy in Africa
In Africa, the media plays a significant role in conflict management and resolution. Which conflicts the media report, which are ignored, and how conflicts are represented can have a profound impact on the outcomes. While the media can in some cases ensure the stability of African democracy, critics have pointed out that in other cases, the media actually increases tensions in areas of conflict. The media tends to privilege only elite voices, offering superficial coverage of marginalized groups in a way that increases polarization.
In The Ethics of Engagement, Herman Wasserman explores the ethics of the media in conflicts that arise during transitions to democracy in Africa. He examines the roles, responsibilities, and obligations of media in contexts of high socioeconomic inequality. In doing so, he looks at ethnic and racial polarization in the histories of colonialism, post-colonial authoritarianism, and hybrid regimes. Taking a critical view of the normative guidelines and professional identities of journalism inherited from contexts outside of Africa, he argues that a more reciprocal and collaborative approach is needed. He develops a new ethics of engagement that would require the media to facilitate the resolution of conflicts across differences of ethnicity, citizenship, and class. A central point of this theory is the development of an “ethics of listening” which would enable the media to conceive of their role as facilitators in democratic deliberation and community-building. Wasserman applies his ethics of listening to case studies across the African continent. He finds that by following this new model of conduct, the media may actually deepen democracy and help de-escalate conflict. This original study provides a useful framework for reimaging the media’s role in transitional democracies in Africa–and across the globe.
Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863–1938) was one of the most innovative and influential directors of modern theatre and his system and related practices continue to be studied and used by actors, directors and students. Maria Shevtsova sheds new light on the extraordinary life of Stanislavsky, uncovering and translating Russian archival sources, rehearsal transcripts, production scores and plans. This comprehensive study rediscovers little-known areas of Stanislavsky’s new type of theatre and its immersion in the visual arts, dance and opera. It demonstrates the fundamental importance of his Russian Orthodoxy to the worldview that underpinned his integrated System and his goals for the six laboratory research studios that he established or mentored. Stanislavsky’s massive achievements are explored in the intricate and historically intertwined political, cultural and theatre contexts of Tsarist Russia, the 1917 Revolution, the volatile 1920s, and Stalin’s 1930s. Rediscovering Stanislavksy provides a completely fresh perspective on his work and legacy.
After toppling the Ming dynasty, the Qing conquerors forced Han Chinese males to adopt Manchu hairstyle and clothing. Yet China’s new rulers tolerated the use of traditional Chinese attire in performances, making theater one of the only areas of life where Han garments could still be seen and where Manchu rule could be contested.
Staging Personhood uncovers a hidden history of the Ming–Qing transition by exploring what it meant for the clothing of a deposed dynasty to survive onstage. Reading dramatic works against Qing sartorial regulations, Guojun Wang offers an interdisciplinary lens on the entanglements between Chinese drama and nascent Manchu rule in seventeenth-century China. He reveals not just how political and ethnic conflicts shaped theatrical costuming but also the ways costuming enabled different modes of identity negotiation during the dynastic transition. In case studies of theatrical texts and performances, Wang considers clothing and costumes as indices of changing ethnic and gender identities. He contends that theatrical costuming provided a productive way to reconnect bodies, clothes, and identities disrupted by political turmoil. Through careful attention to a variety of canonical and lesser-known plays, visual and performance records, and historical documents, Staging Personhood provides a pathbreaking perspective on the cultural dynamics of early Qing China.
In this ground-breaking work, Bridget Orr shows that popular eighteenth-century theatre was about much more than fashion, manners and party politics. Using the theatre as a means of circulating and publicizing radical Enlightenment ideas, many plays made passionate arguments for religious and cultural toleration, and voiced protests against imperial invasion and forced conversion of indigenous peoples by colonial Europeans. Irish and labouring-class dramatists wrote plays, often set in the countryside, attacking social and political hierarchy in Britain itself. Another crucial but as yet unexplored aspect of early eighteenth-century theatre is its connection to freemasonry. Freemasons were pervasive as actors, managers, prompters, scene-painters, dancers and musicians, with their own lodges, benefit performances and particular audiences. In addition to promoting the Enlightened agenda of toleration and cosmopolitanism, freemason dramatists invented the new genre of domestic tragedy, a genre that criticized the effects of commercial and colonial capitalism.
Go behind the scenes and be mentored by the best in the business to find out what it’s really like, and what it really takes, to become a teacher. Educators are the bedrock of a healthy society, and the exceptional ones have a lasting impact. The best teachers surpass mere instruction to cultivate and empower students beyond school.
In LaQuisha Hall’s classroom, students are “scholars,” young ladies are “queens,” and young men are “kings.” The Baltimore high school English teacher’s pioneering approach to literacy has earned her teacher of the year accolades, and has established her as a visionary mentor to the young black men and women of Baltimore. Acclaimed education writer Melinda D. Anderson shadows Mrs. Hall to reveal how this rewarding profession changes lives. Learn about Hall’s path to prominence, from the challenging realities of her rookie year to her place of excellence in the classroom. Learn from Hall’s inspiring approach and confront the critical issues of race, identity, and equity in education. Here is how the job is performed at the highest level.
The Game analyzes our current cultural and social moment by examining just how it is that we got here. Year by year, innovation by innovation, the book recontextualizes our relationship with technology. Alessandro Baricco explores not only how massive technological leaps have changed our world, but how they modified human behavior, economics, and our relationship with our possessions and contemporaries. He focuses on how Space Invaders dramatically shifted how we view our interaction with digital and social space, how the dot-com bubble birthed the online venture capitalist, and how the advent of the algorithm permanently delegitimized the cultural and academic elite in a way we’ll grapple with for decades to come. Razor sharp and technically astute, this book-length essay also reverberates with humanity.
That man should have dominion “over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” is a prophecy that has hardened into fact. So pervasive are human impacts on the planet that it’s said we live in a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene.
The question we now face is: Can we change nature, this time in order to save it? Elizabeth Kolbert, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction, takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. Along the way, she meets scientists who are trying to preserve the world’s rarest fish, which lives in a single, tiny pool in the middle of the Mojave; engineers who are turning carbon emissions to stone in Iceland; Australian researchers who are trying to develop a “super coral” that can survive on a hotter globe; and physicists who are contemplating shooting tiny diamonds into the stratosphere to cool the earth.
One way to look at human civilization, says Kolbert, is as a 10,000-year exercise in defying nature. In The Sixth Extinction, she explored the ways in which our capacity for destruction has reshaped the natural world. Now she examines how the very sorts of interventions that have imperiled our planet are increasingly seen as the only hope for its salvation. By turns inspiring, terrifying, and darkly comic, Under a White Sky is an utterly original examination of the challenges we face.
In Stories from Palestine: Narratives of Resilience, Marda Dunsky presents a vivid overview of contemporary Palestinian society in the venues envisioned for a future Palestinian state. Dunsky has interviewed women and men from cities, towns, villages, and refugee camps who are farmers, scientists, writers, cultural innovators, educators, and entrepreneurs. Using their own words, she illuminates their resourcefulness in navigating agriculture, education, and cultural pursuits in the West Bank; persisting in Jerusalem as a sizable minority in the city; and confronting the challenges and uncertainties of life in the Gaza Strip. Based on her in-depth personal interviews, the narratives weave in quantitative data and historical background from a range of primary and secondary sources that contextualize Palestinian life under occupation.
