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International Rights Guide FALL 2026

Contacts For the sale of translation rights, please contact the following subagents:

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Cover Illustration Credit: Based on the cover of The Price of Living by S. Shankar, designed by Courtney Baker.

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Spain, Portugal, and Latin America AGENCIA LITERARIA RAQUEL DE LA CONCHA Beatriz.coll@rdclitera.com Turkey NURCIHAN KESIM LITERARY AGENCY filiz@nurcihankesim.com All other territories Chris Robinson subrights@duke.edu

Duke University Press

About Duke University Press Duke University Press books have long been known for advancing innovative new scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. In our books, our authors have defined new fields (sound studies, transgender studies, etc.), redefined existing fields (anthropology, cultural studies, Latin American studies, African American and African studies, art history, etc.), and explored the rich spaces between fields to reshape the way we think about the world and our connections to it. We take pride in publishing traditionally underrepresented voices in terms of both authors and areas of study, viewpoints that are critical to understanding the diverse, interconnected societies in which we live. Duke books continue to be an essential part of any humanities and social sciences program.

dukeupress.edu

Content Machines Reading and Writing in the Platform Era

SARAH BROUILLETTE While much has been said about the democratization of publishing through the rise of platforms like Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, little attention has been paid to the broader effect these technologies have had on writers, readers, and the publishing industry. In Content Machines, Sarah Brouillette considers how short-form, platform-based, and social media writing on digital mediums like Wattpad and TikTok has reshaped modern publishing, reading, and writing. Brouillette identifies three mutually reinforcing processes that platform capitalism entangles in the publishing industry: the marked feminization of book work; the rise of a bibliotherapeutic vocabulary that grounds reading and writing as self-care work; and the growth of platform-based processes that cheapen content and intensify the pressure to engage in self-promotion and entrepreneurial strategizing. She breaks down the business models that have been key to this transformation and traces the social conditions that make online self-published fiction, especially young adult, romance, and fantasy stories, into spaces for community while, conversely, signaling how these publishing practices depend upon undervalued and feminized labor from marginalized groups. Content Machines is a much-needed survey of the contours of the modern reading and writing landscape. Sarah Brouillette is Professor of English at Carleton University and author of Underdevelopment and African Literature: Emerging Forms of Reading, among other works.

October 2026 186 pages Cultural studies/Literary Criticism Rights: World

Publishing

TARIQ GODDARD

Throughout his career as a writer and a publisher, Tariq Goddard has pushed the envelope and created intellectual and artistic community. In Publishing, Goddard reflects on the three essential practices that have enabled him to persist in a difficult industry—reading, writing, and wondering—and offers motivation, inspiration, and justification for an inherently unpredictable and insecure livelihood. Goddard recounts the creation, rise, and cessation of his own presses, Zer0 and Repeater Books, to offer insight into the challenges of sustaining independent publishing houses. He draws from his experience on both sides of the editor’s desk to describe the differences between writing a novel and editing one as well as how time in each role has continuously informed the other. Publishing provides a critique of the publishing industry and an insider’s view of the tension between commerce and creativity. Tariq Goddard is a British novelist, journalist, and publisher. He was cofounder of Zer0 and Repeater Books and is author of High John the Conqueror, Nature and Necessity, and Homage to a Firing Squad. February 2027 110 pages Literature/Cultural studies Rights: World

Also in the Practices series From everyday hobbies and activities like running, fishing, and horseback riding to less concrete endeavors such as doing nothing or living among different spiritual traditions, books in the Practices series examine what one person's activities tell us about ourselves, our society, and our understanding of the world.

Raving

Running

Climbing

Kicking

MCKENZIE WARK

LINDSEY FREEMAN

HIL MALATINO

JULES BOYKOFF

March 2023

July 2026

May 2026

Rights: World, excluding Italian,

Rights: World

Fly-Fishing

Forevering

Winnowing

CHRISTOPHER SCHABERG

CAROL MAVOR

SUZANNE MATSON

March 2023

March 2027

November 2026

Rights: World

Riding

Star Charting

Doing Nothing

Taking Leave

BESS MATASSA

JAMES CURRIE

DEBORAH KAPCHAN

February 2026

September 2025

Rights: World

Ukrainian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Czech, Danish, Korean

Juggling STEWART SINCLAIR March 2023

PARDIS MAHDAVI March 2025 Rights: World

The Grit of the Real Toward a Semiotics Against Geontopower

ELIZABETH A. POVINELLI In The Grit of the Real, Elizabeth A. Povinelli explores whether theory can sustain anti-capitalist, anti-white supremacist, and decolonizing worlds. Povinelli draws on her theory of “geontopower”—the power to declare life and nonlife that enabled colonial powers to institute the hierarchies that established and maintained the colonial order. Povinelli formulates an interpretive framework that can bolster a decolonizing stance against the colonial justifications for the governance of life and nonlife. Povinelli examines theoretical approaches to human and more-than-human communication and their world-making capacities within the contemporary maneuvers of geontopower. Povinelli asks: how can one develop interpretive frameworks that not only counter geontopower, but that can understand how their own conceptual elements emerged from a racial and colonial history.

