2022 Tulane University School of Liberal Arts Faculty Showcase

SCHOOL of LIBERAL ARTS

ANNUAL Faculty Showcase

Celebrating Major Accomplishments of 2022

A Message from Dean Edwards

The end of the calendar year gives us an opportunity to come together to recognize the major achievements of our faculty. In the School of Liberal Arts, we have much to celebrate in 2022, with 35 of our faculty realizing major professional achievements over the past twelve months. The production of a scholarly book, a novel or an album, or the production of a play or one-person exhibition is many months or years in preparation. All that time is somehow embedded into these products—imbuing them with an almost palpable aura which they will, we trust, carry with them in their afterlives. So let us salute these works and the time and effort, the intelligence and the creativity that lies within them.

One of the things I love most about this celebration is the diversity represented in our faculty showcase—the types of work, the disciplines represented, the wide range of subjects, and the media and forms represented here. Our faculty colleagues break new ground and show the many possibilities with which the liberal arts disciplines engage the world we know and continue to discover. I urge you to take the time to not only flip through this digital catalog, but to take time to explore and investigate the works that our colleagues have produced. And in the meantime, please offer your congratulations to those celebrated this year for their impressive achievements. My sincere congratulations to all.

Adrian Anagnost

Spatial Orders, Social Forms: Art and the City in Modern Brazil Yale University Press, 2022

Exploring the intersections among art, architecture, and urbanism in Brazil from the 1920s through the 1960s, Adrian Anagnost shows how modernity was manifested in locally specific spatial forms linked to Brazil’s colonial and imperial past. Discussing the ways artists and architects understood urban planning as a tool to reorganize the world, control human action, and remedy social problems, Anagnost offers a nuanced account of the seeming conflict between modernist aesthetics and a predominately poor and historically disenfranchised urban public, with particular attention to regionalist forms of urban development.

Organized as a series of case studies of projects such as Flávio de Carvalho’s performative urbanism, the construction of the Ministry of Education and Public Health building, Lina Bo and Pietro Maria Bardi’s efforts to modernize Brazilian museums, and Hélio Oiticica’s interstitial works, this study is full of groundbreaking insights into the ways that modernist theories of urbanism shaped the art and architecture of 20th-century Brazil.

Moisés Arce

The Roots of Engagement: Understanding Opposition and Support for Resource Extraction

Oxford University Press, 2022

Co-authored

with Michael S. Hendricks and Marc S. Polizzi

In recent years, emerging economies in the Global South have increased the overall demand for raw materials and bolstered the price of oil, minerals, and other commodities. As a result, resource-rich countries in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa have experienced an important economic bonanza and reduced levels of poverty and inequality. However, for communities living near the extractive frontier, mining has caused serious environmental degradation, and many in these communities have protested local extractive industries.

Departing from the existing literature, The Roots of Engagement examines the individual-level factors that shape a person’s opinions over resource extraction. It looks at what makes some individuals accept extractive activities close to their homes, while other individuals strongly reject them. Moreover, it asks why some individuals focus on the potential benefits of employment and local development, while other individuals focus on the defense of livelihoods and the ecological risks associated with mining.

Carl L. Bankston III

Rethinking Social Capital

Edward Elgar Publishing, 2022

Combining theoretical approaches with practical applications, Rethinking Social Capital delineates the meaning, uses, and problems surrounding the concept of social capital. Carl Bankston, a leading scholar in the field, offers a fresh take on the topic, presenting an original way of understanding social capital as a process.

The book provides key definitions of social capital, describing its functionality, the surrounding theoretical issues, and its relationship with social structure. Examining capital in its various forms, Bankston discusses the complications of defining social relationships in a financial resource analogy as investments in future outcomes, and proposes an alternative of an original structural model that approaches social capital as a process. Chapters then explore the major applications of social capital theory: to families, communities and education; to formal organizations and informal networks; to class, race, ethnicity and inequality; and to the nation-state. This cutting-edge book is invaluable in clarifying ambiguities surrounding the concept of social capital to students and scholars of the social sciences. Its practical applications will also prove useful to policy makers and public policy institutes.

Robin Bartram

Stacked Decks: Building Inspectors and the Reproduction of Urban Inequality

The University of Chicago Press, 2022

Though we rarely see them at work, building inspectors have the power to significantly shape our lives through their discretionary decisions. The building inspectors of Chicago are at the heart of sociologist Robin Bartram’s analysis of how individuals impact—or attempt to impact— housing inequality.

In Stacked Decks, she reveals surprising patterns in the judgment calls inspectors make when deciding whom to cite for building code violations. These predominantly white, male inspectors largely recognize that they work within an unequal housing landscape that systematically disadvantages poor people and people of color through redlining, property taxes, and city spending that favor wealthy neighborhoods.

Stacked Decks illustrates the uphill battle inspectors face when trying to change a housing system that works against those with the fewest resources.

