Fordham University Press Spring 2025

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS SPRING 2025

GENERAL INTEREST

“The first major biography of Alice Austen to appear in nearly fifty years. Yochelson offers a new and compelling appraisal of this significant woman photographer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, integrating Austen’s intimate woman-centered life with her evolving photography.”

—KATHY PEISS, ROY F. AND JEANNETTE P. NICHOLS PROFESSOR EMERITA OF AMERICAN HISTORY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

“An engaging, lively, and insightful look at the life and work of photographer Alice Austen, a pioneering figure in women’s and lesbian history whose story has not been well-told until now. Yochelson carefully and thoughtfully assesses Austen’s life as a moving and revealing lens on the place of women in the United States and New York in a period of dramatic change.”

Too Good to Get Married

The Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austen B O N NI E YO C H ELSO N FO R EWOR D BY VICTORIA MU NRO A N D JESS I CA B. PHIL L IPS 288 pages, 8 x 10, 142 b/w illustrations 9781531509507, Hardback, $39.95 (HC), £32.00 Simultaneous electronic edition available M AY New York City & Regional | LGBTQ Studies | History

—STEPHEN VIDER, AUTHOR OF THE QUEERNESS OF HOME: GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND THE POLITICS OF DOMESTICITY AFTER WORLD WAR II

Explore Gilded Age New York through the lens of Alice Austen, who captured the social rituals of New York’s leisured class and the bustling streets of the modern city. Celebrated as a queer artist, she was this and much more Alice Austen (1866–1952) lived at Clear Comfort, her grandparent’s Victorian cottage on Staten Island, which is now a National Historic Landmark. As a teenager, she devoted herself to photography, recording what she called “the larky life” of tennis matches, yacht races, and lavish parties.

When she was 25 and expected to marry, Austen used her camera to satirize gender norms by posing with her friends in their undergarments and in men’s clothes, “smoking” cigarettes, and feigning drunkenness. As she later remarked, she was “too good to get married.” Austen embraced the rebellious spirit of the “New Woman,” a moniker given to those who defied expectations by pursuing athletics, higher education, or careers. She had romantic affairs with women, and at 31, she met Gertrude Tate, who became her life partner. Briefly, Austen considered becoming a professional photographer. She illustrated Bicycling for Ladies, a guide written by her friend Violet Ward, and she explored the workingclass neighborhoods of Manhattan to produce a portfolio, “Street Types of New York.” Rejecting the taint of commerce, however, she remained within the confines of elite society with Tate by her side.

Although interest in Austen has accelerated since 2017, when the Alice Austen House was designated a national site of LGBTQ history, the only prior book on Austen was published in 1976.

Copiously illustrated, Too Good to Get Married fills the need for a fresh and deeply researched look at this skillful and witty photographer. Through analysis of Austen’s photographs, Yochelson illuminates the history of American photography and the history of sexuality.

B O N N I E YO C H E L SO N is a former Curator of Prints and Photographs at the Museum of the City of New York and an established historian of New York City’s photographic history. Her notable works include Jacob A. Riis: Revealing New York’s Other Half, Alfred Stieglitz New York, and Berenice Abbott: Changing New York.

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GENERAL INTEREST

Here Down on Dark Earth

Loss and Remembrance in New York City PH O TO GR A PHS AND I NT RO D UCT I ON BY LARRY RACIOPPO ESSAYS BY C LI FFO RD THOMPSO N A N D JA N R A M I REZ 208 pages, 12 x 9, 330 color illustrations 9781531509491, Hardback, $49.95 (HC), £39.00 Simultaneous electronic edition available MA RC H New York City & Regional | Photography | Sociology

“Death is an unavoidable reality, that we all will inevitably face. Though our way of honoring one’s passing may differ according to our culture, race, creed, or religion, the pain of losing someone can be devastating and life-changing. Larry Racioppo’s poignant photographs and words give life to those who are no longer physically present.”

—JAMEL SHABAZZ, PHOTOGRAPHER

“Larry Racioppo’s photographs take you to the heart of the commemorative impulse—its diverse expressions and the passion behind them. The commission of official memorials should start here.”

—HARRIET F. SENIE, AUTHOR OF MONUMENTAL CONTROVERSIES: MOUNT RUSHMORE, FOUR PRESIDENTS, AND OUR QUEST FOR NATIONAL IDENTITY

“Here Down on Dark Earth is a brilliant book, equal parts heartbreak and beauty. With an abundance of elegance and grace, Larry Racioppo has captured the ways in which New Yorkers grieve, how the memories of their loved ones are preserved, and how the dead go on living in this city long after they’re gone. I will not soon forget these photographs.”

—SAÏD SAYRAFIEZADEH, AUTHOR OF AMERICAN ESTRANGEMENT

“Larry Racioppo’s photographs remind us of the deep human desire to remember the departed. With an unerring eye he captures diverse memorials created by New Yorkers on city streets that endure as powerful expressions of loss and love. Take a walk with Racioppo’s Here Down on Dark Earth and discover a New York you probably never really noticed before.”

—DEBORAH DASH MOORE, AUTHOR OF WALKERS IN THE CITY: JEWISH STREET PHOTOGRAPHERS OF MIDCENTURY NEW YORK 4

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Discover New York’s poignant memorials through powerful photographs capturing everything from fleeting tributes to enduring monuments The photographs in Here Down on Dark Earth document the many ways New Yorkers express their intertwined feelings of loss and remembrance. The famous and the unknown, the rich and the poor, meet the same fate, but how they are mourned and remembered varies greatly. New York City’s monuments and memorials are large and small, civic and personal, traditional and vernacular, planned and spontaneous. Some commemorate a significant event such as the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, others the death of a single child hit by a stray bullet. A memorial of stone and steel dedicated to deceased WWII veterans from a church parish may outlast a painted Rest-In-Peace (RIP) memorial wall for a slain teenager. Still, both grow out of the feeling of loss and a desire to preserve the memory of departed loved ones.

As Racioppo traveled throughout New York City, he became increasingly aware of the impermanence of these memorials. The paint eventually peels, and the image gradually disappears.

Sanitation workers remove the rotted toys and flowers. Small and personal, or large and communal, created by professionals or amateurs, the memorials in Here Down on Dark Earth express a powerful sense of loss and connection. Throughout the book, the author’s contextual notes accompany the poignant photographs depicting these expressions of remembrance.

L A R RY R AC I O P P O , born in South Brooklyn in 1947, has been documenting New York City through his lens since 1971. His work is featured in the collections of the Museum of the City of New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Public Library, El Museo del Barrio, and the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. His previous books include Coney Island Baby, B-Ball NYC, and Brooklyn Before: Photographs, 1971–1983. Learn more at www.larryracioppo.com.

C L I F F O R D T H O M P SO N is an award-winning Brooklyn-based writer and artist. His works

include What It Is, exploring racial and personal identity. Thompson has received the Whiting Writers’ Award and his essay “La Bohème” was selected for the Pushcart Prize Anthology. He contributes to major publications, teaches creative nonfiction, and exhibits his paintings at New York’s Blue Mountain Gallery.

JAN RAMIREZ has been the Chief Curator and Director of Collections at the National September

11 Memorial & Museum since 2006, where she oversees the preservation and interpretation of artifacts that memorialize the September 11 attacks and their aftermath.

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GENERAL INTEREST

An Ordinary White My Antiracist Education DAV I D ROED I GER 256 pages, 18 b/w illustrations 9781531509576, Hardback, $27.95 (HC), £21.99 Simultaneous electronic edition available MA RC H Memoir | American Studies | Race & Ethnic Studies

“David Roediger knows that anti-racists are made, not born. By examining his own personal history, he reveals that the path to militant antiracism is crooked, halting, bound up with the injuries of class, the perjuries of gender, and the vagaries of location. Honest, tragic, funny, An Ordinary White is neither ordinary nor white. It is blues, confronting and shaking off the devil we know.”

—ROBIN D. G. KELLEY, AUTHOR OF FREEDOM DREAMS: THE BLACK RADICAL IMAGINATION

“A thoroughly engrossing narrative, David Roediger’s An Ordinary White: My Antiracist Education is honest, warm, and nuanced. Roediger takes us from the sundown towns of his youth, through his educations—formal and political—to our current dismal time of HWCUs (read the book to find out). Yet he ends, pro-Grinchly, with his faith in change from below and the promise of a vital labor movement.”

—NELL IRVIN PAINTER, AUTHOR OF THE HISTORY OF WHITE PEOPLE

“An Ordinary White is an extraordinary memoir of a historian honing his craft while participating in grassroots organizing and establishing (or not!) the subfield of ‘critical whiteness studies.’ Part autobiography, cultural analysis, and social history, this book strums with honesty, humor, compassion, and insight.”

—TIYA MILES, NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNING AUTHOR OF ALL THAT SHE CARRIED: THE JOURNEY OF ASHLEY’S SACK, A BLACK FAMILY KEEPSAKE

“This intellectual autobiography is a treasure. Roediger lived through times and locations in which race has been a fundamental site of social struggle, contest, transformation, and retrenchment. His observations and analyses are moving, affecting, and important.”

—LISA LOWE, AUTHOR OF THE INTIMACIES OF FOUR CONTINENTS 6

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“In this expansive memoir, David Roediger reveals how ordinary white lives include many invitations and opportunities to reckon with the pervasiveness of white advantage, to see the ways in which the dominant racial order can make even those with advantages miserable, and to learn from racialized communities ways to build a new, better, and more just world.”

—GEORGE LIPSITZ, AUTHOR OF THE POSSESSIVE INVESTMENT IN WHITENESS

“Bursting with humor, insight, and a sprawling cast of characters, An Ordinary White illustrates how ideas and radical activity shape and reshape each other across the terrain of everyday life and during much rarer moments of radical mass upheaval.”

—DANIEL WIDENER, AUTHOR OF THIRD WORLDS WITHIN: MULTIETHNIC MOVEMENTS AND TRANSNATIONAL SOLIDARITY

A prize-winning historian details his intellectual and political evolution Written by the author of the landmark book The Wages of Whiteness and one of the key figures in the critical study of race and racism in America, An Ordinary White is the life story of the historian and radical American writer, David Roediger.

With wry wit and keen observation, Roediger chronicles his intellectual and political evolution from growing up in his southern Midwest sundown town to becoming a leading figure in working-class history and Whiteness studies. A latecomer to the New Left, a longtime figure in the Chicago Surrealist Group, and part of the collective reviving of the Charles Kerr Company—the world’s oldest socialist publisher—Roediger captures events and characters absent from standard histories of the left as well as such icons of resistance as Studs Terkel, Noel Ignatiev, Angela Davis, Toni Morrison, and C. L. R. James.

A direct response to the venom, effectiveness, and durability of white nationalist attacks on Critical Race Theory, this memoir describes Roediger’s youth as “ordinary,” both in its unfolding in a lower-middle-class family of southern Illinois workers and in the depth of white racism he was taught. He considers himself “saved” by social movements of his time, including those of labor, against empire, and, above all, the Black Freedom struggle. Public education, dissenting currents in Catholicism, knowledge of the importance of good union jobs, and generative impulses in sports and music helped make his salvation stick.

Roediger’s knowledge of white advantage came from his personal everyday experiences, but among people ordinary enough to guard against the mistaken notion that poor and working-class whites are uniquely the culprits of white nationalism. Importantly he argues against the characterization of them as intractably racist or incapable of understanding the advantages of whiteness.

A teacher in state universities for forty years, Roediger has tirelessly fought against their being hollowed out by corporate values and austerity. In An Ordinary White, he writes movingly of these experiences and what we have lost in our institutions whose soaring rhetoric outstrips any ability to defend education or racial justice.

DAVID ROEDIGER is a Foundation Distinguished Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Kansas. His books include The Wages of Whiteness, which won the Merle Curti Prize from the Organization of American Historians, and Class, Race and Marxism, which won the Working-Class Studies Association’s C. L. R. James Prize.

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GENERAL INTEREST

“Concerned about fascism’s rising popularity in the United States? How to Read Like an Antifascist can help you fight back. While historicizing the present, Wannamaker shows us how critical reading can counter the seductions of authoritarian narratives and, in so doing, how we can fight the accelerating assaults on public education, history, and civil rights. Read it. And bring a copy to your next school board meeting.”

—PHILIP NEL, AUTHOR OF WAS THE CAT IN THE HAT BLACK?

How to Read Like an Anti-Fascist Storytelling and Narrative Literacy for Young People

AN NET T E WA N NAMAKER 224 pages, 4 b/w illustration 9781531509804, Paperback, $24.95 (TP), £19.99 9781531509798, Hardback, $90.00 (SDT), £74.00 Simultaneous electronic edition available J U NE Education | Children’s Studies | Politics

On the urgent need to promote critical reading skills amidst rising authoritarianism Children’s author Philip Pullman famously said that “There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children’s book.” While the recent rise of fascist ideology in the United States might seem a subject too large and adult to be dealt with in literature for children or teens, Annette Wannamaker proposes in How to Read Like an Anti-Fascist that there are books aimed at future generations which critique and counter fascist propaganda and mythmaking.

Works of literature can reflect fascist ideology and promote it as well, but Wannamaker proposes that some books also offer tools for understanding it. Books written for beginners can introduce readers to complex concepts, break big ideas into manageable parts, and teach readers how to read the world outside of the book. Antifascist books are ones that analyze fascistic rhetoric and storytelling, educate about America’s long history of authoritarianism, and highlight various facets of fascism such as scapegoating others and reasserting patriarchal power.