More than a collection of individual stories, Stories from Palestine presents a broad, crosscut view of the tremendous human potential of this particular society. Narratives that emphasize the human dignity of Palestinians pushing forward under extraordinary circumstances include those of an entrepreneur who markets the yields of Palestinian farmers determined to continue cultivating their land, even as the landscape is shrinking; a professor and medical doctor who aims to improve health in local Palestinian communities; and an award-winning primary school teacher who provides her pupils a safe and creative learning environment. In an era of conflict and divisiveness, Palestinian resilience is relatable to people around the world who seek to express themselves, to achieve, to excel, and to be free. Stories from Palestine creates a new space from which to consider Palestinians and peace.
The hero stands on stage in high-definition 3-D while doubled on a crude pixel screen in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. Alien ships leave Earth by dissolving at the conclusion of Arrival. An illusory death spiral in Vertigo transitions abruptly to a studio set, jolting the spectator. These are a few of the startling visual moments that Garrett Stewart examines in Cinemachines, a compelling, powerful, and witty book about the cultural and mechanical apparatuses that underlie modern cinema.
Engaging in fresh ways with revelatory special effects in the history of cinematic storytelling—from Buster Keaton’s breaching of the film screen in Sherlock Jr. to the pixel disintegration of a remotely projected hologram in Blade Runner 2049—Stewart’s book puts unprecedented emphasis on technique in moving image narrative. Complicating and revising the discourse on historical screen processes, Cinemachines will be crucial reading for anyone interested in the evolution of the movies from a celluloid to a digital medium.
For centuries, scientists and society cast moral judgments on anyone deemed mentally ill, confining many to asylums. In Nobody’s Normal, anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker chronicles the progress and setbacks in the struggle against mental-illness stigma – from the 18th century, through America’s major wars, and into today’s high-tech economy.
Nobody’s Normal argues that stigma is a social process that can be explained through cultural history, a process that began the moment we defined mental illness, that we learn from within our communities, and that we ultimately have the power to change. Though the legacies of shame and secrecy are still with us today, Grinker writes that we are at the cusp of ending the marginalization of the mentally ill. In the 21st century, mental illnesses are fast becoming a more accepted and visible part of human diversity.
Grinker infuses the book with the personal history of his family’s four generations of involvement in psychiatry, including his grandfather’s analysis with Sigmund Freud, his own daughter’s experience with autism, and culminating in his research on neurodiversity. Drawing on cutting-edge science, historical archives, and cross-cultural research in Africa and Asia, Grinker takes listeners on an international journey to discover the origins of, and variances in, our cultural response to neurodiversity.
Urgent, eye-opening, and ultimately hopeful, Nobody’s Normal explains how we are transforming mental illness and offers a path to end the shadow of stigma.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, poetry, music, and painting all underwent a sea change. Poetry abandoned rhyme and meter; music ceased to be tonally centered; and painting no longer aimed at faithful representation. These artistic developments have been attributed to cultural factors ranging from the Industrial Revolution and the technical innovation of photography to Freudian psychoanalysis. In this book, Samuel Jay Keyser argues that the stylistic innovations of Western modernism reflect not a cultural shift but a cognitive one. Behind modernism is the same cognitive phenomenon that led to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century: the brain coming up against its natural limitations.
Keyser argues that the transformation in poetry, music, and painting (the so-called sister arts) is the result of the abandonment of a natural aesthetic based on a set of rules shared between artist and audience, and that this is virtually the same cognitive shift that occurred when scientists abandoned the mechanical philosophy of the Galilean revolution. The cultural explanations for Modernism may still be relevant, but they are epiphenomenal rather than causal. Artists felt that traditional forms of art had been exhausted, and they began to resort to private formats―Easter eggs with hidden and often inaccessible meaning. Keyser proposes that when artists discarded their natural rule-governed aesthetic, it marked a cognitive shift; general intelligence took over from hardwired proclivity. Artists used a different part of the brain to create, and audiences were forced to play catch up.
The Swire Group, started by John Swire in 1816, had its beginnings as a modest Liverpool import-export company, focused mainly on the textile trade. John Swire’s sons, John Samuel (1825-1898) and William Hudson (1830-1884), took the firm overseas and it was John Samuel Swire in particular whose entrepreneurial instincts would be at the root of the firm’s successes in years to come.
In 1861, John Swire & Sons Limited began to trade with China. In 1866, in partnership with R.S. Butterfield, the firm of Butterfield & Swire was established in Shanghai. Four years later, a branch of Butterfield & Swire was opened in Hong Kong.
In 1953, four years after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, Butterfield & Swire closed all of its China offices. In 1974, Butterfield & Swire in Hong Kong was renamed John Swire & Sons (H.K.) Ltd. Today, Swire is a highly diversified group of companies–covering shipping, airlines (including Cathay Pacific), luxury hotels and agribusiness–and continues to operate out of Hong Kong, with a formal group HQ in London.
Welcome to the Library’s virtual New Book Shelf. Here we will present new titles for you to browse and check out. Titles listed here will be monographs published in the current year. If you see a title you would like to borrow, please click the link below the item and sign in with your Hawk ID and Password to request a loan.
The Frightened Ones
In her therapist’s waiting room in Damascus, Suleima meets a strange and reticent man named Naseem, and they soon begin a tense affair. But when Naseem, a writer, flees Syria for Germany, he sends Suleima the unfinished manuscript of his novel. To Suleima’s surprise, she and the novel’s protagonist are uncannily similar. As she reads, Suleima’s past overwhelms her and she has no idea what to trust – Naseem’s pages, her own memory, or nothing at all?
Narrated in alternating chapters by Suleima and the mysterious woman portrayed in Naseem’s novel, The Frightened Ones is a boundary-blurring, radical examination of the effects of oppression on one’s sense of identity, the effects of collective trauma, and a moving window into life inside Assad’s Syria.
Will’s mother’s hokey homily, Waste not, want not… hisses in his ears as he oscillates furiously on the spot, havering on the threshold between the bedroom and the dying one… all the while cradling the plastic leech of the syringe in the crook of his arm. Oscillating furiously, and, as he’d presses the plunger home a touch more… and more, he hears it again and again: Waaaste nooot, waaant nooot..! whooshing into and out of him, while the blackness wells up at the periphery of his vision, and his hackneyed heart begins to beat out weirdly arrhythmic drum fills – even hitting the occasional rim-shot on his resonating rib cage. He waits, paralysed, acutely conscious, that were he simply to press his thumb right home, it’ll be a cartoonish death: That’s all folks! as the aperture screws shut forever.
In this heartfelt, intimate memoir, Yan Lianke brings the reader into his childhood home in Song County in Henan Province, painting a vivid portrait of rural China in the 1960s and ’70s. Three Brothers is a literary testament to the great humanity and small joys that exist even in times of darkness.