Casey Beck

Smells Like | Short Film

Published in partnership with Public Health Watch, Investigative Reporting Workshop & the Pulitzer Center, 2022

For decades, residents of Harris County, Texas have endured life-threatening air pollution from oil refineries and petrochemical plants. This short documentary portrays the neighborhoods that border oil refineries and a determined activist, Juan Flores, who fights for clean air for his community. Directed by Casey Beck and produced by Mary Cardaras, in partnership with Public Health Watch. Funded by the Pulitzer Center and Invoking the Pause.

Thomas Beller

Lost in the Game: A Book about Basketball Duke University Press, 2022

For players, coaches, writers, and fans, basketball is a science and an art, a religious sacrament, a source of entertainment, and a way of interacting with the world.

In Lost in the Game, Thomas Beller entwines these threads with his lifetime’s experience as a player and journalist, roaming NBA locker rooms and city parks as a basketball flaneur in search of the meaning of the modern game. He captures the magnificence and mastery of today’s most accomplished NBA players while paying homage to the devotion of countless congregants in the global church of pickup basketball. He shares his own stories from the courts, meditating on basketball’s role in city life and its impact on the athlete’s psyche as he moves from youth to middle age.

Part journalistic account, part memoir of a slightly talented player whose main gift is being tall, Lost in the Game charts the game’s inexorable gravitational hold on those who love it.

Brumfield

across Russia: Avant-Garde Architecture in Moscow” | Photo Collection National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2022

“Travels

In the early 1920s, political developments in the newly established Soviet Union created an environment for radical innovation in architectural design. Many of the designs remained on paper, but by 1925 a number of large-scale experimental projects were undertaken despite severe limitations on engineering technology. The parallels with avant-garde movements elsewhere in Europe and in the United States led to an international exchange of ideas in the realm of architectural theory.

The most significant manifestation of Soviet avant-garde design in the 1920s was constructivism, represented by the Organization of Contemporary Architects. “Constructivism” has since been used as a general designation for modernist architecture in the Soviet Union, although there were prominent avant-garde architects such as Konstantin Melnikov who rejected the label. In the early 1930s, the Soviet regime replaced modernism with conservative design approaches based on historicist models such as neoclassicism. Nonetheless, certain constructivist projects continued until the late 1930s.

This selection of photographs provides an overview of some of the most important examples in Moscow, the center of Soviet avant-garde architecture.

William Craft

Olivia Cosentino

The Lost Cinema of Mexico: From Lucha Libre to Cine Familiar and Other Churros University of Florida Press, 2022 Co-edited with Brian Pierce

The Lost Cinema of Mexico is the first volume to challenge the dismissal of Mexican filmmaking during the 1960s through 1980s, an era long considered a low-budget departure from the artistic quality and international acclaim of the nation’s earlier Golden Age. This pivotal collection examines the critical implications of discovering, uncovering, and recovering forgotten or ignored films.

This largely unexamined era of film reveals shifts in Mexican culture, economics, and societal norms as state-sponsored revolutionary nationalism faltered. During this time, movies were widely embraced by the public as a way to make sense of the rapidly changing realities and values connected to Mexico’s modernization. These essays shine a light on many genres that thrived in these decades: rock churros, campy luchador movies, countercultural superocheros, Black melodramas, family films, and Chili Westerns. Redefining a time usually seen as a cinematic “crisis,” this volume offers a new model of the film auteur shaped by productive tension between highbrow aesthetics, industry shortages, and national audiences. It also traces connections from these Mexican films to Latinx, Latin American, and Hollywood cinema at large.

Naomi DeCelles

Recollecting Lotte Eisner provides the first in-depth examination of the remarkable transnational career of film journalist, archivist, and historian Lotte Eisner (1896–1983). From her early years as a film critic in interwar Berlin to her escape from prison in occupied France and from her role as chief curator at the Cinémathèque française to that as the mythic “collective conscience” of New German Cinema, Eisner was a prolific writer and lecturer and a pivotal voice in early film and media studies.

Situated at the juncture of feminist media historiography and disciplinary intellectual history, this groundbreaking book is based on extensive multilingual archival research and the excavation of a rich corpus of previously overlooked materials. Introducing samples of Eisner’s writing in translation, this volume makes some of the most important contributions of a foundational scholar in the field of film studies accessible for the first time to an English-language readership.

Recollecting Lotte Eisner: Cinema, Exile, and the Archive University of California Press, 2022

Brian DeMare

Tiger, Tyrant, Bandit, Businessman: Echoes of Counterrevolution from New China Stanford University Press, 2022

The rural county of Poyang, lying in northern Jiangxi Province, goes largely unmentioned in the annals of modern Chinese history. Yet records from the Public Security Bureau archive hold a treasure trove of data on the every day interactions between locals and the law. Drawing on these largely overlooked resources, Tiger, Tyrant, Bandit, Businessman follows four criminal cases that together uniquely illuminate the dawning years of the People’s Republic.

