NYU Spring 2026 Catalogue by Mare Nostrum Group

Radioactive Governance

The Politics of Revitalization in PostFukushima

Japan

Maxime Polleri

Examines the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster

The 2011 Fukushima Dai’ichi nuclear disaster was the worst industrial nuclear catastrophe to hit Japan. It was a major event, rated at the highest severity, which released radioactive elements into the power plant’s surrounding environment when back-up systems failed and could not sufficiently cool the nuclear reactors. At least 164,000 people were permanently or temporarily displaced.

Radioactive Governance offers an ethnographic look at how the disaster was handled by Japan. Unlike prior nuclear-related narratives, such as those surrounding Chernobyl or Hiroshima, which focused on themes of harm, trauma, and victimization, the Japanese government consistently put forward a discourse of minimal or no radiation-related dangers, a gradual bringing home of former evacuees, a restarting of nuclear power plants, and the promotion of a resilient mindset in the face of adversity. This narrative worked to counter other understandings of recovery, such as those of worried citizens unsuccessfully fighting for permanent evacuation because they were afraid to go back to their homes.

Providing a rich theorization of how both governments and citizens shape narratives about catastrophic events, Radioactive Governance not only displays how Fukushima became a story of hope and resilience rather than of victimization, but also how radioactive governance shifted from the nuclear secrecy that characterized the Cold War era to relying on international organizations and domestic citizens to comanage the aftermath of disasters.

Maxime Polleri is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Université Laval.

Inside Knowledge

Incarcerated People on the Failures of the American Prison

Doran Larson

New in Paper!

A powerful critique of mass incarceration by the people who have experienced it

Inside Knowledge is the first book to examine the American prison system through the eyes of those who are trapped within it. Drawing from the writings collected in the American Prison Writing Archive, Doran Larson deftly illustrates how mass incarceration does less to contain any harm perpetrated by convicted people than to spread and perpetuate harm among their families and communities.

Inside Knowledge makes a powerful argument that America’s prisons not only degrade and debilitate their wards but also defeat the prison’s cardinal missions of rehabilitation, containment, deterrence, and even meaningful retribution.

If prisons are places where convicted people are sent to learn a lesson, then imprisoned people are the ones who know just what American prisons actually teach. At once profound and devastating, Inside Knowledge is an invaluable resource for those interested in addressing mass incarceration in America.

Doran Larson is Edward North Professor of Literature at Hamilton College. He is the author of Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration, editor of Fourth City: Essays from the Prison in America, and founded and co-directs The American Prison Writing Archive (prisonwitness.org).

Therapeutic Inequalities

Mood

Disorder Self-Management in Chicago

Talia Rose Weiner

Argues that self-management approaches for depressive disorders ask the most from those with the least

Therapeutic Inequalities offers a powerful and timely critique of the U.S. mental healthcare system, uncovering how structural disparities are maintained and often hidden through the widespread promotion of “self-management.”

Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork and community-engaged research, the volume traces how “self-management” a treatment model that encourages patients to regulate their own conditions has gained prominence in the care of mood disorders like depression.

As mood disorders have become leading causes of disability in the United States, public health officials have embraced a biomedical framing that casts them as brain diseases. While this medicalized approach has helped to reduce stigma, it has also justified shifting responsibility for care onto individuals, especially those already disadvantaged by systemic racism, poverty, and the erosion of public mental health infrastructure.

Weiner shows how the logic of self-management aligns with neoliberal ideals of personal responsibility, while obscuring the broader conditions that shape mental health outcomes. Far from simply diagnosing the failures of the current system, Therapeutic Inequalities asks what a more humane, interconnected model of care might look like. It calls for a radical reimagining of both mental health and personhood one that values empathy, community, and the recognition of our shared vulnerabilities.

Talia Weiner is Assistant Professor of Psychology in the Department of Anthropology, Psychology, and Sociology at the University of West Georgia. This work emerges from her dissertation in Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago, which won the William E. Henry Memorial Award for best dissertation of the year in the department.

Understanding Harm How the Law Should Assess Injury

Mark G. Kelman

Examines broad political theoretical issues while exploring injuries associated with poverty, discrimination, sexual harassment, and disabling injury

“Do No Harm.” Generally speaking, our society’s commitment to this principle has grounded its system of ethics, legal rules, and policies. Yet, in the context of the law, determining what it means for people to be harmed is a much more complex theoretical question.

In Understanding Harm, legal scholar Mark Kelman expands our contemporary legal and moral understandings of injury and welfare, directly addressing what it means for people to be well or badly off. Engaging with political theory, legal analysis, and empirical findings, Kelman examines how and why people may (or may not) be harmed by disability, poverty, discrimination, and sexual harassment. He provides a comprehensive exploration of how individuals who have been harmed by unjust social practices or the bad acts of others are often injured through the lack of adequate accommodations, restrictions on access to material resources, or economic disadvantages. In doing so, he sharply critiques current legal approaches to injury, examining the intricacies of modern harm-inducing practices. Providing a fresh perspective on today’s most pressing societal issues, Understanding Harm calls for readers to rethink our approach to harm, and to question what can, and should, be done for people who have been harmed.

Mark G. Kelman is Vice Dean and the James C. Gaither Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. He is the author of many books, including What is in a Name?: Taxation and Regulation across Constitutional Domains, The Heuristics Debate, and A Guide to Critical Legal Studies Previously, Kelman served as Director of Criminal Justice Projects at the Fund for the City of New York.

01/13/2026 | 304 pages | 6 x 9 | Hardback: 9781479834303 | $45 NYUS

Who Belongs

White Christian Nationalism and the Roberts Court

Stephen M. Feldman

Examines how Roberts Court decisions have reshaped "We the People" to favor a narrow vision of belonging rooted in white Christian nationalism and minority rule

Who belongs to “We the People”? Are “the People” exclusive, inegalitarian, and hierarchical, or inclusive and egalitarian? For much of American history, an exclusionary and inegalitarian republican democracy predominated, but in the 1930s, political forces lifted an egalitarian and participatory pluralist democracy to ascendance. Although a conservative Supreme Court initially resisted this change, the Court acquiesced in 1937 and then subsequently deepened the nation’s commitment to pluralist democracy by invigorating constitutional protections for individual rights religious freedom, free expression, and equal protection. Protection of individual rights facilitated the acceptance of diverse values and the expression of those values in the pluralist democratic arena. Disgruntled with these constitutional developments, conservatives eventually denounced the 1937 transition and urged the Court to restore the original Constitution.

In Who Belongs, Stephen M. Feldman assesses how the conservative justices of the Roberts Court seem intent on undoing the 1937 constitutional transformation. Yet, Feldman reveals, they are not returning the nation to pre-1937 republican democratic constitutional principles. Instead, the justices reinterpret the post-1937 rights of religious freedom, free speech, and equal protection to privilege a narrow segment of the American people white, Christian, heterosexual men. The Roberts Court is limiting who fully belongs to “We the People,” narrowing the rights of non-Christians, people of color, women, and LGBTQ+ individuals. Ultimately, the conservative justices are interpreting individuals’ rights to serve minority rule in harmony with the political agenda of white Christi an nationalism.

Providing a powerful assessment of white Christian nationalism in American constitutionalism, Who Belongs reminds us that a healthy democracy depends on not only what rights exist but also who enjoys them.

Stephen M. Feldman is the Jerry W. Housel/Carl F. Arnold Distinguished Professor of Law and Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Wyoming. He is the author of Please Don’t Wish Me a Merry Christmas: A Critical History of the Separation of Church and State, Free Expression and Democracy in America: A History, and Pack the Court! A Defense of Supreme Court Expansion among other titles.

01/20/2026 | 280 pages | 6 x 9 | Hardback: 9781479841165 | $39 NYUS

Zoning Faith How City Politics Shape Muslim Communities in Chicago

Sultan Tepe

An intriguing look at how the city's built environment influences the shape of Muslim communities in Chicago

Zoning Faith offers a rare in-depth look at three distinct Muslim communities in Chicago, one Shia Muslim, one Sunni, and one Black Muslim community. The volume explores how these communities navigate their social and political environments, and how their experiences in urban settings help to explain the emergence of new Islamic organizations, practices, and theologies in America.

Zoning Faith provides the first comprehensive spatial examination of Muslims' experiences in global cities. Although cities play a crucial role in the enactment of faith, they are often treated as places Muslims happen to live, or as places that are transformed as many Muslims come to inhabit them. Little attention has been paid to the ways in which cities may transform faith groups in meaningful ways, from zoning regulations and debates about where a mosque can be situated to how a building’s structure can influence prayer and communal life. This book pays careful attention to the intersections of urban space and religion, approaching “built spaces” as profoundly political and particularly illuminating of the experiences of minority faiths.

Drawing on a multi-year and multi-site ethnography, the volume provides a previously unobtainable, in-depth look at how Muslim communities in Chicago defy the expectations of conventional places of worship. Crossing the boundaries of urban studies, theological studies, architecture, and public policy, Zoning Faith offers new insights into how Islam is vernacularized and grounded in the US in many different ways.

Sultan Tepe is Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois, Chicago. She is the author of Beyond Sacred and Secular: Politics of Religion in Israel and Turkey , the co-editor chief of Political and Religion, and recipient of several awards, including the Choice Outstanding National Title and Weber Best Paper in Religion and Politics.

Currencies of Cruelty

Slavery, Freak Shows, and the Performance Archive

Danielle Bainbridge

Uncovers a haunting yet vital record of bodies commodified, archived, and performed

Currencies of Cruelty is a bold and incisive reconsideration of the relationship between enslavement, disability, and performance in 19thand early 20th-century America. Danielle Bainbridge traces how the transition from slavery to legal freedom became entangled with the spectacle of the freak show stage, where disabled and racialized performers often denied traditional labor opportunities became highly lucrative attractions.

At the heart of this powerful study are conjoined twins Millie Christine McKoy, born into slavery and later emancipated, and the so-called “original Siamese Twins,” Chang and Eng Bunker, who navigated the freak show circuit not only as performers but also as enslavers. Their stories reveal how archival practices surrounding enslavement and performance labor worked in tandem, creating a system where unfree and newly freed bodies were simultaneously valued and devalued exploited for their spectacle yet rendered abject within traditional labor economies.

Blending historical analysis with innovative archival theory, Currencies of Cruelty challenges conventional narratives of labor, freedom, and human worth. Bainbridge introduces the concept of the “future perfect” archive one that anticipates what will have been rather than merely recording the past offering a radical new way to engage with histories of enslavement, disability, and performance. A gripping exploration of race, commerce, and bodily spectacle, this book sheds crucial light on how histories of subjugation continue to shape our understanding of value and visibility today.

Danielle Bainbridge is Assistant Professor of Theatre at Northwestern University, where she also holds courtesy appointments in Performance Studies and African American Studies. Her writing has been featured in Killens Review of Arts & Letters, Moko Magazine , and The Mechanics’ Institute Review Online

Family Legal Vulnerability

How Immigration Policy Shapes the Lives of Latino College Students

Laura E. Enriquez, Cecilia Ayón, Jennifer R. Nájera, Annie Ro, and Zulema Valdez

How college students in mixed-status families are affected by immigration policies

Focusing on Latinx students attending the University of California, Family Legal Vulnerability exposes how their educational experiences and social mobility are shaped not only by their own immigration status, but also by their family members’ undocumented immigration status. The authors introduce the concept of "family legal vulnerability" as a novel framework that captures how undocumented and mixed-status immigrant families collectively experience deportability, economic insecurity, discrimination, social exclusion, and legal uncertainty.

The authors show how the adverse effects of family legal vulnerability are similar for both college students who are undocumented and U.S. citizens with undocumented parents. Cascading consequences emerge among immigration-impacted students as family legal vulnerability compromises their mental and emotional health, academic success, and political engagement.

The book also illustrates how students demonstrate agency as they negotiate family legal vulnerability, seeking out ways to bolster their individual and collective flourishing. Ultimately, this book calls on scholars, policy makers, and university administrators to account for family legal vulnerability when considering how immigration policies undermine students’ college experiences and to identify actionable practices to advance greater equity and inclusion.

Laura E. Enriquez is Associate Professor of Chicano/Latino Studies and Associate Director of the Center for Liberation, Anti-racism, and Belonging (C-LAB) at The University of California, Irvine. She is the author of the award-winning book, Of Love and Papers: How Immigration Policy Affects Romance and Family.

Cecilia Ayón is Professor of Public Policy at The University of California, Riverside.

Jennifer R. Nájera is Professor of Ethnic Studies at The University of California, Riverside. She is the author of The Borderlands of Race: Mexican Segregation in a South Texas Town.

Annie Ro is Associate Professor of Health, Society, and Behavior at The University of California, Irvine.

Zulema Valdez is Professor of Sociology at The University of California, Merced. She is the author of The New Entrepreneurs: How Race, Class, and Gender Shape American Enterprise.

Printing Nueva York

Spanish-Language Print Culture, Media Change, and Democracy in the Late Nineteenth Century

Kelley Kreitz

Uncovers the network of Spanish-language writers and editors in 19th-century New York, whose media innovations fueled anticolonial struggles and democratic ideals

At the end of the nineteenth century, New York City was a vital hub for writers from Latin America, providing a haven of press freedom and the latest printing technology. In Printing Nueva York , Kelley Kreitz reexamines the development of mass media in the United States by highlighting the significant contributions of Spanish -language newspapers and magazines created by US-based Latinx writers, editors, and their allies. This dynamic, hemispheric network of collaborators used a mix of storytelling and strategic media engagement to model democratic principles centered on equality and collective action.