With lyricism and deep emotion, Yan chronicles the extraordinary lives of his father and uncles, as well as his own. Living in a remote village, Yan’s parents are so poor that they can only afford to use wheat flour on New Year and festival days, and while Yan dreams of fried scallion buns, and even steals from his father to buy sesame seed cakes. He yearns to leave the village, however he can, and soon novels become an escape. He resolves to become a writer himself after reading on the back of a novel that its author was given leave to remain in the city of Harbin after publishing her book. In the evenings, after finishing back-breaking shifts hauling stones at a cement factory, sometimes sixteen hours long, he sets to work writing. He is ultimately delivered from the drudgery and danger of manual labor by a career in the Army, but he is filled with regrets as he recalls these years of scarcity, turmoil, and poverty.
A philosophical portrait of grief, death, home, and fate that gleams with Yan’s quick wit and gift for imagery, Three Brothers is a personal portrait of a politically devastating period, and a celebration of the power of the family to hold together even in the harshest circumstances.
Violette Toussaint is the caretaker at a cemetery in a small town in Bourgogne. Casual mourners, regular visitors, and sundry colleagues – gravediggers, groundskeepers, and a priest – visit her to warm themselves in her lodge, where laughter, companionship, and occasional tears mix with the coffee she offers them. Her life is lived to the rhythms of their funny, moving confidences.
But her routine is disrupted by the arrival of the local police chief, who insists on scattering the ashes of his recently deceased mother on the gravesite of a complete stranger. Soon it becomes clear that his inexplicable gesture is intertwined with Violette’s own difficult past.
With Fresh Water for Flowers, Valérie Perrin has given listeners an intimately told story that tugs on the heartstrings about a woman who believes obstinately in happiness, despite it all. A number-one best seller in France, it is a heartwarming and tender story that will stay with listeners long after they finish it.
Vienna is an uncanny, magical, and sometimes brutally alienating city. The past lives on in the cafes where lost souls come to kill time and hash over the bygone glories of the twentieth century―or maybe just a recent love affair. Here, in one of these cafes, an anonymous narrator meets a strange character, “like someone out of a novel”: a decrepit old Russian named Suvorin.
A Soviet pianist of international renown, Suvorin committed career suicide when he developed a violent distaste for the sound of applause. This eccentric gentleman―sometimes charming, sometimes sulky, sometimes disconcertingly frank―knows the end of his life is approaching, and allows himself to be convinced to tell his life story. Over a series of coffee dates, punctuated by confessions, anecdotes, and rages―and by the narrator’s schemes to keep his quarry talking―a strained friendship develops between the two men, and it soon becomes difficult to tell who is more dependent on whom.
Rhapsodic and melancholic, with shades of Vladimir Nabokov, W. G. Sebald, Hans Keilson, and Thomas Bernhard, Wolf Wondratschek’s Self-Portrait with Russian Piano is a literary sonata circling the eternal question of whether beauty, music, and passion are worth the sacrifices some people are compelled to make for them.
From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture
Koritha Mitchell analyzes canonical texts by and about African American women to lay bare the hostility these women face as they invest in traditional domesticity. Instead of the respectability and safety granted white homemakers, black women endure pejorative labels, racist governmental policies, attacks on their citizenship, and aggression meant to keep them in “their place.”
Tracing how African Americans define and redefine success in a nation determined to deprive them of it, Mitchell plumbs the works of Frances Harper, Zora Neale Hurston, Lorraine Hansberry, Toni Morrison, Michelle Obama, and others. These artists honor black homes from slavery and post-emancipation through the Civil Rights era to “post-racial” America. Mitchell follows black families asserting their citizenship in domestic settings while the larger society and culture marginalize and attack them, not because they are deviants or failures but because they meet American standards.
Powerful and provocative, From Slave Cabins to the White House illuminates the links between African American women’s homemaking and citizenship in history and across literature.
By the time Chloé Hilliard was 12, she wore a size 12 – both shoe and dress – and stood over six feet tall. Fitting in was never an option. That didn’t stop her from trying. Cursed with a “slow metabolism”, “baby weight”, and “big bones” – the fat trilogy – Chloe turned to fad diets, starvation, pills, and workouts, all of which failed.
Realizing that everything – from government policies to corporate capitalism – directly impacts our relationship with food and our waistlines, Chloé changed her outlook on herself and hopes others will do the same for themselves.
The perfect mix of cultural commentary, conspiracies, and confessions, F*ck Your Diet pokes fun at the all too familiar, misguided quest for better health, permanent weight loss, and a sense of self-worth.
“Fake news” is a term you’ve probably heard a lot in the last few years, but it’s not a new phenomenon. From the ancient Egyptians to the French Revolution to Jack the Ripper and the Founding Fathers, fake news has been around as long as human civilization. But that doesn’t mean that we should just give up on the idea of finding the truth.
In True or False, former CIA analyst Cindy Otis takes listeners through the history and impact of misinformation over the centuries, sharing stories from the past and insights that listeners today can gain from them. Then, she shares lessons learned in more than a decade working for the CIA, including actionable tips on how to spot fake news, how to make sense of the information we receive each day, and, perhaps most importantly, how to understand and see past our own information biases so that we can think critically about important issues and put events happening around us into context.
Giovanna’s pretty face is changing, turning ugly, at least so her father thinks. Giovanna, he says, looks more like her Aunt Vittoria every day. But can it be true? Is she really changing? Is she turning into Aunt Vittoria, a woman she hardly knows but whom her mother and father clearly despise? Surely there is a mirror somewhere in which she can see herself as she truly is.
Giovanna is searching for her reflection in two kindred cities that fear and detest one another: a Naples of the heights, which assumes a mask of refinement, and a Naples of the depths, a place of excess and vulgarity. She moves between both in search of the truth, but neither city seems to offer answers or escape.
Named one of 2016’s most influential people by Time Magazine and frequently touted as a future Nobel Prize winner, Elena Ferrante has become one of the world’s most read and beloved writers. With this novel about the transition from childhood to adolescence to adulthood, Ferrante proves once again that she deserves her many accolades.
In The Lying Life of Adults, listeners will discover another gripping, highly addictive, and totally unforgettable Neapolitan story.
Alfred Hitchcock is said to have once remarked, “Actors are cattle”, a line that has stuck in the public consciousness ever since. For Hitchcock, acting was a matter of contrast and counterpoint, valuing subtlety and understatement over flashiness. He felt that the camera was duplicitous and directed actors to look and act conversely. In The Camera Lies, author Dan Callahan spotlights the many nuances of Hitchcock’s direction throughout his career, from Cary Grant in Notorious to Janet Leigh in Psycho. Delving further, he examines the ways that sex and sexuality are presented through Hitchcock’s characters, reflecting the director’s own complex relationship with sexuality.
Detailing the fluidity of acting, Callahan examines the spectrum of treatment and direction Hitchcock provided well- and lesser-known actors alike, including Ingrid Bergman, Henry Kendall, Joan Barry, Robert Walker, Jessica Tandy, Kim Novak, and Tippi Hedren. As Hitchcock believed, the best actor was one who could “do nothing well” – but behind an outward indifference to his players was a sophisticated acting theorist who often drew out great performances. The Camera Lies unpacks Hitchcock’s legacy both as a director who continuously taught audiences to distrust appearance and as a man with an uncanny insight into the human capacity for deceit and misinterpretation.
From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire made concerted efforts to collect information about China. It bribed Chinese porcelain-makers to give up trade secrets, sent Buddhist monks to Mongolia on intelligence-gathering missions, and trained students at its Orthodox mission in Beijing to spy on their hosts. From diplomatic offices to guard posts on the Chinese frontier, Russians were producing knowledge everywhere, not only at elite institutions like the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. But that information was secret, not destined for wide circulation.