May 2027 192 pages Anthropology/Social Theory Rights: World, excluding Turkey

Elizabeth A. Povinelli is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of several books, including Between Gaia and Ground and The Inheritance, both published by Duke University Press.

Also by Elizabeth A. Povinelli

Geontologies A Requiem to Late Liberalism Povinelli offers "geontopower" as a new theory of power that operates through the regulation of the clear distinctions between life and nonlife. 2016 Anthropology/Social Theory 6,000 lifetime paperback sales Rights: World, excluding Japanese (Ibunsha); Portuguese (Brazil exclusive, non-exclusive rest of world, excluding Portugal) (UBU Editora); Spanish (Editorial Otros Presentes); Italian

Between Gaia and Ground Four Axioms of Existence and the Ancestral Catastrophe of Late Liberalism Povinelli theorizes how the legacies of colonial violence and the ways the dispossession and extraction that destroyed Indigenous and colonized people's lives now pose an existential threat to the West. 2021 Anthropology/Social Theory 1,200 lifetime paperback sales Rights: World

Worlding Finding a Way in Broken Times

KATHLEEN STEWART

May 2027 280 pages Anthropology/American studies Rights: World

In Worlding, Kathleen Stewart traces the proliferation of everyday practices, fantasies, and scenes of damage in a new ordinary in the United States from the 1950s to the Trump years. Her poetic prose moves like a flip book across patterns, places, times, strays, troubles, and lines of power, laying down a creative-critical experiment in description, autoethnography, auto-theory, and a new materialism of elements. Writing in fragments overrun with ideas, she proposes a creative-critical practice that branches out rather than synthesizes. Worlding is a series of tryouts approaching the weight, generativity, and politics of the unthought, the cryptic, the visceral, the conventional, the artful, and the elemental. From birds and weather to a face or a harsh phrase, Stewart plays at the boundaries of worlding’s capacities, creatively mulling over the possibilities beyond the edge of experience and speculation. Kathleen Stewart is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin, author of Ordinary Affects, and coauthor of The Hundreds, both published by Duke University Press.

Also by Kathleen Stewart

Ordinary Affects Stewart outlines how the disparate, fragmented, and seemingly inconsequential experiences of everyday life bring attention to the ordinary as an integral site of cultural politics. 2007 Anthropology/Cultural studies 17,000 lifetime paperback sales Rights: World Previously licensed in Korean and Turkish

The Hundreds

WITH LAUREN BERLANT

Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart's collaborative experimental writing project in which they strive toward sensing and capturing everyday experience. 2019 Cultural studies/Anthropology/Affect Theory 7,000 lifetime paperback sales Rights: World

Learning from the High Priestess Affect, Femme Care, and Somatic Practice

ANN CVETKOVICH In Learning from the High Priestess, Ann Cvetkovich integrates theory and somatic practice to assemble a survival guide for artists, academics, and activists in search of new strategies for social justice in times of trouble. Building on her previous work on why feelings matter to political action and intellectual inquiry, Cvetkovich shows how experiments in writing can be a form of affective and somatic practice. She uses four key themes—care, disability and madness, trauma and somatics, and breath—as launch points for reframing discourses of mental health in the direction of practices for decolonizing bodyminds and for the sensory experience of freedom. Engaging with writer/practitioners from Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Alison Bechdel to Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Staci Haines, and Kai Cheng Thom, and with particular emphasis on Black feminisms, Cvetkovich places femme care and embodied practice at the center of movements for social transformation. Ann Cvetkovich is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Depression: A Public Feeling and An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures, both published by Duke University Press.