Using a unique casefile approach, Brian DeMare recounts stories of a Confucian scholar who found himself allied with bandits and secret society members; a farmer who murdered a cadre; an evil tyrant who exploited religious traditions to avoid prosecution; and a merchant accused of a crime he did not commit. Each case is a tremendous tale, complete with memorable characters, plot twists, and drama. And while all depict the enemies of New China, each also reveals details of village life during this most pivotal moment of recent Chinese history. Together, the narratives bring rural regime change to life, illustrating how the Chinese Communist Party cemented its authority through mass political campaigns, careful legal investigations, and sheer patience.

Balancing storytelling with historical inquiry, this book is at once a grassroots view of rural China’s legal system and its application to apparent counterrevolutionaries, and a lesson in archival research itself.

Martin K. Dimitrov

Dictatorship and Information: Authoritarian Regime Resilience in Communist Europe and China

Oxford University Press, 2022

Fear pervades dictatorial regimes. Citizens fear leaders, the regime’s agents fear superiors, and leaders fear the masses. The ubiquity of fear in such regimes gives rise to the “dictator’s dilemma,” where autocrats do not know the level of opposition they face and cannot effectively neutralize domestic threats to their rule. The dilemma has led scholars to believe that autocracies are likely to be short-lived. Yet, some autocracies have found ways to mitigate the dictator’s dilemma.

As Martin K. Dimitrov shows in Dictatorship and Information, substantial variability exists in the survival of nondemocratic regimes, with single-party polities having the longest average duration. Offering a systematic theory of the institutional solutions to the dictator’s dilemma, Dimitrov argues that single-party autocracies have fostered channels that allow for the confidential vertical transmission of information, while also solving the problems associated with distorted information.To explain how this all works, Dimitrov focuses on communist regimes, which have the longest average lifespan among single-party autocracies and have developed the most sophisticated informationgathering institutions. Communist regimes face a variety of threats, but the main one is the masses. Dimitrov therefore examines the origins, evolution, and internal logic of the information-collection ecosystem established by communist states to monitor popular dissent.

Drawing from a rich base of evidence across multiple communist regimes and nearly 100 interviews, Dimitrov reshapes our understanding of how autocrats learn—or fail to learn—about the societies they rule, and how they maintain—or lose—power.

Fayçal Falaky

Diderot et le paysage Droz, 2022

C0-edited with Zeina Hakim

This issue of Diderot Studies, coedited with Zeina Hakim, presents a series of articles devoted to Diderot’s relationship to nature and landscape, including the space “felt” by the various narrators and characters.

The eleven contributions, from Francophone and Anglophone voices, explore different aspects of the dialogue between man and nature, and address questions related to the writing of landscape in Diderot’s work.

Christopher J. Fettweis

The Pursuit of Dominance: 2000 Years of Superpower Grand Strategy Oxford University Press, 2022

A sweeping yet concise account of history’s empires that managed to maintain dominance for long stretches, The Pursuit of Dominance looks at the past 2,000 years to highlight what—if anything—current US strategists can learn from the experience of earlier superpowers.

Christopher J. Fettweis examines the grand strategy of previous superpowers to see how they maintained, or failed to maintain, their status. Over the course of six cases, from Ancient Rome to the British Empire, he seeks guidance from the past for present US policymakers. Like the United States, the examples Fettweis uses were the world’s strongest powers at particularly moments in time, and they were hoping to stay that way. Rather than focusing on those powers’ rise or how they ruled, however, Fettweis looks at how they sought to maintain their power. From these cases, one paramount lesson becomes clear: Dominant powers usually survive even the most incompetent leaders. Fettweis is most interested in how these superpowers defined their interests, the grand strategies these regimes followed to maintain superiority over their rivals, and how the practice of that strategy worked.

Holly Flora

Le Meditationes Vitae Christi in volgare secondo il codice Paris, BnF, it. 115 Edizioni Ca’ Foscari, 2021

The Pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes vitae Christi is one of the most influential devotional narratives of the late middle ages. It was written in Tuscany in the early 14th century and survived in several Latin and vernacular manuscripts and early prints. An extensive discussion has engaged the scholars, especially about the issue of the first linguistic version of the text. Even if the Latin version seems to be the original text, the vernacular manuscript Paris, BnF, it. 115 stays as one of the most important and interesting witnesses of the work. One of the earliest surviving codices, it conserves the first Italian translation (penned in the Pisan area) of the text, enriched by a wonderful set of illustrations.

The present volume, which is the outcome of an international and interdisciplinary collaboration, offers the first critical edition of the text, the reproduction of all images, the edition of the instructions given to the artist, accompanied by detailed philological and art-historical commentaries, glossaries, and seven interdisciplinary introductory essays. Professor Holly Flora contributed commentary on each of the manuscript’s 193 images as well as an essay on the iconography.

Bouchaib Gadir

The Immigrant’s Verses: Mouths Filled with Salt Sameh Publishing, 2022

In his book of poetry, The Immigrant’s Verses: Mouths Filled with Salt, Bouchaib Gadir tell stories about immigrants—displaced and marginalized—in New Orleans, Spain, and France. His collection of poems is a display of mixed emotion, loneliness, and marginalization felt by migrants with a sense of belonging to a host land or to their native cultures.