Gregory Afinogenov distinguishes between the kinds of knowledge Russia sought over the years and argues that they changed with the shifting aims of the state and its perceived place in the world. In the seventeenth century, Russian bureaucrats were focused on China and the forbidding Siberian frontier. They relied more on spies, including Jesuit scholars stationed in China. In the early nineteenth century, the geopolitical challenge shifted to Europe: rivalry with Britain drove the Russians to stake their prestige on public-facing intellectual work, and knowledge of the East was embedded in the academy. None of these institutional configurations was especially effective in delivering strategic or commercial advantages. But various knowledge regimes did have their consequences. Knowledge filtered through Russian espionage and publication found its way to Europe, informing the encounter between China and Western empires.
Based on extensive archival research in Russia and beyond, Spies and Scholars breaks down long-accepted assumptions about the connection between knowledge regimes and imperial power and excavates an intellectual legacy largely neglected by historians.
In 1799, a French Army officer was rebuilding the defenses of a fort on the banks of the Nile when he discovered an ancient stele fragment bearing a decree inscribed in three different scripts. So begins one of the most familiar tales in Egyptology – that of the Rosetta Stone and the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs. This book draws on fresh archival evidence to provide a major new account of how the English polymath Thomas Young and the French philologist Jean-François Champollion vied to be the first to solve the riddle of the Rosetta.
Jed Buchwald and Diane Greco Josefowicz bring to life a bygone age of intellectual adventure. Much more than a decoding exercise centered on a single artifact, the race to decipher the Rosetta Stone reflected broader disputes about language, historical evidence, biblical truth, and the value of classical learning. The authors paint compelling portraits of Young and Champollion, two gifted intellects with altogether different motivations. Young disdained Egyptian culture and saw Egyptian writing as a means to greater knowledge about Greco-Roman antiquity. Champollion, swept up in the political chaos of Restoration France and fiercely opposed to the scholars aligned with throne and altar, admired ancient Egypt and was prepared to upend conventional wisdom to solve the mystery of the hieroglyphs.
The UI Latinx Council Executive Board has created the Rachel Garza Carreón IMPACT Award to recognize her valuable work with the Latinx community at the University of Iowa.
The award will recognize long-time UI Latinx community members who have contributed years of service at University of Iowa and who have made a lasting impact with their efforts. The Latinx Council also selected Carreón as the first award recipient.
According to the board, “Chicana-Tejana, Rachel Garza Carreón, a staunch advocate for social justice, does many things in her role as the outreach and research librarian with University of Iowa Libraries to make the UI a more welcoming place. A vital part of that mission is to collect and document the history of the most cherished space on campus for many, the Latino Native American Cultural Center (LNACC).”
Current chair of the UI Latinx Council, Dana Dominguez (Pomerantz Career Center) says long-time staff and faculty such as Carreón play a crucial role in the campus’ Latinx community, which is the reason the council has chosen her as the inaugural recipient and namesake for the newly created award. “Often during council meetings or monthly luncheons, we talk about challenges that comes with trying to coexist and succeed within a place that wasn’t built for us,” says Dominguez. “We lose a lot of Latinx members who move on to other institutions because they don’t feel supported or valued here. When we talk about missing those who have left, I can’t help but feel so much gratitude for those who have stayed.”
Dominguez listed Carreón among leaders in the Latinx community who have made a tremendous impact at Iowa. “There is so much institutional knowledge, experience, and decades upon decades of collective contributions between them, and I can’t help but think of how different the campus would be if they had chosen to leave when times were hard,” she says. “Representation matters. We need our students to be able to see themselves in those leadership positions and believe that they can get there too.”
The council credits Carreón for her work to preserve the history of Latinx people on campus, without which the stories would have been lost. Carreón has spent years collecting and archiving photos, texts, and documents to piece together the 50-year story of those who have called the LNACC ‘home’ during their time at Iowa. She is the co-curator of the UI Main Library Gallery exhibit Building Our Own Community: 50 Years of the Latino Native American Cultural Center, Founded by Chicano and American Indian Students in 1971, which chronicles five decades of activism and placemaking at the LNACC.
“It makes me proud to be a part of it when I hear people say that they stayed here at Iowa because they had the Latinx Council and people like them to be in community with,” Dominguez says. “That’s why we made this award. It’s for people who have made an impact because they chose to stay. Who better to name it after than the one who documents our existence and affirms that we are an important part of the [University of Iowa’s] history?”
The award is unique not only because it is named after Carreón, but also because the council invited her to have full oversight over its development—a role Carreón accepted. Dominguez explains, “We wanted to be sure that this award just doesn’t have her name on it, but that it has her personal touch and approval. We want her to be able to provide feedback on the nomination process, the criteria, even if she wants to pick out what the award looks like, we will let her do it. Just like she has made a mark with her research and her exhibits, we want this to be something she had a hand in, something that lasts forever. It’s the least we can do.”
Upon accepting the award, Carreón said, “To be recognized by my community is an honor. In the years I have worked at the university, I have seen students, staff, and faculty come and go. I’ve seen the community be upset, worried, and angry as they prepare to protest the many injustices we face. I’ve also seen these same community members laugh, dance, and celebrate our successes. It is important that our whole story is chronicled for future community members who come here. I am dedicated to making sure that our story is told.”
Welcome to our rotating DVD display, here we will present a themed selection of titles for you to browse. If you would like to borrow a DVD, just click the link below the title and sign in with your Hawk ID and password to make a request. Thanks for browsing!
LGBTQ+ movies for Pride Month
Portrait of a Lady on Fire
From Casablanca to Titanic, the epic, star-crossed romantic drama has been a Hollywood staple for as long as Hollywood has been in existence. In Céline Sciamma’s breathtaking 2019 film, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the genre meets its match in Héloïse, an aristocratic bride-to-be in an arranged marriage, and Marianne, an artist commissioned to paint Héloïse’s wedding portrait. Over the course of their time together, what starts as an antagonistic mutual fascination transforms into a love affair for the ages.
Before Pose and RuPaul’s Drag Race, there was Paris Is Burning. Shot during the late 1980s, Jennie Livingston’s documentary is the definitive record of golden-age New York City drag ball culture, featuring interviews with house founders such as Willi Ninja, Angie Xtravaganza, Dorian Corey, and other fixtures of the ballroom scene. To this day, the film remains an enduring record of what it was like to be Black, Latinx, or queer in New York City during the height of the AIDS crisis.
The first feature film directed by an out Black lesbian, The Watermelon Woman remains a landmark title in the history of queer cinema. Director Cheryl Dunye plays Cheryl, a Black lesbian filmmaker who decides to make a documentary about a Black actress from Hollywood’s Golden Age who is known only as the Watermelon Woman.
What list of queer classics would be complete without Call Me by Your Name? Italian director Luca Guadagnino’s lush, sensuous adaptation of the André Aciman novel follows 17-year-old Elio as he falls in love with Oliver, Elio’s father’s 24-year-old graduate student assistant, in 1980s northern Italy. The romantic drama features dreamy original compositions from Sufjan Stevens and a notable cameo by an overripe peach.