Kreitz's work offers a fresh look at U.S. media and literary history, challenging established narratives that have primarily focused on English-language publications. Through a vivid analysis of innovative figures such as José Martí, Rafael Serra, and Sotero Figueroa, the book uncovers a rich intellectual exchange that crossed national and linguistic borders. Unlike many Anglophone outlets that emphasized passive consumption, these trans-American media networks promoted active participation, cultural exchange, and collective mobilization to address pressing issues of the time, including colonialism, anarchism, and the pursuit of economic, gender, and racial equality.

Printing Nueva York demonstrates how early Latinx writers and editors redefined what democracy could be, offering insights that are highly relevant to our current digital age. The book encourages readers to consider how storytelling, participation, and the transformative power of technology can continue to drive the potential of contemporary media to build a more democratic future.

Kelley Kreitz is Associate Professor of English at Pace University. She is also the cofounder and director of Babble Lab, a digital humanities center at Pace University.

Reading Media

How to Do Textual Analysis

Edited by Jonathan Gray and Daphne Gershon

Innovative methods in textual analysis to decode today’s ever-expanding media landscape

Reading Media: How to do Textual Analysis reinvigorates one of media and cultural studies’ most foundational methods at a moment when it is most needed, showing its continuing vitality by adapting it to new media environments, cultural objects, and scholarly questions.

The volume insists that the close study of meaning, form, and representation remains central to understanding media’s power. With contributions from leading and emerging scholars, the book offers a diverse toolkit: from narratological and semiotic analysis of film and TV, to historical poetic accounts of TikTok, multimodal analysis of Afrobeats music videos, and postcolonial criticism of games. Essays extend the scope of textual analysis to unexpected objects such as plastic waste, memes, and refugee-authored media while others demonstrate how texts operate across platforms, genres, and transmedia franchises. Beyond offering new and improved approaches to textual analysis, each chapter illustrates its approach using a specific case study, functioning both as a step-by-step how-to guide and as an example of textual analysis in action.

Reading Media advances a vision of textual analysis that is rigorous yet flexible, attuned to both aesthetics and politics, and responsive to today’s media environment. Essential for students and scholars in media, communication, and cultural studies, Reading Media both reaffirms and renews textual analysis as an indispensable way of engaging with the mediated worlds that shape contemporary life.

Jonathan Gray is Hamel Family Distinguished Chair in Communication Arts, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and author and editor of numerous books, including Keywords for Media Studies (2017), and Satire TV (2009), as well as Television Studies (with Amanda D. Lotz), and A Companion to Media Authorship (with Derek Johnson).

Daphne Gershon is Lecturer at Gonzaga University. She received her PhD from the Media and Cultural Studies program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

Centering Families of Color A Reimagination of Family Law

Nancy E. Dowd and R. A. Lenhardt

Centers families of color in family law, revealing their pivotal role in shaping justice, equality, and social change and how their perspectives reframes the scope of family law

Centering Families of Color argues for the reframing of how we define “family law.” Centering the voices and perspectives of families of color, it expands and contextualizes how the law functions in relation to families. It exposes the impact of structural inequalities as they differentially and hierarchically impact families. This groundbreaking volume thus reorients how we think of family law, offering the experiences of families of color as critical to both the diagnoses and solutions for structural inequality.

While conventional treatment of families of color marginalizes their role socially and politically as add-ons, this volume centers them as essential. Leading scholars across disciplinary groups unearth and expose the hidden norms of family law, identify the critical history of how the law impacts families of color, and detail their dynamic contributions to social transformation. Families of color offer affirmative, resilient strategies for social justice and reform.

At a time of diversity among families and dramatic changes in the pattern of life, this volume provides a critical examination of the legal structures that impact families from the much-needed perspective of families of color. Centering Families of Color showcases how families of color are central to understanding what family is and how families interact with the law.

Nancy E. Dowd is Emeritus Professor, University of Florida Levin College of Law, where she was a University Professor and Director of the Center on Children and Families. She is the author of multiple books, most recently, with Margaret Beale Spencer, Radical Brown: Keeping the Promise to America’s Children.

R. A. Lenhardt is Agnes Williams Sesquicentennial Professor of Race, Law, and Justice and Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Georgetown Law. She is the co-editor of Critical Race Judgments: Rewritten U.S. Court Opinions on Race and the Law.

In Dependence

Women and the Patriarchal State in Revolutionary America

Jacqueline Beatty

Examines the role of the American Revolution in the everyday lives of women

Patriarchal forces of law, finance, and social custom restricted women’s rights and agency in revolutionary America. Yet women in this period exploited these confines, transforming constraints into vehicles of female empowerment. Through a close reading of thousands of legislative, judicial, and institutional pleas across seventy years of history in three urban centers, Jacqueline Beatty illustrates the ways in which women in the revolutionary era asserted their status as dependents, demanding the protections owed to them as the assumed subordinates of men. In so doing, they claimed various forms of aid and assistance, won divorce suits, and defended themselves and their female friends in the face of patriarchal assumptions about their powerlessness. Ultimately, women in the revolutionary era were able to advocate for themselves and express a relative degree of power not in spite of their dependent status, but because of it.

Their varying degrees of success in using these methods, however, was contingent on their race, class, and socio-economic status, and the degree to which their language and behavior conformed to assumptions of Anglo-American femininity. In Dependence thus exposes the central paradoxes inherent in American women’s social, legal, and economic positions of dependence in the Revolutionary era, complicating binary understandings of power and weakness, of agency and impotence, and of independence and dependence. Significantly, the American Revolution provided some women with the language and opportunities in which to claim old rights the rights of dependents in new ways. Most importantly, In Dependence shows how women’s coming to consciousness as rights-bearing individuals laid the groundwork for the activism and collective petitioning efforts of later generations of American feminists.

Jacqueline Beatty is Assistant Professor of History in the Department of History and Political Science at York College of Pennsylvania.

In the Spirit, In the Dark

Black Music and Political Activism

Najja K. Baptist

How Black music shapes the political identity, consciousness, and engagement of Black youth

From Rihanna and Kendrick Lamar, to J. Cole and Janelle Monae, Najja K. Baptist shows us how Black music has, more than ever before, become a form of political participation and resistance that has socialized and mobilized a new generation of Black youth, leading them to enter and remain engaged with large-scale activist movements.

Drawing on surveys with hundreds of youth, interviews with artists and activists, and in-depth content analysis, Baptist shows us how the creation and consumption of Black music has made movements like Black Lives Matter possible. As Black music both responds to, and educates its listeners about, catalytic political events like police killings, it simultaneously heightens, develops, and sustains the political consciousness of Black youth, particularly in the age of social media. Baptist finds that music predicts - and further shapes - their larger public attitudes toward government, political leaders, and policies, in addition to encouraging more traditional forms of political participation, such as organizing and attending protests.

Ultimately, Baptist invites us into the fascinating, often-hidden space where young Black political consciousness is born and cultivated, driving many to become agents of change.

Najja K. Baptist is Director of the African and African American Studies program and Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Arkansas. He is also the founding director of the University Advanced Research Team.

Complex Innocence

Defending Deﬁant Victims of Police Killings

Lisa Marie Cacho

Every day in the United States, an average of three people are killed by police officers. Black and Indigenous victims are disproportionately represented, and their stories are too often distorted by courts and media to justify their deaths and exonerate police actions.

In Complex Innocence, Lisa Marie Cacho examines five police killings that occurred between 2012 and 2019 across the continental U.S., Hawaiʻi, and the Muckleshoot Nation. Many of the victims queer people, women of color, and other multiply marginalized individuals had prior encounters with law enforcement, leading their deaths to be framed as deserved or inevitable. Cacho challenges these narratives by interrogating the legal, cultural, and historical frameworks that determine which acts of self-defense are protected and which are criminalized.

Drawing on self-defense law, Supreme Court cases, anti-resisting arrest statutes, and policing practices, Cacho reveals how “self-defense” as a right has been repeatedly redefined to privilege police officers while denying protection to victims of state violence. Through careful analysis of reports, testimonies, and media portrayals, she demonstrates how people of color’s efforts at self-preservation are recast as threats, while officers’ violence is framed as justifiable.

By reclaiming the complex innocence of those killed, Complex Innocence exposes the racial, sexual, and colonial foundations of policing. It offers an urgent critique of how U.S. law and culture sustain the cycle of sanctioned state violence.

Lisa Marie Cacho is Associate Professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Virginia and author of Social Death: Racialized Rightless and the Criminalization of the Unprotected

Accessing Abortion Global and Comparative Perspectives

Mindy Jane Roseman,Rachel Rebouché

Explores the global landscape of abortion law reform

In many countries, barriers to abortion access legal, cultural, or practical have been dismantled in places as diverse as Mexico, Kenya, Thailand, and Ireland. Yet, in a few countries the United States and Poland to name two obstacles to abortion abound. Why? Why do some countries find abortion access a publicly polarizing issue and others a relatively uncontroversial health and family decision? Why has abortion access been a rallying point for progressive political organizing and, in others, the site of democratic backsliding?

In Accessing Abortion, expert academics and lawyers look to countries that have passed permissive abortion laws to make visible how legislation both settled and stirred conflict in politically-divided environments. By comparing the process of enacting laws in these countries, the volume spotlights current social mobilization for and against abortion rights. At the same time, the volume assesses how these varied and comparative national developments unfolded in an international and transnational context where the floor of what c ountries can do is set by international human rights norms. Ultimately, this collection aims to show how law and public policy functions to facilitate both permissive and restrictive abortion law reform, and how that reform then changes the delivery of abo rtion services. Providing a sustained comparative analysis of the costs and benefits of legislating and/or judicializing abortion rights across the globe, Accessing Abortion assesses what is missing from contemporary conversations on reproductive justice.

Mindy Jane Roseman is Director of the Gruber Program for Global Justice and Women’s Rights at Yale Law School and co -editor of Beyond Virtue and Vice: Rethinking Human Rights and Criminal Law.

Rachel Rebouché is the Kean Family Dean and Peter J. Liacouras Professor of Law at the Temple University Beasley School of Law and co -author of Governance Feminism: An Introduction.

Latinx Civil Wars

The Formation of Latinidad in an Age of Revolution and Rebellion

Jesse Alemán

Uncovers how Mexican-American and CubanAmerican writings during the US Civil War shaped Latinidad amid conflicts over race, slavery, and national identity

The mid-nineteenth century was a crucible for the emergence of US Latinidad. Against the backdrop of the US–Mexico War, the Cuban wars of independence, and the American Civil War, Latinx identity took shape in fractured and contested ways through struggles over race, slavery, and governance in the United States, Mexico, and Cuba.

Latinx Civil Wars uncovers this turbulent history through a rich archive of letters, military dispatches, journalism, and literature that reveal Latinx identity as itself at war during the long Civil War era. These embattled writings illuminate how questions of race, displacement, and assimilation reverberated across national and cultural borders, producing competing visions of what it meant to be Latinx in nineteenthcentury America.

Alemán reconstructs this contested landscape by bringing together well -known figures such as María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Loreta Janeta Velázquez, and Rafael Chacón with overlooked participants like Miguel Otero, James Santiago Tafolla, and Federico and Adolfo Cavada. Their lives and words trace a diaspora negotiating the fraught intersections of race, class, language, and national allegiance across Union and Confederate lines.

Challenging historians and literary scholars alike, Latinx Civil Wars demonstrates how the formation of Latinx identity was entangled with slavery, independence, racialization, and rebellion revealing Latinidad as a product not of unity, but of conflict and contradiction.

Jesse Alemán is Professor of English and Presidential Teaching Fellow at the University of New Mexico. He is co-editor of Empire and the Literature of Sensation (2007), and The Latino Nineteenth Century (2016).

Regulating Conception

Science, Politics, and Reproductive Genetic Innovation

Myrisha S. Lewis

Uncovers the hidden federal regulation of assisted reproductive technology and reproductive genetic innovation

The use of assisted reproductive technology (ART) has become increasingly prevalent in society, with approximately ⅓ of American adults reporting in 2018 that they or someone they know has undergone fertility treatment. Yet, while traditional ART techniques like artificial insemination or in vitro fertilization (IVF) have led to the birth of millions of children worldwide, their use and research has remained contested within the American regulatory sphere.

In Regulating Conception, Myrisha S. Lewis assesses the moral, political and social issues that influence the federal regulation of ART and reproductive genetic innovation. Contrasting the prevailing viewpoint that ART is “minimally regulated,” Lewis uncovers how ART techniques that combine IVF with genetic modification or substitution face hidden regulations from federal agencies that curtail access to reproductive genetic innovation. Though the jurisdictional basis of these agency actions has never been clearly articulated, agency employees continue to use agency-issued letters and advisories to deter practitioners of reproductive genetic innovation. In doing so, these actions limit access to life-altering reproductive technologies in the United States and further disparities in access to assisted reproduction. Exposing the extent of over -regulation assisted reproduction in the US, Regulating Conception urges the minimal regulation of assisted reproduction and reproductive genetic innovation in place of clandestine regulation, to increase transparency and safeguard reproductive rights.

Myrisha S. Lewis is Professor of Law at William & Mary School of Law.