From “The Emperor’s New Clothes” and the tales of Superman to Mildred Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, the 1619 Project and contemporary works such as All Boys Aren’t Blue and Donald Builds the Wall, Wannamaker shows how the ethos of authoritarianism is characterized by a strict hierarchy that places children at its very bottom. In doing so, she argues convincingly that books written for young people can provide a particular view from the bottom, a perspective well-suited to interrogating systems of power.

ANNETTE WANNAMAKER is Professor of Children’s Literature in the Department of English

at Eastern Michigan University. She has served as North American Editor-in-Chief of Children’s Literature in Education and as President of the Children’s Literature Association. She is the author of Boys in Children’s Literature and Popular Culture: Masculinity, Abjection, and the Fictional Child.

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GENERAL INTEREST

“After taking office during a time of financial crisis and deep division, Mayor Flynn helped bring people together to solve problems and advance the common good across the city’s neighborhoods. From historic housing reforms and the creation of thousands of good jobs, to compassionately addressing homelessness and the AIDS epidemic, to improving parks and recreation facilities, to balancing the budget, Mayor Flynn’s administration made Boston better, fairer, and stronger.”

—PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON

“This book uncovers the complex challenges of how Mayor Ray Flynn advanced racial unity in Boston and shared the benefits of growth. The social revolution in the city that established a more progressive politics resulted in the election of Mayor Michelle Wu. It is a must-read for community organizers and civic leaders.”

—HUBIE JONES, DEAN EMERITUS BOSTON UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF SOCIAL WORK AND BLACK CIVIC ACTIVIST

How Mayor Ray Flynn’s leadership and a coalition of activists transformed Boston, challenging established powers and setting new precedents for urban governance

The Battle for Boston

How Mayor Ray Flynn and Community Organizers Fought Racism and Downtown Power Brokers D O N GI LLI S FO R EWORD BY M AYOR B I LL D E BLASIO 432 pages, 39 b/w illustrations and 15 charts 9781531509835, Hardback, $34.95 (HC), £27.99 Simultaneous electronic edition available Polis: Fordham Series in Urban Studies A P R IL Urban Studies | Politics | Race & Ethnic Studies

The Battle for Boston captures the remarkable era under Mayor Ray Flynn, whose election in 1983 marked the beginning of a profound shift in the city’s political and social landscape. Don Gillis, a Flynn senior advisor, chronicles the inspiring journey of a city that dared to challenge the entrenched power brokers—including developers, landlords, and banking industry leaders—through powerful grassroots campaigns.

Gillis provides a vivid portrayal of the political dynamics and the coalition of community organizers, neighborhood leaders, and residents that played a pivotal role in rejecting the business-backed growth machine and the city’s historically divisive racial politics. This book charts the strategic battles fought within the corridors of power and on the streets and highlights the substantial impact these movements had on the city’s governance and power dynamics.

In a historic turn, in 2021, Michelle Wu became the first woman, person of color, and AsianAmerican elected Mayor of Boston. Wu’s victory on a similarly progressive platform as Flynn underscores the enduring relevance of his legacy, signaling a hopeful future for more inclusive and effectively governed cities.

The Battle for Boston poses a critical inquiry: Can cities truly embrace progressivism and govern effectively in the twenty-first century? This qualitative narrative study is a testament to the possibility of such governance, driven by the indomitable spirit of those who strive for a fair and equitable society.

DON GILLIS, PhD , is a community organizer and longtime activist in Boston. He has advised mayors of several cities and led economic and workforce development agencies. He holds a PhD in urban sociology and the sociology of education and an MA in community sociology from Boston University. He has taught sociology courses such as Boston’s People and Neighborhoods, Race and Ethnicity, Occupations and the Workplace, Racial and Social Inequality in Schools, and the Sociology of HBO’s The Wire.

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ANNOUNCING A NEW SERIES CUTAWAYS

Series Editors: Erika Balsom (King’s College London) and Genevieve Yue (The New School) “This new series of small-format books focused on cinematic motifs, themes, and devices represents something new and exciting in English-language writing on film” —DENNIS LIM, ARTISTIC DIRECTOR, NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL

“Featuring some of the field’s most exciting scholars and critics, Cutaways is a welcome addition to film writing. The series promises to expand the ways cinema is conceived, consumed, and received, in ways that parallel the contemporary situation of cinema.”

— S ARAH KELLER, AUTHOR OF ANXIOUS CINEPHILIA: PLEASURE AND PERIL AT THE MOVIES

Cutaways is a series of pocket-sized books by and for cinephiles. Each volume offers a journey through the history of cinema guided by a single motif or formal device. Adopting an essayistic style free of jargon and imbued with each author’s unique voice, the books create a space for intellectually engaged and broadly accessible cinephilia, bringing together expertise, eclecticism, provocation, and passion.

Cutaways offers inspiring and unlikely conversations with and among films. Each volume considers popular and lesser-known films from around the world, ranging from early cinema to contemporary releases, and from Hollywood to documentary and the avant-garde. Breaking with the categories of author, nation, and period that govern so much writing on cinema, the motif-based approach allows for classic films to appear in a new light and for relatively unknown films to challenge the inherited narratives of film history.

Cutaways inhabits a space between academia and a wider public sphere, bringing together contributors who aim to advance film criticism as a domain of vibrant intellectual inquiry. It allows our best film writers to experiment with form and voice. While the series is grounded in a commitment to cinema, it conceives of filmmaking as a portal through which to consider culture, history, and politics.

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The Prop

E L E NA GOR FIN K EL A N D JO HN DAV ID R HOD ES

176 pages, 5 x 7, 9 b/w illustrations 9781531509613, Paperback, $19.95 (TP), £15.99 9781531509606, Hardback, $70.00 (SDT), £58.00 Simultaneous electronic edition available M A RC H Cinema & Media Studies

“A beautiful object in itself, Gorfinkel’s and Rhodes’s inspiring book brings to life the object in film.

It gives the prop its deserved close-up and in doing so unravels a fascinating new way of looking at cinema.” —JOANNA HOGG, DIRECTOR OF THE SOUVENIR

A fresh look at film through its invisible visible objects What are film props? What do they do? This book answers these questions by a close attention to those material objects that are used to construct cinematic worlds.

From the domestic bric-a-brac of Sirk’s melodramas to the crystal egg of Risky Business, props are the material furniture of cinema’s diegetic reality: both narrative agents and the stuff of mise-en-scène. And yet, the prop has rarely been taken as an object of analysis in its own right.

This book begins by tracing the prop’s curious but unacknowledged role in film theory, before proceeding to a series of theoretical speculations and close readings that bring the prop into focus. Across a variety of genres, modes, and historical contexts—studio filmmaking, art cinema, adult and avant-garde films—Gorfinkel and Rhodes argue that the prop is nothing less than a condensation of how labor, subjection, value, and instrumentality underwrite the very conditions of cinema.

EL EN A GORFINKEL is Reader in Film Studies at King’s College London.

JO H N DAV ID RHODES is Professor of Film Studies and Visual Culture at the University of Cambridge.

Hotels

144 pages, 5 x 7, 8 b/w illustrations 9781531509651, Paperback, $19.95 (TP), £15.99 9781531509644, Hardback, $70.00 (SDT), £58.00 Simultaneous electronic edition available

JU L ES O’DWY ER

A PR I L Cinema & Media Studies

“Hotels ingeniously charts the trajectories of sight and site in the cinematic hotel, that place where the illicit transpires and fantasies are projected. From early silent shorts to the Chelsea Hotel, from Claire Denis to Atom Egoyan to Chantal Akerman, O’Dwyer shows how films and hotels have mutually constituted one another across a shared history. This slim volume offers a new way to imagine both cinema and its spaces.” —B. RUBY RICH, AUTHOR OF NEW QUEER CINEMA:

THE DIRECTOR’S CUT

Exploring film through its living spaces From Marienbad to the Bates Motel, cinematic hotels are more than a mere backdrop to a film’s action. They actively scaffold the formal, aesthetic, and narrative possibilities of cinema. This book takes a journey through spaces of temporary dwelling—hotels, inns, and motels—to delve into the dynamics and contradictions that structure modern life.

Along the way, O’Dwyer considers questions of plot and eroticism, labor and globalization, and the ethics and economics of hospitality. Drawing on a broad array of films from European art cinema to experimental adult media, and placing cinema into dialogue with film theory and media history, Hotels explores both how and why the hotel has such a strong purchase on the cinematic imaginary.

JUL ES O’ DWYER is Teaching Associate in Film Studies and French at the University of Cambridge.

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“It’s tempting to say that I ‘inhaled’ Like the Sea, except that metaphor seems wrong regarding a work that’s so fluid, so amniotic. And while there’s been ample documentation of the lives and work of some of the most significant figures in postmodern dance, this ‘biography’ expands the possibilities for exploring the ways in which an aesthetic practice is grounded in both political and personal histories. Mavor’s Mary Glass is an uncannily convincing participant in this sphere, and the places where her life and those of ‘real people’ intersect are both illuminating and enthralling.”

—BARBARA BROWNING, AUTHOR OF THE GIFT

An exploration of the mythical Mary Glass—her art, her life, and her times

Like the Sea

Dancing with Mary Glass CA ROL MAVOR 192 pages, 5-1/2 x 8-1/2, 25 b/w illustrations 9781531509545, Paperback, $19.95 (TP), £15.99 9781531509538, Hardback, $70.00 (SDT), £58.00 Simultaneous electronic edition available M AY Art & Visual Culture | Theater & Performance | Fiction

Mary Glass (1946–2021) was an innovative modern dancer and choreographer, quietly instrumental to the San Francisco Bay Area art scene of the 1960s and ’70s—barely known today—admired for her experimental movements based on sounds and images of the Pacific.

As a child, Mary Glass took her first dance class with Anna Halprin on her famed redwood dance deck in Marin County’s Kent Woodlands. Dancing with the blue sky as her ceiling—surrounded by magical madrones and redwoods—the effect on Mary Glass was seismic. Fittingly, Halprin called her classes “dance experiences.”

Mary Glass’s lifestyle, her anxieties, and her dance reflect the human geography of Northern California: Happenings, Zero Population Growth (ZPG), feminism, same-sex love, civil rights, Vietnam, environmentalism. Cascading in the waves of the politics of the time was Mary Glass’s anorexia, an unexpected pregnancy, and her life-long love affair with the Black painter Eliza Vesper.

Today Mary Glass is remembered by an increasingly diminishing handful of devotees. Author Carol Mavor is one of them.

In this daring work of fictocriticism, where “feelings are facts,” Like the Sea asks its readers—just as Anna Halprin asked of each of her young students as they were leaving class—“What are you taking with you from the natural world?”

Halprin’s words will resonate in Mary’s mind her entire lifetime and beyond.

In the after-time of the prescient Mary Glass—with its decline of sea kelp and warm Decembers— Mavor herself considers the Anthropocene, tasting extinction as if swallowing the long-gone abalone mollusks of her own Bay-Area childhood: salty, like the sea, but strangely sweet. And from it, Mavor delivers the reader to the far-away country of the not-so-distant past to help envision a future.

There are no photographs or films of Mary Glass dancing. The life of Mary Glass is nearly forgotten, her memory on the edge of extinction. In meditative, dazzling and lyrical prose, Like the Sea tells us—like the ocean’s music in our ear—we need to remember extinction to imagine our way out of it.

C A RO L M AVO R is Professor Emeritus of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of

Manchester, UK. The most recent of her books are Serendipity: The Afterlife of the Object and Like a Lake: A Story of Uneasy Love and Photography (Fordham, 2020).

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GENERAL SCHOLARLY INTEREST

BEFRIENDS A FAMILY WITH A SPECIAL INTEREST IN A YOUNG BOY, THE MOTIVA­ TION BEHIND HIS SPECIAL ATTENTION IS DIFFICULT TO GRASP, “LIKE WATER SLIPPING THROUGH OUR FINGERS.” CAN A MAN INNOCENTLY LOVE A BOY WHO IS NOT HIS OWN?

C A R O L M AV O R

like a lake

CAROL MAVOR

A Story of Uneasy Love and Photography

Using fiction to reveal the truths about families, communities, art objects, love, and mourning, Like a Lake tells the story of tenyear-old Nico, who lives with his father (an Italian-American architect) and his mother (a Japanese-American sculptor who learned how to draw while interned during World War II). Set in the 1960s, this is a story of aesthetic perfection waiting to be broken. Nico’s mid-century modern house, with its Italian pottery jars along the outside and its interior lit by Japanese lanterns. The elephant-hide gray, fiberglass-reinforced plastic 1951 Eames rocking chair, with metal legs and birch runners. Clam consommé with kombu, giant kelp, yuzu rind, and a little fennel—in each bowl, two clams opened like a pair of butterflies, symbols of the happy couple. Nico’s boyish delight in developing photographs under the red safety light of Coda’s “Floating Zendo”—the darkroom boat that he keeps on Lake Tahoe.

The lives of Nico, his parents, and Coda embody northern California’s postwar landscape, giving way to fissures of alternative lifestyles and poetic visions. Author Carol Mavor addresses the sensuality and complexity of a son’s love for his mother and that mother’s own erotic response to it. The (continued on back flap)

FORDHAM

Like a Lake

A Story of Uneasy Love and Photography CA RO L MAVOR 144 pages, 5- /2 x 8- /2, 17 b/w illustrations 9781531509941, Paperback, $19.95 (TP), £15.99 [Hardback available: 9780823289325] eBook available 1

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JU NE Photography | Gender & Sexuality | Fiction

“Like a Lake is like a novella teasing an essay, or an erotic ghost haunting a fictional memoir, or a negative searching for its lost prints. It is an unnerving question-machine where desire, memory, loss and invention are staged, folded and held, tasted, re-made and undone. It’s a strange, vivid, troubling and beautiful book.”