Abdellatif Kechiche’s 2013 queer coming-of-age drama has come under fire many times: for being a lesbian film directed by a straight man, for Kechiche’s reportedly abusive behavior as a director, for its inclusion of a largely gratuitous—and extremely explicit—lesbian sex scene between the two leads. Nevertheless, Blue Is the Warmest Color, which follows its protagonist, Adele, over the course of her first serious relationship with a woman, remains a landmark depiction of sexuality and first love.
Though Oldboy director Park Chan-wook’s adaptation of Sarah Waters’s lesbian novel Fingersmith transposes the action from Victorian-era Britain to Japanese-occupied Korea, The Handmaiden has established itself as the definitive film version of its source material. A psychological thriller about an heiress, a con man planning to steal her fortune, and the pickpocket hired by the con man to become the heiress’s maid, The Handmaiden is a Russian nesting doll of a film in which nothing is quite as it seems.
When transgender nightclub singer Marina’s older boyfriend, Orlando, unexpectedly dies, she faces an uphill battle to have her role in Orlando’s life recognized by his ex-wife and kids. Featuring a tour-de-force performance from Daniela Vega as Marina, the film won the 2018 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, and then went on to play an important role in accelerating the Chilean trans rights movement.
Camp is typically considered the province of gay men and drag queens, but the genre’s roots in the lesbian community run just as deep. Nowhere is this on greater display than in Jamie Babbit’s But I’m a Cheerleader, the movie that launched Natasha Lyonne’s and Clea DuVall’s careers, and gave us the vision that is RuPaul Charles playing an “ex-gay” conversion therapy counselor in baby-blue booty shorts. In this queer classic, Lyonne plays a cheerleader whose conservative parents suspect she is a lesbian. They ship her off to conversion therapy, where she falls for DuVall’s enigmatic outsider.
My Own Private Idaho stands as one of Gus Van Sant’s most conceptual films: it has an unconventional narrative structure, not to mention a central character who suffers from narcolepsy, which lends additional surrealism to the film’s disjointed architecture. But River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves anchor the film as Mike and Scott, two rent boys bonded by their estrangement from society. For a film with sex at its center, My Own Private Idaho is less concerned with sexuality than with love and comfort—something made especially clear in its famous campfire scene. It’s a masterclass in acting—a radical statement in a film already full of them.
In a post-RuPaul’s Drag Race world, it’s easy to forget how subversive Stephan Elliot’s film was for its time. But the sequined gaudiness and over-the-top production of The Adventures of Priscilla represented something of a watershed moment when it first came out. This scrappy spectacular, centered on two drag queens and a transwoman journeying through Australia, not only reached cult status; it eventually opened cinema up to more positive and mainstream representations of the LGBT community.
Wong Kar-wai’s metaphor for Hong Kong’s handover to China finds a couple adrift in Argentina, caught in the same abusive cycle that prevents either half from letting go. As much a story of codependence as it is a study of rootless and shifting identities, Happy Together both touches upon and sidelines its themes of homosexuality—groundbreaking for Chinese cinema in 1997—and focuses instead on the loss and regret of a relationship that can’t be saved. It’s a snapshot of a moment in time and the restlessness and melancholy that invariably afflicts youth.
Much has been said about the casting of Hilary Swank, a cisgender actress, in this compassionate biopic of Brandon Teena, a trans man murdered in Nebraska for being himself. But the film itself helped introduce ideas of queerness and female masculinity to mainstream audiences, offering a frank portrayal of trans identity unabashed in its honesty and sensuality. And for better or worse, Boys Don’t Cry’s effectiveness hinges on Swank’s performance, one still considered among the best of all time.
Unsurprising: a popular stage musical gets turned into a film. Surprising: a popular stage musical gets turned into a good film. Such was the case with director-writer-star John Cameron Mitchell’s electric adaptation about the titular Hedwig, a would-be rock star and botched sex-change operation survivor who masks loneliness in equal parts camp and charisma. But Hedwig and the Angry Inch is more than the sum of its wigs and glam rock; it’s a spiky examination of individualism, and performance as a means of owning and transcending heartbreak.
Moonlight fits no simple classification, resisting easy labels that would call it a film simply about being black, poor, or gay. It’s a gentle exploration of identity, a beautiful masterwork that operates as an intimate biography as well as a social document about the America we live in. Through Chiron and three distinct acts in his upbringing, director Barry Jenkins suggests that certain facts of life—drug use, prison sentences—don’t necessarily make up a life. Instead, it’s the choices we make, oftentimes alone and in a sliver of nighttime light, that decide who we’re meant to be.
Libraries at the University of Iowa, Iowa State University, and the University of Northern Iowa announce a joint funding opportunity for the creation of Open Educational Resources (OER). This program is open to small teams of faculty, graduate students, and staff at any of the three Board of Regents State of Iowa public universities.
The Regents OER Grant Program was recently created via support from the Governor’s Emergency Education Relief Fund (GEER Fund), which was established in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act passed by Congress in 2020. The new Regents OER Grant Program will facilitate the development of OER across the three Iowa Regent universities. The grant program supports the growing use of sustainable, affordable course content at the Regent institutions through the development of OER. OER provide teaching, learning, and research resources that are free of cost and access barriers and licensed for open use (SPARC, n.d.).
Two types of awards are available through this program. Textbook development grants, in the amount of up to $7,500 per team member, are intended to fund the development of new open textbooks to fill gaps in existing OER coverage within a discipline. Grants for ancillary materials projects will be funded at up to $1,500 per team member for the development of slide presentations, test banks, and/or other support materials to accompany an existing open textbook.
In addition to financial stipends, successful applicants will receive intensive training on OER creation and development. This training will include an OER development “sprint” that will take place in September 2021, at which grantees will have the opportunity to work intensively on their projects over the course of a two-day workshop. In addition, grant recipients will receive support for finding source material, using OER authoring tools, developing content, understanding open licensing, and OER project management before and after the workshop.
More details about the Regents OER Grant Program will be distributed with the call for proposals on June 22, 2021.
Questions about the grant program should be sent to the grant coordinator for each institution, Abbey Elder (Iowa State University), Mahrya Burnett (University of Iowa), and Anne Marie Gruber (University of Northern Iowa).
Welcome to the Library’s virtual New Book Shelf. Here we will present new titles for you to browse and check out. Titles listed here will be monographs published in the current year. If you see a title you would like to borrow, please click the link below the item and sign in with your Hawk ID and Password to request a loan.
Queenship in Early Modern Europe
Offering a fascinating survey of European queenship from 1500-1800, with each chapter beginning with a discussion of the archetypal queens of Western, Central, Northern, and Eastern Europe, Charles Beem explores the particular nature of the regional forms and functions of queenship – including consorts, queens regnant, dowagers and female regents – while interrogating our understanding of the dynamic operations of queenship as a transnational phenomenon in European history. Incorporating detailed discussions of gender and material culture, this book encourages both instructors and student readers to engage in meaningful further research on queenship.
This is an excellent overview of an exciting area of historical research and is the perfect companion for undergraduate and postgraduate students of History with an interest in queens and queenship.