Civility Unbound Contesting a Democratic Value

Edited by Michael DiNiscia and Ellyn M. Toscano

An urgent interrogation of an eroding norm

Amidst unprecedented turmoil in American Democracy as norms of conduct in our institutions erode and polarizing, combative behavior is increasingly rewarded an acclaimed group of thought leaders, policymakers, artists, activists, and scholars interrogate a cornerstone of American politics and society: civility.

In Civility Unbound, these luminaries examine “civility” and address the question of whether being “civil” is a fundamental good. Tackling the concept’s core paradoxes, they consider how those in power have defined civility to regulate the norms of “acceptable” behavior in politics. The collection features powerful contributions: Norm Ornstein discusses how tribalization has pushed political institutions to the breaking point; Jonathan Haidt describes how social media has fundamentally changed our relations that supercharges moralistic anger while dissolving trust and cooperation; Lynn Mie Itagaki unearths the ways in which civility is deployed as a means to delay or defer the pursuit of justice; Karen Jackson-Weaver recounts the history of African American women deploying civility in the fight for universal suffrage; Ricardo Maldonado uses his own life as a Puerto Rican poet as a case study to think about issues of belonging and identity; and Anthony Appiah points to how civility can be a positive means for negotiating our differences.

Together, these essays present readers with a sweeping understanding of the values that dictate the political environment, addressing how these conventions evolve or deteriorate over time. Ultimately, Civility Unbound offers a potential path forward for redeeming this democratic value, in the pursuit of accepting differences, facilitating dialogue, and encouraging compromise.

Michael F. DiNiscia serves as Director of Research & Strategic Initiatives of the John Brademas Center of New York University. He is the co-editor of Are the Arts Essential?

Ellyn M. Toscano is Executive Director of the Hawthornden Foundation.

No Restraint

Disabled Children and Institutionalized Violence in America's Schools

Charles Bell

A wake-up call on the use and abuse of restraints against disabled children in public schools

Over 100,000 students are restrained and secluded in locked rooms throughout US public schools; the overwhelming majority are students with disabilities. Despite pleas from parents, disability rights organizations, and at least seventeen state Attorneys General, Congress has refused to pass laws to protect these students from the horrors of harmful restraint and seclusion practices. In No Restraint, Charles Bell argues that seclusion and restraint are so harmful and traumatic that they provoke night terrors, a profound aversion to school, and self-harm in children. Students reported being subjected to aggressive restraint tactics that left bruises on their arms and legs, dragged into seclusion rooms that resemble solitary confinement cells in prisons, and locked inside.

Featuring extensive interviews, ranging across fifteen states, with parents of Black and white children with disabilities as well as university teacher education program directors, Bell explores how parents of children with disabilities perceive the impact of school seclusion and restraint on their families and investigates how the training school officials receive contributes to the misuse of these practices. Among parents, the trauma associated with their child’s restraint and seclusion in school led to physical and mental health challenges, as well as long-term job loss as they advocated for their children. Additionally, as parents challenged harmful restraint and seclusion practices in legal proceedings, school officials often retaliated by filing claims with child protective services, targeting spouses employed within the district, and involving law enforcement.

A deeply moving and timely work, No Restraint exposes how schools function as structurally violent anti-disability institutions. This book will encourage school officials and policymakers to rethink harmful disciplinary strategies and craft stronger policy guidelines that protect children from these practices.

Charles Bell is Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice Sciences at Illinois State University. He is the author of Suspended: Punishment, Violence, and the Failure of School Safety, which was a finalist for the 2021 C. Wright Mills Book Award.

02/24/2026 | 224 pages | 5 x 8 | Hardback: 9781479834587 | $25 NYUS

"Are You Calling Me a Racist?" Why We Need to Stop Talking about Race and Start Making Real Antiracist Change

Sarita Srivastava

New in Paper!

Winner, 2025 Canadian Sociology Book Award, given by the Canadian Sociological Association

Shows why diversity workshops fail and offers concrete solutions for a path forward

Despite decades of anti-racism workshops and diversity policies in corporations, schools, and nonprofit organizations, racial conflict has only increased in recent years. “Are You Calling Me a Racist?” reveals why these efforts have failed to effectively challenge racism and offers a new way forward.

Drawing from her own experience as an educator and activist, as well as extensive interviews and analyses of contemporary events, Sarita Srivastava shows that racial encounters among well-meaning people are ironically hindered by the emotional investment they have in being seen as good people. Diversity workshops devote energy to defending, recuperating, educating, and inwardly reflecting, with limited results, and these exercises often make things worse. These “Feel -Good politics of race,” Srivastava explains, train our focus on the therapeutic and educational, rather than on concrete practices that could move us towards true racial equity. In this type of approach to diversity training, people are more concerned about being called a racist than they are about changing racist behavior.

“Are You Calling Me a Racist?” is a much-needed challenge to the status quo of diversity training, and will serve as a valuable resource for anyone dedicated to dismantling racism in their communities, educational institutions, public or private organizations, and social movements.

Sarita Srivastava is Professor of Sociology and Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Science at OCAD University in Toronto.

Forbidden

A 3,000-Year History of Jews and the Pig

Jordan D. Rosenblum

New in Paper!

Winner of the 74th National Jewish Book Award: The Jane and Stuart Weitz-man Family Award for Food Writing and Cookbooks

Jews do not eat pig. This (not always true) observation has been made by both Jews and non-Jews for more than three thousand years and is rooted in biblical law. Though the Torah prohibits eating pig meat, it is not singled out more than other food prohibitions. Horses, rabbits, squirrels, and even vultures, while also not kosher, do not inspire the same level of revulsion for Jews as the pig. The pig has become an iconic symbol for people to signal their Jewishness, nonJewishness, or rebellion from Judaism. There is nothing in the Bible that suggests Jews are meant to embrace this level of pigphobia.

Starting with the Hebrew Bible, Jordan D. Rosenblum historicizes the emergence of the pig as a key symbol of Jewish identity, from the Roman persecution of ancient rabbis, to the Spanish Inquisition, when so -called Marranos (“Pigs”) converted to Catholicism, to Shakespeare’s writings, to modern memoirs of those leaving Orthodox Judaism. The pig appears in debates about Jewish emancipation in eighteenth-century England and in vaccine conspiracies; in World War II rallying cries, when many American Jewish soldiers were “eating ham for Uncle Sam;” in conversations about pig sandwiches reportedly consumed by Karl Marx; and in recent deliberations about the kosher status of Impossible Pork.

All told, there is a rich and varied story about the associations of Jews and pigs over time, both emerging from within Judaism and imposed on Jews by others. Expansive yet accessible, Forbidden offers a captivating look into Jewish history and identity through the lens of the pig.

Jordan Rosenblum is Professor of Religious Studies, University of WisconsinMadison, where he is also the Belzer Professor of Classical Judaism at the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies. He is the author of many books, including Rabbinic Drinking: What Beverages Teach Us About Rabbinic Literature, The Jewish Dietary Laws in the Ancient World and Food and Identity in Early Rabbinic Judaism and coeditor of Feasting and Fasting: The History and Ethics of Jewish Food .

Mormon Barrio

Latino Belonging in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter- day Saints

Sujey Vega

Illuminates the unique struggles and triumphs of Latino Latter-day Saints, the second largest demographic group in the church

The Mormon community is usually thought of as a homogenous, white-dominant faith. However, Latinos make up the second largest demographic group in the Church, with about 3.3 million practicing members today. Despite their rich history and influence, little research has focused on Latinos within the LDS Church or the push-pull factors that have attracted Spanish-speaking members to Mormonism in record numbers.

Mormon Barrio charts the century-long history of Latino Latter-day Saints, examining their historic and present contributions to the Mormon faith as well as their unique positioning within the religion’s demographic makeup. Early in the Church’s history, founder Joseph Smith’s successor, Brigham Young, denied Black members full participation in the faith. Latino Saints existed somewhere between White and Black members in this system. Since the late 1970s the church has disavowed the belief that people with dark skin are inferior, but the Church is still an overwhelmingly white institution.

Centering the voices of Latino LDS members, the volume explores how Latino Mormons have navigated and established a sense of belonging for themselves within the faith, countering its Whiteness and coming to terms with its racist history. It shows how Latino Mormons have developed ethnoreligious barrios (communities) to function as sacred ethnic collectives where their religious beliefs and cultural practices can intersect. And it pays particular attention to gender, and to the ways in which Latina Mormons engage their faith and feminism to navigate their gendered positions within Mormonism. Mormon Barrio demystifies the lived ethno-religious experiences of Latino Mormons and accentuates their efforts to build a sense of communal belonging within their faith.

Sujey Vega is Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies and American Studies, and Affiliate Faculty in Transborder Studies and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. She is the author of L atino Heartland: Of Borders and Belonging in the Midwest

Detroit Never Left

Black Space, White Borders, Latino Crossings

Nicole E. Trujillo -Pagán

A new perspective on the relationship between race and space in Detroit

Detroit seemed to experience an explosive rebirth following its bankruptcy, the largest in US municipal history. It was as if the slate had been wiped clean and the color line erased in the nation’s largest Black city. Detroit Never Left explains the relation between racism and space by analyzing the ways opportunities changed in the years leading up to and following bankruptcy.

Based on a variety of data, including in-depth interviews with people who identify as “Latina/o/x” in their early 20s, ethnographic observation, and media coverage, Nicole E. Trujillo-Pagán shows how a dialectic between empty and concrete abstractions created new opportunities for outside investment, often at the expense of residents' fortunes. She reveals space is much more than a neutral backdrop; It is continually produced through abstractions that act like bordering and crossing practices to control resources and opportunities. With broad implications for analyses of space and opportunity, Detroit Never Left tackles important contradictions in the post -bankruptcy city. For example, urban youth do not want to be moved out or isolated in their barrio. Similarly, many Detroiters feel spatial changes happen “to,” instead of “for” them. Ultimately, residents’ concerns underscored broader tensions between democratic inclusion and racialized capitalism.

Nicole E. Trujillo-Pagán is Associate Professor of Sociology at Wayne State University. She is the author of Modern Colonization by Medical Intervention: U.S. Medicine in Puerto Rico

Troubling Testimonies

Women's Narratives of War, Genocide, and Sexual Violence

Annika Björkdahl, Kristine Höglund, and Johanna Mannergren

Analyzes the narrative agency of women who have come forward to break silences around wartime atrocities

In Troubling Testimonies, Annika Björkdahl, Kristine Höglund, and Johanna Mannergren explore the power of women's voices in the aftermath of war. Demonstrating the importance of personal testimony, this book analyzes the narrative agency of women who have courageously come forward to shatter gendered silences around wartime atrocities and who have produced crucial new knowledge about women’s experiences of war and its aftermath.

Employing a feminist lens, the authors highlight women's powerful testimonies from different post-war contexts; Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, and Iraq. They examine how these testimonies provide insight into complex forms of gender-based violence, such as wartime rapes in Rwanda and Bosnia and Herzegovina, the enslavement of young Yazidi women at the hands of ISIS, and the trauma of "secondary witnessing" in Sri Lanka. Most importantly, they examine how the act of testifying provides agency to the women themselves. The book develops an innovative theoretical framework for understanding narrative agency, offering scholars and practitioners a new tool for analyzing how testimony contributes to transitional justice, peace and transformation after war.

Annika Björkdahl is Professor of Political Science at Lund University in Sweden. She is the co-author of Peace and the Politics of Memory and Peacebuilding and Spatial Transformation: Peace, Space and Place, and co-editor of The Production of Gendered Knowledge of War: Women and Epistemic Power.

Kristine Höglund is Professor of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University in Sweden. She is the author of Peace Negotiations in the Shadow of Violence and co-editor of The Spatiality of Violence in Post-war Cities.

Johanna Mannergren is Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Södertörn University in Sweden. She is the co-author of Peace and the Politics of Memory, and co-editor of The Production of Gendered Knowledge of War: Women and Epistemic Power.

03/03/2026 | 288 pages | 6 x 9 | Hardback: 9781479830183 | $30 NYUS

Enduring Otherwise Muslim Queer and Trans Worldmaking in Indonesia

Ferdiansyah Thajib

Explores Muslim queer and trans experiences in the world’s largest Muslim-majority country

Many gender and sexual minorities in Indonesia remain practicing Muslims, but they face violence stemming from Muslim society’s rejection of their sexual and gender identities. With their faith often pitted against their desires and ways of living, many are confronted with a forced choice between two seemingly irreconcilable ways of being.

Drawing on ethnographic research in multiple locations in Indonesia, Enduring Otherwise examines how Muslim individuals and communities grapple with the challenges and possibilities of inhabiting queer and trans religiosity. Some distance themselves from religious tenets because of the harms implicated in them, while others immerse themselves in religious practices and spiritual values, seeking to reimagine them. There are also those who remain caught in tensions, having to navigate a life entrenched in ambivalence. Yet across these varied engagements, they continue to find ways to keep going .

This book showcases how everyday gestures of endurance complicate widely held notions of survival and resilience. Through such actions, Muslim queer and trans subjectivities build complex relationships with faith, piety, and religious norms, while also laying the groundwork to transform the conditions that marginalize them. Offering a nuanced account of the affective politics of worldmaking at the intersection of sexuality, gender, and religion, Enduring Otherwise highlights how the drawn-out moments of hope, failure, improvisation, and exhaustion experienced by queer and gender non-conforming Indonesians configure efforts to create a world where no one will have to endure the unendurable anymore.

Ferdiansyah Thajib is Senior Lecturer, Institute for Near Eastern and East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. He is the coauthor of Video Activism and Online Video Distribution in Indonesia.