—MAX PORTER

“Like a Lake is a story of where art comes from, the love and grief held in forms—a house, a cup, a photograph, a stone. The experience of reading this novel is lake-like—a beautiful surface opens, and opens, and opens and ripples with grief.”

—JENNIFER DOYLE, AUTHOR OF HOLD IT AGAINST ME: DIFFICULTY AND EMOTION IN CONTEMPORARY ART

“Like A Lake is . . . like a lake. A famous one, Lake Tahoe, situated on the California/Nevada border, features plot-wise and thematically in the book, almost flowing it together . . . an adventurous, even pioneering, book . . .”

—SOURCE MAGAZINE

A vivid, imaginative response to the sensual and erotic in postwar American photography, with attention to the beauty of the nude, both male and female CAROL MAVOR , Professor Emeritus of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester, UK, is the author of Serendipity: The Afterlife of the Object and Like the Sea (Fordham, Spring 2025).

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“The section titles of Tejada’s intense, harrowing new book are derived from place names, as though the poems marked some sort of periplus, an account of a journey. And indeed, Tejada initiates a journey that begins in the familial and radiates into a world of ‘missing through-lines,’ surveilled borders, of sequestrations and dispossessions. Perhaps more significantly, it is the kaleidoscopic originality of Tejada’s language, its at once precise and vividly sensual chthonic glow, that lights the way for the reader’s own journey by insistently ‘propelling forward a hope.’ ” —FORREST GANDER, AUTHOR OF MOJAVE GHOST

“Tejada’s Carbonate of Copper is valuable and needed, moving from place to perception to meditation, placing meaning and me-ness into a mediated space. His is a poetics of environment creation, where poems are molecular structures, made of the imagination, with an intent of mutual transfiguration.”

Carbonate of Copper RO B E RT O T EJADA 144 pages, 16 b/w illustrations 9781531509705, Paperback, $17.95 (TP), £13.99 Simultaneous electronic edition available A P R IL Poetry | Latinx Studies | Art & Visual Culture

—HOA NGUYEN, AUTHOR OF A THOUSAND TIMES YOU LOSE YOUR TREASURE

Transformative poetry that illuminates migration and memory, giving voice to the unseen and uncounted Written during extended periods in Brownsville, McAllen, and Marfa, Texas, in Carbonate of Copper Roberto Tejada gives voice to unsettled stories from the past, as well as to present-day experiences of custody and displacement. The poems stage scenes adjacent to the U.S.-Mexico border and to the realities of migration warped by jarring political vitriol, bearing witness to past and presentday hazards and sorrows wagered by those in search of asylum. So enabled, these poems make visible not only the infrastructure of militarized surveillance and its detention complex but also the aspiration to justice and mercy and the resilient self-organized order of time for migrants seeking human dignity while awaiting passage to the other side of the dividing line.

The book’s title refers also to a mineral found in azurite and malachite, a color medium that had an impact on art during the first phase of globalization, the ensuing colonial enterprise, and its systems of extraction. Carbonate of copper was less desirable than the deeper ultramarine made from ground lapis lazuli, but Renaissance artists and patrons nonetheless coveted it and prompted a market for the blue derivative used in tempera and oil pigment. The blue powder pigment serves, too, as a form of sorcery: one that would ward off those who deal in injury of the already dispossessed.

Turning his attention to the forced relocation of peoples, the COVID-19 death toll, the encroaching dangers of illiberal rule, the meanings of home and eviction, the power of cultural memory, as well as his artistic forebears, Tejada accounts for the uncounted and those excluded from belonging in voices that tell the cruel fortunes and joyful vitality of human and non-human life forms.

ROBERTO TEJADA is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor at the University of Houston, where he teaches in the Departments of English, Creative Writing, and Art History. He has published numerous volumes of poetry as well as several works of art and media history.

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“Rosalind Morris’s sonorous For Lack of a Dictionary reads like the answer to prayers I don’t quite remember making. But I must have made them. Because, line by line, poem by poem that’s the feeling: thanks. From the beckoning in ‘Memory gives up / what starlight won’t forget’ to the bracing in ‘human order: / everyone burns their witches,’ my thanks to this poet for re-measuring the meeting of metabolic onrush in what’s lyrical with the restraint, deliberate, that knowing and knowledge require.”

—ED PAVLIĆ, AUTHOR OF OUTWARD: ADRIENNE RICH’S EXPANDING SOLITUDES

For Lack of a Dictionary RO SALI N D M OR RIS 80 pages, 5-1/2 x 8-1/2 9781531509736, Paperback, $17.95 (TP), £13.99 Simultaneous electronic edition available A P R IL Poetry

Poetry that weaves personal narratives with deep political insights, masterfully exploring the intricate intersections of history, philosophy, and emotion In this debut collection, renowned scholar Rosalind Morris spans the lyrical landscapes of personal experience and global political dilemmas. Organized into four distinct sections, each featuring seven poems that vary in style and content, For Lack of a Dictionary reflects the diverse facets of human complexity and the struggle to find a language capable of addressing them. Beginning with a mythopoetic exploration of the self and progressing through varied voices and forms—from the epistolary and the erotic to the elegiac—the collection navigates the absences and presences that shape our interpersonal connections. From Homer’s Iliad to Hobbes’s Leviathan, and from the intimate letters of the Rosenbergs to the television broadcasts of lunar landings, Morris revisits epic figures of classical literature with a contemporary voice, concluding with poignant reflections on personal loss and the seductive allure of magical thinking in times of grief.

In the tradition of Adrienne Rich and Muriel Rukeyser, Morris engages in a dialogue that challenges and enlightens, positioning For Lack of a Dictionary as a profound commentary on the intersections of personal and political realms.

ROSA L I N D M O R R I S , Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, is a prolific writer and scholar. Her recent books include Unstable Ground: The Lives, Deaths, and Afterlives of Gold in South Africa and Accounts and Drawings from Underground, co-created with William Kentridge.

Recognized with Rockefeller and Guggenheim fellowships, a Berlin Prize, and residencies at prestigious institutions, as well as film festival prizes, Morris’s academic and creative works traverse disciplinary boundaries with artfulness, courage, and precision. Visit www.rosalindcmorris.com for more.

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“This insightful and enlightening volume, Eamon Grennan’s Nine Irish Plays for Voices, brings the audience or reader through the famine of the nineteenth century up to a more recent conversation featuring an old man in a multiracial and multicultural Ireland reflecting on Ireland’s past and future. This book of plays will be a welcome way for readers and theatrical companies to rethink Irish history, global Irishness, and the present.”

—ELIZABETH BREWER REDWINE, SETON HALL UNIVERSITY

Nine Irish Plays for Voices E AM ON GREN NAN

360 pages, 9 b/w illustrations 9781531509958, Paperback, $24.95 (TP), £19.99 [Hardback available: 9781531502546] eBook Available MA RC H Theater & Performance | Poetry

“This collection of nine plays for voices will be of enormous interest to readers who want to deepen their knowledge of theatre, Irish culture, and the relationship between great literature and society. It provides new perspectives on such well-known figures as James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Peig Sayers—while also offering an innovative approach to Irish history. These plays were written to be performed live, making the book valuable to theatre companies and directors everywhere. But they also work beautifully as dramatic literature—meaning that this is a volume that can be read from cover to cover with pleasure.”

—PATRICK LONERGAN, UNIVERSITY OF GALWAY

A vibrant collection of short plays bringing Irish history and culture alive through an extraordinary collage of documents, songs, poems, and texts In Nine Irish Plays for Voices, award-winning poet Eamon Grennan delves deep into key Irish subjects—big, small, literary, historical, political, biographical—and illuminates them for today’s audiences and readers. These short plays draw from original material centering on important moments in Irish history and the formation of the Irish Republic, such as the Great Famine and the Easter Rising; the lives of Irish literary figures like Yeats, Joyce, and Lady Gregory; and the crucial and life-changing condition of emigration.

EAMON GRENNAN is retired from the Dexter M. Ferry Jr. Chair of English at Vassar College.

The most recent of his thirteen volumes of poetry are Plainchant and There Now. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lannan Foundation Poetry Prize, the Listowel Poetry Prize, the Poetry Now Award for Out of Breath, and the PEN award for poetry in translation for Leopardi: Selected Poems by Giacomo Leopardi.

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WINNER, IPPY BOOK AWARDS, LGBTQ+ FICTION WINNER, 2023 BEST INDIE BOOK AWARD, LGBTQ2 FICTION SHORT LIST, VCU CABELL FIRST NOVELIST AWARD ON LAMBDA LITERARY REVIEW’S SEPTEMBER MOST ANTICIPATED LIST ONE OF QUEER FORTY’S BEST PRIDE READS FOR SUMMER 2023!

“Cahill’s story is an essential reminder of the vicious battle we continue to fight to protect and liberate all of us.”

—BAY AREA REPORTER

“Although a work of fiction, the author has so accurately portrayed the times . . . especially and unreservedly recommended.”

—MIDWEST BOOK REVIEW

Disorderly Men A novel

E DWA R D CA HI LL 320 pages 9781531504458, Paperback, $18.95 (TP), £14.99 [Hardback available: 9781531504441] eBook Available JU NE Fiction | LGBTQ Studies | New York City & Regional

“Cahill keeps us eager to know what’s coming next: what indignities and setbacks his characters are going to endure, what shards of their lives they will be able to hold onto. He does an excellent job of creating distinct, easily identifiable, lifelike dialog, and characters whose different response to their plight are completely believable given the times —THE GAY & LESBIAN REVIEW

“In New York City half a dozen years before Stonewall, gay men knew who they loved but not yet who they were. Cahill brings their world to life in a big-hearted novel of existential suspense. A closeted banker fences with a blackmailer, an English professor searches for a brutalized lover, and a grocery store manager loses his job and his family, and the reader turns the pages faster and faster to find out not just whether these men make it but also how gays became people of integrity at a time when shame was so deeply nested in laws, institutions, and their own psyches. Cahill paints on a grand canvas the internal, individual revolutions that came before the historic one.”

—CALEB CRAIN, AUTHOR OF OVERTHROW AND NECESSARY ERRORS

“A moving and deeply engaging portrait of pre-Stonewall New York gay male communities in crisis. Cahill, while exploring a complex web of classes, social positions and status, and professions, deftly uncovers the emotional and political complexity of the period.

Disorderly Men vividly imagines the tone and texture of a gay world now almost completely gone.”

—MICHAEL BRONSKI, AUTHOR OF A QUEER HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

Three gay men in pre-Stonewall New York City find their fates thrown together in the police raid of a Village bar EDWARD CAHILL is Professor of English at Fordham University. Disorderly Men is his first novel.

Learn more at www.edwardcahill.net.

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“What a gift it is to have these stories from the living master not only of klezmer musicology, but the many worlds of music and language that touch and have been touched by this Jewish diasporic idiom. Feldman demonstrates here, and in a lifetime of performance and documentation, that the truest cosmopolitan is the one richly informed by his own ancestry and the very specific places that have shaped him.”

—JONATHAN BOYARIN, DIANN G. AND THOMAS A. MANN PROFESSOR OF MODERN JEWISH STUDIES, CORNELL UNIVERSITY

“A triumph. Feldman retrieves a forgotten world of global cultures and communities commingling in 1960s and 1970s New York. We meet fascinating immigrant musicians and follow along as a pioneering musician and scholar reflects on the many diasporas that shaped his life and bred his powerful vision of the intertwined European and Asian musical pasts. In a graceful, poetic style enlivened with vivid dialogues, Feldman invites us to retrace his fascinating journey into his role as one of our leading musical minds.”

—JAMES LOEFFLER, AUTHOR OF THE MOST MUSICAL NATION: JEWS AND CULTURE IN THE LATE RUSSIAN EMPIRE

From the Bronx to the Bosphorus Klezmer and Other Displaced Musics of New York WALT ER Z EV F EL DMAN 240 pages, 18 b/w illustrations 9781531509767, Hardback, $34.95 (HC), £27.99 Simultaneous electronic edition available J UNE New York City & Regional | Music | Race & Ethnic Studies

Discover the vibrant journey of music from New York’s melting pot to the mystical shores of the Bosphorus From the Bronx to the Bosphorus explores the vibrant, yet largely concealed, musical culture of New York, tracing its origins to a period when the city served as a crucible for immigrants and their diverse musical expressions. Walter Zev Feldman chronicles his journey through the musical landscapes of post–WWII New York—from the declining world of East European immigrant klezmorim to the dynamic environments of Greek, Armenian, and Caucasian musicians.

These experiences culminate in the klezmer revitalization movement of the late 1970s. Feldman, whose father emigrated from Bessarabia—a region known for its rich interactions among Jewish, Roma, and Greek musicians—connects various musical worlds. From the local Turkish Sephardi synagogue and the Greek Orthodox cathedral in Washington Heights to the lively Armenian and Greek nightclubs of Manhattan, his interactions with a diverse group of musicians, including an Armenian virtuoso who once performed for Stalin and the Shah of Iran, enhance his understanding and appreciation of these interconnected cultures.

Finally, at age twenty-five, in a sense he returned to his father’s shtetl and studied with Dave Tarras, the greatest living klezmer in America, who had learned his key musical lessons in that very same Bessarabian town following World War I. From the Bronx to the Bosphorus is not just a chronicle of music but a poignant examination of the power of music to connect cultures, transcend borders, and preserve the echoes of a nearly vanished world.