Yarsan of Iran, Socio-Political Changes and Migrations
This book examines how socio-political surroundings have affected the evolution of Yārsāni religious thought and why the Yārsāni religious belief, despite its fundamental disagreement with Islamic tenets, has been affiliated with Islam. It also considers the historical context and socio-religious milieu in which the Yārsāni belief appropriates religious forces to survive, how Yārsānis experience their religion in Islamic society, and what differences are significant in their lived experiences. The author explores how the experience of worship influences real life for the Yārsānis from the perspectives of sociology, behaviorism, content analysis, cultural studies and ethnography in Iran and diaspora with focus on Sweden. Yārsāni followers became known as those who “don’t tell secrets,” primarily because they were not allowed to promote and advertise their religion in public, but recently have started to reveal their religion, especially in social media. This book discovers the transformation of this religion, and in particular in which context an individual can change the content of religion, and bring about new ideas regarding religion and belief.
History of Fascism in France: From the First World War to the National Front
A History of Fascism in France explores the origins, development, and action of fascism and extreme right and fascist organisations in France since the First World War. Synthesizing decades of scholarship, it is the first book in any language to trace the full story of French fascism from the First World War to the modern National Front, via the interwar years, the Vichy regime and the collapse of the French Empire. Chris Millington unpicks why this extremist political phenomenon has, at times, found such fervent and widespread support among the French people.
The book chronologically surveys fascism in France whilst contextualizing this within the broader European and colonial frameworks that are so significant to the subject. Concluding with a useful historiographical chapter that brings together all the previously explored aspects of fascism in France, A History of Fascism in France is a crucial volume for all students of European fascism and France in the 20th century.
Keepers of Memory: The Holocaust and Transgenerational Identity
Keepers of Memory answers the question of how descendants of Holocaust survivors remember the Holocaust, the event that preceded their birth but has shaped their lives. Through personal stories and in-depth interviews, Rich examines the complicated relationship between history, truth, and memory. Keepers of Memory explores topics that include how stories of survival become stories of either empowerment or trauma for the descending generations, career choice as a form of commemoration, religion, and family life. Ultimately, this work paints a compelling picture of the promises and pitfalls of memory and points to implications for memory and commemoration in the coming generations.
In the ten years of the Cultural Revolution, political persecutions, violation of rights, deprivation of freedom, violence and brutality were daily occurrences. Especially striking is the huge number of ordinary civilians who were involved in inflicting pain and suffering on their comrades, colleagues, friends, neighbors, and even family members. The large-scale and systematic form of violence and injustice that was witnessed differs from that in countries like Chile under military rule or South Africa during apartheid in that such acts were largely committed by ordinary people instead of officials in uniforms. Mok asks how we should assess the moral responsibility of these wrongdoers, if any, for the harm they did both voluntarily and involuntarily.
After the death of Chairman Mao, there was a trial of the Gang of Four, who were condemned as the chief perpetrators of the Cultural Revolution. Besides, tens of millions of officials and cadres who were wrongly accused and unfairly treated were subsequently cleared and reinstated under the new leadership. However, justice has not yet been fully done because no legal or political mechanism has ever been established for the massive number of civilian perpetrators to answer for all sorts of violence inflicted on other civilians, to make peace with their victims, and to make amends. The numerous civilians who participated need to come to terms with the people they wronged in those turbulent years. Justice in general and transitional justice in particular may still be pursued by taking the first steps to clarify and identify the moral burden and responsibility that may legitimately be ascribed to the various types of participant.
This book will be of interest to anyone who studies the Cultural Revolution of China, especially those who are concerned with the ethical dimension.
Creating the Opium War: British Imperial Attitudes Towards China. 1792-1840
Creating the Opium War examines British imperial attitudes towards China during their early encounters from the Macartney embassy to the outbreak of the Opium War – a deeply consequential event which arguably reshaped relations between China and the West in the next century. It makes the first attempt to bring together the political history of Sino-western relations and the cultural studies of British representations of China, as a new way of explaining the origins of the conflict. The book focuses on a crucial period (1792–1840), which scholars such as Kitson and Markley have recently compared in importance to that of American and French Revolutions. By examining a wealth of primary materials, some in more detail than ever before, this study reveals how the idea of war against China was created out of changing British perceptions of the country.
Zhou Enlai, the premier of the People’s Republic of China from 1949 until his death in 1976, is the last Communist political leader to be revered by the Chinese people. He is considered “a modern saint” who offered protection to his people during the Cultural Revolution; an admirable figure in an otherwise traumatic and bloody era. Works about Zhou in China are heavily censored, and every hint of criticism is removed — so when Gao Wenqian first published this groundbreaking, provocative biography in Hong Kong, it was immediately banned in the People’s Republic.
Using classified documents spirited out of China, Gao Wenqian offers an objective human portrait of the real Zhou, a man who lived his life at the heart of Chinese politics for fifty years, who survived both the Long March and the Cultural Revolution not thanks to ideological or personal purity, but because he was artful, crafty, and politically supple. He may have had the looks of a matinee idol, and Nixon may have called him “the greatest statesman of our era,” but Zhou’s greatest gift was to survive, at almost any price, thanks to his acute understanding of where political power resided at any one time.
Your Sons are at Your Service: Tunisia’s Missionaries of Jihad
Tunisia became one of the largest sources of foreign fighters for the Islamic State―even though the country stands out as a democratic bright spot of the Arab uprisings and despite the fact that it had very little history of terrorist violence within its borders prior to 2011. In Your Sons Are at Your Service, Aaron Y. Zelin uncovers the longer history of Tunisian involvement in the jihadi movement and offers an in-depth examination of the reasons why so many Tunisians became drawn to jihadism following the 2011 revolution.
Zelin highlights the longer-term causes that affected jihadi recruitment in Tunisia, including the prior history of Tunisians joining jihadi organizations and playing key roles in far-flung parts of the world over the past four decades. He contends that the jihadi group Ansar al-Sharia in Tunisia was able to take advantage of the universal prisoner amnesty, increased openness, and the lack of governmental policy toward it after the revolution. In turn, this provided space for greater recruitment and subsequent mobilization to fight abroad once the Tunisian government cracked down on the group in 2013. Zelin marshals cutting-edge empirical findings, extensive primary source research, and on-the-ground fieldwork, including a variety of documents in Arabic going as far back as the 1980s and interviews with Ansar al-Sharia members and Tunisian fighters returning from Syria. The first book on the history of the Tunisian jihadi movement, Your Sons Are at Your Service is a meticulously researched account that challenges simplified views of jihadism’s appeal and success.
Fabric of Immortality: ancestral power, performance, and agency in Egungun artistry
Fabric of Immortality focuses on Egungun masking, a unique cultural tradition practiced by the Yoruba of West Africa and their descendants in the African Diaspora, particularly in Brazil, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Barbados, Trinidad, Venezuela and the United States of America.
Egungun performances provide a vehicle and arena for dialogic reflections and celebrations, parody and play, and communication between the living and the departed, the seen and the unseen, upon which the stability of the human community and the universe is dependent. A great many varieties of these masks celebrate the guild of hunters and warriors, legendary heroes and heroines and founding ancestors including the legion of divinities straddling the landscape of Yoruba universe.