Whispers in the Pews Evangelical Uniformity in a Divided America

Amy D. McDowell

Reveals how mundane social interactions in an evangelical church silence difference and reinforce right-wing conformity

Small talk, whether enjoyed or despised, is often thought of as trivial and largely useless. In certain situations, however, it can be surprisingly powerful. Whispers in the Pews offers a bottom-up explanation of Christian nationalism, revealing how cultural homogeneity within evangelical church communities is upheld by an active, manufactured effort to dodge reflective engagement with topics that could stir up diverging points of view.

Whispers in the Pews exposes how small talk is utilized to construct an appearance of social and political sameness in evangelical church communities. Based on an ethnography of a church that appeals to students, working class residents, and racial minorities alike in a politically divided Southern college town, McDowell showcases how churchgoers avoid consequential issues that could expose disagreements on border control, electoral politics, race and gender.

By confining themselves to blander topics, the church, which prides itself on inclusivity, positions itself as welcoming to all. But by creating an environment in which certain topics are discouraged from discussion, a façade is developed in which everyone is assumed to believe the same things, and any sort of debate is silenced. Whispers in the Pews shows that the presumption that everyone is of the same mind makes it difficult for churchgoers to articulate or contemplate progressive views, and by extension, advances the idea that differences of opinion are un-Christian, and therefore un-American.

Amy D. McDowell is Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Mississippi. 03/10/2026

Your Data Will Be Used Against You Policing

in the Age of Self-Surveillance

Andrew Guthrie Ferguson

Interrogates how digital self-surveillance can be turned against us by police, prosecutors, and political whims

For consumers living in a digitally-connected world, smart technologies have built an inescapable trap of digital self-surveillance. Smart cars, smart homes, smart watches, and smart medical devices track our most private activities and intimate patterns. While these devices allow users to receive personal insights by monitoring their every move, that data can be accessed by police and prosecutors looking to find incriminating clues. Digital technology exposes everyone, everywhere, all at once and we have few laws to regulate it.

In Your Data Will Be Used Against You , Andrew Guthrie Ferguson warns us of how the rise of sensor-driven technology, social media monitoring, and artificial intelligence can be weaponized against democratic values and personal freedoms. At the same time, that data will solve crimes, radically transforming how criminal cases are prosecuted. Ferguson explores how this proliferation of private data in combination with public surveillance networks promises new ways to solve previously unsolvable crimes but also leaves us vulnerable to governmental overreach and abuse. He argues for legal interventions that address the threat of digital self-surveillance and provides concrete suggestions about how legislators, judges, and communities should respond.

As consumers, citizens, and potential subjects of surveillance, the questions in this book must be confronted now, before the trap of surveillance captures us completely. Providing a stark warning of the dangers of digital self-surveillance, Your Data Will be Used Against You is a defense of civil liberties against the growing threat of data-driven policing.

Andrew Guthrie Ferguson is Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School. He is a national expert on new surveillance technologies, policing, and criminal justice. He is the author of the 2018 PROSE Award winning book, The Rise of Big Data Policing. He is an elected member of the American Law Institute.

On Retirement

How Aging is Transforming American Lives

Daniel Horowitz

How longer lives, greater prosperity, and policy shifts are reshaping aging and retirement

Once considered a period of frailty and physical decline, aging and retirement has transformed into a chapter of continued vitality and growth for many Americans. Indeed, medical advancements and government policies opened opportunities for people to live longer and healthier lives, leading to the rise of public discussions over aging and retirement.

On Retirement offers a multi-faceted exploration of how and why retirement, aging, and longevity have emerged as prominent issues in the United States. Written from the perspective of a retired historian, the book assesses the factors that have shaped popular discussions about retirement and aging, from dramatic increases in life expectancy to shifting government policies. The book explores movies, print and new media, senior housing, how-to books, aging organizations, to examine how writers and entrepreneurs have seen and promoted long lives. While popular advice books and media often enforce self-governance narratives to achieve a “successful” retirement, Daniel Horowitz examines how this success is often only accessible through expensive and ti me-consuming avenues. Moreover, he assesses the socioeconomic and existential challenges most Americans encounter as they age, shaping the choices available to them post-retirement.

Ultimately, the volume assesses that while popular “self-help” perspectives on longevity are shaped by an obsessive interest in doing so successfully, they have failed to account for how dramatic inequalities shape American experiences with retirement. Providing an expansive look into the history of retirement and the profound issues and fears of seniors surrounding finance, health, and longevity, On Retirement examines the changing demographics that have allowed people to live longer and healthier lives and offers a critical assessment of self-governance perspectives within popular retirement advice.

Daniel Horowitz is Mary Huggins Gamble Professor Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of American Studies at Smith College. He is the author of 7 books including Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World and Happier?: The History of a Cultural Movement That Aspired to Transform America.

Powered by Smart A Prehistory of Everyday AI

Sarah Murray

Powered by Smart traces the techno-cultural evolutions that made artificial intelligence feel more familiar than futuristic. From wearables and streaming platforms to home voice assistants and AI toasters, smart is an inescapable feature of postdigital life. Today, thousands of products and platforms define smart as routine automation and friendly digital kinship. Yet smartness was not always so digital. Sarah Murray uncovers the century-long process through which smart became synonymous with seamless interaction between bodies and machines, showing how this intimate interfacing helped to normalize today’s algorithmic world.

Offering a critical, feminist prehistory of everyday AI, Powered by Smart reveals how the pursuit of convenience, comfort, and efficiency has long been a gendered campaign. Smartness has often been associated with women from early switchboard operators and industrial designer Lillian Gilbreth’s test kitchens to Jane Fonda’s Jazzercise empire and Disney’s computer-housewife PAT in Smart House. These moments illuminate how machine intelligence has already been made ordinary, and how the smart ideal was built over time through domesticity, discipline, and desirability.

Moving across factory floors, suburban kitchens, exercise trends, and digital homes, Murray shows how twentieth-century innovations in wearability, solutionism, and recognition laid the groundwork for our contemporary tolerance of and attachment to AI. Far from a sudden technological revolution, everyday AI emerged through decades of cultural conditioning of smart life as a caring, attentive endeavour that cast human–machine harmony as both natural and necessary. Powered by Smart reframes artificial intelligence not as the next frontier of progress, but as the logical extension of a much older dream of efficiency made ordinary and personal.

Sarah Murray is Assistant Professor in Film, Television, Media and Digital Studies at the University of Michigan and co -editor of Appified: Culture in the Age of Apps

Rebooting Inequality

Critical Takes on Film and Television Remakes

Edited by Isabel Molina-Guzmán and Angharad N. Valdivia

Explores how nostalgia-driven reboots, revivals, and remakes perpetuate systemic biases around race, gender, and sexuality amid global nationalism

From Ghostbusters to Will & Grace, One Day at a Time to Jurassic Park, the past decade has seen Hollywood reach a new peak in its obsession with reboots, remakes, and revivals. Spearheaded by media giants like Disney and Netflix, these projects promise progress more diverse casts, “timely” social commentary, and redemptive nostalgia yet they often reproduce the very inequalities they claim to address.

Rebooting Inequality brings together twelve concise, theoretically rich essays that interrogate how Hollywood’s recycling of intellectual property sustains entrenched systems of racial, gender, and sexual inequality. Across genres and platforms, contributors explore how the industry’s nostalgic return to familiar stories masks an ongoing reliance on white, patriarchal, and heteronormative frameworks of storytelling and production.

Blending critical race, feminist, and media studies, the collection analyzes dozens of recent film and television revivals, remakes, and reboots from Roseanne to Charlie’s Angels to ask what it means when entertainment markets strive for diversity while leaving the structures of inequality intact.

Accessible yet deeply analytical, Rebooting Inequality exposes how nostalgia has become both a marketing strategy and a political tool, revealing how the “new” Hollywood continues to reanimate the past profitably, repeatedly, and unequally.

Isabel Molina-Guzmán is Professor of Communications and Latina/o Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She serves as co-editor of the journal Feminist Media Studies, and is the author of more than two dozen academic articles and two books, including Latinas/Latinos on Television and Dangerous Curves: Latina Bodies in the Media.

Angharad N. Valdivia is Research Professor of Communications and Media at the Institute of Communications Research. She has written many books on Latina/o Media Studies, the latest of which is The Gender of Latinidad: Uses and Abuses of Hybridity (2020).

Killing Radicalism Anti-Rape

Advocacy Reimagined

Melinda Chen

A radical challenge to the ways anti-rape advocates work with the survivors of sexual assault

What is “victim advocacy” when regulated by the government? Victim advocates have long served as the designated support people for survivors of sexual violence. But in the neoliberal era, advocates no longer work at independent collectives supporting survivors through whatever means necessary, but instead operate at rape crisis centers, government-funded agencies with strict policies on the uses of their funding. In this compelling book, Melinda Chen argues that pressures from governmental granting agencies onto rape crisis centers have compelled advocates to turn away from their responsibility of challenging intersectional violence and instead lean into normative interpretations of rape and survivorship, hurting the most marginalized of victims.

Killing Radicalism demonstrates that even the most well-intentioned anti-rape activists can inadvertently harm survivors when they forgo an intersectional critique of the oppressive social and institutional structures around them. Through interviews with advocates from over 50 rape crisis centers, and drawing from her own experience as an advocate, Chen examines how neoliberalism affects anti -rape advocacy today. She shows that through everyday activities like grant writing or the compilation of survey data, advocates can inadvertently force victims out of the post-rape process through small -scale acts suggesting that they are not worthy victims.

Chen asks advocates to reconsider their relationship to racial and other marginalized peoples' movements to reimagine a radical politics that can resist hegemonic and normative state powers. Ultimately, this book is a wake-up call for advocates and scholars to reexamine their approaches to anti-violence work and prioritize the needs of all survivors.

Melinda Chen is Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Oklahoma.

First Lady of Laughs

The Forgotten Story of Jean Carroll, America's First Jewish Woman Stand-Up Comedian

Grace Kessler Overbeke

New in Paper

Before Hacks and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel , there was the comedienne who started it all

First Lady of Laughs tells the story of Jean Carroll, the first Jewish woman to become a star in the field we now call stand-up comedy. Though rarely mentioned among the pantheon of early stand-up comics such as Henny Youngman and Lenny Bruce, Jean Carroll rivaled or even out shone the male counterparts of her heyday, playing more major theaters than any other comedian of her period. In addition to releasing a hit comedy album, Girl in a Hot Steam Bath, and briefly starring in her own sitcom on ABC, she also made twenty-nine appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show .

Carroll made enduring changes to the genre of stand-up comedy, carving space for women and modeling a new form of Jewish femininity with her glamorous, acculturated, but still recognizably Jewish persona. She innovated a newly conversational, intimate style of stand-up, which is now recognized in comics like Joan Rivers, Sarah Silverman, and Tiffany Haddish. When Carroll was ninety-five she was honored at the Friars Club in New York City, where celebrities like Joy Behar and Lily Tomlin praised her influence on their craft. But her celebrated career began as an impoverished immigrant child, scrounging for talent show prize money to support her family.

Drawing on archival footage, press clippings, and Jean Carroll’s personal scrapbook, First Lady of Laughs restores Jean Carroll’s remarkable story to its rightful place in the lineage of comedy history and Jewish American performance.

Grace Kessler Overbeke is Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre at Columbia College, Chicago.

Racial Virtuality

Information Capitalism and the Suggestive Materiality of Asianness

Danielle Wong

Racial Virtuality contends that racialization not only occurs through representation in media, but also through our very interactions with media technologies and their unseen operations. The racialization of Asians, who appeared to embody the model minority success story i n the first decade of social media, is now implicated more in the racial logics of algorithms, interfaces, gestures, circulations, and affects, rather than individual representations of Asianness.

Racial Virtuality intervenes in existing new media discourses to approach race as virtual relation, following a rich methodology of Asian American materialist critique to investigate gendered, racial form and mediated life. Danielle Wong theorizes “racial virtuality” as the suggestive materiality of non-representational new media processes and argues that these non -figurative images, affects, textures, sounds, and gestures constitute racializing calibrations within the context of information capitalism. Extending the archive of Asianness into everyday interactions with the virtual, such as Instagram skincare stories, memes of sleeping Asians, and algorithmic choreography on TikTok, Wong considers race as a capacity for labor and capital and argues for Asianness as a specific racial form of informational capital and a mode of relational critique. She reveals the ways in which Asianness moves beyond a politics of recuperation and recognition to yield modes of fugitivity, illicit knowledge, and resistance, all of which threaten existing relationships between capital, labor and information that govern human capital.

By putting memes, social media apps, and digital platforms in conversation with more traditional cultural productions like film, literature, and theatre, Racial Virtuality broadens our understanding of racialization in the digital age and challenges traditional notions of cultural production and subject formation. In doing so, it demonstrates how Asianness circulates as a new media form in a digital marketplace of commodified affects, senses, gestures, and tastes.

Danielle

Wong is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia

Under the Gun Criminology Goes Back to the Movies

Michelle Brow n and Travis Linnemann

An essential guide to understanding classic and contemporary crime films

Under the Gun provides a systematic and sophisticated criminological perspective to bear on crime films. The book provides a fresh way of looking at cinema, using the concepts and analytical tools of criminology to uncover previously unnoticed meanings in film, ultimat ely making the study of criminological theory more engaging and effective for students while simultaneously demonstrating how theories of crime circulate in our mass-mediated worlds. The result is an illuminating new way of seeing movies and a compelling way of learning about criminology.