WA LT E R Z E V F E L D M A N is a leading researcher in Ottoman Turkish and Jewish music,

instrumental in the 1970s klezmer revival. His notable works include Klezmer: Music, History, and Memory and Music of the Ottoman Court. Feldman has extensively studied the instrumental traditions of Moldova’s klezmer and lautar communities. He is the Academic Director of the Klezmer Institute.

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GENERAL SCHOLARLY INTEREST “Rockin’ the Bronx has a headlong momentum and street-level immediacy, teeming with drama, romance, and politics.”

—PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER

“Pitting the lilt of an Irish brogue against the jazzy rhythm of pimps and drug dealers in the Bronx of the early 1980s, Irish-American author and playwright Kirwan begins this roman a clef with arresting musicality.”

—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

“A tremendous rock n roll saga . . .The prolific Kirwan offers writing about the transformative and curative powers of music and performance that is brilliant on its own, but his lovingly rendered portrait of American and Irish social and political realties in the 1980s is both brutal and magical.”

—LIBRARY JOURNAL

“Larry Kirwan writes with all the charm of his music. This is Angela’s Ashes for a new generation.”

—THOMAS KENEALLY

“Rockin’ the Bronx is a tragic tale of home-from-home and heartbreak. . . . The city that Kirwan presents is so real you can feel the humidity in the air as you read, and the characters are fully-formed and soulful. . . . Well worth a read if you like your pints black and your whiskey Irish.”

—NEW YORK JOURNAL OF BOOKS

Discover the untold story of 1980s Irish New York, where love, politics, and rock ‘n’ roll collide in a gritty urban tale that’s as passionate as it is poignant

Rockin’ the Bronx LA R RY KI RWA N

376 pages, 5-1/4 x 8-1/4 9781531510008, Paperback, $19.95 (TP), £15.99 Simultaneous electronic edition available MA RC H Fiction | Music | Biography

Rockin’ The Bronx vividly transports readers to the vibrant and chaotic world of 1980s Bronx, where Irish immigrants forged a new community amidst the backdrop of political upheaval and cultural transformation. Larry Kirwan, leader of the revolutionary band Black 47, blends drama, passion, and musical evolution into a narrative that captures the essence of an era defined by its challenges and triumphs. Through the eyes of characters like the groundbreaking gay hero, a book-loving, hard-hitting immigrant with IRA roots, and the central couple, Seán and Mary, who navigate this raucous landscape, Kirwan explores the intersecting worlds of personal identity and communal struggle. Set during significant historical moments—the deaths of John Lennon and Bobby Sands, the AIDS crisis, and the birth of new musical movements—this novel not only tells the story of its characters but also of a neighborhood echoing with the rhythms of change. As these Irish immigrants carve out their destinies, they leave behind a legacy of resilience and rebirth, encapsulated in a narrative that moves irrepressibly to the beat of the 1980s. Rockin’ The Bronx is more than a novel; it’s a chronicle of a time when being Irish in New York could mean everything from strapping on a Stratocaster to knocking down walls both structural and cultural.

L A R RY K I RWA N , originally from Wexford, Ireland, is a renowned figure in both music and

literature, based in New York City. He led the influential political rock band Black 47 for 25 years, performing 2500 gigs and releasing 16 albums. Kirwan has authored three novels—Liverpool Fantasy, Rockin’ The Bronx, and Rockaway Blue—a memoir, Green Suede Shoes, and A History of Irish Music.

In theater, he has written or collaborated on twenty-one plays and musicals, notably conceiving Paradise Square, which earned ten Tony Award nominations, including one for himself as co-book writer. An active political voice and former president of Irish American Writers & Artists, Kirwan received the 2022 Eugene O’Neill Lifetime Achievement Award. He also writes for the Irish Echo and hosts Celtic Crush on SiriusXM Satellite Radio.

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“A brave book by a courageous thinker.” —HAYDEN WHITE, AUTHOR OF METAHISTORY “Hailed when it was first published, Giving an Account of Oneself is all the more significant for us now. Butler elegantly executes a double helix of argument that thinks sexuality as dispossession and, at the same time, the ethical demands of this dispossession—against settler-colonial statecraft, against occupation, and toward a political relationality for which we are still fighting.” —JORDY ROSENBERG, AUTHOR OF CONFESSIONS OF THE FOX “Brilliantly argued and beautifully written, Giving an Account of Oneself is destined to become a classi c, a must read for philosophers and students of present-day culture and politics alike.” —HENT DE VRIES, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY “In a time when moral certitude is used to justify the worst violence, Butler’s nuanced reworking of what it means to be ethically responsible to ourselves and to others is welcome indeed.” —DRUCILLA CORNELL, RUTGERS UNIVERSITY

A pathbreaking account of ethics beyond the classically imagined subject, reissued with a new preface

Giving an Account of Oneself Twentieth-Anniversary Edition with a new preface by the author J U D I TH BUT LER 176 pages 9781531509972, Paperback, $24.95 (TP), £19.99 9781531509965, Hardback, $87.00 (SDT), £72.00 Simultaneous electronic edition available A P R IL Philosophy & Theory | Ethics

What does it mean to lead a moral life?

In their first extended study of moral philosophy, Judith Butler offers a provocative outline for a new ethical practice—one responsive to the need for critical autonomy yet grounded in the opacity of the human subject.

Butler takes as their starting point one’s ability to answer the questions “What have I done?” and “What ought I to do?” They show that these questions can be answered only by asking a prior question, “Who is this ‘I’ who is under an obligation to give an account of itself and to act in certain ways?” Because I find that I cannot give an account of myself without accounting for the social conditions under which I emerge, ethical reflection requires a turn to social theory.

In three powerfully crafted and lucidly written chapters, Butler demonstrates how difficult it is to give an account of oneself, and how this lack of self-transparency and narratability is crucial to an ethical understanding of the human. In dialogue with Adorno, Levinas, Foucault, and other thinkers, they eloquently argue the limits, possibilities, and dangers of contemporary ethical thought.

Butler offers a critique of the moral self, arguing that the transparent, rational, and continuous ethical subject is an impossible construct that seeks to deny the specificity of what it is to be human.

We can know ourselves only incompletely, and only in relation to a broader social world that has always preceded us and already shaped us in ways we cannot grasp. If inevitably we are partially opaque to ourselves, how can giving an account of ourselves define the ethical act? And doesn’t an ethical system that holds us impossibly accountable for full self-knowledge and self-consistency inflict a kind of psychic violence, leading to a culture of self-beratement and cruelty? How does the turn to social theory offer us a chance to understand the specifically social character of our own unknowingness about ourselves?

By recasting ethics as a project in which being ethical means becoming critical of norms under which we are asked to act, but which we can never fully choose, Butler illuminates what it means for us as “fallible creatures” to create and share an ethics of vulnerability, humility, and ethical responsiveness.

JUDITH BUTLER is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of Cali-

fornia, Berkeley. Their books include Who’s Afraid of Gender?, What World Is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology, The Force of Nonviolence, Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, Giving an Account of Oneself, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence, and Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.

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ACADEMIC SCHOLARLY TRADE “The significance of history for Catholic theology in the United States cannot be overestimated. Too often and too eagerly we accept an uncritical and romantic historical narrative that treats Catholics as ‘recent’ or nineteenth-century European immigrants and, as such, had little to do with the cruel dispossession and disruption of the lives of Indigenous peoples or the brutal enslavement and continuing oppression of Africandescended peoples. Jeannine Hill Fletcher interrogates our history, unmasks our putative innocence, and encourages us all to reach out to accept the grace-filled solidarity of the dead who continue to care for us and for this land.”

—M. SHAWN COPELAND, PROFESSOR EMERITA, BOSTON COLLEGE

“In Grace of the Ghosts, Jeannine Hill Fletcher contends with the religious history of white supremacy and its consequences. Drawing on the work of Indigenous scholar Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, the book calls us to reckon with all of our ancestors, the communion of saints and sinners alike. In so doing, Hill Fletcher provides a roadmap for the holy work of truth-telling, reparations, and healing that is necessary to build a truly anti-racist, multicultural Church—work she invites us to undertake ‘enveloped by the grace of the ghosts.’”

—MATTHEW CRESSLER, CREATOR OF THE WEBCOMIC SERIES BAD CATHOLICS, GOOD TROUBLE

A profound new volume that reckons with the history of an American Catholic Church embedded in and drawing benefits from White supremacy

Grace of the Ghosts

A Theology of Institutional Reparation J E A N NI N E H I LL FL ETCHER 336 pages 9781531509873, Paperback, $29.95 (AC), £20.99 9781531509866, Hardback, $105.00 (SDT), £87.00 Simultaneous electronic edition available A P R IL Theology | Religion | History

For the Church to become a truly anti-racist institution, we must first understand how today’s racial challenges are embedded in the theo-logic of American Christianity and the cultural production of our Christian educational institutions. As colleges and universities reckon with their involvement in slavery, Grace of the Ghosts asks Christian-affiliated institutions (of congregation, school, and media) to expand this reckoning with attention to the many ways they have been embedded in and drew benefits from American systems of White supremacy.

Too often, White Christian histories render White Christians as the “good guys” in order to make a brutal history plausible and thus erase countless injustices committed against Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and Asian peoples. Author Jeannine Hill Fletcher writes instead a US Catholic history that sheds light on the crimes committed against these ancestors by members of their own faith community. Grace of the Ghosts focuses on specific case studies of Catholic educational and ecclesial institutions, journeying through numerous microhistories to provide an accessible program to work toward the flourishing of a multiracial and multicultural Church. Hill Fletcher digs deeply into the details of Jesuit slaveholding at Georgetown, the expansion of Church networks on the frontiers to the West and South and emergent cities to the North, and the extension of the work of religious women from the East Coast to the Midwest. The volume considers the implications of Catholic involvement in Indian Boarding Schools and envisions alternative possibilities in the Catholic activism of the United Farmworkers. Each microhistory elevates the theological insights that emerge from those who withstood the assaults of White Christian supremacy. Hill Fletcher then orients the reader forward by envisioning possibilities of repair.

Recognizing that this will require extensive and ongoing work, the book closes with the consideration of spiritual capital (including a reclamation of Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises) that might sustain us as we write the next chapter in the nation’s long struggle against White supremacy.

Much work must be done for reparation, reconciliation, and repair to unfold fully. Grace of the Ghosts provides a bridge to institutional accountability for past failings and a path toward becoming transformative institutions for the future.

J E A N N I N E H I L L F L E TC H E R is professor of theology at Fordham University and a board

member of the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, an intergenerational, multiracial, and multi-religious organization working for economic democracy and racial justice in the Bronx and beyond.

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“A heart-stopping, stunning, and tremendously significant book. Sommer offers a brilliant and sensitive critical examination of a vast primary source base of new archival materials and a multidimensionally, conceptually innovative analysis.”

—DAGMAR HERZOG, AUTHOR OF THE QUESTION OF UNWORTHY LIFE: EUGENICS AND GERMANY’S TWENTIETH CENTURY

“A powerful argument why these brothels should be understood as an integral part of the National Socialist camp system and its racial and political ideology. Sommer manages to uncover the identity of nearly 80% of the female inmates enslaved in this system, offering an unprecedented look into the journey of the victims.”

—PASCALE BOS, AUTHOR OF “BARTER, PROSTITUTION, ABUSE? REFRAMING EXPERIENCES OF SEXUAL EXCHANGE DURING THE HOLOCAUST,” THE JOURNAL OF HOLOCAUST RESEARCH, AND STEERING COMMITTEE MEMBER OF INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH GROUP “SEXUAL VIOLENCE IN ARMED CONFLICT” (SVAC)

“Myths and mystifications have obscured our knowledge about brothels in Nazi concentration camps for a long time. Sommer’s impeccably researched study establishes the relevant facts and explores motives and rationales of the planners and organizers of the brothels without losing sight of the suffering of the victimized women. A must-read for students of sexual violence, Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust.”

—THOMAS KUEHNE, STRASSLER COLIN FLUG PROFESSOR OF HOLOCAUST HISTORY AT CLARK UNIVERSITY

Discover the chilling untold story of sexual forced labor in Nazi concentration camps

The Concentration Camp Brothel Forced Sexual Labor under Nazi Rule RO B E RT S OMM ER T R ANS LAT ED BY D O M IN I C B ON FIGL IO FO R EWOR D BY ANNETTE F. TIMM 384 pages, 12 tables, 31 images 9781531509910, Paperback, $34.95 (AC), £27.99 9781531509903, Hardback, $125.00 (SDT), £103.00 Simultaneous electronic edition available World War II: The Global, Human, and Ethical Dimension M AY History | Jewish Studies | World War II

In his seminal work, The Concentration Camp Brothel, Robert Sommer reveals the hidden horrors of sexual forced labor within the SS camp system, a subject long overshadowed and seldom acknowledged in the discourse on the Holocaust.

Through his rigorous examination of over seventy archives and poignant interviews with more than thirty survivors, including former visitors of camp brothels, Sommer paints a vivid and harrowing picture of the atrocities committed. This book is the first to offer a comprehensive exploration of the establishment, operation, and profound impact of brothels in Nazi concentration camps.

Sommer’s research meticulously details the brothels’ integration into the concentration camp system, their role in the Nazi exploitation of bodies for control and profit, and the complex reactions of the prisoner society to these establishments. He explores the desperate survival strategies employed by the women forced into sexual labor and the chilling motivations of their exploiters.

The book also places the tragedy of camp brothels in the broader context of sexual violence under Nazi rule, making a critical connection between these acts of exploitation and the overall history of the Holocaust. This updated English edition incorporates new findings and perspectives since the original German publication in 2009, providing a more comprehensive understanding of the subject. The foreword by Annette F. Timm adds further context and contemporary analysis, enhancing the book’s relevance and depth.