November 2026 176 pages Gender studies/Cultural studies Rights: World

Also by Ann Cvetkovich

Depression A Public Feeling Cvetkovich combines memoir and cultural critique in search of ways of writing about depression as a public cultural and political phenomenon rather than as a personal medical pathology. 2012 Queer Theory/Affect Theory 8,300 lifetime paperback sales Rights: World, excluding Spanish in Argentina Previously licensed in Korean and Turkish

An Archive of Feelings Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures Cvetkovich develops a queer approach to trauma. She argues for the importance of recognizing and archiving accounts of trauma that belong as much to the everyday as to the domain of catastrophe. 2003 LGBTQ studies/Cultural studies 8,600 lifetime paperback sales Rights: World, excluding Korean (Hyunsil); Japanese (Kaden-Sha); French (license pending) Previously licensed in Spanish

Duke University Press dukeupress.edu

Feminist Book Work Reading with the Women's Press

ROSY MACK

March 2027 296 pages Women's studies Rights: World

From the 1970s to the 1990s, a new wave of women’s writing emerged, spanning from serious feminist theoretical interventions to lesbian detective fiction. In Feminist Book Work, Rosy Mack traces how the British publisher The Women’s Press, in tandem with the booksellers and other presses that comprised the interdependent infrastructure of feminist print culture, made this proliferation of feminist publishing possible. Mack uncovers the everyday work of feminist publishing through five case studies informed by the press’s archives along with oral history interviews with former workers. She centers the care and labor that went into facilitating innovative, politically responsive, and delightfully strange women’s writing, paying close attention to the many workers and forms of work that help bring books into the world, as well as highlighting feminist publishing’s most influential contributions to leftist publications and women’s literature. In theorizing feminist textual work as a practice of care, Mack sheds light on the often-hidden labor of facilitating cultural production and makes the case for the necessity of independent and innovative publishing in the face of political crisis. Rosy Mack teaches literature and digital media at the University of Birmingham.

Rivers on the Move Waterways in Human Life from the Ice Age to the Anthropocene

BATHSHEBA DEMUTH, MARK A. HEALEY, GIACOMO PARRINELLO, AND LAURENCE C. SMITH, EDITORS Ever-moving rivers create landscapes and sustain life, yet their variability can also bring disaster to human communities that do not adapt to that movement. Furthermore, in an era of climate instability, river movements are increasingly harder to deny, suppress, or harness. Rivers on the Move collects essays across disciplines to explore the tension between rivers’ movements and economic, social, and political desires for ecological stability. Contributors, hailing from a wide range of humanities and scientific fields alike, examine river movements as both physical and cultural phenomena that shape environments across the world and across all ages. Together, their essays analyze how rivers move, what counts as movement, how human societies try to control those movements, and how we can imagine new ways of coexisting with rivers. February 2027 308 pages Environmental studies/Geography Rights: World

Bathsheba Demuth is Dean’s Associate Professor of History and Environment and Society at Brown University. Mark A. Healey is Associate Professor of History at the University of Connecticut. Giacomo Parrinello is Associate Professor of Environmental History at the Centre for History of the Sciences Po Paris. Laurence C. Smith is John Atwater and Diana Nelson University Professor of Environmental Studies in the Institute at Brown for Environment & Society at Brown University.

Afromodernism Six Turning Points

KOBENA MERCER Across the twentieth century, Black artists transformed the visual meanings of Blackness under modernity. Introducing a fresh approach, Kobena Mercer shows how such changes were driven by the creative friction of cross-cultural dialogue. In Afromodernism, Mercer examines dialogic aesthetics of ambiguation, hyphenation, and transcoding among African American, Caribbean, and Black British artists at six key turning points, including the New Negro presence at the world’s fairs of the 1900s, Harlem Renaissance encounters with African art, post-1945 abstraction, and the 1960s critique of the society of spectacle. Putting artists such as Aaron Douglas, Elizabeth Catlett, Frank Bowling, and Adrian Piper into conversation with such critical thinkers as W. E. B. Du Bois, Michel Foucault, and Stuart Hall, Mercer reframes the arc of modernism within the Black Atlantic and opens a new angle on twentieth-century art. Kobena Mercer is Charles P. Stevenson Professor of Art History and Humanities at Bard College. He is author of Travel & See: Black Diaspora Art Practices since the 1980s, also published by Duke University Press.