Stepping into the fray between the gritty realities of crime and punishment and their mediated forms, Under the Gun also brings into relief the ways that crime theory might birth the seeds of its own undoing. From those primordial and revenant crime theories the elemental evil driving films like The Conjuring, the brute biological determinism of There’s Something About Kevin , and the banal carceral feminism of The Silence of the Lambs to the countervisual work of reckoning: the prescient intersectionality of Set It Off, the queer and green criminologies of Moonlight and Dark Water, and the anti-colonial indictment of Saint Omer , Under the Gun asks would-be criminologists to a take up the cultural work that is truly foundational to the study of harm, violence, and justice.

Michelle Brown is Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Appalachian Justice Research Center at the University of Tennessee. She is the author of The Culture of Punishment, the co-editor of The Routledge International Handbook of Visual Criminology, and co-director of the digital project Abolition Now: Images for Study and Struggle.

Travis Linnemann is Associate Professor of Sociology at Kansas State University. He is the author of Meth Wars: Police, Media, Power and The Horror of Police.

Black Muslim Freedom Dreams

Islamic Education, Pan-Africanism, and Collective Care

Samiha Rahman

Explores three generations of Black American Muslims pursuing education and liberation beyond the borders of the United States

Since the 1970s, hundreds of Black American Muslims in the Tijani Sufi order have sought refuge in a new world that would nurture their racial, religious and gendered identities away from antiBlack and anti-Muslim racism in the United States. This new world is in Medina Baye, a city in Senegal that is the headquarters of a pan -African Sufi movement with tens of millions of members in Africa alone.

Drawing on a decade and a half of ethnographic engagement, Black Muslim Freedom Dreams explores the Islamic educational opportunities created for and by Black American Muslims in Medina Baye, chronicling the dreams, sacrifices, struggles, and joys of young people and parents who live, learn, and strive for liberation between the United States and Senegal. The volume traces their journeys between these two worlds, zooming in to vividly portray everyday Black American and West African religious life, and zooming out to map the sociopolitical landscapes, educational conditions and Islamic and pan-African ideologies that shape believers' perspectives.

Black Muslim Freedom Dreams argues that Black Muslims’ experiences of Islamic education and pan-African exchange are oriented towards collective care – a radical way of being and belonging through which believers journey on the path towards Allah’s love by caring for one another and addressing the material inequities that constrain their communities. This notion disrupts narratives of religion that are limited to systems of personal belief, showcasing instead how their educational experiences foster a collective responsibility and solidarity. The book offers a compelling account of how Black Muslims engage with transnational religious and racial networks to build liberatory communities beyond the United States.

Samiha Rahman is Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Development at California State University, Long Beach.

American Fanatics

Religion, Rebellion, and Empire in the Nineteenth Century

Jeffrey Wheatley

Shows how religious fanaticism became a tool used to police subversive and targeted religions at home and abroad

In 1822, Thomas Jefferson wrote that the “atmosphere of our country is unquestionably charged with a threatening cloud of fanaticism.” Indeed, during the nineteenth century the United States was full of radical theologies, messiahs, utopian dreams, passionate exhortations, and sacred violence. This book seeks to uncover the history, rationales, and effects of understandings of religious fanaticism, and how the term was wielded to describe and denigrate a diverse array of religious groups in the United States.

American Fanatics traces the development and popularization of religious fanaticism a precursor to today’s categories of religious terrorism, radicalism, and extremism and explores the violence hidden in its usage. From the Second Great Awakening in the early 1800s to the US occupation of the Philippines in the early 1990s, the book follows the rise of the concept through distinct conflicts over evangelical revivals, abolition, literature, psychiatry, and colonial anthropology. It charts how the term “fanatic” started out as a marker for excessive religious practices, but evolved into a religio-racial category that framed resistance to power as overly emotional, delusional, and inherently violent.

American Fanatics illuminates how from the colonial period to the nineteenth century, Americans transformed “fanaticism” from a term of Christian theology into one of religio-racial security, wielding it as a tool of domestic and imperial governance.

Jeffrey Wheatley is Assistant Professor of Religion at Iowa State University. He has contributed to distinguished publications such as Religion and Method & Theory in the Study of Religion.

Neighborhoods Matter

How Place and People AXect Political Participation

Carrie LeVan

The unexpected impact of neighborhood design on civic engagement

Participation in official governmental institutions and activities has declined dramatically. Americans are less inclined to express trust in, or cooperate with, political leaders and each other to address society's most pressing problems. In Neighborhoods that Matter, Carrie LeVan explores this growing crisis in civic engagement, arguing that where we live –and the people who live around us– may be to blame.

Drawing on national surveys, census data, and spatial analysis, LeVan demonstrates how neighborhood design can dramatically impact political participation, including people's desire and ability to vote in local, state, and national elections. She argues that the suburbs, which isolate residents, require driving, and are zoned for singleuse, do not provide an effective infrastructure for civic engagement. However, cities, which are often designed to be walkable, more interactive, and are zoned for mixed-use, provide a supportive environment where people and politics can thrive.

Ultimately, LeVan underscores how neighborhoods that support interaction, competition, collective action and even conflict can support greater civic engagement and political participation. Neighborhoods that Matter highlights the connection between politics, people, and place, calling for good suburban and urban design that can support a vibrant and engaging civic life.

Carrie LeVan is the Montgoris Family Assistant Professor of Government at Colby College. Her work as appeared in a number of prestigious journals, including American Politics Research and Quarterly Journal of Political Science. LeVan received the Susan Clarke Young Scholar Award for Urban and Local Politics from APSA in 2019.

04/21/2026 | 368 pages | 6 x 9 | Paperback: 9781479834389 | $35 NYUS

Lessons for a Warming Planet

A Vital History of US Environmental Law

Alejandro E. Camacho and Brigham Daniels

Displays how US law has consistently been foundational to the nation's environmental exploitation and protection

The relationship between humans and the environment in the United States has been a tale of countless contrasting, overlapping trends, movements, and tensions. Cultivating both the planet’s biggest environmental threats and its most creative innovations for protecting human and ecological health, US laws have been the key driver of both exploitation and temperance; destruction and restoration; and resistance and adaptation.

Lessons for a Warming Planet showcases the fundamental role the law has served in reckoning with environmental harm in the United States. Authors Alejandro E. Camacho and Brigham Daniels explore the full arc of US Environmental legal history across five major periods in the United States: the Allocation Era, Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Era, the Modernization Era, the Environmental Era of the Sixties and Seventies, and the contemporary Contested Era. Through this rich history, the book considers the ways leadership, social movements, political coalitions, information, and technologies have both been catalyzed by the law and have advanced legal change.

Camacho and Daniels ask what lessons can be drawn from this environmental legal history to help observers address today’s contemporary challenges, from climate change to AI and other emerging biotechnologies. In looking to the past, the book illustrates how others have deployed legal imagination to reckon with similar environmental challenges. Providing a deeply fascinating and insightful history of environmental law, Lessons for a Warming Planet beckons readers to consider: What lessons can be drawn from environmental legal history and its related social, political, and economic movements to address the critical problems of today?

Alejandro E. Camacho is Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles, and co-author, with Robert Glicksman, of Reorganizing Government: A Functional and Dimensional Framework.

Brigham Daniels is Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources, and the Environment at the University of Utah, S.J. Quinney College of Law.

The Gospel According to Frank Wood Memory and the Making of White American Evangelicalism

Christopher D. Cantwell

An eye-opening history of how white evangelicals came to see America’s past as sacred– and themselves as its rightful stewards

Though unknown to scholars of religion today, Frank Wood (1864-1945) was a prominent Protestant figure in his day. He taught what was said to be the largest Bible classes in Chicago and helped found the city’s first neighborhood historical society. In this compelling microhistory, Christopher D. Cantwell draws upon these features of Wood’s life to uncover the historic rise and historical origins of the white evangelical nostalgia that haunts the United States today. In fact, Wood’s religious life and historical interests directly reveal how evangelicalism itself is something of an invented tradition a religious movement devised by layfolk like Frank Wood to defend their white, Protestant privilege.

Beginning with Wood’s move to Chicago, the book situates the origins of the modern evangelical movement in the mass migration of rural, white Protestants from the country to the city at the turn of the twentieth century. The sense of dislocation that accompanied this move made recreating the rhythms of rural social life a major feature of the Bible classes that Wood and millions of other white Protestants joined. The sense of cultural displacement that came with city living, meanwhile, placed an aggrieved sense of nativism and a commitment to Protestant nationalism at the center this community’s religious faith and political vision. Out of this culturally meaningful, but racially charged sense of nostalgia would emerge what Wood and others like him called “the old-time religion,” a wooden yet pliable phrase that spoke to the religious commitments and the social anxieties of an emerging community that identified itself as “evangelical.” The historical importance that everyday white evangelicals attributed to their religious history became a stand-in for the white, Christian nationalism that animated their social vision.

Through this surprising and compelling social biography, The Gospel According to Frank Wood offers a bottom-up examination of American evangelicalism, grounding the movement’s history in the religious beliefs, cultural memories, and social anxieties of white American Protestants.

Christopher D. Cantwell is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Loyola University Chicago.

Resurgence and Revolution

The PKK and the Kurdish Fight in Turkey and Syria

Aliza Marcus

A riveting current history of the Kurdish rebel PKK group

Aliza Marcus’ new book tells the remarkable story of Kurdish revolution in the Middle East led by the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) the rebel group whose insurgency in Turkey has impacted countries, conflicts, and Kurdish demands throughout the region.

Combining reportage and scholarship, Resurgence and Revolution explores the PKK’s resurgence from the brink of defeat after the capture of its leader, Abdullah Ocalan, in 1999, and the brutal internal split that followed. The book tells the story of how Ocalan – operating from prison reshaped the PKK to extend the group’s influence beyond Turkey’s borders, setting the stage for the group’s dominance of northea stern Syria and the unlikely partnership between its allied forces and the U.S. in the fight against ISIS. Based on interviews with PKK fighters, their supporters, and opponents in Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Europe, Marcus traces the group’s ability to maint ain power in Turkey and extend its activities across borders, using PKK rebels’ own voices to show why young people join and fight for the group and its affiliates in Syria and Iran.

For the more than 30 million Kurds in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria – and for the leaders of these countries the PKK is a force that cannot be ignored. Understanding the PKK and what drives its supporters is crucial for understanding Kurdish demands and potential solutions.

The fall of the Assad regime, and a new peace process between Turkey and the PKK has changed the dynamics for Kurdish demands and their control over territory in Syria. Resurgence and Revolution is a compelling and necessary read for understanding the impact of a resurgent PKK, the future of the Middle East, and the enduring struggle of the Kurds to rule themselves.

Aliza Marcus is the author of Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence. She is formerly an international correspondent for The Boston Globe. Marcus covered the PKK for more than eight years, ﬁrst as a freelance reporter for the Christian Science Monitor, and later as a staff writer for Reuters, receiving a National Press Club Award for her reporting. She is also a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation grant for her work.

Koreatown, NYC

The Consumption of a Transnational Brand

Jinwon Kim

How Manhattan's Koreatown functions as a new ethnic enclave

In the past decade, Korean entertainment has gained global recognition, with Korean movies and TV shows winning Oscars and Emmys, and K -Pop groups becoming wildly popular. In Manhattan, Koreatown has become a popular destination for both locals and tourists, drawing them in with its bars, restaurants, and day spas. Jinwon Kim argues that Manhattan’s Koreatown has become a new type of ethnic enclave, what she dubs a “transclave.” This commercialized ethnic space exists solely for consumption, leisure, and entertainment, and has been shaped by South Korea's nation-branding strategy, new economic and cultural strategies, patterns in Korean migration, and shifts in tourism and urban policies in New York City.

Kim posits that for many consumers in Koreatown, especially those who are not of Korean descent, the space has become a commercialized place where transnational culture meets the diverse racial and ethnic mosaic of New York City. Kim emphasizes how the space functions to "brand Korea" as a space to "consume ethnicity," reflecting the landscape of South Korea’s consumer culture through the physical appearance of buildings and stores and the inclusion of franchise brands. Ultimately, Koreatown, NYC is a fascinating exploration of the intersection of authenticity, ethnicity, and identity in the heart of New York’s midtown.

Jinwon Kim is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Smith College. She is a co-editor of Koreatowns: Exploring the Economics, Politics, and Identities of Korean Spatial Formations.

05/05/2026 | Asian American Sociology | 288 pages | 6 x 9

Paperback: 9781479833634 | $30 NYUS

Children in Minority Faiths

Religious Liberty and State Control

Susan J. Palmer

Addresses how to balance freedom of religion and parental rights with the wellbeing of the child

That belief that children are likely to be harmed when they are raised in new or minority religions has led to dramatic and sometimes tragic events, such as the 2008 government raid on the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints in Texas, which resulted in the removal of over 400 children from the community, although no evidence was found of any abuse and the courts eventually demanded that the children be returned.

Children in Minority Faiths showcases original field research and vivid ethnographies of alternative childhoods. It adopts a sociological approach to analyze state responses to alleged abuse and problematic aspects of childrearing in marginal religions. Offering twelve case studies of alternative childhoods and spiritually-based childrearing patterns in minority religions, the volume argues that these groups’ minority status has often led to mounting tensions and investigations over alleged child abuse by police and social workers. On one hand, the volume challenges the assumptions that children growing up in sectarian religions are routinely abused or at risk. Yet it also examines cases where children did come to harm, assessing the ideological and structural factors that have fostered child abuse in specific groups.