While marking contrasts between immigrants’ dreams and the harsh realities within which they find themselves, these poems are written in the spirit of solidarity with women’s conditions, immigration, and minority populations, in the hope of making the world a better place for all.

Antonio Gómez

The Film Archipelago - Islands in Latin American Cinema Bloomsbury Publishing Inc, 2022 Co-edited with Francisco-J. Hernández Adrián

How do the islands and archipelagos of the New World figure in Latin American cinema? Comprising 15 essays and a critical introduction, The Film Archipelago: Islands in Latin American Cinema addresses this question by examining a series of intersections between insular spaces and filmmaking in Latin America. The volume brings together international scholars and filmmakers to consider a diverse corpus of films about islands, films that take place on islands, films produced in islands, and films that problematise islands. The book explores a diverse range of films that extend from the Chilean documentaries of Patricio Guzmán to work on the Malvinas/Falkland Islands, and films by Argentine directors Gustavo Fontán and Lucrecia Martel. Chapters focus on Rapa Nui (Easter Island), the Mexican Islas Marías, and the Panamanian Caribbean; on ecocritical, environmental and film historical aspects of Brazilian and Argentine river islands; and on Cuban, Guadeloupean, Haitian, and Puerto Rican contexts.

The Film Archipelago argues that the islands and archipelagos of Latin American cinema constitute a critically interesting, analytically complex, and historically suggestive angle to explore issues of marginality and peripherality, remoteness and isolation, and fragility and dependency. As a whole, the collection demonstrates to what extent the combined insular and archipelagic lens can reframe and re-figure both longstanding and recent discussions on the spaces of Latin American cinema.

Brian Horowitz

An Amateur Performance (Reminiscences of a Student in the 1850s)

Academic Studies Press, 2022

Co-edited with Conor Daly

Despite being Russia’s best Jewish writer of the 19th century, Lev Levanda is barely known in the English-speaking world, with some of his most famous works, like the 1873 novel Seething Times, having yet to be published in their entirety. Another such work is An Amateur Performance (Reminiscences of a Student in the 1850s), which appears here in English for the first time, translated with elegance by Hugh McLean with Conor Daly and edited by Brian Horowitz.

A classic in Russian-Jewish literature from 1882, An Amateur Performance describes the rush by Jews to government schools, secular education, and the lights of enlightenment, while also revealing the struggles of these Jewish students on the cusp of modernity, including keen observations on their lack of preparation, their confusion over the new ideas, and their confrontation with the repressive power of the Russian government. In short, it’s a brilliant sociological study of Russian Jewry in the 1850s as remembered by a writer who fought for progress and Jewish integration.

Ilana M. Horwitz

God, Grades, and Graduation: Religion’s Surprising Impact on Academic Success Oxford University Press, 2022

It’s widely acknowledged that American parents from different class backgrounds take different approaches to raising their children. Upper and middle-class parents invest considerable time facilitating their children’s activities, while working class and poor families take a more hands-off approach. These different strategies influence how children approach school. But missing from the discussion is the fact that millions of parents on both sides of the class divide are raising their children to listen to God. What impact does a religious upbringing have on their academic trajectories?

Drawing on 10 years of survey data with over 3,000 teenagers and over 200 interviews, God, Grades, and Graduation offers a revealing and at times surprising account of how teenagers’ religious upbringing influences their educational pathways from high school to college. Dr. Ilana M. Horwitz estimates that approximately one out of every four students in American schools are raised with religious restraint. These students orient their life around God so deeply that it alters how they see themselves and how they behave, inside and outside of church.

This book takes us inside the lives of these teenagers to discover why they achieve higher grades than their peers, why they are more likely to graduate from college, and why boys from lower middle-class families particularly benefit from religious restraint. But readers also learn how for middle-upper class kids—and for girls especially—religious restraint recalibrates their academic ambitions after graduation, leading them to question the value of attending a selective college despite their stellar grades in high school. By illuminating the far-reaching effects of the childrearing logic of religious restraint, God, Grades and Graduation offers a compelling new narrative about the role of religion in academic outcomes and educational inequality.

Blas Isasi

An idea is just the shape of a flower | Art Exhibition

The Front, New Orleans, 2022

Following in the footsteps of numerous past Peruvian artists like Emilio Rodríguez Larraín, Juan Javier Salazar, and most notoriously Jorge Eduardo Eielson in making the desert a subject of their work, in An idea is just the shape of a flower, Isasi brings into play different key aspects, fragments, materials and symbols characteristic to this unique cultural landscape.