ROBERT SOMMER is a distinguished historian specializing in the intersections of violence, sexual-

ity, and human rights, with a focus on the Holocaust. He teaches at the University of Cooperative Education, Berlin, Germany. Sommer has served as a historical consultant for museums and film productions, including the BBC documentary Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution (2005).

DOMINIC BONFIGLIO is an expert translator with a background in Germanic studies, special-

izing in historical and academic texts. His translations are known for their precision and accessibility, making German scholarship accessible to a global audience.

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industry in the decades following the American Civil War “O’Connor’s well-written account of the political reconstruction of American tobacco has found a way to infuse what one might think of as a well—studied commodity with insight and nuance. His careful and perceptive analysis of the role of government in promoting and taxing tobacco will be welcomed by scholars of tobacco but also by those interested in the role of government in other industries and commodities.”

—JEANNIE WHAYNE, UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS

A deeply researched and clearly argued account of the mutual growth of the federal government and the modern tobacco

The Political Reconstruction of American Tobacco, 1862–1933 PAT R IC K MULFORD O ’CONNO R 240 pages, 16 b/w illustrations 9781531510596, Paperback, $35.00 (SDT), £27.99 9781531510589, Hardback, $105.00 (SDT), £87.00 Simultaneous electronic edition available Reconstructing America JU NE Civil War | History | Politics

Nearly everything about the United States tobacco economy changed in the generation following the American Civil War. From labor to consumption, manufacturing to regulation, tobacco was utterly reconstructed, “comparatively a new industry,” as one contemporary wrote.

The Political Reconstruction of American Tobacco, 1862–1933 exposes the causes of these changes, and in the process, it reconsiders cornerstones of the American national narrative. Through a detailed rendering of tobacco’s late-nineteenth-century political economy, this book argues that the federal state’s and American capitalism’s development were mutually constitutive—and fundamentally political—processes. From the Civil War to the Progressive Era, diverse political movements across tobacco’s commodity chain drove state and market development, creating the immense power and stifling poverty that defined tobacco’s reconstruction. The Political Reconstruction of American Tobacco, 1862–1933 emphasizes the significance of the thousands of manufacturers whose interest groups shaped federal tax policy and, in turn, forged a powerful and effective internal revenue system; the increasingly influential fertilizer producers and warehouse operators who determined tobacco’s value; and the crop scientists who sought to promote and rationalize US tobacco production. As these actors reshaped tobacco’s commodity chain, they missed, and even dismissed, the interests of tobacco growers, especially newly emancipated African Americans and smallholding whites throughout the South.

The ruling logic of tobacco’s reconstructed political economy rationalized agrarian indebtedness, justified low prices, and intensified labor discipline on thousands of small farms. In emphasizing these exclusions, The Political Reconstruction of American Tobacco, 1862–1933 reveals how nineteenthcentury state and economic development coincided with and even created rural poverty.

Patrick Mulford O’Connor is a history teacher at The Putney School in Putney, Vermont. He earned his doctorate in history at the University of Montana. The Political Reconstruction of American Tobacco, 1862–1933 is his first book.

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“Fighter-Writer” reports from major battles in the Pacific highlight what America’s Marines endured in World War II

Kill– Do Not Release Censored Marine Corps Stories from World War II D O U G LASS K. DANIEL 320 pages, 18 b/w illustrations 9781531510404, Paperback, $35.00 (SDT), £27.99 9781531510398, Hardback, $105.00 (SDT), £87.00 Simultaneous electronic edition available World War II: The Global, Human, and Ethical Dimension AUG U S T History | Journalism | World War II

Douglass K. Daniel presents a fascinating trove of previously classified material withheld from the public because of government and public relations concerns at the time, including tactical details that could inadvertently aid the enemy, battlefield gore that could disturb readers, and the gamut of issues of taste. Navy censors in the field and editors at Marine Corps headquarters in Washington were also on alert for any material that could negatively affect the Corps itself or the overall war effort. Soul-searching stories that questioned the nature of war were rejected lest they sow doubt stateside about the cause for which so many lives were being lost.

Behind the bylines was a new breed of storytellers. Considered “fighter-writers,” Marine combat correspondents, or CCs, carried typewriters as well as weapons. The Marine Corps Division of Public Relations recruited them from America’s newsrooms to join the fight that stretched from Guadalcanal and the bloody assault on Tarawa to the black sands of Iwo Jima and the dense jungles of Okinawa. Their approved work appeared in civilian newspapers, magazines, and other national and local media.

This collection also highlights the unique efforts of the CCs and the public relations officers who commanded them. While they were assigned to report and write, they were Marines first.

They eagerly put aside their notebooks to take up arms against the enemy as needed. Many were wounded in battle, and more than a dozen were killed, giving their lives to get the story behind the most significant conflict in human history.

D O U G L A S S K . DA N I E L has practiced journalism and studied and written about media and

history. He was a reporter and editor for the Associated Press for nearly three decades. Daniel also taught journalism as an assistant professor at Kansas State University and Ohio University. He is the author of several books, including biographies of 60 Minutes correspondent Harry Reasoner, Oscar-winning writer and director Richard Brooks, and celebrated actress Anne Bancroft.

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“In Caracas, Rafael Sánchez witnessed a transformative scene that led to his groundbreaking theory of the state. This stunning memoir of the intersection of politics and personal life narrates his rejection of patriarchy and his growing understanding of the complexities and limits of emancipatory politics. A loving and living anthropology of an eccentric life, Reconocimientos is a testament to the transformative power of becoming.”

—JAVIER GUERRERO, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

“In this uniquely moving, genre-bending book, Sánchez confronts patriarchal authority as it has imposed itself on his life and dissolves it into the collective, radically democratic powers of the Venezuelan crowd.”

—RIHAN YEH, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO

“An essay of incredible originality, a work of passional reason by a writer with a wonderful poetic sensibility.”

—CHARLES HIRSCHKIND, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY

“A singular text, a kind of Latin American cross between Montaigne and Malinowski, in which an anthropologist discovers in his own biography a key to understanding the collective history of a continent.”

Reconocimientos A Memoir of Becoming

R AFA EL SÁ N C HEZ E D I TED BY ROSAL IND C. MO RRIS FO R EWORD BY IGO R BARRETO A F TE RWORDS BY LU IS P ÉREZ -OR AMAS AND C LAU DI O LOMN ITZ 160 pages, 5 x 8 9781531510053, Paperback, $28.00 (SDT), £21.99 9781531510046, Hardback, $95.00 (SDT), £79.00 Simultaneous electronic edition available M AY Anthropology | Latin American Studies | Gender & Sexuality

—CLAUDIO LOMNITZ, FROM THE AFTERWORD

An anthropologist’s memoir confronting patriarchy and authoritarianism, revealing radical possibilities for collective transformation What is the relationship between a writer’s life, milieu, and thought? In this daring and intellectually expansive text, part memoir and part political philosophy, the anthropologist Rafael Sánchez explores the forces and events that shaped him and the nations through which he moved.

Reconocimientos is a book of both personal and political reckoning, from the thrillingly emancipatory possibilities of Venezuela’s plazas to the political promise and disappointments of revolution. Written in the final year of his life, Reconocimientos moves from scenes of Sánchez’s youth in Cuba to fieldwork on the cult of Maria Lionza in Venezuela to confront the terrifying and alluring forces of patriarchal privilege at the base of monumentalist authoritarianism.

Sánchez’s intimate prose speaks with the urgency both of his own mortality and of the political crises of our moment. Amid the resurgence of patriarchy, hierarchy, and the valorization of inequality that have become pillars of populist movements in Latin America and beyond, Sánchez finds a residual radical possibility in “horizontal” spaces, where the forces of mimesis permit manifold transformations.

RAFAEL SÁNCHEZ (1950–2024) was senior lecturer at the Geneva Graduate Institute. He is the author of Dancing Jacobins: A Venezuelan Genealogy of Latin American Populism (Fordham, 2016).

ROSALIND C. MORRIS is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. Her most recent

books are Unstable Ground: The Lives, Deaths, and Afterlives of Gold in South Africa and, with William Kentridge, Accounts and Drawings from Underground. Her most recent film is the documentary We Are Zama Zama.

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“Bound up as they may be in fantasies of normative futurity, children in The Small Worlds of Childhood are neither innocents nor pre-adults. Lauren Stone’s elegantly written book encourages us to tarry with the time and small spaces of childhood in texts by Adalbert Stifter, Rilke, Benjamin, and Freud, and in doing so it suggestively presents an alternative temporality to the nostalgia of the Romantic view of childhood, or the essential futurity of the ubiquitous Bildungsroman tradition.”

—CATRIONA MACLEOD, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

“Lauren Shizuko Stone’s book is a theoretically far-ranging, deeply grounded, and always stimulating study of the changing world of literary childhood. She traces with great alacrity what poetics did with children and their gaze, and what this focus did to literature.”

The Small Worlds of Childhood Philosophy, Poetics, and the Queer Temporalities of Early Life LAU REN S HI ZUKO STONE 224 pages 9781531510510, Paperback, $35.00 (SDT), £27.99 9781531510503, Hardback, $125.00 (SDT), £103.00 Simultaneous electronic edition available M AY Children’s Studies | Gender & Sexuality | Literary Studies

—ADRIAN DAUB, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

An in-depth exploration of bourgeois childhood in 19th and early 20th-century literature that challenges conventional notions of temporality The Small Worlds of Childhood argues that prose representations of bourgeois childhood contain surprising opportunities to reflect on the temporality of experience. In their narratives of children at home in their everyday worlds, Adalbert Stifter, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Walter Benjamin are not only able to shed a unique light on key issues in the history of philosophy. They also offer a queer critique of the normative expectation that the literature of childhood is oriented toward the future.

Stone shows that when writers engage in philosophical storytelling, showing children tarrying in quotidian experience, they dislodge childhood from its nostalgic value to grown-ups and the heteronormative demand to grow up. Such stories of children as philosophical subjects thus take on their own lingering, backwards, or all together strange sense of time. Stone demonstrates the necessity of recognizing how texts on childhood—before and beyond Freud—engage literary language in the service of a variety of philosophical attitudes, reminding us how poetic techniques can tell us something extraordinary about moments of ordinary experience and the manner with which humans, and especially children, cognize the world.

By bringing canonical German-language literary and philosophical traditions into conversation with current English-language queer approaches, Stone opens a queer counter-history of German and Austrian realist and modernist literature.

This title is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

LAUREN SHIZUKO STONE is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Colorado

at Boulder.

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“Indigenous Affinities shows how we might develop a South-South dialogue that circumvents or even short-circuits the usual dynamics of knowledge production. A brilliant, nuanced book that will set the standard for comparative work in global Indigenous studies for years to come.”

—PAUL WORLEY, APPALACHIAN STATE UNIVERSITY

“From a profound intellectual interest in peoples’ lives, histories, struggles, and creations, Eqeiq focuses on the solidarities around dispossessed collectivities and their encounters and exchanges across continents. While Indigenous studies has grown into a vibrant field in North America, the book’s comparative dimension remains unique, especially in including Palestinian experience.”

—NAJAT RAHMAN, UNIVERSITY OF MONTREAL

Indigenous Affinities

Toward Solidarity Across the Global South A M A L EQEI Q 224 pages 9781531510282, Paperback, $32.00 (SDT), £24.99 9781531510275, Hardback, $110.00 (SDT), £91.00 Simultaneous electronic edition available AU G US T Literary Studies | Middle Eastern Studies | Latin American Studies

“Eqeiq’s book movingly establishes relations of affinity between Palestinian (Arabic) and Mayan (Tsotsil) language, literature, and community memory, while also showing how we might understand Indigenous affinity across a range of seemingly unrelated languages and social contexts.”

—MANU KARUKA, AUTHOR OF EMPIRE’S TRACKS: INDIGENOUS NATIONS, CHINESE WORKERS, AND THE TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROAD

Reveals how Mayan and Palestinian narratives connect through shared Indigenous struggles, proposing ‘affinity’ as a framework for global solidarity Inspired by and committed to global Indigenous solidarity and South-South encounters, Indigenous Affinities examines the multifaceted connection between Chiapas and Palestine. In tracing unseen threads that connect parallel geographies of struggle found in contemporary Mayan and Palestinian narratives, Indigenous Affinities proposes affinity as a new conceptual framework. Eqeiq shows how—despite emerging from distinct historical processes of minoritization, subalternization, and racialization—Mayan and Palestinian written, visual, and performance texts articulate a common configuration of Indigeneity. These seemingly unrelated connections, Eqeiq contends, can be read through shared histories of land struggle, practices of autonomy, quests for liberation, and collective resistance to racial capitalism, military oppression, and colonial violence.

Eqeiq examines murals that offer a visual testimony to common struggles and transnational connection, explores fragmented bilingualisms that have propelled language revival and revitalization, highlights a shared concern with borders, and documents the performative commemorations of massacres. Reading such sites together in the complexities and specificities of disparate contexts, Indigenous Affinities illuminates how the lens of affinity can elucidate solidarity and resistance within the Global South.

AMAL EQEIQ is Associate Professor of Arabic Studies and Comparative Literature at Williams

College.

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“The Dread Heights is a remarkable contribution to the anthropology of religion. Iqbal traces the different ways refugees fleeing from the political cruelty and oppression of the Syrian regime resort to the Islamic tradition to make sense of their desperate, disrupted lives. The book offers insights that are at once moving and original, and it helps to push the debate about the relationship of transcendence to immanence, of theology to politics, to new levels. It deserves to be widely read.”