Children in Minority Faiths examines the delicate balance between the rights of religious parents and their children. Ultimately, the volume considers what appropriate state intervention looks like, and how the state might prevent crimes against children that happen within the setting of new and marginalized religious movements in the future, while at the same time pushing back against anti-cult narratives that claim that new religions are dangerous environments in which to raise children.

Susan J. Palmer is Affiliate Professor at Concordia University. She is the author of Aliens Adored: Rael’s UFO Religion, The New Heretics of France, The Nuwaubian Nation: Black Spirituality and State Control, among other books.

A Monument of Charity

St. Vincent’s Hospital and Catholic Health Care in New York City

Thomas F. Rzeznik

Showcases the immense contributions of Catholic sisters within an otherwise male-dominated medical sector, adding an important piece to the history of women's health care activism

St. Vincent’s Hospital began with a simple, but radical mission: to care for all those in need regardless of race, creed, or financial means. For more than 160 years, the hospital carried out that work, serving notables and the nameless alike, from impoverished immigrants and those stricken by devastating nineteenth-century epidemics to AIDS patients and the victims of the attacks of 9/11.

A Monument of Charity provides the first comprehensive history of this remarkable institution, from its humble beginnings in 1849 to its abrupt closure in 2010. Located in the heart of Greenwich Village, St. Vincent’s earned distinction not only for the quality of its medical programs, but also for its unwavering dedication to the poor. The hospital was a testament to the vision and labor of the Sisters of Charity, who founded, staffed, and administered the hospital with remarkable skill and devotion.

This captivating account documents St. Vincent’s growth into one of the largest and most prominent Catholic medical centers in the United States, as well as its struggles to sustain its religious mission within the ever-changing and increasingly competitive medical marketplace. A Monument to Charity highlights the immense contributions of Catholic sisters to health care in the United States as well as the enduring legacy of all those who worked alongside them to care for the sick and alleviate suffering.

Thomas F. Rzeznik is Professor of History at Seton Hall University and co-editor of the quarterly journal, American Catholic Studies . He is author of Church and Estate: Religion and Wealth in Industrial Era Philadelphia and co-editor with Margaret M. McGuinness of The Cambridge Companion to American Catholicism.

Fear of Queer Taiwan

Anti-LGBTQ Movements Between Taiwan and the U.S. Religious Right

Ying-Chao Kao

Traces the development of new anti-LGBTQ movements in Taiwan and their interactions with the U.S. Religious Right

In 2019, global media celebrated Taiwan as the first Asian country to legalize same-sex marriage. However, the pursuit of this human rights milestone spurred waves of opposition to LGBTQ rights that have fundamentally shaped the nation’s democracy and its relationship with the United States. This book examines Taiwan’s anti -LGBTQ movements, analyzes their rise and fall, and reveals their surprising links with American religious conservatism.

Given that Christianity is a minority religion in Taiwan and East Asia, the book seeks to answer how and why Christian -led anti-LGBTQ sentiments became so powerful in Taiwan, and how they have built transnational connections with American and other international counterparts.

Drawing on more than 100 in-depth interviews with leading figures across a wide political spectrum, and two years of cumulative ethnographic observation in both Taiwan and the United States, Kao reveals that moral conservatism has been flowing across borders and adapting to contemporary socio -political institutions as it seeks to protect its moral territories and expand its ideological power. Exploring the transnational ebbs and flows of moral conservatism as a direct response to rising pro LGBTQ liberalism and queer radicalism, Fear of Queer Taiwan offers a groundbreaking theoretical framework to understand conservatism’s fluidity in today’s ever-evolving global landscape of gender and sexual politics.

Ying-Chao Kao is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Politics in Our Veins

The Rise of Dominican American Political Power in the United States

Yalidy Matos, Domingo Morel, and Michelle Bueno Vásquez

Captures the complex journey of how Dominican Americans mobilized to become key progressive players in American politics

Dominican Americans are one of the largest and fastest-growing Latinx groups in the United States, with a population that has quadrupled from 517,000 to a little over 2.3 million as of 2023. While New York City is home to the largest Dominican community in the country and is where most Dominican American elected officials (DEOs) are from Dominican Americans continue to increase their representation nationwide. In Politics in Our Veins, Yalidy Matos, Domingo Morel, and Michelle Bueno Vásquez chart the rise of Dominican American political power across the United States, exploring the myriad factors that have contributed to their political success as thoughtful citizens, activists, and elected officials.

Drawing on original surveys, in-depth interviews with elected officials, and archival data, Matos, Morel, and Vásquez trace the past, present, and future of Dominican American political power, demonstrating how one group fought from the margins for a seat at the table. They explore how community, civic, and cultural organizations have played an important role in helping newly immigrated Dominican Americans gain political power through influential national coalitions like "Dominicans on the Hill" and the Dominican National Roundtable. They also examine how identity politics, in particular race and gender, influence the political attitudes and behavior of DEOs.

Ultimately, Politics in Our Veins shines a light on how Dominicans have created avenues for political engagement identifying where barriers to participation have been dismantled, where they remain, and where new obstacles are emerging.

Domingo Morel is Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Service at the Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service at New York University. He is the author and co-editor of several books, including Takeover: Race, Education, and American Democracy , which won the W.E.B. Du Bois Distinguished Book Award, and most recently Developing Scholars: Race, Politics, and the Pursuit of Higher Education.

Yalidy Matos is Associate Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University. She is the author of Moral and Immoral Whiteness in Immigration Politics

Michelle Bueno Vásquez is a Doctoral Student in Political Science at Northwestern University.

The Law of Presidential Impeachment A Guide for the Engaged Citizen

Michael J. Gerhardt New in Paper!

A clear and comprehensive overview of presidential impeachment from a leading expert in the field

As a result of Donald Trump’s presidency, impeachment was once again thrust into the spotlight of American political discussion. However, its history goes back to the very founding of the nation, when American colonists, remembering their grievances against their former king, entrenched the process in their new Constitution.

The Law of Presidential Impeachment breaks down both the law and politics of this process, providing a comprehensive, nonpartisan, and up-to-date explanation of the Constitution’s various mechanisms for holding presidents accountable for their misdeeds. Based on a lifetime of scholarly research, as well as unique experience as a witness and consultant in the impeachment trials of Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, Michael J. Gerhardt’s new book takes the reader back to the basics of presidential impeachments. Rather than provide reasons for or against impeaching particular presidents, he explains the law and procedures that govern impeachment, examining a number of significant, yet under-explored, issues and themes. Gerhardt offers new perspectives on the subject, arguing that it cannot be properly understood in a vacuum, but must instead be viewed in the context of its coordination with such other mechanisms as criminal prosecutions, censure, elections, congressional oversight, and the Fourteenth and Twenty-Fifth Amendments.

The Law of Presidential Impeachment will be an invaluable, accessible guide for future generations, giving them a succinct yet remarkably nuanced understanding of this core aspect of our executive branch and overarching governmental system.

Michael J. Gerhardt is Burton Craige Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of North Carolina Law School and author of six books, including The Forgotten Presidents: Their Untold Constitutional Legacy, which The Financial Times selected as one of the best non-fiction books of 2013.

05/19/2026 | 216 pages | 5 x 8 | Paperback: 9781479824717 | $19.95 NYUS

Reading Matters

A History for the Digital Age

Joel Halldorf

Traces earlier revolutions in the history of reading to orient our shift to the digital age

Considered one of the greatest inventions of human civilization, writing has served as a pathway to culture and education through history. The digital revolution has ushered in a dramatic transformation, leading to growing concern over the effects and possible detriments of algorithms, information overload, and fake news. In Reading Matters, Joel Halldorf makes the case that in order to navigate the upheavals of the digital age, we must understand prior technical revolutions and the transformations they engendered. He shows how our ways of reading are inseparable from the media we use, and that the decline of deep, attentive reading may be the most serious consequence of our move from page to screen.

Originally published in Swedish in 2023, this newly revised volume presents a sweeping history of transformations in reading and writing, tracing precedents in the invention of writing, the shift from clay tablets to papyrus and from scrolls to codices, the advent of printing, and the development of industrial printing. It explores how each new format of writing has encouraged new ways to think, relate, and organize the world. Essentially, it is not only what we read that is important, but how we read.

Moving through key historical events including the rise of Christianity, the scientific revolution, and the development of democracy, Halldorf explores how changes in the physical book reflected major cultural and historical shifts of the time. By tracing how new media forms have impacted human attention, authority, and community, the volume equips readers to better understand our own digital habits today. Detailing the riveting cultural history of reading technologies, book revolutions, and cultural upheavals, Reading Matters showcases the massive power of reading, writing, and books in helping us understand who we are.

Joel Halldorf is Professor of Church History and a public intellectual in Scandinavia, with regular contributions to leading newspapers and cultural journals in Sweden and Norway. He has authored numerous works on religion and society, including Pentecostal Politics in a Secular World , and has received several awards for his writing.

Apocalyptic Abolitionism

How Millennialists Helped Abolish Slavery and Reform America

Kevin M. Burton

Shows how apocalypticism helped drive antislavery abolitionism and inspire progressive social reform in nineteenth-century America

In March 1844, Melissa Botsford of Meriden, Connecticut, defiantly left her local Methodist church because it supported slavery and other “sins” that permeated America. Botsford was among one hundred thousand other abolitionists who abandoned their evangelical churches throughout the decade. These protesters came out with a stern apocalyptic warning: God would soon judge America and its churches for the sins of slavery and race prejudice.

It has long been assumed that apocalypticism is antithetical to social reform. Yet in Apocalyptic Abolitionism, Kevin M. Burton uncovers the untold story of how apocalypticism shaped the abolitionist cause and helped destroy slavery in the United States. Contrary to popular opinion, the revival fires of the Second Great Awakening did not drive most evangelicals to progressive social reforms like abolitionism. Neither were the denominational schisms during that period a fight between northern abolitionists and southern slaveholders. Rather, before the Methodist and Baptist denominations split along sectional lines, most abolitionists, particularly members of the Adventist movement, had already left their churches in what was likely the largest mass exodus from mainstream evangelicalism in American history, precisely because most evangelicals opposed radical social reform movements. This volume makes the case that evangelicals receive undeserved credit for antislavery, and that it was apocalyptic abolitionists who led the way.

Drawing from rare and overlooked sources to create a database of biographies of nearly 2000 people to track their religious affiliations and activism over time, Burton offers invaluable data to develop a robust framework for understanding apocalypticism, evangelicalism, and social reform politics of the nineteenth century.

Kevin Burton is Assistant Professor of Church History, Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary, Andrews University, where he also directs the Center for Adventist Research.

Jews in the Soviet Union: A History

Postwar Life, Hopes, and Fears, 1945–1953,

Volume 4

Anna Shternshis

Offers a compelling account of how Soviet Jews rebuilt their lives amid postwar devastation, rising hostility, discrimination and the repressive final years of Stalin’s rule

At the beginning of the twentieth century, more Jews lived in the Russian Empire than anywhere else in the world. After the Holocaust, the USSR remained one of the world’s three key centers of Jewish population, along with the United States and Israel. While a great deal is known about the history and experiences of the Jewish people in the US and in Israel in the twentieth century, much less is known about the experiences of Soviet Jews. Understanding the history of Jewish communities under Soviet rule is essential to comprehending the dynamics of Jewish history in the modern world. Only a small number of scholars and the last generation of Soviet Jews who lived during this period hold a deep knowledge of this history. Jews in the Soviet Union, a new multi-volume history, is an unprecedented undertaking. Publishing over the next few years, this groundbreaking work draws on rare access to documents from the Soviet archives, allowing for the presentation of a sweeping history of Jewish life in the Soviet Union from 1917 through the early 1990s.

Focusing on the final eight years of Stalin’s rule, Volume 4 offers a gripping account of the complex realities of Soviet Jewish life in the aftermath of World War II. Soviet Jews emerged from the devastation of the Holocaust and the battlefield to face new struggles. The volume traces the lives of key figures and ordinary citizens as they returned to hometowns emptied of their communities, facing the rising tide of hostilities, exclusion, persecution of Jewish cultural leaders, and state-led crackdowns.

The book highlights elements of thriving Jewish life despite official repression, from the unprecedented growth of Yiddish theatres to Jewish successes in science, literature, and the arts. It uncovers the deep contradictions of Soviet life– at once enabling and at times even celebrating Jewish achievements in industries and public sphere, while systemically repressing Yiddish culture and identity. With unparalleled depth and insight, historian Anna Shternshis brings to light the resilience and survival strategies of Soviet Jews during one of the most challenging periods in their history.

Anna Shternshis is the J. Richard and Dorothy Shiff Chair in Jewish Studies and director of the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. She is the author of critically acclaimed monographs, including Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923 - 1939, When Sonia Met Boris: An Oral History of Jewish Life under Stalin, and most recently co-author (together with Oleg Budnitsky, David Engel and Gennady Estraikh) of Jews in the Soviet Union: A History: War, Conquest, and Catastrophe, 1939 –1945.

We All Do the Time

Who Cares for Incarcerated Women and Why It Matters

Holly Foster-Talbot

Breaks new ground by showing how women in prison and their families interact through prison boundaries

Although women make up only 7% of the overall prison population in the US, their numbers are rising faster than men's, and yet little research has been done on their lives behind bars. In We All Do the Time, Holly Foster-Talbot focuses on how incarcerated women maintain connections to their families and communities while inside prison, and shows how these connections foster positive emotions and feelings of belonging with broader society, in line with re-integrative and rehabilitative ideals. She argues that generating inclusive emotions is a vital part of how imprisoned women and their families cope with and survive imprisonment.