By deploying various strategies, he intends to animate some of its most representative elements such as sand, clay, bones, etc. so as to put them in dialogue with each other in ways that seem counterintuitive, suggesting not only new connections and meanings but also other possible worlds. The accompanying presence of seamless metal structures in the installations hint to cartesian reason on the one hand, while evoking 20th-century Modernist design on the other, the quintessential aesthetics that symbolizes the unfulfilled promise of progress in the context of the Global South. The resulting tension from the juxtaposition of these seemingly opposing sets of elements is meant to, in the words of Raymond Williams, convey a “structure of feeling”: the feeling of things before we are able think them; the feeling of a different world before we can imagine it.

In short, Isasi’s installation is a humble attempt to reenchant the world and sow the seeds of hope in a bleak and perilous age. Last but not least, this exhibition is meant as a heartfelt and critical homage to the arid and stunningly beautiful land he grew up on.

Gene H. Koss

Gene Koss: Sculptures and Maquettes Phase One: The Interior Work | Solo Exhibition Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art, Biloxi, 2022

Always an admirer of Frank Gehry architecture, Gene Koss is excited to exhibit Sculptures and Maquettes Phase One: The Interior Work in a stainless steel, Gehry-designed pod on the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum campus. The huge steel panels and exposed beams in the raw, unfinished interior of the pod contrast and complement Koss’s sculpture.

The exhibit was curated by David Houston, the Ohr-O’Keefe executive director, and covers a span of Koss’s sculpture career from 1990 to 2019. Included is Arc, a large-scale sculpture of steel, stone and glass; Totem, a large wooden timber sculpture; as well as several multi-media maquette sculptures.

Kris Lane

Pandemic in Potosí: Fear, Loathing, and Public Piety in a Colonial Mining Metropolis Penn State University Press, 2022

In 1719, a deadly and highly contagious disease took hold of the Imperial Villa of Potosí, a silver mining metropolis in what is now Bolivia. Within a year, the pathogen had killed some 22,000 people, just over a third of the city’s residents. The Great Andean Pandemic of 1717-22, which ravaged Buenos Aires, Arequipa, and Cuzco as well as Potosí, was likely the most destructive disease to strike South America since the days of the Spanish Conquest.

Pandemic in Potosí features the single longest narrative of this nearly forgotten period, penned by local historian Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela, along with shorter treatments of the disease’s ravages in Cuzco, Arequipa, and the outskirts of Lima. The “Gran Peste,” as it was called, was a pivotal event about which Arzáns wrote at length because he lived through it, but also because it was believed to have cosmic significance.

Kris Lane translates and contextualizes Arzáns’s account, which is rich in local detail that sheds light on a range of topics—from therapeutics, devotional life, class relations, gender, and race to conceptions of illness, sin, and human will and responsibility during a major public health crisis.

Original narratives of the pandemic, translated here for the first time, help readers see commonalities and differences between past and present disease encounters.

J. Celeste Lay

Public Schools, Private Governance: Education Reform and Democracy in New Orleans

Temple University Press, 2022

Two months after Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana took control of nearly all the public schools in New Orleans. Today, all of the city’s public schools are charter schools. Although many analyses mark the beginning of education reform in New Orleans with Katrina, in Public Schools, Private Governance, J. Celeste Lay argues that the storm merely accelerated the timeline for reforms that had inched along incrementally over the previous decade.

Both before and after Katrina, white reformers purposely excluded Black educators, community members, and parents. Public Schools, Private Governance traces the slow, deliberate dismantling of New Orleans’ public schools, and the processes that have maintained the reforms made in Katrina’s immediate aftermath. Lay shows how Black parents and residents were left without a voice and the mostly white officials charged with school governance had little accountability. She cogently explains how political minorities disrupted systems to create change and keep reforms in place, and the predictable political effects—exclusion, frustration, and resignation—on the part of those most directly affected.

Zachary Lazar

The Apartment on Calle Uruguay: A Novel Penguin Random House, 2022

A haunting new novel by the author of Vengeance in which a chance encounter between a blocked painter and a journalist leads to a complicated romance that reveals their buried histories and vulnerabilities against the backdrops of an America in chaos and Mexico.

Beginning in the first summer of the post-Obama world, Zachary Lazar’s bewitching and masterful new novel tells the story of Christopher Bell, a blocked painter on the East End of Long Island, and Ana Ramirez, a journalist who fled the crisis in Venezuela and is looking for work in New York. Bell has always felt marked by his foreignness, having emigrated to the US as a child, and has come to believe that “words like ‘identity’ and ‘American’ are somehow very meaningful and very meaningless at the same time.” He has retreated to a modest house near a patch of woods, “a rural nowhere… that sometimes held more meaning for me in its silence than human language.”

In the woods, he encounters Ana, who is trying to “reinvent herself as the kind of person she’d been before” the world she knew disappeared. A complicated romance develops that gradually reveals their buried histories—from the death of Bell’s former partner, Malika Jordan, a fellow artist, to the prison farm where he visits Malika’s incarcerated brother Jesse, to Mexico City, where Ana’s exiled family now lives. All of them have faced the same problem: how to build a new life once the idea you’ve had of “home” vanishes or becomes unrecognizable.