January 2027 384 pages Art History/Black studies Rights: World

How Color Became a Technology The Making of Chromatic Capitalism

LIDA ZEITLIN-WU Lida Zeitlin-Wu traces how color transformed from a natural concept to a sophisticated and marketable technology. Beginning with nineteenth-century industrialization and culminating in the digital present, Zeitlin-Wu moves across three distinct phases of capitalism—systemization, standardization, and privatization—to argue that color adapts to different regimes of cultural production to benefit those in power. Color is central to modern consumer culture, whether in homes or on social media pages. She calls this phenomenon “chromatic capitalism.” From scientific racism’s obsession with the color grid to the techno-utopian “colorblind” fantasies of Web 2.0, Zeitlin-Wu reveals how color shifts with changing cultural and economic contexts to the benefit of corporate capitalism and white supremacy. How Color Became a Technology reframes color as a key instrument of capitalist extraction that transcends media forms.

May 2027 288 pages Media studies/Design Rights: World

Lida Zeitlin-Wu is Assistant Professor of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame.

Duke University Press dukeupress.edu

Gaming Exhaustion Reclaiming Play from Late Capitalism April 2027 248 pages Media studies/Cultural studies Rights: World

RAINFOREST SCULLY-BLAKER The neoliberal, capitalist logics that underpin the world are failing. Everyone is exhausted, and video games are not the relaxation tools they are often marketed as. In Gaming Exhaustion, Rainforest Scully-Blaker frames video games as media technologies that inform and are informed by culture. Through studies of popular titles like Animal Crossing: New Horizons, World of Warcraft, and American Truck Simulator, Scully-Blaker shows that games perpetuate hegemonic logics that deplete and oppress, further driving the fatigue that plagues life under capitalism and maintaining an exhausting status quo. However, he argues, it doesn’t have to be this way. Whether by design or through play, video games can help identify and confront exhaustion and offer models of regenerative play which demand more restful ways of being. Speaking against the systemic conditions that leave people too exhausted to live otherwise, Scully-Blaker demonstrates how the critical, revitalizing potential of play can enable us to take our time before it is taken. Rainforest Scully-Blaker is Assistant Teaching Professor in Digital Media at Northeastern University in Vancouver.

Antiracist Futures for Games and Play

TREAANDREA M. RUSSWORM AND SORAYA MURRAY, EDITORS

May 2027 392 pages Media studies/Cultural studies Rights: World

The essays in Antiracist Futures for Games and Play show how games are distributive sites of power that should not merely replicate the dystopian conditions of the here and now. After outlining a set of key terms to foster commonality, contributors then consider difference and inclusion in games, speculative design interventions, Blackness in game design, and the building of imaginative spaces and new worlds. Their approaches demonstrate the speculative nature of all antiracist practice as the modes of critique conjure a means of escape from an unjust present, even when such efforts seem futile. These works create a call to action and an active imagining of change in the industry through vast systems of gamic representations and worldbuilding, design principles, and human imagination to more fully realize the potential of an interactive medium for modeling antiracist futures from which other forms of equity can flow. TreaAndrea M. Russworm is Microsoft Endowed Chair and Professor of Interactive Media and Games Division at University of Southern California. Soraya Murray is Professor of Film and Digital Media at University of California at Santa Cruz.

Tender Grammars SERENA ALAGAPPAN

Tender Grammars is a collection of lyrical essays chronicling love across language barriers and cross-cultural exchange. Through intimate portraits and braided essays, Serena Alagappan tells the true stories of people who fell in love without speaking the same language or who learned a new language for love. Alagappan explores how couples navigate first phrases, missteps, and misunderstandings; how they search for belonging in each other’s families and cultures; and how language itself shapes who we become in love. Along the way, Alagappan considers what these relationships built across words and worlds can teach us about communication and connection. Blending insights from psychology, translation studies, linguistics, and anthropology with Alagappan’s own bicultural perspective, she reveals how learning another language can transform how we listen, express, and understand ourselves and the world around us.

February 2027 176 pages Creative Nonfiction Rights: World

Serena Alagappan is the author of the chapbook, Sensitive to Temperature. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, POETRY, and elsewhere. A Rhodes Scholar and senior editor at Poets & Writers Magazine, she lives in New York City.

The Beautiful Agonies ADRIE KUSSEROW

The Beautiful Agonies is a luminous, genre-bending work of literary nonfiction that braids intimate memoir, lyric essay, Buddhism, and anthropological insight into a meditation on aging, maternal caregiving, dying, and the beauty of the natural world. With fierce tenderness, Kusserow chronicles her mother’s final year of life in rural Vermont—days shaped by stark comedy and bodily decline, loneliness and fear, a scrappy, dogged search for meaning, and the intense beauty of the Vermont landscape. Kusserow’s trained anthropological lens, alert to stigma, cultural scripts, and the performance of “good aging,” sits alongside a tender daughter’s heart, creating a poetic, nuanced narrative that is both intellectually rigorous and emotionally shattering. Kusserow’s poetic and culturally perceptive voice—by turns wry, furious, reverent, and quietly funny—refuses sentimentality while still delivering catharsis. The Beautiful Agonies offers readers an extraordinary intersection of humanities and health, ethics and embodied emotion, cultural critique and spiritual inquiry, and a mother and daughter’s shared love of the natural world, a work as philosophically searching as it is heartbreakingly human. Adrie Kusserow is Professor of Anthropology at St. Michael’s College and author of The Trauma Mantras, also published by Duke University Press, as well as Hunting Down the Monk, Refuge, and American Individualisms.