—TALAL ASAD, CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

The Dread Heights Tribulation and Refuge after the Syrian Revolution BAS IT KA REEM IQ BAL 304 pages, 4 b/w illustrations 9781531510329, Paperback, $35.00 (SDT), £27.99 9781531510312, Hardback, $125.00 (SDT), £103.00 Simultaneous electronic edition available Thinking from Elsewhere J ULY Anthropology | Middle Eastern Studies | Religion

“Artfully and poignantly, Basit Iqbal guides us through a landscape of displacement, devastation, and destruction. His gripping book asks us to reflect on an apocalyptic present without ever resorting to the temptation of hope or the promise of healing. It offers a pathbreaking example of what an ethnography of theology (and specifically of eschatology) can look like—one that takes seriously the hold of the Islamic tradition while also showing how multiple interpretations can coexist and honoring the ultimate unknowability and incommensurability of the Divine.”

—AMIRA MITTERMAIER, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

An ethnography of how Islamic tradition shapes Syrian refugees’ responses to war and displacement beyond humanitarian aid Muslim charities and community organizations have assumed a significant role in refugee support since the Syrian catastrophe: in Jordan and Canada, as elsewhere, they deliver food aid, house orphans, and organize remedial education. But Islam is more than just a resource for humanitarian projects. The Dread Heights details how the Islamic tradition guides refugees, relief workers, and religious scholars in a world of brutal sieges and mass displacement.

Through an ethnography of religious imagination and theological argumentation, Iqbal demonstrates what is at stake beyond secular frames for migration and relief. Even as refugees become objects of humanitarian concern suspended between national orders, The Dread Heights brings another suspension into view: a form of life whose gestures are illuminated by the Quranic figure of the Heights. Iqbal’s ethnography pursues an unsentimental lucidity across the search for refuge, the trials of creational existence, and the ultimately enigmatic divine decree. In the shadow of war, beyond humanitarian order, Islam offers an orientation to the devastation of the present.

BASIT KAREEM IQBAL is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at McMaster University.

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“This is a crucial work for those interested in plumbing the depths of creative activity, both human and divine, in the multifaceted traditions of Christianity and Hinduism.

The scholarship here is wide-ranging and insightful, and it will ensure that līlā in Hindu theology can no longer be translated simply as ‘play’ without further qualification.

Daniel Soars is to be commended for conveying so important a contribution for a closer understanding of two world faiths.”

—JULIUS LIPNER, PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF HINDUISM AND THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF RELIGION, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE, AND EMERITUS FELLOW OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY.

The first comparative treatment of the topic of līlā in Hindu and Christian traditions, this volume explores what it means to consider divine and human action under the categories of play, wit, drama, grace, and compassion

God at Play

Līlā in Hindu and Christian Traditions DAN IEL S OA R S , EDITOR A F TE RWORD BY MICHE L L E VO SS 320 pages 9781531510091, Paperback, $40.00 (SDT), £32.00 9781531510084, Hardback, $140.00 (SDT), £116.00 Simultaneous electronic edition available Comparative Theology: Thinking Across Traditions JU LY Theology | Religion

God at Play presents a theological exploration of the multifaceted motif of līlā across diverse Hindu and Christian landscapes and its wide-ranging connections to divine and human creativity. Given its ubiquity in Hindu theologies and life-forms, līlā offers a rich comparative framework for exploring certain ways of understanding divine and human action as expressed in Hindu and Christian sacred texts, philosophical theology, and ritual practices.

Though līlā is often interpreted simply as “play,” the essays in this volume reflect a far richer semantic and conceptual field, ranging from spontaneity and gratuitousness, through joy and humor, to mercy and compassion. By focusing on the different contexts in which līlā is found in Hindu traditions and resisting any uniform translation of the term, the contributors to this volume avoid the risk of using predominantly western or Christian categories to understand the Hindu other.

The volume thus explores how līlā functions in a variety of distinctive philosophical, theological, and devotional ways across Hindu traditions, and listens for echoes in Christian understandings of the gratuitousness of the created order in relation to God. God at Play is a genuine experiment in deep learning across traditions. Each chapter reflects on what is learned by taking līlā as the category of comparison and invites the reader to think about what these conversations add, confirm, or change in relation to earlier twentieth-century scholarship on play—not least, in terms of what difference it might make to understand human life as an imitation and a participation in the divine life of a playful deity.

DANIEL SOARS teaches in the divinity department at Eton College and is book reviews editor for the Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies. Recent publications include a co-edited volume entitled Hindu-Christian Dual Belonging and a monograph entitled The World and God Are Not-Two: A Hindu-Christian Conversation. He has published articles on Neoplatonism, the doctrine of creation ex nihilo and divine ideas, the Calcutta School of Indology, and Meister Eckhart.

CONTRIBUTORS: Sucharita Adluri, Ankur Barua, Stephen R.L. Clark, Francis X. Clooney SJ,

Rachel Fell McDermott, Jessica Frazier, Bernard McGinn, Douglas Hedley, Srilata Raman, Daniel Soars, Daniel J. Tolan, Peter Tyler, Michelle Voss, Dominic White OP F O R D H A M P R E S S .C O M

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“Words Made Flesh engages Sylvia Wynter’s work as critical of, and critical to, the study of religion. As such, it is a compelling and powerful contribution to a field often still saddled by a (perhaps unwitting) commitment to colonialist, racist, and discriminatory logics of comparison and categorization. This book is as necessary as it is groundbreaking.”

—BIKO MANDELA GRAY, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF RELIGION AT SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY AND AUTHOR OF BLACK LIFE MATTER: RELIGION, BLACKNESS, AND THE SUBJECT

The first sustained treatment of religion and religions in the scholarship of a prominent Caribbean thinker

Words Made Flesh Sylvia Wynter and Religion

J UST I N E M. BA KK ER AND DAVID K LI NE 288 pages 9781531510244, Paperback, $35.00 (SDT), £27.99 9781531510237, Hardback, $125.00 (SDT), £103.00 Simultaneous electronic edition available J UNE Theology | Postcolonial Studies

Sylvia Wynter is a profoundly transdisciplinary scholar whose works span an impressive array of theory, literature, science, anthropology, philosophy, and religious studies as well as different forms, including essays, plays, a novel, and a 935-page unpublished manuscript entitled “Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World.” Whatever the medium, Wynter frequently engages religion as a relevant category of analysis, from reflections on Christianity, Islam, and Rastafarianism to the category and role of religion as a universal aspect of human social production.

Wynter’s writings have received enthusiastic attention by scholars in Black studies, Caribbean theory, critical race theory, literature, and philosophy. But until recently little scholarly writing exists that directly engages the topic of religion in her corpus. Words Made Flesh seeks to fill this gap by focusing exclusively on religion, religions, and religiosity in her work.

Bringing together scholars that provide a wide variety of theoretical perspectives on religion, political theology, social theory, and science studies, this book offers an in-depth engagement with one of the most innovative and important thinkers of the last forty years and illustrates how Wynter’s writing has significant implications for the study of religion and religion’s relationship to colonialism, race, humanism, science, and political theology.

CONTRIBUTORS: Shamara Wylie Alhassan, Niki Kasumi Clements, Tapji Garba, Oludamini Ogunnaike, Anthony Bayani Rodriguez, Rafael Vizcaíno, Joseph Winters J U S T I N E M . B A K K E R is Assistant Professor in Comparative Religious Studies at Radboud

University Nijmegen. She has published on religion, esotericism, and race in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Religion, Correspondences, Aries, and Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory.

DAV I D K L I N E is Teaching Associate Professor in the Religious Studies Department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is author of Racism and the Weakness of Christian Identity: Religious Autoimmunity.

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“Aesthetic Impropriety reconceives the aesthetic force of literature to theorize justice.

Casey’s gorgeous close readings and keen attention to the histories of English-derived property law generate new ways to reckon with collective dispossession.”

—ANGELA NAIMOU, CLEMSON UNIVERSITY

Literature and law unite to dismantle colonial property injustices worldwide

Aesthetic Impropriety

Property Law and Postcolonial Style RO S E CAS EY 208 pages 9781531510633, Paperback, $32.00 (SDT), £24.99 9781531510626, Hardback, $110.00 (SDT), £91.00 Simultaneous electronic edition available JU LY Literary Studies | Law | Postcolonial Studies

Across Africa, Asia, and the Americas, colonial Britain’s property laws are in the process of being transformed. Aesthetic Impropriety analyzes vanguard legal actions and literary innovations to reveal contemporary reforms to property law that are undoing law’s colonial legacies. Casey traces precise legal histories across distinct jurisdictions throughout the anglophone world, revealing the connection between land law and petroleum extraction in the Niger Delta, inheritance and divorce laws and gender inequality in India, intellectual property law and Indigenous dispossession in South Africa, and admiralty law and racialized non-personhood in the English Atlantic. In response to these manifold forms of dispossession, significant reforms are underway, including through common law suits, statutory reform, and proposed changes to legal doctrine.

Casey develops the concept of aesthetic impropriety to identify shared structures of thought across legal and literary venues. She shows that writers of poetry and prose are also transforming harmful property laws: in Nigeria, Ben Okri and Chigozie Obioma have articulated symbiotic ecological relationships that are also evidenced in recent actions against petroleum companies; in India, Arundhati Roy’s challenge to divorce laws has preempted similar attempts at reform in Parliament; in South Africa, Zoë Wicomb theorized protections for Indigenous modes of creative production nineteen years before they were signed into law; and in the Americas, M. NourbeSe Philip has proposed a novel method of achieving justice for the one hundred fifty enslaved people who were killed in the 1781 Zong massacre.

Aesthetic Impropriety makes a convincing case for literature’s generative capacities and registers the enduring significance of the postcolonial as a necessary framework for understanding globalized inequality in the twenty-first century. By analyzing shared legal and aesthetic transformations, Aesthetic Impropriety argues that law and literature play vital roles in creating anticolonial world orders.

ROSE CASEY is Assistant Professor of English at West Virginia University.

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“Through a series of studies on singular Argentine authors, Sottong lucidly demonstrates how Dante and his Divine Comedy, seen by Italian thinkers and political figures as the source for an imagined Italian national identity in the nineteenth century, in turn inspired Argentine authors in a similar fashion. This is an important, pioneering book that will open the field of Dante studies to new transnational studies of the poem’s circulation, translation, and global influence.”

—KRISTINA M. OLSON, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ITALIAN, GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY, AND AUTHOR OF COURTESY LOST: DANTE, BOCCACCIO AND THE LITERATURE OF HISTORY

Opens the field of Dante Studies to further transnational studies of the Divine Comedy’s circulation, translation, and global influence

Transnational Dante

Inventing Argentine Cultural Identity H E ATHER R EN EE SOTTO NG 256 pages, 1 b/w illustration 9781531510442, Paperback, $30.00 (SDT), £23.99 9781531510435, Hardback, $105.00 (SDT), £87.00 Critical Studies in Italian Migrations A P R IL Italian American Studies | Race & Ethnic Studies | Literary Studies

This fascinating book examines how Dante was repurposed by Argentine politicians and authors who were concerned with the construction of Argentine national identity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sottong’s work is informed by the theories of Eric Hobsbawm, Benedict Anderson, and Nicolas Shumway, who coined the concepts of “invented traditions,” “imagined communities,” and “guiding fictions,” respectively. Sottong has applied these notions to the case of Argentina, which, after the War of Independence from Spain (1810–1818), had to develop its own national cultural identity.

In this volume, she investigates Dante’s transnational influence in Argentina: Why did Argentine authors consistently call upon Dante in their attempts to develop Argentine literature? What are the textual and thematic characteristics of Dante’s Divine Comedy that make it an ideal vehicle for literary appropriation? What are the historical and cultural factors that account for Dante’s enduring popularity in Italy and beyond? How did the strong presence of Italians in Argentina influence cultural production in the developing nation? And how are the re-writings of Dante in the Argentine canon in dialogue with one another?

What Sottong found, remarkably, was that rewriting Dante was a way for Argentine authors to voice their views on the direction that should be taken to develop Argentine letters; Dante became something of a literary guide as Argentine intellectuals navigated the complex labyrinth of their national identity. The consistent rewriting of the Divine Comedy in the Argentine context testifies to the fact that great works of literature can be revived during different periods and even reappropriated by various peoples to foster mythologies of inclusion or exclusion related to national identity.

H E AT H E R R E N E E SOT TO N G is an Assistant Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at FLAME University in Pune, India. Her research focuses on the Italian diaspora in Argentina and the literary appropriation of Dante in the Americas.

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“Teaching Politically addresses a pair of important and resonant issues in universities in the US and elsewhere: how one teaches and learns under political pressure and surveillance, and how one talks about politics in literary and cultural classrooms. The book’s attention to a range of sites around the world admirably pushes the conversation beyond the US context.”

—CHRISTOPHER NEWFIELD, AUTHOR OF THE GREAT MISTAKE: HOW WE WRECKED PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES AND HOW WE CAN FIX THEM

“At a moment when the politics of the university classroom is undergoing blistering attacks from the right, this smart and thoughtful collection investigates what is in fact political about teaching. What is authority? Who are the university’s publics? What is the teacher’s responsibility? This volume is refreshing and unusual in its global reach, addressing pedagogy and politics in Egypt, Greece, and Palestine, as well as the US and Australia.”