The Apartment on Calle Uruguay is a haunting exploration of love, art, and the cost of transformation. It lays out a fiercely intentional and introspective way of living in an unjust world.

Amalia Leguizamón

Las semillas del poder: Injusticia ambiental en la Argentina sojera Elefante Editora, 2022

In 1996, Argentina adopted transgenic soybeans as a central part of its development strategy. Today it is the third largest producer and exporter of transgenic crops in the world. Its soybeans, modified to tolerate glyphosate, cover half of the country’s arable land and represent a third of its exports. Soy has brought with it modernization and economic growth, but also tremendous ecological and social damage: rural displacement, concentration of land ownership, food insecurity, deforestation, and health problems from exposure to agrochemicals.

In The Seeds of Power, Amalia Leguizamón explores why many Argentines support transgenic soybeans despite the damage it causes. The author reveals how agribusiness, the state and its media and scientific allies deploy narratives of economic distribution, scientific expertise, and national identity to gain compliance from the most vulnerable rural residents. And it shows that transgenic soy operates as a power tool to achieve consent, legitimize injustices and silence possible dissent.

Judith Maxwell

Kemchi’ Wuj Pa Oxi’ Ch’ab’äl: Kaqchikel, K’iche’ chuqa’ Tz’utujiil –Gramática Arte de los tres idiomas Mayas: Kaqchikel, K’iche’ y Tz’utujil

U Rafael Landívar Press, 2022

Co-authored with Mgr. Ajpub’ García Ixmata’ and Juan Rodrigo Guarchaj

This book outlines grammar of three Mayan languages of the K’iche’an group.

It includes the first grammars written of these languages in the languages themselves and the first grammars of these languages to include semantics and pragmatics as analytical levels.

Technical vocabulary provided for descriptive and theoretic linguistic terminology—over 1400 items.

Andrew McDowell

Global Health for All: Knowledge, Politics, and Practices

Rutgers University Press, 2022

Co-edited with Jean-Paul Gaudillière, Claudia Lang, and Claire Beaudevin

Global Health for All trains a critical lens on global health to share the stories that global health’s practices and logics tell about 20th- and 21stcentury configurations of science and power. An ethnography on multiple scales, the book focuses on global health’s key epistemic and therapeutic practices like localization, measurement, triage, markets, technology, care, and regulation. Its roving approach traverses policy centers, sites of intervention, and innumerable spaces in between to consider what happens when globalized logics, circulations, and actors work to imagine, modify, and manage health.

By resting in these in-between places, Global Health for All simultaneously examines global health as a coherent system and as a dynamic, unpredictable collection of modular parts.

Emilia Oddo

This volume presents a complete study of the architecture and finds from the House of the Frescoes at Knossos, a Neopalatial building uncovered by Sir Arthur Evans and Duncan Mackenzie in 1923 and 1926. Located in a prominent position, a few meters south of the Royal Road and close to both the Theatral Area and the north-west corner of the Palace, the House of the Frescoes owes its name to the large deposit of painted plaster discovered within its ruins.

Reinvestigation of the House took place in 2016-2019 and included: on-site cleaning of the remains in 2018; detailed analysis of the pottery and other finds; and study of archival material from the original excavations (excerpts presented in this volume).

The results offer new insights into the architecture and finds’ contexts, as well as fresh perspectives on the building’s occupation, purpose and abandonment. They suggest that the House of the Frescoes was a non-residential building, and instead had a public role with strong ritual connotations. Its memory survived for a while after its abandonment, as demonstrated by the structured depositions—including the frescoes—found within.

Finally, this analysis highlights the urban context of the House of the Frescoes and its connections with the Royal Road area, where much archaeological work has been carried out after Evans. The emerging picture helps to shed further light on the character of Knossos, pre-eminent centre of Minoan Crete at the height of the Bronze Age.

Knossos: The House of the Frescoes British School at Athens, 2022

Emilia Oddo

South by Southeast: The History and Archaeology of Southeast Crete from Myrtos to Kato Zakros Archaeopress, 2022 Co-edited with Konstantinos Chalikias

South by Southeast: The History and Archaeology of Southeast Crete from Myrtos to Kato Zakros publishes the proceedings of the conference of the same name held in Pacheia Ammos (Crete) in July 2017. Its aim is to investigate the settlement patterns, maritime connectivity, and material culture of the southeast of Crete in a diachronic fashion, in an attempt to define it as a region and trace its history. The title South by Southeast, an ironic take on Alfred Hitchcock’s film North by Northwest, encapsulates the uncertainty of what exactly the Southeast means and our need to clarify its geographical limits and cultural span.

The papers presented focus primarily on the archaeology of the sites along the coastal strip spanning between the Myrtos Valley and Kato Zakros, an area that has time and again produced evidence of interconnection. Indeed one of the most important aspects surfacing from the volume is the evidence for the diachronic existence of the Southeast as a distinct cultural entity. The elements that tied the sites together shifted at times, forcing us to evaluate the concept of region as a flexible one that reflects different ways of defining a community.