Duke University Press dukeupress.edu

February 2027 170 pages Memoir Rights: World

Where Is the Light Coming From Essays on Art and Regular People March 2027 160 pages Art/Essays Rights: World

DAN KOIS Cultural critic and novelist Dan Kois explores the way art, literature, music, and theater make themselves relevant to all sorts of—as artists call them—“regular people”: postal workers writing their lives with the help of a legendary cartoonist; angry socialites protesting a tacky statue; readers falling in love with America’s cheesiest poet; librarians being asked to defend a modernist masterpiece that everyone knows is very dirty. Interspersed with Kois’s keeneyed reporting are moving, funny personal narratives illustrating the rewards of staying alert to the possibilities of art: a life-changing decision based on a hopeless crush on a regional theater actress; a clarifying encounter with a grumpy traveler at an Italian hotel; and a previously unpublished story from inside a Kentucky memory-care facility, where Kois helps a MacArthur Fellow conjure an astonishing theater production starring dementia patients. Written with sharp critical insight and disarming honesty, these eleven essays offer a fresh angle on the age-old question of how art makes an impact on the world. Dan Kois is an author, podcaster, and longtime editor and writer for Slate magazine. His books include Hampton Heights, Vintage Contemporaries, How to Be a Family, and The World Only Spins Forward.

Smut and Sandwiches A History of Stag Film February 2027 168 pages Film studies Rights: World

RUSSELL SHEAFFER In Smut and Sandwiches, Russell Sheaffer reconstructs the history of “stag films,” spanning from the term’s roots in the late nineteenth century to the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography’s 1970 Report, which used the term to refer to early hardcore film. While histories of pornography equate the phrase with sexually explicit films, Sheaffer draws from an archive of advertisements, newspaper reports, institutional records, and public spaces to show that the early stag films were comprised of a variety of genres deemed to be popular with men, including boxing pictures, slapstick comedies, films that displayed women’s bodies through dancing or modeling, and both softcore and hardcore representations of sex. Sheaffer highlights how the 1920s vice reform movements played a crucial role in shaping the codification of the term itself as well as the environments in which stag films would be viewed and remembered, ironically making screenings more noteworthy than they would have been otherwise. Smut and Sandwiches intervenes in the established history of transgressive film to understand the methods and consequences of mobilizing and modifying language in service of moral and political aims. Russell Sheaffer is Assistant Professor of Cinema at Palomar College and author of Orlando (Queer Film Classics).

Dance Cadaverous Antiblackness of the Social World and Social Theory

MOON-KIE JUNG AND JOÃO H. COSTA VARGAS In Dance Cadaverous, Moon-Kie Jung and João H. Costa Vargas argue that the modern social world and modern social theory are foundationally antiblack. Antiblackness, the ontological exclusion inaugurated by racial slavery, persists while social theorists reproduce the exclusion, missing and misrecognizing this profoundly antisocial predicament at the heart of modernity. Across three historical moments—antebellum, Jim Crow, and contemporary—Jung and Vargas offer fundamental critiques of antiblackness, putting under scrutiny humanist and posthumanist social theories, science and technology studies, agency, genocide, racism, people-of-color intersectionality, and environmental justice. Drawing on radical Black study, freedom struggles, and jazz improvisation, they propose antisociology and abolitionist antipolitics as paths forward to provincialize and leave behind the modern social world. Moon-Kie Jung teaches sociology and antisociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. João H. Costa Vargas teaches Black study and anthropology at the University of California, Riverside.