Focusing on the experiences of over 300 women in minimum-security federal prison, Foster-Talbot demonstrates that women and their families navigate the prisonfamily interface through two key mechanisms: women’s intersectionally linked lives and their intergenerationally linked lives. Among core findings is that Latina and Black women suffer worse self-rated mental health in prison than white women, despite having more supportive family ties. And if not for these ties, women’s racial and ethnic health disparities in prison would be even greater than they already are. This book also shows how the families and communities hit hardest by mass incarceration are also more heavily affected by resultant caring-related absences when women are incarcerated. Ultimately, Foster-Talbot argues that understanding these important connections behind bars are vital for prison programming and policy.

Holly Foster-Talbot is Professor of Sociology & Chancellor EDGES Fellow at Texas A&M University. She is a Research Affiliated Scholar at the American Bar Foundation.

Unﬁnished Grief

Queer Love and Loss

Joshua Chambers -Letson

What if, instead of overcoming grief, we learned to live with it? Unfinished Grief invites readers to linger within loss and to understand mourning not as an endpoint, but as a mode of relation, continuance, and care.

In this lyrical follow-up to his acclaimed After the Party, Joshua Chambers-Letson turns toward the art and theory of grief as a way of imagining queer survival. Drawing from queer of color critique, performance studies, Asian American studies, and Black studies, Chambers-Letson explores how love and loss are inseparable conditions of queer life. Engaging artists including Yoko Ono, Gertrude Stein, Bimbola Akinbola, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Joshua Rains, and Kia LaBeija, he considers the lessons art and performance teach about living with what remains unfinished.

Set against the backdrop of public and private catastrophe, from war and pandemics to the ravages of racial capitalism, Unfinished Grief insists that mourning and political struggle are entwined practices. Through sensuous, reflective prose and a deeply personal critical voice, Chambers-Letson reveals how grief can be both a sustaining and shattering site of vulnerability, creativity, and communal becoming. Intimate, meditative, and defiantly alive, Unfinished Grief reflects on the queer art of mourning in this guide to the beautiful, difficult work of staying with loss and finding life within it.

Joshua Chambers-Letson is Associate Professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University and author of After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life (2018).

The Dallas Way Gay Rights in a Conservative City

M. Rhys Dotson

Uncovers the untold story of LGBT activism in the American South as they navigated faith, politics, and activism

For more than forty years, historians have researched the formation of gay communities and activism in the United States. Yet, the vast majority of scholarship on gay activism in the United States focuses on liberal urban areas like San Francisco, New York City, and Chicago, as opposed to conservative regions.

In The Dallas Way , M. Rhys Dotson examines the development and impact of Dallas’s queer community throughout the twentieth century. The book explores the unique challenges and values that impacted queer residents’ experiences in conservative regions, from the interplay of traditional family structures, to religious values, and skepticism of rapid social change. Responding to these circumstances, Dotson highlights how early gay activists adopted a nuanced form of activism that both challenged and aligned with their city’s conservative values, forging a distinctive path to equality through their own “Dallas Way.”

Moreover, the book illustrates how activists utilized strategies that complemented existing social and political structures in Dallas to further their advocacy for collective equality. From the formation of the state’s first homophile organization, the Circle of Friends, in 1966, to the establishments of a gay-affirming church, and the Dallas Gay Political Caucus in the 1970s, the book showcases the way Dallas’ queer activism used religious communities and political activism to foster community and circumvent law enforcement raids. Offering a fresh perspective on the history of LGBT activism in the United States, The Dallas Way displays the unique strategies Southern gay activists leveraged to effect meaningful change and equality in Dallas.

Rhys Maddox Dotson is Assistant Professor of History at University of Texas at Tyler.

The Fenian Empire

A Hemispheric History of Irish Republican Nationalism

Patrick J. Mahoney

A bold new exploration of Fenian revolutionary activity across the Americas

In the aftermath of the American Civil War, the Fenian movement stood at a crossroads. Thousands of demobilized Irish soldiers held the power to reshape history. Inspired by a popular desire to expel monarchical and aristocratic influence from the New World, many American Fenians began to align their efforts to establish an independent Irish Republic with the wider aims of American republican expansion. In doing so, the Fenians’ fight for Irish liberation became more than a single cause – it was a web of alliances, contradictions, and ambitions, carried out under a common banner of republicanism.

In The Fenian Empire, Patrick J. Mahoney uncovers the untold story of how Fenianism intersected with race, colonialism, and internationalist solidarity across North America and the Caribbean at a time of intense political turmoil. Fueled by the cause of republican expansion, the period saw the unlikely emergence of Black Fenian volunteers, attempts to land Fenian troops into Mexico and Cuba, and the participation of many Fenians in the subjugation of Native peoples along the western plains of North America. While their views and strategies varied, their aim remained clear: Irish freedom.

Drawing on an expansive range of archives and sources across multiple languages, Mahoney delivers a fresh take on the Fenian story, guiding readers through a world of clandestine meetings, personal networks, propaganda, and long-forgotten military operations. What results is a groundbreaking look at how one struggle echoed across the revolutionary landscape of the Civil War era.

Patrick J. Mahoney, or Pádraig Fhia Ó Mathúna, is a Government of Ireland postdoctoral fellow in the Centre for Irish Studies at the University of Galway. A former Fulbright scholar, his previous publications include Recovering an Irish Voice from the American Frontier: The Prose Writings of Eoin Ua Cathail.

The Religious Left

What It Does and How It Can Do Better

Robert Wuthnow

An incisive examination of progressive faith-based activism and its impact on American public life

While the Religious Right often dominates headlines, the Religious Left has been a persistent and influential force in shaping public policy across a wide spectrum of issues from immigration and climate change to gun reform, marriage equality, and criminal justice. Despite its lower visibility, its contributions have been substantial, though not always successful.

In The Religious Left , Robert Wuthnow offers a compelling analysis of progressive religious activism over the past 25 years. Drawing on policy documents, denominational reports, and public testimony, he highlights the work of key leaders and organizations operating largely behind the scenes. The book places contemporary efforts in historical context, tracing their roots to the Social Gospel movement of the nineteenth century and examining how strategies and priorities have evolved.

Through in-depth case studies of nine major issues, Wuthnow assesses the strengths and limitations of the Religious Left’s approach to advocacy. He offers thoughtful recommendations for faith leaders and congregations seeking to engage more effectively in progressive activism especially at a time when democracy itself is embattled.

Robert Wuthnow is the Gerard R. Andlinger ’52 Professor of Professor of Sociology Emeritus and former director of the Princeton University Center for the Study of Religion, and author/editor of more than three dozen books including After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s and Why Religion Is Good for American Democracy. He is a past President of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and of the Eastern Sociological Society.

Shameless

The Making of Black Gay Identities in LA

Terrell J. A. Winder

How young Black queer men in Los Angeles reject stigma and stereotypes and instead find pride in their racial and sexual identities

Shameless is an in-depth exploration of the ways that young Black gay men in Los Angeles come together to learn how to navigate racial and sexual stigma in everyday interactions. Based on 4 years of intensive ethnographic fieldwork resulting in observations with over 200 young men in a Los Angeles community health organization, in-depth interviews with self-identified Black queer men, observations with gay kinship families, and media content analysis, Terrell J. A. Winder paints a full picture of the socialization and stigma negotiations of young Black gay men. He explains how traditional strategies like passing and covering can become untenable and ineffective for young Black gay men dealing with multiple stigmas simultaneously, who are looking to experience their identities with a sense of pride, rather than as a source of shame.

Terrell J. A. Winder is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Lawyer Nation

The Past, Present, and Future of the American Legal Profession

Ray Brescia

New in Paper!

Explores the critical role that American lawyers have played since the nation’s founding and what the future holds for the profession

The American legal profession faces significant challenges: the changing nature of work in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic; calls for greater racial and gender justice; threats to democracy; the inaccessibility of legal services for the majority of Americans; the risk of obsolescence owing to the emergence of new technologies; and the disaffection many lawyers feel toward their work.

Ambitious in its scope yet straightforward in its approach, Lawyer Nation seeks to address these crises by offering a path forward for the legal profession. Ray Brescia provides concrete ideas for transforming law into a field whose services are accessible, egalitarian, and viable in the long term. Further, he addresses how the profession can improve so that the health of its practitioners is not compromised in the process. If the legal profession does not respond to its crises in an effective way, he argues, the dysfunction and unfairness plaguing the legal world will deepen. This is an unprecedented opportunity for the world of law to reimagine its future in way that honors its highest ideals: preserving the rule of law, protecting individual liberty, and addressing social inequality in all of its forms.

Ray Brescia is the Associate Dean for Research & Intellectual Life and the Hon. Harold R. Tyler Professor in Law & Technology at Albany Law School. He is the author of Lawyer Nation: The Past, Present, and Future of the American Legal Profession and The Future of Change: How Technology Shapes Social Revolutions ; and editor of Crisis Lawyering: Effective Legal Advocacy in Emergency Situations; and How Cities Will Save the World: Urban Innovation in the Face of Population Flows, Climate Change, and Economic Inequality.

A Kitchenette to Fit Your Needs

Housing Chicago's Great Migration

Amani C. Morrison

During the twentieth century’s Great Migration, kitchenette apartments served as the primary homes for Black migrants to Chicago. These small one- and two-room units were often illegally converted from larger apartments and were concentrated on the city’s densely populated, segregated South Side. Typically featuring a communal hallway bathroom, a cooktop tucked into a closet, chronic overcrowding, and exploitative rents, kitchenettes gained widespread fame and notoriety in news reports, housing code campaigns, and the works of celebrated Black artists including Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, and Richard Wright. They also preceded and paved the way for Chicago’s notorious public housing projects.

Morrison is Assistant Professor of African American Literature and Culture in George Washington University’s English Department.

Amani

Trans Geographies of Joy Building Community in Atlanta

Elias Capello

Shows how trans activists confront the intersections of white supremacy and transphobia

Trans Geographies of Joy charts the stories of trans activists in Atlanta, focusing particularly on people of color, to document how they confront the intersections of white supremacy and transphobia through their organizing. The volume offers insight into the oft-overlooked trans activist scene, particularly as political strategists and the broader news media struggle to make sense of newly-purple states like Georgia.

Elias Capello uncovers how trans activists create spaces to help them feel safe in the face of the violence they routinely encounter. He argues that colonialism, white supremacy, and cisnormativity are all connected through shame, designating cisgender bodies as "safe, secure, and sane.” Cisgender culture masks itself within whiteness to create a narrative of safety that prioritizes cisgender lives, all the while pathologizing, policing, and commodifying trans lives. Yet, as Capello illuminates, trans activists offer alternative narratives of safety, creating spaces of joy outside of cisnormativity’s colonial-based shame. The volume details how activists create art, spaces, and communities that help them flourish, illuminating trans pleasure and joy rather than focusing solely on the struggles trans people face.

Dr. Elias Capello is Professor of Anthropology in the Liberal Arts Department at Savannah College of Art Design, Atlanta.

The Contemporary Black Church

The New Dynamics of African American Religion

Jason E. Shelton

New in Paper!

Charts the changing dynamics of religion and spirituality among African Americans

Recent decades have ushered in a profound transformation within the American religious landscape, characterized by an explosion of religious diversification and individualism as well as a rising number of “nones.” The Contemporary Black Church makes the case that the story of this changing religious landscape needs to be told incorporating more data as it applies specifically to African Americans.

Jason E. Shelton draws from survey data as well as interviews with individuals from a wide variety of religious backgrounds to argue that social reforms and the resulting freedoms have paved the way for a pronounced diversification among African Americans in matters of faith. Many African Americans have switched denominational affiliations within the Black Church, others now adhere to historically White traditions, and a record number of African Americans have left organized religion altogether in recent decades. These changing demographics and affiliations are having a real and measurable effect on American politics, particularly as members of the historic Black Church are much more likely than those of other faiths to vote and to strongly support governmen t policies aimed at bridging the racial divide.

Though not the first work to note that African Americans are not monolithic in their religious affiliation, or to argue that there is a trend toward secularism in Black America, this book is the first to substantiate these claims with extensive empirical data, charting these changing dynamics and their ramifications for American society and politics.

Jason E. Shelton is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for African American Studies at the University of Texas at Arlington and the author of Blacks and Whites in Christian America: How Racial Discrimination Shapes Religious Convictions

Organizing Your Own

The White Fight for Black Power in Detroit

Say Burgin

New in Paper !

The fascinating history of white solidarity with the Black Power movement

In the mid-1960s, as the politics of Black selfdetermination gained steam, Black activists had a new message for white activists: Go into your own communities and organize white people against racism. While much of the media at the time and many historians since have regarded this directive as a “white purge” from the Black freedom movement, Say Burgin argues that it heralded a new strategy, racially parallel organizing, which people experimented with all over the country. Organizing Your Own shows that the Black freedom movement never experienced a “white purge,” and it offers a new way of understanding Black Power’s relationship to white America.