Scott Oldenberg

Religion

and the Early Modern British Marketplace Routledge, 2002

Co-edited with Kristin M. S. Bezio

Religion and the Early Modern British Marketplace explores the complex intersection between the geographic, material, and ideological marketplaces through the lens of religious belief and practice. By examining the religiously motivated markets and marketplace practices in the 16th and 17th centuries in England, Scotland, and Wales, the volume presents religious praxis as a driving force in the formulation and everyday workings of the social and economic markets.

Within the volume, the authors address first spiritual markets and marketplaces, discussing the intersection of Puritan and Protestant Ethics with the market economy. The second part addresses material marketplaces, including the marriage market, commercial trade markets, and the post-Reformation Catholic black market. In the third part of the volume, the chapters focus specifically on publication markets and books, including manuscripts and commonplace books, as well as printed volumes and pamphlets. Finally, the volume concludes with an examination of the literary marketplace, with analyses of plays and poems which engage with and depict both spiritual and material markets.

Taken as a whole, this collection posits that the “modern” conception of a division between religion and the socioeconomic marketplace was a largely fictional construct, and the chapters demonstrate the depth to which both were integrated in early modern life.

Amy Pfrimmer

Songs of Louis Vierne | Album Centaur Records, 2022

Released by Centaur Records in May 2022, the album Songs of Louis Vierne was recorded in New Orleans and Paris. Best known for his six symphonies, which are among the greatest of 20th-century organ literature, Louis Vierne became famous in his role as organist of Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris. His compositional color palette was certainly influenced by the rise of late 19th century, orchestrally inspired, Parisian organs. While recognizing Vierne’s organ expertise, this recording seeks, additionally, to position him as a refined mélodie and singer’s composer who drew inspiration from the organ’s sound and from the instruction of César Franck, Charles-Marie Widor, and Gabriel Fauré. It often surprises Vierne’s admirers that, in addition to organ symphonies, he was equally adept at composing the smaller form of the mélodie. Vierne’s songs were conceived with the organ’s expressive, characteristic sound and endless color variability in mind and Vierne deftly developed his melodically intriguing songs by deploying harmonies that pushed the boundaries of the early 20th century. Soprano Amy Pfrimmer is known for her uniquely expressive voice and emotionally honest character portrayals.

John “Ray” Proctor

Set in the late 1970s, August Wilson’s first play in his 10-play cycle of ten decades of history in Pittsburgh takes place in the midst of urban renewal, which threatens to eliminate the makeshift gypsy cab service. The story follows a group of men who make a living driving these cabs, as they navigate love as fathers and sons, loss and hope, and ultimately, community. This must-see work comes to life with a passion that transcends all races.

It’s 1821 in New York, and two productions of Shakespeare’s Richard III are vying for audiences. One is presented by the African Company of New York, a downtown theater known for its growing popularity with both Black and white audiences. A white theater owner is threatened by the success of his competition and will stop at nothing to shut them down. Learn what happens in this true story straight from American theater history.

August Wilson’s Jitney | Dramaturg Carlyle Brown’s The African Company Presents: Richard III | Dramaturg The Black Rep Theatre, St Louis, 2022

John “Ray” Proctor

Summer Lyric Music Theatre - Into the Woods | Director Crescent City Stage -

Walcott’s Pantomime | Director New Orleans, 2022

What happens after happily ever after, after all? In Sondheim and Lapine’s beloved musical retelling of the Grimm classics, a parade of familiar folktale figures find their way “into the woods” and try to get home before dark.

Set in Tobago, in the hope of entertaining future guests, a white English hotel owner proposes that he and his black handyman work up a satire on the Robinson Crusoe story. This metatheatrical two-hander dissects the effects of colonialism, examining the way that British imperial policies create fateful cultural links forever. Joy and dark humor abound as the hotel owner and handyman explore who is allowed to use language and in what way.

Derek

Thomas F. Reese

Las Nuevas Poblaciones de Sierra Morena y Andalucía: Reforma agraria, repoblación, y urbanismo en la España rural del siglo XVIII Rústica, 2022

This book studies a series of 32 towns created by Carlos III in southern Spain. Such creation is due to an illustrated project prepared by the Count of Aranda, president of the Council of Castilla, and entrusted to the Lima superintendent Pablo de Olavide. The initiative sought to implement a new social organization, for which a charter of its own was drawn up for the foundations that regulated aspects of the economic and social life of the more than 6,000 settlers from Alsace, Bavaria, Switzerland and Savoy. These towns were built over 37 months of intensive work, between February 26, 1767 and April 11, 1770; erected on desolate and largely uninhabited land along the main routes between Madrid and Cádiz, and between Valencia and Cádiz.