Majority of the scholarly literatures on Egungun have focused on its spectacular and glamourous aspects, using the methodological approaches prevalent within the disciplines of art history, religion, theater, dance, performance studies, and anthropology. Because masquerading is a universal human experience, there’s always a tendency to seek commonalities outside the immediate cultural environment under investigation. This invariably creates a tendency to impose alien theoretical and methodological theories that may lead to “dubious universals” in order to unravel key elements of the fascinating tradition. All too frequently, these approaches fail to fully grasp the complex nature of Egungun, which is at once compelling, evocative, and awe inspiring. While Egungun is a true reflection of the distinct features of the cultural values, religious beliefs, and social practices of the Yoruba, it cannot be rigidly separated into strict disciplinary categories reflective of the Western production of knowledge. No matter the level of sophistication of these alien theoretical models, they invariably end up distorting the realities of the lived experiences implicit in the Egungun cultural and aesthetic imagination. This present study departs from such approaches by drawing heavily on Yoruba oral genres in order to engage fully with both the spectacular and phenomenological aspects of Egungun—a compelling multifaceted experience involving rituals, drama, entertainment, magic, history, performance, and celebratory aspects.
This latest philosophical text by John Sallis is inspired by the work of contemporary Chinese painter Cao Jun. It carries out a series of philosophical reflections on nature, art, and music by taking up Cao Jun’s art and thought, with a focus on questions of the elemental. Sallis’s reflections are not a matter of simply relating art works to philosophical thought, as theoretical insights and developments run throughout Cao Jun’s writings and inform many of his artistic works. Sallis maintains abundant points of contact with Chinese philosophical traditions but also with Western philosophy. In these reflections on art, Sallis poses a critique of mimesis and considers the relation of painting to music. He affirms his conviction that the artist must always turn to nature, especially as reflections on the earth and sky delimit the scale and place of what is human. Full-color illustrations enhance this provocative and penetrating text.
The University of Iowa Libraries has entered into an agreement with the American Chemical Society (ACS) to bundle the cost of journal subscriptions and Open Access (OA) publishing. Under this three-year contract, UI corresponding authors can publish their journal articles Open Access and free of cost to them in any ACS journal. These articles can then be immediately read by anyone, anywhere, without the paywalls that traditionally accompany academic journals. Under this agreement, UI authors can publish a significant number of articles OA, but not an unlimited number.
This arrangement is part of a larger effort by UI Libraries to reduce the cost of OA for individual researchers. Unfortunately, publishers often charge authors directly to pay for the cost of publishing OA journal articles. (For instance, ACS normally charges authors $4,500 per article for OA.) For faculty who don’t have grant or departmental funding, this can be prohibitively expensive. These costs have soared in recent years and are a significant barrier to making research open and freely accessible.
Welcome to the Libraries’ virtual New Book Shelf. Here we will present new titles for you to browse and check out. Titles listed here will be monographs published in the current year. If you see a title you would like to borrow, please click the link below the item and sign in with your Hawk ID and Password to request a loan.
American Pragmatism
In this comprehensive introduction, Albert Spencer presents a new story of the origins and development of American pragmatism, from its emergence through the interaction of European and Indigenous American cultures to its contemporary status as a diverse, vibrant, and contested global philosophy.
Spencer explores the intellectual legacies of American pragmatism’s founders, Peirce and James, but also those of newly canonical figures such as Addams, Anzaldúa, Cordova, DuBois, and others crucial to its development. He presents the diversity of pragmatisms, old and new, by weaving together familiar and unfamiliar authors through shared themes, such as fallibilism, meliorism, pluralism, verification, and hope. Throughout, Spencer reveals American pragmatism’s engagement with the consequences of US political hegemony, as versions of pragmatism arise in response to both the tragic legacies and the complicated benefits of colonialism.
American Pragmatism is an indispensable guide for undergraduate students taking courses in pragmatism or American philosophy, for scholars wishing to develop their understanding of this thriving philosophical tradition, or for curious readers interested in the genealogy of American thought.
Exiles on Mission: How Christians Can Thrive in a Post-Christian World
Many Christians in the West sense that traditional Christian teaching is losing traction in the public square. What does faithful Christian witness look like in a post-Christian culture?
Paul Williams, the CEO of one of the world’s largest and oldest Bible societies, interprets the dissonance Christians often experience while trying to live out their faith in the 21st century. He provides constructive tools to help readers understand culture in myriad contexts and offer a missional response. Williams calls for a truly missional understanding of post-Christendom Christianity whereby local churches are reimagined as embassies of the kingdom of God and Christians serve as ambassadors in all spheres of life and work.
This book invites readers to embrace the language of exile and imagine a hopeful mission of the scattered and gathered church in the post-Christian West. It shows a clear pathway for fruitful missional engagement for the whole people of God, helping Christians make sense of the world in which they live, more authentically integrate faith with everyday life, and orient all of their efforts within God’s missional purpose for the world.
If rhetoric is the art of speaking, who is listening? In Being-Moved, Daniel M. Gross provides an answer, showing when and where the art of speaking parted ways with the art of listening – and what happens when they intersect once again. Much in the history of rhetoric must be rethought along the way. And much of this rethinking pivots around Martin Heidegger’s early lectures on Aristotle’s Rhetoric where his famous topic, Being, gives way to being-moved. The results, Gross goes on to show, are profound. Listening to the gods, listening to the world around us, and even listening to one another in the classroom – all of these experiences become different when rhetoric is reoriented from the voice to the ear.
Crossing Confessional Boundaries: Exemplary Lives in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Traditions
Arguably the single most important element in Abrahamic cross-confessional relations has been an ongoing mutual interest in perennial spiritual and ethical exemplars of one another’s communities. Ranging from Late Antiquity through the Middle Ages, Crossing Confessional Boundaries explores the complex roles played by saints, sages, and Friends of God in the communal and intercommunal lives of Christians, Muslims, and Jews across the Mediterranean world, from Spain and North Africa to the Middle East to the Balkans. By examining these stories in their broad institutional, social, and cultural contexts, Crossing Confessional Boundaries reveals unique theological insights into the interlocking histories of the Abrahamic faiths.
The Grieving Child in the Classroom integrates the latest research on children’s bereavement and adapts it for use in the classroom.
Chapters tackle the neurological, cognitive, emotional, and social effects of childhood grief and demonstrate the ways in which those reactions can manifest in the classroom. By recognizing individual differences in coping styles and considering variables such as developmental stage, nature of the loss, and availability of support, teachers and staff can become better equipped to respond to the bereaved child’s needs. The book incorporates theoretical explanations of grief responses as well as practical suggestions for supporting bereaved children in real-world settings.
Whether the loss affects one child or the entire student body, educators can turn to this comprehensive guidebook for ways to support grieving students in their classrooms.
At the height of his career, Washington Gladden was one of the most respected and beloved ministers in the United States. An 1897 newspaper profile emphasized his “international reputation” as both a pastor and a thinker. Gladden’s reputation resulted from the warmth of his personality, the keenness of his intellect, and the breadth of his writing. More so than any of his contemporaries, he was equally successful as both the pastor of a community church and as an internationally recognized theologian. During his career, which spanned the decades from the Civil War to World War I, he led Congregational churches in New York, Massachusetts, and Ohio. He also penned dozens of books and hundreds of magazine articles. Gladden’s prolific output ensured that he shaped the religious views of countless Americans throughout the nation. Yet a century after his death, Washington Gladden has been all but forgotten.