February 2027 168 pages Black studies/Social Theory Rights: World

Mundus Imaginalis World Literatures After Phantom Empires

HAMID DABASHI In Mundus Imaginalis, Hamid Dabashi exposes the Eurocentric worldview underlying the concept of world literature and maps an alternative vision in a centerless, pluralist world. Drawing on comparisons to the Persian literary tradition, Dabashi shows how imperial pasts cast a long and distorting shadow on cultural presents. Imperial imaginations outlast empires themselves, leaving “phantom empires” that perpetuate particular geographies of the world and arbitrate the literary. The Eurocentric idea of world literature domesticates and provincializes alternative ideas and conceptions, casting them as national allegories precisely at a time when Europe itself has been exposed for its own provinciality. Drawing on the classical Persian notion of the “imaginal world,” or mundus imaginalis, Dabashi retrieves a metaphysical foregrounding of worldly literature, charting a trajectory of thinkers whose literary imagination does not align with political desires for conquest, calculation, and consumption. Mundus Imaginalis shows how this imaginal world which gives root to all aesthetic acts maps an entirely distinct world of creative imagination.

February 2027 272 pages Literary studies Rights: World

Hamid Dabashi is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is author of over twenty-five books, including Reversing the Colonial Gaze, Authority in Islam, and Truth and Narrative.

Duke University Press dukeupress.edu

The Price of Living The Stories We Tell About the Poor

S. SHANKAR In The Price of Living, S. Shankar investigates popular and global understandings of poverty through what he calls cultural fictions. Engaging powerful, public, invented stories about the poor, from the Bollywood classic Deewaar to the Parable novels of Octavia Butler, and drawing from thinkers like B. R. Ambedkar, Angela Davis, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Antonio Gramsci, Shankar explores depictions of destitution alongside narratives of poverty that present escape and resistance. Shankar urges a public humanities perspective on poverty through readings of novels and films from Africa, India, and the United States. Using humanistic methodologies that challenge social scientific and policy approaches, he unveils how poverty circulates in the cultural imaginary politically and morally, leading his argument to abolitionism. The Price of Living is a wide-ranging introduction to poverty discourse and an urgent call for poverty abolition.

February 2027 264 pages Literary studies/Cultural studies Rights: World

S. Shankar is Professor of English at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and editor of the literary journal Mānoa. He is author of several books of criticism and fiction, including Flesh and Fish Blood and Ghost in the Tamarind.

Companion Spirits More-Than-Secular Journeys in More-Than-Human Worlds

MAYANTHI L. FERNANDO In Companion Spirits, Mayanthi L. Fernando draws readers into stories of the more-than-human, expanding the concept beyond animals and plants to the spirits that surround us. She argues that the ways of thinking about, making, and being in the world that have produced the Anthropocene —the idea that nature is inert, or that human mastery of the universe is possible—are effects of secularity. Drawing on autobiography, historiography, ethnography, theology, speculative fiction, nature writing, and more, Fernando examines the nexus of the Anthropocene and secularity and accounts for more-than-human worlds in more-than-secular ways. In so doing, she offers a counter-anthropology of the secular, tracking submerged sensibilities that do not adhere to dominant norms about science and religion, spirit and matter, reality and illusion.

March 2027 256 pages Philosophy Rights: World

Mayanthi L. Fernando is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism and coeditor of Trouillot Remixed: The Michel-Rolph Trouillot Reader, both published by Duke University Press.

Transmedial Exposure Toward an Experimental Humanities

ERIN GRAFF ZIVIN In Transmedial Exposure, Erin Graff Zivin analyzes what happens when artistic works of different mediums transform through influence, adaptation, translation, or distortion. Graff Zivin uses the conceptual thought of Emmanuel Levinas as her starting point to define exposure as that which unsettles the sovereignty of the self and reveals alterity as internal rather than external to subjectivity. Graff Zivin investigates experimental works of art in dozens of mediums from across the Americas and Europe, showing each autonomous work, discipline, or sensory experience to be constitutively relational, heteronomous, and exposed: philosophy to music, narrative to film, performance to documentation, movement to montage, sound to touch. Drawing on continental philosophy, critical theory, Black thought, and media, film, music, and sound studies, Transmedial Exposure advances an experimental, interdisciplinary approach to the humanities that foregrounds embodied and sensorial thought while insisting on its far-reaching ethical and political consequences.

May 2027 296 pages Literary studies/Cultural studies Rights: World

Erin Graff Zivin is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. She is the author of The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary, also published by Duke University Press.