—CAROLINE LEVINE, AUTHOR OF THE ACTIVIST HUMANIST: FORM AND METHOD IN THE CLIMATE CRISIS

Teaching Politically Global Perspectives on Pedagogy and Autonomy

M AY HAWAS A N D BRU CE ROBBINS , E D I TOR S 224 pages, 5 b/w illustrations 9781531510206, Paperback, $32.00 (SDT), £24.99 9781531510190, Hardback, $110.00 (SDT), £91.00 Simultaneous electronic edition available JU LY Education | Literary Studies

An insightful global exploration of how educators navigate political pressures and engage with politics in the classroom Culture is inextricable from politics. This includes the politics of who we are, as teachers, intellectuals, writers, cultural workers, and students, and what we want to bring to and take from the site of instruction. It also includes the politics of who we want to be, as citizens, professionals, and active contributors to our communities and to the world in general, and what we can be, realistically, in the particular contexts in which we live.

Teaching Politically addresses some of the political constraints that shape our pedagogical spaces, especially in the teaching of literature. The book brings together a global group of academics, activists, public intellectuals, poets, and novelists to examine the way politics manifest pedagogically, and how a commitment to educating manifests politically, in and beyond the classroom. At the heart of the discussion is how political and professional paradigms chafe against, intersect with, or otherwise become inseparable from each other in any vocation that attempts to educate: from writing, journalism, and public speaking to art, activism, and medicine.

CONTRIBUTORS: Dimitris Christopoulos, Dimitri Dimoulis, Khaled Fahmy, Rishi Goyal, May

Hawas, Bonnie Honig, Mona Kareem, Benjamin Mangrum, Nora Parr, Bruce Robbins, Ahdaf Soueif, Omid Tofighian, Elahe Zivardar MAY HAWAS is Associate Professor of World Literature at Cambridge University, and Valerie Eliot Fellow of English at Newnham College. She is the author of Politicising World Literature: Egypt, Between Pedagogy and Politics and editor of The Diaries of Waguih Ghali.

B R U C E RO B B I N S is Old Dominion Foundation Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. His most recent books are Atrocity: A Literary History and Criticism and Politics: A Polemical Introduction.

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“Groundbreaking on a grand philosophical scale, The Quest for Liberation shows how German and Chinese thinkers drew on each other in search of emancipation from the confines of their own traditions. The book goes beyond comparison to articulate a horizon of exchange, mutual learning, and convergence between East and West in search of broader horizons of world culture. Zhang’s extraordinary polyglot proficiency and knowledge of major thinkers in the West and East makes for an outstanding intellectual history: bold, provocative, and admirable” —BAN WANG, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

The Quest for Liberation

Philosophy and the Making of World Culture in China and the West C H UNJI E Z HA N G 240 pages 9781531510367, Paperback, $35.00 (SDT), £27.99 9781531510350, Hardback, $125.00 (SDT), £103.00 Simultaneous electronic edition available Idiom: Inventing Writing Theory AUG U S T Philosophy & Theory | Asian Studies

“An excellent intervention into the burgeoning scholarship on German and Asian studies, Chunjie Zhang’s The Quest for Liberation shows us how Chinese and German intellectuals harnessed each other’s philosophical traditions to rethink economics, ethics, politics, and spirituality in a quest for global justice over imperial hegemony.”

—GLENN PENNY, UCLA

Rethinking Global Justice through the Convergence of Chinese and German Thinkers Contemporary debate on cosmopolitanism routinely refers to Immanuel Kant as its intellectual origin. A group of Chinese and German-speaking thinkers in the early twentieth century, however, used classical Chinese philosophy as an alternative intellectual genealogy to reimagine ethics, politics, society, and modernity for the entire world. Their engagement with Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism broadens the scope of global intellectual history to include a non-European origin of concepts and ideas.

Due to the differences in their local crises, the Chinese and the European stories are often narrated in separate national and cultural contexts. Bridging the critical divide between China and the West, The Quest for Liberation examines the thinkers’ shared interest in Chinese philosophy and their common effort to envision a world culture other than Western modernity.

Breaking with the common logic of either studying the reception and adaptation of Western ideas in the East or critiquing the misrepresentation of the East in the West, Zhang’s book emphasizes entanglements between Chinese and European thinkers and highlights their quest for liberation in a globalizing world. Their visions of an ontological commons for everyone help us imagine a better world community in our time of global crises, beyond the clash of civilizations.

This book is available from the publisher on an open access basis.

CHUNJIE ZHANG is Associate Professor of German at the University of California, Davis. She

is the author of Transculturality and German Discourse in the Age of European Colonialism.

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“This book is a lively and erudite collection of essays addressing the complex relationship between the Middle Ages and their cinematic representation since the beginning of the twentieth century. Certain of the films are well known, classics even; others have fallen into obscurity over the years, but all of them under the skillful scrutiny of the scholars represented in the collection testify powerfully to the benefits—and dangers— of mobilizing imagined medieval histories in the cultural and ideological controversies of modernity.”

—WILLIAM CHESTER JORDAN, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

This coursebook is the first full-length study of cinematic “legal medievalism,” or the modern interpretation of medieval law in film and popular culture

Law, Justice, and Society in the Medieval World An Introduction through Film

EST H ER LI B ERMAN CU ENCA , M . C H RI ST I NA BRU NO, AND A N TH ON Y PER RO N, EDITOR S 288 pages 9781531510138, Paperback, $29.95 (SDT), £20.99 9781531510121, Hardback, $105.00 (SDT), £87.00 Simultaneous electronic edition available Fordham Series in Medieval Studies M AY Medieval Studies | History | Cinema & Media Studies

For more than a century, filmmakers have used the “Middle Ages” to produce popular entertainment and comment on contemporary issues. Each of the twenty chapters in Law, Justice, and Society in the Medieval World represents an original contribution to our understanding of how medieval regulations, laws, and customs have been depicted in film. It offers a window into the “rules” of medieval society through the lens of popular culture.

This book includes analyses of recent and older films, avant-garde as well as popular cinema.

Films discussed in this book include Braveheart (1995), Kingdom of Heaven (2005), The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), The Last Duel (2021), The Green Knight (2021), The Little Hours (2017), and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), among others.

Each chapter explores the contemporary context of the film in question, the medieval literary or historical milieu the film references, and the lessons the film can teach us about the medieval world. Attached to each chapter is an appendix of medieval documentary sources and reading questions to prompt critical reflection.

ESTHER LIBERMAN CUENCA is Assistant Professor of History at the University of HoustonVictoria. She is the author of The Making of Urban Customary Law in Medieval and Reformation England. Her essays have appeared in Urban History, The Paris Review, Historical Reflections, Popular Music, and Continuity and Change.

M. CHRISTINA BRUNO is Associate Director of the Center for Medieval Studies at Fordham University in New York. She is a historian of late medieval Italy, focusing upon fifteenth-century Italian Observant Franciscans as legal and economic experts and practitioners.

ANTHONY PERRON is Associate Professor of History at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He is the author of three chapters in the Cambridge Histories series, including the Cambridge History of Medieval Canon Law. He has published articles in The Catholic Historical Review, The Journal of the Historical Society, and Historical Reflections, as well as in several edited volumes.

CONTRIBUTORS: Maria Americo, Daniel Armenti, Lucy C. Barnhouse, Christopher Bonura,

M. Christina Bruno, Julie K. Chamberlin, Celia Chazelle, Rachel Ellen Clark, Esther Liberman Cuenca, Casey Ireland, Henry Ansgar Kelly, Sarah C. Luginbill, Coral Lumbley, Sara McDougall, Nathan Melson, Nahir I. Otaño Gracia, Anthony Perron, David M. Perry, Asif A. Siddiqi, Eugene Smelyansky, Lorraine Kochanske Stock, Spencer Strub F O R D H A M P R E S S .C O M

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SCHOLARLY “Seldom are Martin Luther and John Henry Newman presented as allies, but in this learned account of the understanding of conscience, Ian Levy shows that Luther at the Diet of Worms, ‘I am bound by the testimony of Scripture and my conscience,’ and John Henry Newman, in his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, ‘conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ,’ are inheritors of a common Christian tradition forged over centuries in the medieval west.”

—ROBERT LOUIS WILKEN, WILLIAM R. KENAN PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

“A fascinating book that explores the tension between ecclesiastical authority and academic freedom, between the demands of conscience and bonum commune, and between personal conviction and institutional liability. Instead of treating the problem in abstract terms, Ian Levy gives the floor to the people involved in these conflicts. The book is surprising on every page: Not only did medieval theologians recognize the dilemma of this—supposedly modern—challenge, but also did they try to solve it intellectually. The reader is introduced to some of the great dramas of medieval theology, which cannot be separated from the biographies of those involved.”

—THOMAS PRÜGL, UNIVERSITY OF VIENNA

Offers new perspectives on freedom of conscience and religious liberty by tracing their origins to the Middle Ages, thereby challenging the common assumption that these core tenets of modernity were products of the Enlightenment

With a Pure Conscience

Christian Liberty before the Reformation I AN CHR I ST OPHER L EVY 320 pages 9781531510473, Hardback, $70.00 (SDT), £58.00 Simultaneous electronic edition available Fordham Series in Medieval Studies M AY Medieval Studies | Religion | History

Deeply committed to the formation of a just and sacred society, medieval theologians and canonists developed sophisticated arguments in defense of religious liberty and freedom of conscience.

They did so based upon the conviction that each human person possesses an inalienable right to pursue his or her spiritual vocation and to inquire into the truth, provided that such pursuits were not deemed injurious to the commonweal. For this was an age in which all power, whether secular or sacred, was held to be exercised legitimately only insofar as it served the common good. Within these basic parameters there existed a domain of personal freedom guaranteed by natural and divine law that could not be infringed by either secular or ecclesiastical authority. Theologians and canonists did not countenance blind obedience to reigning powers nor did they permit Christians to stand idle in the face of manifest transgressions of sacred tradition, constitutional order, and fundamental human rights.

Such foundational principles as the sacred domain of conscience, freedom of intellectual inquiry, dissent from unjust authority, and inalienable personal rights had been carefully developed throughout the later Middle Ages, hence from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries. Contrary to the popular conception, therefore, the West did not need to wait for the Protestant Reformation, or the Enlightenment, for these values to take hold. In fact, the modern West may owe its greatest debt to the Middle Ages. With a Pure Conscience sheds further light on these matters in a variety of contexts, within and without the medieval university walls, and often amid momentous controversies. This was a robust intellectual culture that revered careful analysis and vigorous disputation in its relentless quest to understand and defend the truth as it could be ascertained through both reason and revelation.

IAN CHRISTOPHER LEV Y is Professor of Theology at Providence College in Rhode Island.

His principal fields of research are medieval biblical exegesis, sacraments, and ecclesiology. He has worked especially on the roles of authority, tradition, and conscience in the determination of Catholic doctrine. His books include Introducing Medieval Biblical Interpretation: The Senses of Scripture in Premodern Exegesis; John Wyclif’s Theology of the Eucharist in Its Medieval Context; and Holy Scripture and the Quest for Authority at the End of the Middle Ages.

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SCHOLARLY

“The Council of Nicaea is a grain of mustard seed from Jesus’s parable. It started as a modest gathering to address a local theological issue that emerged in northeastern Africa and it grew to one of the most comprehensive frames for global Christianity. The volume explores this plant from its roots up to the crown, as well as the phases of its growth.”

—ARCHIMANDRITE CYRIL HOVORUN, DIRECTOR OF THE HUFFINGTON ECUMENICAL INSTITUTE AT LOYOLA MARYMOUNT UNIVERSITY IN LOS ANGELES

Commemorating the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, this volume offers an original examination of the enduring impact of the single most famous gathering of Christians since the apostolic age

Nicaea and the Future of Christianity

G EO RGE E. DEMACOPOU L OS AND A R ISTOT LE PA PANIKOLAOU, E D I TOR S 400 pages, 7 x 10, 3 b/w illustrations 9781531510169, Hardback, $80.00 (SDT), £66.00 Simultaneous electronic edition available Orthodox Christianity and Contemporary Thought JU NE Religion | Theology | History

Despite the longstanding historical and theological study of the Council of Nicaea, several central questions remain. Was Nicaea a theological event or a political one? What does it mean if it was both? Was Constantine’s intervention without precedent, or was he simply continuing a longstanding role of a Roman emperor who was responsible for leading a religious cult (albeit now for a different faith tradition)? And what about the actual theological debates of Nicaea and our ability to understand them? Scholars might never exhaust this avenue of inquiry, despite the numerous studies in recent decades.

For many scholars and Christian activists today, the significance of Nicaea centers around the idea of conciliarity and what this has meant, both historically and theologically, for the Christian community. Why and how did Nicaea become foundational for thinking that the church operates in a conciliar manner? How did that work historically in different parts of the Christian world? And how should it work today?

Nicaea and the Future of Christianity offers a fresh, globally-diverse, ecumenically-minded approach to these questions with an impressive collection of both senior and junior scholars, reflecting a diversity of views within the Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant traditions. The great benefit of this wide-ranging approach lies precisely in its ability to see the many ways in which Nicaea continues to speak to the future of Christianity.

GEORGE E. DEMACOPOULOS is Fr. John Meyendorff & Patterson Family Chair of Orthodox Christian Studies and Professor of Theology at Fordham University. He is also a co-founding director of the Orthodox Christian Studies Center at Fordham University. He serves as a Senior Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks and as President of the Byzantine Studies Association of North America. He is the author of five monographs and dozens of scholarly articles of the history of Christianity in the premodern period.

ARISTOTLE PAPANIKOLAOU is professor of theology, the Archbishop Demetrios Chair of

Orthodox Theology and Culture, and a co-director of the Orthodox Christian Studies Center at Fordham University. He is also McDonald Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Emory University Center for the Study of Law and Religion. He is the author of two monographs and numerous scholarly articles on Orthodox theology, as well as co-editor of ten volumes.