The past few years have witnessed a dramatic resurgence in scholarship on mainline Protestantism and its liberal commitments. Within these denominations themselves, there has likewise been an effort to embrace a liberal identity after decades of declining membership and the resurgence of conservative evangelicalism. Thus far, however, no work has been written that builds on this new body of scholarship while speaking directly to general readers within the mainline churches.
David Mislin focuses on eight defining elements of Gladden’s religious thought and explores the crucial moments in his life that shaped his ministry. He weaves together critical analysis of Gladden’s ideas with engaging anecdotes that offer insights into the ordinary life and work of a nineteenth-century pastor and the activities of his churches.
Nietzsche’s Naturalist Deconstruction of Truth: A World Fragmented in Late Nineteenth-Century Epistemology offers a new interpretation of Nietzsche’s discussions of truth and knowledge, covering the period from his early essay “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense” to his late notebooks. It places these discussions in the context of the neo-Kantian, Naturalist, Positivist, and Pragmatic schools influential in Nietzsche’s late nineteenth-century Europe. Peter Bornedal argues for a view of Nietzsche’s epistemological thought as an elaboration of this paradigm: proposing ideas that are anti-metaphysical and anti-theological in their polemic orientation, and in general promoting new scientific naturalist ideals in the discussions of knowledge. Bornedal suggests that the rational pursuit of these new ideals to the unencumbered mind logically leads to Nihilism in its most profound epistemological sense. Nietzsche’s “critique of metaphysics” is thus seen as having sprung from sources different from and, at times, in patent opposition to more recent postmodern and deconstructionist critiques. This book contextualizes Nietzsche in relation to a number of philosophical peers and juxtaposes him to contemporary thinkers in a way that resolves some of the difficulties that have plagued recent Nietzsche scholarship.
Between Socrates and the Many: A Study of Plato’s Crito is foremost concerned with Plato’s character, Crito. By focusing on its namesake, Hoffpauir draws attention to aspects of the Crito that may otherwise go unnoticed or underrated: justice, as most know it, seems unjust, and justice, as Socrates knows it, seems impossible; love of one’s own, as most know it, limits one’s own good and the city’s good; and concern for the body and hatred of suffering undermine virtue. Through a consideration of the problems evinced by Crito—problems not peculiar to him or to his Athens—readers may gain a newfound appreciation of why Socrates’ arguments about living well fail. More importantly, by considering why Socrates must advance these arguments in the first place, readers may come to appreciate the strength of man’s natural resistance to that which is necessary for civilized life. Although Crito initially comes to sight as in-between Socrates and the many, as one who shares in the opinions of both, in the end, Crito reveals that all that is in-between Socrates and the many is an unbridgeable chasm.
The Phenomenology of Pain is the first book-length investigation of its topic to appear in English. Groundbreaking, systematic, and illuminating, it opens a dialogue between phenomenology and such disciplines as cognitive science and cultural anthropology to argue that science alone cannot clarify the nature of pain experience without incorporating a phenomenological approach. Building on this premise, Saulius Geniusas develops a novel conception of pain grounded in phenomenological principles: pain is an aversive bodily feeling with a distinct experiential quality, which can only be given in original first-hand experience, either as a feeling-sensation or as an emotion.
Geniusas crystallizes the fundamental methodological principles that underlie phenomenological research. On the basis of those principles, he offers a phenomenological clarification of the fundamental structures of pain experience and contests the common conflation of phenomenology with introspectionism. Geniusas analyzes numerous pain dissociation syndromes, brings into focus the de-personalizing and re-personalizing nature of chronic pain experience, and demonstrates what role somatization and psychologization play in pain experience. In the process, he advances Husserlian phenomenology in a direction that is not explicitly worked out in Husserl’s own writings.
This volume challenges a long history of normalizing patriarchal approaches to the Qur’an and calls for a questioning of the interpretive credibility of many inherited Qur’anic commentaries. The author presents a fresh reading of the sacred text and Islamic teaching traditions as the rediscovery of a lost humanitarian and gender-egalitarian textual richness that has been poorly and loosely handled for centuries. The book stresses the importance of reviewing the interpretive linguistic choices that jurists and exegetes over the last fourteen centuries have adopted to semantically reshape the Qur’anic text. The vigilant reading the author provides of carefully chosen texts and commentaries suggests that many interpretive approaches to the Qur’an are dominated by sociopolitical factors alien to the intrinsic values of the text itself. More importantly, inconsistencies across putatively sound books of tafsīr indicate that the Qur’anic text often suffers from historical and systematic drainage of its humanitarianism, gender-egalitarianism, and religious pluralism.
The review committee is pleased to announce the recipients for the Spring 2021 Undergraduate Library Research Awards. This year the committee received a small but mighty number of applications ranging from research on campus food pantries to African art collections. This small number made for a difficult decision as all the applicants were well deserving and engaged in inspiring and valuable research.
This semester weawarded two undergraduates in two different award categories. These students showed exemplary use of library resources, including research consultations with a librarian in their discipline. Their research projects were also both very relevant and timely, in terms of the goals and findings.
Photo courtesy of Charlotte Lenkaitis
Charlotte Lenkaitis, a senior in Global Health Studies & Spanish received the Humanities & Social Sciences research award for her research on campus food pantries, particularly student-operated food pantries and their sustainability. Using an autoethnographic analysis she interviewed students and University admin on their experiences and support of student-managed food pantries. Her research project is titled “Campus Food Pantries: Exploring the Sustainability of Student-led Food Pantries and Perceived Administrative Support”.
Here is what Charlotte had to say upon receiving the award:
“The success of my first independent research project which evaluated the sustainability of student-led food pantries on college campuses was highly connected to the support I received from UI libraries. I am forever grateful for the positive interactions I’ve had with all staff members, especially Brett Cloyd whose guidance was extremely helpful as I gathered sources for my international literature review on college food insecurity.”
Photo courtesy of Bryan Mouser
Bryan Mouser, a Senior in Exercise Science received the STEM research award for his research conducting a systematic review evaluating the rates of breast cancer in patients undergoing Female-to-Male gender affirming breast surgery. Within his application, Bryan stated that he hopes thefindingswill support continued research on breast cancer risk for transgender patients and noting thelack of research on thisparticularcommunity. His research project is titled “Evaluating the Need for Routine Pathological Analysis in Female-to-Male Mastectomy Patients”.
Here is what Bryan had to say upon receiving the award:
“I would like to express so much thanks to the University of Iowa Libraries for selecting my research to be recognized for the Undergraduate Library Research Award. While it feels great to have a work acknowledged, I am even more proud of the recognition for a project that draws attention to and advocates for an underserved demographic. I would like to say a special thank you to Dr. Ali Abtahi, who developed the idea for the project and was willing to let me be a member of his research team, as well as Heather Healy, whose expertise and patience with me throughout the process made a systematic review possible. I look forward to seeing how the scientific community responds to our project and am excited to see the influence it might have on future research.”
Please join me in congratulating these students on their well-deserved accomplishments! To learn more about the award and to see past winners, visit the ULRA site.
Thank you to the review committee: Tim Arnold, Katie Hassman, Elizabeth Riordan, and Riley Samuelson for their help selecting this semester’s award winners!
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