The Edible and the Endangered Animals, Empire, Extinction

JOHN LEVI BARNARD In The Edible and the Endangered, John Levi Barnard traces the entwined histories of US imperialism, the industrial food system, and global ecological calamity. Interrogating conventional distinctions between the animals we eat and those we protect, Barnard reveals the tangled relations between a mainstream environmentalism concerned with the preservation of endangered species and the industrial animal food system that drives their endangerment. Through a rich and eclectic archive of literary and cultural productions, Barnard shows how foods ranging from the Thanksgiving turkey to the Chicken McNugget have come to be viewed as essential to both material existence and national identity in the United States, even as they have contributed significantly to a planetary ecological emergency. Despite the grim realities of climate change and mass extinction, The Edible and the Endangered holds out hope for a better world, demonstrating how understanding the historical emergence of these human-animal relations can help bring about a just and sustainable future for humans and animals alike.

March 2027 270 pages Environmental Humanities/American studies Rights: World

John Levi Barnard is Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Duke University Press dukeupress.edu

Protein The Making of a Nutritional Superstar

SAMANTHA KING AND GAVIN WEEDON Protein is everywhere—praised as a muscle builder, a weight-loss miracle, an anti-aging elixir, and the catch-all solution for everything from exercise recovery to global malnutrition. In Protein, Samantha King and Gavin Weedon argue that protein’s rise to nutritional superstardom has less to do with human dietary needs and more to do with how its indeterminate, adhesive qualities are marshalled towards commercial, scientific, and social imperatives. Tracing its path from nineteenth-century biochemistry to the status it enjoys today, they expose how protein has been marketed as a cure for global hunger, repackaged as an eco-friendly meat alternative, and wielded as a symbol of masculinity in the fitness industry. From whey waste in industrial farming to longevity drugs for aging bodies, Protein unpacks the myths behind the macronutrient and challenges what we think we know about food, health, and the forces that shape our diets.

March 2026 216 pages Science studies/Nutrition Rights: World, excluding Japanese and Turkish

Samantha King is Professor in the School of Kinesiology & Health Studies at Queen’s University and the author of Messy Eating and Pink Ribbons, Inc. Gavin Weedon is Associate Professor of Sociology of Sport, Health and the Body at Nottingham Trent University.

Abolition Archives, Feminist Futures KATHI WEEKS

Abolition Archives, Feminist Futures takes up the work of three iconic feminist thinkers— Angela Davis, Shulamith Firestone, and Donna Haraway—to ask how each author’s vision of work, the family, and the carceral state can expand contemporary feminism’s ability to structurally analyze social problems. Kathi Weeks examines the archive of this unexpected collection of Marxist feminists whose works are united by their abolitionist approaches, arguing that feminism can gain a broader constituency by taking up anti-capitalist critique and praxis. Across the book’s chapters, Weeks recontextualizes well-known feminist texts in a new and original light, bringing their insight from the past into the present and future of abolitionist politics. Kathi Weeks is Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University and the author of The Problem with Work, published by Duke University Press, and Constituting Feminist Subjects.

March 2026 288 pages Feminist Theory/Marxism Rights: World, excluding Turkish

Decolonial Becoming Immobility, Indigeneity, and Disability in Transpacific Korea

JEONG EUN ANNABEL WE Decolonial Becoming reimagines decolonization by centering questions of Indigeneity, disability, and the settler-diaspora in modern Korea from the 1930s to the present. Jeong Eun Annabel We traces the ways that South Korean military and economic practices in the Pacific have functioned as a sub-empire of US settler colonialism and how South Korea’s nationalist ideology of monoethnicity as Indigeneity under US and Japanese occupations have come at the expense of myriad Indigenous and disabled peoples. Arguing that Korea must grapple with its place in this transpacific colonial order, We challenges the binary of mobility as freedom and immobility as unfreedom through what she calls “decolonial becoming,” a polyrhythmic theory of dialectics in which immobility is a condition of occupation as well as a critical site of relationality. She places Asian, diasporic, and transpacific theories and literatures of decolonization in conversation with Caribbean and Latin American decolonial thought and Native and Indigenous Studies to show how immobility can offer a means of unlearning settler colonial logics.

January 2027 240 pages Postcolonial and Colonial studies/Asian studies Rights: World

Jeong Eun Annabel We is Assistant Professor of Asian Languages and Cultures at Northwestern University.

National Greens The Natures of Korean Golf

RACHAEL MIYUNG JOO In National Greens, Rachael Miyung Joo details the rise of golf as a global Korean cultural project in the twenty-first century. While courses began as exclusive domains of the privileged hidden from public view, the sport is now a visible cultural practice popular across communities in South Korea and the Korean diaspora. Joo aligns this transformation of golfing with shifts in Korean cultural formations, like the rising significance of leisure culture in everyday life, the globalization of popular Korean media celebrity, and technological advances. She also explores the environmental and political repercussions of the sport’s proliferation as an influx in physical courses radically alter geographies and ecosystems while activist attempts to block or slow construction have largely proven ineffective. Highlighting the growth of golf in South Korea, its functions in imperialism and migration, and the effects of golf technologies, National Greens illustrates the game’s symbolic power in shaping ideas of leisure, landscape, environment, nation, and identity.