The objective of these populations was also to protect the main roads, where frequent attacks by bandits took place, as well as to increase grain supplies in Madrid, since the Esquilache Mutiny of 1766 in the capital persuaded the Crown of the need to increase production. Two groups of populations were established: the New Populations of Sierra Morena, between Despeñaperros and Bailén, and those of Andalusia, between Córdoba and Carmona. In total they housed 1,499 houses for 1,535 families and 6,585 settlers, who planted 14,289 bushels of grain, 97,791 olive trees, 525,701 vines and 2,222 fig trees. In 1775, the number of populations had increased to 41, and in 1795, there were already more than 50.

Oliver Sensen

Kant on Human Dignity | Chinese Translation De Gruyter, 2022

This is a revised and updated version, for the first time available in Chinese, of Kant on Human Dignity (De Gruyter).

Kant is often considered the source of the contemporary idea of human dignity.

Based on a comprehensive analysis of the relevant passages in Kant, the book provides a thorough interpretation of Kant’s conception of human dignity.

Dale Shuger

God Made Word: An Archaeology of Mystic Discourse in Early Modern Spain

University of Toronto Press, 2022

The Golden Age of Spanish mysticism has traditionally been read in terms of individual authors or theological traditions. God Made Word, however, considers early modern Spanish mysticism as a question of language and as a discourse that circulated in concrete social, institutional, and geographic spaces.

Proposing a new reading of early modern Spanish mysticism, God Made Word traces the struggles over the representation of interiorized spiritual union—the tension between making it known and conveying its unknowability—far beyond the usual canon of mystic literature. Dale Shuger combines a study of genres that have traditionally been the object of literary study, including poetry, theatre, and autobiography, with a language-based analysis of other areas that have largely been studied by historians and theologians. Arguing that these generic separations grew out of an increasing preoccupation with the cultivation and control of interiorized spirituality, God Made Word shows that by tracing certain mystic representations we come to understand the emergence of different discursive rules and expectations for a wide range of representations of the ineffable.

Nick Spitzer

American Routes | Radio Program PRX, 2022

American Routes is a weekly, two-hour public radio music and culture program produced at Tulane University. Hosted by the Anthroplogy Department’s Nick Spitzer, the show features blues and jazz, roots rock and soul, R&B and gospel, rockabilly/country/cowboy, Cajun/zydeco, conjunto, Latin, Caribbean and beyond—all framed by a New Orleans Gulf South by Southwest aesthetic.

The program’s 800+ interviews over the quarter century have included Ray Charles, Chuck Berry, Nina Simone, Sonny Rollins, B.B. King, Santana, Celia Cruz, Jimmy Cliff, Tito Puente, Dolly Parton, Merle Haggard, Jerry Lee Louis, Dewey Balfa, Queen Ida, Tom Waits, Bonnie Raitt, Allen Toussaint, Dr. John and Fats Domino. The late Wall Street Journal culture critic Nat Hentoff wrote, “In the history of American radio, no series has ever come close to Nick Spitzer’s American Routes in exploring the many streams of this nation’s music.”

Michele White

Touch Screen Theory: Digital Devices and Feelings MIT Press, 2022

Technology companies and device designers correlate touchscreens and online sites with physical contact and emotional sentiments, promising unmediated experiences in which the screen falls away in favor of visceral materiality and connections. While touchscreens are key elements of most people’s everyday lives, critical frameworks for understanding the embodied experiences of using them are wanting. In Touch Screen Theory, Michele White focuses on the relation between physically touching and emotionally feeling to recenter the bodies and identities that are empowered, produced, and displaced by these digital technologies and settings. Drawing on detailed cases and humanities methods, White shows how and why gender, race, and sexuality should be further analyzed in relation to touchscreen use and design. White delves into such details as how women are informed that their bodies and fingernails are not a fit for iPhones, how cellphone surfaces are correlated with skin and understood as erotic, the ways social networks use heart buttons and icons to seem to physically and emotionally connect with individuals, how online references to feminine and queer feelings are resisted by many men, and how women producers of autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) videos use tactile strategies and touchscreens to emotionally bond with viewers. Proposing critical methods for studying touchscreens and digital engagement, Touch Screen Theory expands a variety of research areas, including digital and internet cultures, hardware, interfaces, media and screens, and popular culture.

Michele White

Anti-Feminisms in Media Culture

Routledge, 2022

Co-edited with Diane Negra

This important and timely collection examines the troubling proliferation of anti-feminist language and concepts in contemporary media culture. Edited by Michele White and Diane Negra, these curated essays offer a critical means of considering how contemporary media, politics, and digital culture function, especially in relation to how they simultaneously construct and displace feminist politics, women’s bodies, and the rights of women and other disenfranchised subjects. The collection explores the simplification and disparagement of feminist histories and ongoing feminist engagements, the consolidation of all feminisms into a static and rigid structure, and tactics that are designed to disparage women and feminists as a means of further displacing disenfranchised people’s identities and rights.

The book also highlights how it is becoming more imperative to consider how anti-feminisms, including hostilities towards feminist activism and theories, are amplified in times of political and social unrest and used to instigate violence against women, people of color, and LGBTQIA+ individuals.