CONTRIBUTORS: Demetrios Bathrellos, Leslie Baynes, Bogdan Bucur, Christophe Chalamet, John Chryssavgis, Emanuel Fiano, Brandon Gallaher, Jaisy Joseph, Karen Kilby, Vincent Lloyd, Stephen Meawad, Francesca Aran Murphy, Leonora Neville, Cyril O’Regan, Edward Siecienski, Caroline Schroeder, Kathryn Tanner, Alexis Torrance, Bishop Maxim (Vasiljević), Erin Galgay Walsh F O R D H A M P R E S S .C O M

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SCHOLARLY

“Roumas reframes the doctrine of redemption in this first major Girardian theological work with Eastern Orthodox roots. Redemption is seen as referencing while deconstructing humanity’s structural dependence on sacrifice and is united with conversion. Thus, Roumas overcomes von Balthasar’s tarring of Girard with a gnostic brush, showing (via an Eastern Orthodox account of saving knowledge) how restoring right understanding is integral to salvation. A significant contribution to theology in a Girardian key.”

—SCOTT COWDELL, RESEARCH PROFESSOR IN THEOLOGY AT CHARLES STURT UNIVERSITY, AND AUTHOR OF RENÉ GIRARD AND THE NONVIOLENT GOD

“Redemption breaks new ground in the theological understanding of salvation. It provides the first serious integration of René Girard’s mimetic theory with the rich traditions of Eastern Orthodox theology. At the same time, it brings fresh perspective to models of atonement, with its reading of Gregory of Nyssa and the inverted sacrifice of the cross.”

—S. MARK HEIM, ANDOVER NEWTON SEMINARY AT YALE DIVINITY SCHOOL

“This book provides a mimetic soteriology by using René Girard’s theory of sacrifice for an Orthodox theology of redemption. In unfolding this its author does not follow Girard’s early anti-sacrificial attitude but goes even beyond Girard’s later understanding of Christian sacrifice by insisting on the necessity of a transformation of the sacrificial roots of human culture. This emphasis on the unavoidability of sacrifice results, however, not in a Christian reactionism but in a critique of growing tendencies toward fundamentalism and nationalism.”

—WOLFGANG PALAVER, PROFESSOR (RETIRED) AT THE CATHOLIC THEOLOGICAL FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF INNSBRUCK

Redemption A Mimetic Soteriology N IC H OLAS ROU MAS 192 Pages 9781531510558, Paperback, $30.00 (SDT), £23.99 9781531510541, Hardback, $105.00 (SDT), £87.00 Simultaneous electronic edition available Orthodox Christianity and Contemporary Thought AUG U S T Theology | Philosophy & Theory | Religion

A bold, trailblazing investigation into soteriology, approached by way of Girardian mimetic theory and Eastern Orthodox theological reflection Redemption: A Mimetic Soteriology brings French literary critic René Girard’s mimetic theory of human behavior together with a breadth of Christian approaches to redemption through the Cross.

Girard’s mimetic understanding of sacrifice is drawn upon to illuminate biblical narratives about redemption as well as the theologies of Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Abelard, and Gregory of Nyssa.

Nicholas Roumas shows by these readings that redemption can be understood as a reconfiguration of symbolic values with profound consequences for human relations and social organization.

Redemption thus serves theologians as a basis for a new practical dogmatics.

This exploration is a breath of fresh air in Orthodox theology, utilizing patristic and scriptural sources outside the framework of the predominant “neo-Patristic synthesis” and introducing an entirely new modern paradigm onto the Orthodox scene. For theologians of other traditions, Redemption contributes to the library of Girardian theologies its first Eastern Orthodox installment. For Girardians, it provides critique and refinement of many of Girard’s most nuanced views and gives due attention to overlooked and controversial aspects of his thought. For the lay reader, the book provides an accessible entry into the spirituality of the Cross through a lens that is both modern and traditional.

Redemption provides a revitalizing infusion into contemporary Orthodox theological discourse.

Its ideas will impact theology in the Orthodox Church and beyond for decades to come and are the basis for a paradigm shift in our understanding of redemption and its practical consequences.

The lay reader and professional theologian alike will find novelty and utility in its ideas.

N I C H O L A S RO U M A S is Professor of Theology at Hellenic College in Brookline, MA. His research focuses on theologies of the Cross and Girardian mimetic theory.

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F O R D H A M P R E S S .C O M

Fordham University Press Makes Newly Digitized Backlist Titles Available as eBooks Fordham University Press (FUP) is proud to announce the ongoing expansion of its Digitization Project, adding twenty titles spanning a wide range of academic disciplines to its digital offerings. This initiative makes these valuable works globally accessible and inclusive for visually impaired audiences, aligning with the mission of FUP and Fordham University to disseminate knowledge widely and equitably.

Previously available only in print, these books faced limitations in reaching critical audiences who require different formats.

The continued digitization effort overcomes these barriers, increasing both print and digital readership and expanding the global impact of these scholarly works.

“We are excited to make these essential titles accessible to a broader audience,” said Fredric Nachbaur, Director at Fordham University Press. “By expanding our digitization efforts, we ensure that our publications can be read by anyone in the formats they desire, preserving these works for future generations.”

The Digitization Project enhances accessibility by providing formats compatible with screen readers and other assistive technologies, supporting visually impaired readers worldwide.

Support Fordham University Press’s ongoing Digitization Project and help make more backlist titles available—please click HERE to contribute.

The Fordham University Press Book Fund The Fordham University Press Book Fund helps support nontraditional book projects, innovative digital initiatives, and robust marketing programs that further the mission of the Press to publish boundary-pushing scholarship reaching expansive audiences.

For more information about the Digitization Project, please contact Kate O’Brien-Nicholson at bkaobrien@fordham.edu.

BACKLIST

Most titles available as eBooks

Just City

Growing Up on the Upper West Side When Housing Was a Human Right

Jennifer Baum

Brooklyn Is

272 pages, 37 b/w illustrations 9781531506216, Hardback, $29.95 (HC), £23.99 Empire State Editions

Southeast of the Island: Travel Notes

James Agee, Preface by Jonathan Lethem 64 pages, 5 x 7 9780823224920, Hardback, $25.95 (HC), £19.99

In Defense of Sex

Whose Middle Ages?

Christopher Breu

Nonbinary Embodiment and Desire

224 pages, 2 b/w illustrations 9781531508777, Paperback, $30.00 (SDT), £23.99

Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past Andrew Albin, Mary C. Erler, Thomas O’Donnell, Nicholas L. Paul, and Nina Rowe, Editors, Introduction by David Perry, Afterword by Geraldine Heng

The Book of Tiny Prayer

Daily Meditations from the Plague Year

Micah Bucey, Foreword by Pádraig Ó Tuama

240 pages, 5 x 8 35 b/w illustrations 9780823285563, Paperback, $22.00 (AC), £16.99 Fordham Series in Medieval Studies

312 pages, 4 1⁄2 x 7 9780823299225, Paperback, $15.95 (TP), £12.99

Reading Shakespeare Reading Me Leonard Barkan

256 pages 5 color and 6 b/w illustrations 9781531507312, Paperback, $19.95 (TP), £15.99

Join the Conspiracy

How a Brooklyn Eccentric Got Lost on the Right, Infiltrated the Left, and Brought Down the Biggest Bombing Network in New York

Jonathan Butler

384 pages, 68 b/w illustrations 9781531508159, Hardback, $34.95 (HC), £27.99 Empire State Editions

IN DEFENSE

OF SEX NONBINARY EMBODIMENT AND DESIRE

CHRISTOPHER BREU

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F O R D H A M P R E S S .C O M

Senses of the Subject

Judith Butler

228 pages, 9780823264674, Paperback, $27.00 (AC)

Postindustrial DIY

Recovering American Rust Belt Icons Daniel Campo

384 pages, 9 x 9, 102 color and b/w illustrations 9781531504687, Paperback, $24.95 (AC), £19.99 Polis: Fordham Series in Urban Studies

Mortimer and the Witches

A History of NineteenthCentury Fortune Tellers Marie Carter

208 pages, 25 b/w illustrations 9781531506247, Hardback, $29.95 (HC), £23.99 Empire State Editions

Power of Gentleness

Meditations on the Risk of Living

Anne Dufourmantelle, Translated by Katherine Payne and Vincent Sallé, Foreword by Catherine Malabou

152 pages, 5 x 7 1⁄2 9780823279609, Paperback, $22.00 (AC), £16.99

BACKLIST

Moroccan Other-Archives

What Fanon Said

Brahim El Guabli

A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought

History and Citizenship after State Violence

272 pages, 6 b/w illustrations 9781531501457, Paperback, $35.00 (SDT), £27.99

Lewis R. Gordon

Movement

216 pages, 9 b/w illustrations 9780823266098, Paperback, $24.00 (SDT), £18.99 Just Ideas

Nicole Gelinas

The Civil War and the Summer of 2020

Boy with the Bullhorn

208 pages 9781531505004, Paperback, $25.00 (AC), £19.99 Reconstructing America

New York’s Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car

576 pages, 39 b/w illustrations 9781531508210, Hardback, $44.95 (HC), £35.00 Empire State Editions

Hilary N. Green and Andrew L. Slap, Editors, Foreword by Andre E. Johnson

A Memoir and History of ACT UP New York

Unforgettable Sacrifice

512 pages, 32 b/w illustrations 9781531508074, Paperback, $22.95 (TP), £17.99 Empire State Editions

Hilary N. Green, Foreword

by Edda L. Fields-Black

Ron Goldberg

Midnight Rambles

H. P. Lovecraft in Gotham David J. Goodwin

288 pages, 22 b/w illustrations 9781531504410, Hardback, $29.95 (HC), £23.99 Empire State Editions

How Black Communities Remembered the Civil War

400 pages, 15 b/w illustrations 9781531508524, Paperback, $35.00 (AC), £27.99 Reconstructing America

Greek

Latinx Revolutionary Horizons Form and Futurity in the Americas Renee Hudson

288 pages, 3 b/w illustrations 9781531507190, Paperback, $30.00 (SDT), £23.99

Jimmy’s Faith

James Baldwin, Disidentification, and the Queer Possibilities of Black Religion Christopher W. Hunt

192 pages 9781531508814, Paperback, $28.00 (SDT), £21.99

South Bronx Rising

The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of an American City Jill Jonnes

481 pages, 5 1⁄2 x 8 1⁄2 9780823221998, Paperback, $44.00 (SDT), £35.00

Queer Callings

Untimely Notes on Names and Desires Mark D. Jordan

176 pages, 5 x 8 9781531504533, Hardback, $27.95 (AC), £21.99

An Intensive Course, 2nd Revised Edition Hardy Hansen, and Gerald M. Quinn

868 pages, 7 x 10 9780823216635, Paperback, $60.00 (SDT), £50.00

F O R D H A M P R E S S .C O M

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BACKLIST

Flesh and Spirit

Group Works

Confessions of a Young Lord

Art, Politics, and Collective Ambivalence

352 pages, 25 b/w illustrations 9781531504489, Hardback, $34.95 (HC), £27.99 Empire State Editions

192 pages, 5 x 8, 23 b/w illustrations 9781531502706, Paperback, $25.00 (AC), £19.99

Felipe Luciano

We Charge Genocide!

American Fascism and the Rule of Law Bill V. Mullen

240 pages, 6 b/w illustrations 9781531508456, Paperback, $29.95 (AC), £23.99

Corpus

Jean-Luc Nancy, Translated

by Richard A. Rand

208 pages 9780823229628, Paperback, $31.00 (SDT), £23.99 Perspectives in Continental Philosophy

The City in the Distance

Jean-Luc Nancy, Translated by Cory Stockwell, Foreword by Jean-Christophe Bailly 160 pages, 5 x 8 9781531508975, Paperback, $25.00 (SDT), £19.99

The Intruder

Jean-Luc Nancy, Foreword by Claire Denis 96 pages, 5 x 8, 3 b/w illustrations 9781531506186, Paperback, $19.95 (TP), £15.99

FELIPE LUCIANO

FLESH & SPIRIT Confessions of a Young Lord

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F O R D H A M P R E S S .C O M

Ethan Philbrick

Cross Bronx

An Honest Living

A Memoir of Peculiar Itineraries Steven Salaita

178 pages 9781531506353, Hardback, $24.95 (HC), £19.99

Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill

A Writing Life

Alexander Hamilton’s Old Harlem Neighborhood Through the Centuries

256 pages, 25 b/w illustrations 9781531508067, Paperback, $19.95 (TP), £15.99 Empire State Editions

434 pages, 128 b/w illustrations 9781531506148, Hardback, $34.95 (HC), £27.99 Empire State Editions

Peter Quinn, Foreword by Dan Barry, reporter and columnist for The New York Times

The Routes Not Taken

Davida Siwisa James

Colorful Palate

A Trip Through New York City’s Unbuilt Subway System

A Flavorful Journey Through a Mixed American Experience

336 pages, 7 x 10, 100 black and white illustrations 9780823267408, Paperback, $21.95 (TP), £16.99 Empire State Editions

160 pages, 16 b/w illustrations 9781531504571, Hardback, $24.95 (HC), £19.99 Empire State Editions

White Reconstruction

Best Minds

Joseph B. Raskin

Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide Dylan Rodríguez

256 pages, 6 b/w illustrations 9780823289394, Paperback, $30.00 (SDT), £23.99

Raj Tawney

How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness Stevan M. Weine

304 pages, 37 b/w illustrations 9781531502669, Hardback, $34.95 (HC), £27.99

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