May 2027 264 pages Sports/Asian studies Rights: World

Rachel Miyung Joo is Professor of American Studies at Middlebury College and is author of Transnational Sport: Gender, Media, and Global Korea, also published by Duke University Press.

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Backlist Highlights The Intimacies of Four Continents LISA LOWE

Reading across archives, canons, and continents, Lisa Lowe examines the relationships between Europe, Asia, and the Americas in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries. She argues that Western liberal ideology, African slavery, Asian indentured labor, colonialism and trade must be understood as being mutually constitutive. June 2015 World History/Postcolonial and Colonial studies 13,000 lifetime paperback sales Rights: World, excluding Chinese(s) (The Commercial Press)

Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory PATRICIA HILL COLLINS

Collins offers a set of analytical tools for those wishing to develop intersectionality's capability to theorize social inequality in ways that would facilitate social change. August 2019 Sociology/Gender and Sexuality/Theory and Philosophy 10,100 lifetime paperback sales Rights: World, excluding German (Unrast Verlag); Japanese (Keiso Shobo); Czech (Karolinum Press); Portuguese (Boitempo) Previously licensed in Italian

On the Inconvenience of Other People LAUREN BERLANT

Berlant continues to explore our affective engagement with the world, focusing on the encounter with and the desire for the bother of other people and objects, showing that to be driven toward attachment is to desire to be inconvenienced. September 2022 Theory and Philosophy/Gender and Sexuality/Literary studies 7,900 lifetime paperback sales Rights: World, excluding Italian (Uttunul); Korean (Bookhouse)

Insurgent Visions Feminism, Justice, Solidarity

CHANDRA TALPADE MOHANTY Exploring methods to radically transform everyday life, Chandra Talpade Mohanty presents insurgent feminism—a theory and praxis with which to contest and replace the imperialist, heteronormative, and racialized practice of violence grounded in gender relations. September 2025 Gender and Sexuality/Theory and Philosophy/Activism 655 lifetime paperback sales Rights: World, excluding Italian (Meltemi); Japanese (Kashiwashobo); English South Asia (Zubaan)

Backlist Highlights Terrorist Assemblages (10th Anniversary edition) Homonationalism in Queer Times

JASBIR K. PUAR Puar argues that configurations of sexuality, race, gender, nation, class, and ethnicity are realigning in relation to contemporary forces of securitization, counterterrorism, and nationalism. December 2017 Gender and Sexuality/American studies/Cultural studies 18,400 lifetime paperback sales (first and anniversary editions combined) Rights: World, excluding Japanese (Kadensha); Portuguese (Crocodilo Edicoes; Brazil, non-exclusive world, excluding Portugal); Korean (Sechang Publishing)

The Right to Maim Debility, Capacity, Disability

JASBIR K. PUAR Puar continues her pathbreaking work on the liberal state, sexuality, and biopolitics to theorize the production of disability, using Israel's occupation of Palestine as an example of how settler colonial states rely on liberal frameworks of disability to maintain control of bodies and populations. November 2017 Disability studies/Gender and Sexuality/Sociology 10,500 lifetime paperback sales Rights: World, excluding Spanish (Bellaterra); Portuguese (Crocodilo Edicoes; Brazil, non-exclusive world, excluding Portugal)

On Decoloniality Concepts, Analytics, Praxis

WALTER D. MIGNOLO AND CATHERINE E. WALSH Mignolo and Walsh introduce the concept of decoloniality by providing a theoretical overview and discussing concrete examples of decolonial projects in action. June 2018 Theory and Philosophy/Postcolonial and Colonial studies 9,400 lifetime paperback sales Rights: World, excluding Italian (Lit Edizioni); Turkish

The Darker Side of Western Modernity Global Futures, Decolonial Options

WALTER D. MIGNOLO Mignolo offers a new theorization of Western modernity, arguing that modernity is a complex matrix of power that has been created and sustained by colonialism from the Renaissance to the present. December 2011 Theory and Philosophy/Postcolonial and Colonial studies 6,700 lifetime paperback sales Rights: World, excluding Turkish Previously licensed in Chinese (s) and Korean

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