By focusing on Detroit from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s, this volume illuminates a wide cross-section of white activists who took direction from Black-led groups like the Northern Student Movement, the City-Wide Citizens Action Committee, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Organizing Your Own draws on numerous oral histories and heretofore unseen archives to show that these white activists mobilized support for Black self -determination in education, policing, employment, and labor unions. It was a trial -and-error effort that pushed white activists to grapple with tough questions – which white people should they organize and how, which Black-led groups should they take direction from, and when did taking Black direction become mere sycophancy. The story of Detroit’s white fight for Black Power thus not only reveals a broader, richer movement, but it carries great insight into questions that remain relevant.

Say Burgin is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Dickinson College.

Jewish Firebugs

Arson and Antisemitism from the Civil War to World War I

Jeffrey A. Marx

Explores the history of Jews and arson in America

Following the Civil War, prominent fire insurance companies in the United States issued instructions to their agents to deny Jews fire insurance policies because of their alleged proclivity to arson. In the years that followed, the stereotype of the Jewish arsonist spread throughout the United States, appearing in fire insurance manuals, cartoons, songs, and silent films.

Jewish Firebugs presents the first detailed exploration of both the accusations and the realities of Jewish arson from the late 1800s to the early 1920s. Drawing on such diverse records as fire department reports, insurance records, newspapers, trial transcripts, and humor journals, Jeffrey Marx delves into the social forces that created and then sensationalized the caricature of the Jewish arsonist, investigating how and why Jews became the only racial/ethnic group to be targeted this way in the United States. The book critically assesses how these antisemitic representations were solidified in the American imagination–from the spread of jokes and cartoons, to vaudeville performances across the country.

In addition, Marx also investigates the various factors that led to arson criminal activity in Jewish neighborhoods, the unique way that Jewish “arson gangs” were organized, and how the fire insurance companies actively supported their efforts. Jewish Firebugs illustrates the socioeconomic realities of Jewish immigrant life at the turn of the nineteenth century, and details what the Jewish arsonist trope reveals about the dynamics of antisemitism in the United States.

Jeffrey A. Marx is an Independent Scholar and the author of Smoothing the Jew: Abie the Agent and Ethnic Caricature in the Progressive Era.

Conscience Incorporated Pursue

Proﬁts While Protecting Human Rights

Michael H. Posner

New in Paper!

Category Winner, 2025 PROSE Awards: Business, Finance, and Management Category

A guide for business leaders working to create socially conscious, sustainable companies while pursuing profits

Amid growing international concerns about income inequality, labor abuses, racial injustice, and disinformation online, Conscience Incorporated examines the gaps in current corporate social responsibility measures and what more needs be done to address these challenges. The rise of new technologies such as smartphones and social media have made it easier than ever to document and spread awareness of corporate actions. Despite these developments, large corporations often fail to meaningfully address the human rights abuses linked to their business models and practices. In Conscience Incorporated, Michael Posner addresses what lies at the root of these challenges, drawing on his extensive personal experience as a human rights lawyer, State Department official under President Obama, chair of the Fair Labor Association and Director of the Center for Business and Human Rights at NYU Stern School of Business.

Drawing from research into the history of business ethics and anchoring his argument with examples of companies publicly accused of human rights abuses Nike, Coca-Cola, Walmart, Meta, and more Posner provides a blueprint for global business leaders to navigate human rights challenges and adopt sustainable corporate practices. Conscience Incorporated highlights the need for increased protections for outsourced workers in faraway nations, greater attention to harmful online content, and prioritization of human rights by investors. He argues that growing public awareness has not been enough to enforce ethical practices for global businesses. As a result, governments, especially in Europe, are becoming more involved in regulating global business practices in various industries.

Posner proposes a series of concrete reforms and argues compellingly for why businesses need to devote greater time and resources to protecting basic human rights. Conscience Incorporated is a powerful challenge to the status quo and advocates for a fundamental shift in the principles that govern global businesses.

Michael H. Posner is the Jerome Kohlberg Professor of Ethics and Finance and the Director of the Center for Business and Human Rights at NYU’s Stern School of Business.

07/14/2026 | 320 pages | 6 x 9 | Paperback: 9781479847617 | $19.95 NYUS

Crime Gone Viral

Eyewitnessing in a Digital Age

Karen G. Weiss

Highlights crime eyewitnesses who use digital technologies to record, share, and watch crime online

In the digital age, crime and efforts to control crime have been transformed by the ability of ordinary citizens to “witness” crime remotely and intervene through smartphones and computer screens. Crime Gone Viral shines a spotlight on the digital eyewitnesses who record, share and watch crime online to elucidate how their responses impact crime outcomes. With the ability to see crime for themselves and digitally intervene from afar, digital eyewitnesses play outsized roles in social control as both capable guardians who help, and as incapable guardians who make matters worse. Digital eyewitnesses also play important roles as storytellers who inform and shape public perceptions about crime and criminal justice.

By placing crime eyewitnesses front and center, Weiss provides a bold and critical framework that challenges existing criminological research that assumes third parties deter crime by virtue of their presence and problematizes traditional ways of thinking about third party social control. Drawing from original survey data and providing examples of real-life criminal cases from both traditional news media and social media to illustrate and analyze digital responses to crime, Weiss identifies three digital eyewitness types: Samaritans, Voyeurs, and Vigilantes. Together, these eyewitness types form the basis of a theoretical framework meant to provide a more nuanced understanding of third-party participation in social control and punishment in the digital age. Ultimately, Crime Gone Viral provides a necessary and comprehensive understanding of crime in the 21st century aimed at developing a theoretical, empirical, and practical understanding of what it means to witness crime in a digital age.

Karen G. Weiss is Professor of Criminology in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at West Virginia University. She is the author of Party School: Crime, Campus and Community.

Planet Digital A Global Media Cultures Reader

Edited by Aswin Punathambekar, Adrienne Shaw, and Jonathan Gray

Explores how digitalization has transformed global media entertainment and the making of popular cultures

In the three decades since the rise of the global internet, digitalization has transformed how media are made, circulated, and consumed, reshaping culture on a planetary scale. Yet the story of global media is not one of seamless connection or cultural homogenization. Planet Digital challenges the myth of a “global village,” revealing instead how regional histories, infrastructures, economies, and power relations shape the uneven terrains of our digital world.

Edited by the series editors of Critical Cultural Communication, this field-defining anthology gathers leading scholars to examine the texts, genres, platforms, and industries that define today’s global entertainment landscape. From TikTok to Squid Game, K-Pop to Marvel, Bluey to Nollywood, each chapter offers a focused case study that illuminates how digital media both reflect and remake global cultural life.

Spanning influencer culture, streaming platforms, esports, and beyond, Planet Digital shows how digital technologies and global media flows continually reshape one another, producing hybrid forms of creativity, circulation, and control. Together, these essays provide a vital framework for understanding how the world’s screens, sounds, and networks are rewriting the relationship between culture and power in the twenty-first century.

Aswin Punathambekar is a Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication and Director of the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC).

Adrienne Shaw is Associate Professor at Temple University in the Klein College of Media and Communication

Jonathan Gray is Hamel Family Distinguished Chair in Communication Arts, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison

Black Crip Modern Race, Gender, and the Roots of Disability Consciousness

Jess Waggoner

Black Crip Modern uncovers how early twentiethcentury Black writers, artists, and activists laid the groundwork for modern disability consciousness. Under Jim Crow, Black disabled citizens were excluded from social services and medical reforms, even as racist violence, ca rceral surveillance, eugenic logic, and exploitative labor conditions deepened disabling experiences. Through literature, film, photography, and personal testimony, Black modernists registered these compounded injustices and articulated new ways of thinking about illness, impairment, and care.

Engaging the work of figures such as Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Wallace Thurman, Pauli Murray, Langston Hughes and Marita Bonner, Jess Waggoner traces how Black cultural production challenged both white supremacy and ableist ideals of progress. In their writing, Waggoner finds an early “Black crip modern” consciousness one that rejected eugenic reform, critiqued racialized caregiving hierarchies, and envisioned collective care grounded in feminist and anti-carceral principles.

In conversation with contemporary disability justice movements, Black Crip Modern reveals how Black thinkers and artists forged a disability politics before it was formally named. By assembling these overlooked histories of Black ill and disabled life, Waggoner reframes the foundations of disability studies and insists that Black cultural production has always been central to the struggle for bodily autonomy, access, and justice.

Jess Waggoner is Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies and English at UW-Madison.

Paper Tombs

Post-Holocaust Memorial Books and Prewar Jewish Life

Jennifer Rich

Published in Association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, this volume explores how post-Holocaust memorial books help to reshape our understanding of Jewish life and death in Eastern Europe

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Eastern European survivors created yizker bikher – Yiddish for “memorial books”– to honor their towns destroyed and loved ones murdered during the Second World War. Devoted to their fellow community members, these collaborativelywritten volumes were one way for survivors to reclaim their lives and memories.

In Paper Tombs , Jennifer Rich argues that yizker bikher demand renewed attention. Often dismissed as nothing more than nostalgic, amateur histories, Rich showcases how these vibrant sources are exceptional accomplishments that reanimate prewar Jewish life, condemn the Germans and their local collaborators, and memorialize the people, places, and ways of life destroyed during the Holocaust.

Paper Tombs makes the case for the importance of post-Holocaust memorial books as a resource for understanding Eastern European Jewish life, reshaping our understanding of Jewish experiences following the Holocaust. Deeply-researched and engagingly-written, Paper Tombs recovers these largely forgotten volumes and repositions them as critically important sources that reveal the rich diversity of prewar Jewish life, the relentless cruelty wrought by the Nazi occupation of the small towns and large cities of Eastern Europe, and the ways that survivors wanted them to be remembered.

Jennifer Rich is the Executive Director of the Rowan University Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights, and author of Keepers of Memory: The Holocaust and Transgenerational Identity.

Race on the Move

Public Transportation and Unequal Spaces

Gwendolyn Purifoye

Whether on the bus, subway or train, public transit continues to be a separate and unequal experience for many Black Americans

In Race on the Move, Gwendolyn Purifoye argues that, whether on the subway, bus, or commuter rail, Black passengers have unequal experiences in terms of time, quality, speed of service, bodily movement, and leisurely enjoyment. As she shows, the capacity to move around a cit y is of major economic and social import: who has the ability to get to jobs, healthcare, grocery shopping, good schools, and quality and affordable housing are among the features of urban life that are structured by public transportation systems. The woefully inadequate and underperforming public transportation systems in many Black communities has led to unyielding disruptions of families, communities, and futures.

Drawing on interviews and nine years of ethnographic field research and media analysis in Chicago, Purifoye details how covert and overt racial hostilities are shaped through racial residential segregation. Purifoye contends that race and racism have been historically spatialized, materialized, and mobilized through public transportation systems. By showing how minority passengers and transit personnel are not equally protected by the transit agencies, how they experience raced social aggression, and the lack of dignity afforded riders on a daily basis, Purifoye documents the intensity of everyday racism as lived out on public transportation. Race on the Move also offers community organizers and policy makers more equitable and sustainable design options that could improve the lives of Black city dwellers.

Gwendolyn Purifoye is Assistant Professor in the Keough School of Global Affairs and the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

Peddlers, Merchants, and Junk Dealers

Jewish Life in Small-Town Vermont

Margaret K. Nelson

Provides a rare study of Jews in small town America

For many years, histories of Jews in the United States focused on Jewish migrants who settled in large cities. Peddlers, Merchants, and Junk Dealers offers a rare study of Jews in small town America, illuminating the experiences of Jewish families in towns where they constituted one of, at most, a few Jewish families. In particular, the volume explores the occupational niches of Jews in rural Vermont, from peddling to the ownership of junk yards and dry goods stores that were disparagingly known as “the Jew Store.”

The book also looks specifically at the experiences of Jewish women and children in families headed by men in these occupations. These families lived in communities where they were often isolated from relatives and friends, and without a Jewish congregation. Margaret K. Nelson carefully investigates various aspects of this small-town experience, including how generations of immigrants were regarded by others, how they held onto the practice of their religion, and how they were able to socially integrate into their communities.

By narrating the trajectory of Jewish immigrant experiences through men’s occupations, the volume places the experiences of Jews in Vermont alongside those of other marginalized groups, particularly the families of Chinese restaurant owners and South Asian motel managers, as they established and sustained their own distinctive economic activities in small towns.

Showcasing the largely unexplored history of Jews in very small towns, Peddlers, Merchants, and Junk Dealers provides a novel account of Jewish community and belonging as minorities in rural communities.

Margaret K. Nelson is A. Barton Hepburn Professor Emerita of Sociology at Middlebury College. She is the author of many books, including Like Family: Narratives of Fictive Kinship; Limited Choices: Mable Jones, a Black Children’s Nurse in a Northern White Household (with Emily K. Abel); and Sociology Meets Memoir: An Exploration of Narrative and Method (New York University Press).

Judaism Mediated Learning About Jewishness Through the Cultural Arts

Sharon

Avni and Laura Yares

Explores how Jews and non-Jews come to learn about Jews and Judaism through leisure-time entertainment

Judaism Mediated explores how Jews and non-Jews learn about Judaism through participation in cultural, digital, and leisurely spaces. Most work on religious education has focused on institutional learning, like religious classrooms and houses of worship, or on the transmission of religious values at home. And most studies focus on youth and how they become socialized into their religious traditions. But, looking specifically at Judaism, Judaism Mediated argues that this focus overlooks how engagement with the arts, such as theatre or museums or music, influences how adults learn about religion.

Laura Yares and Sharon Avni examine audience engagements with five different Jewish cultural arts settings–museums, web-based performances, streaming television, concerts, and live theatre. They show that depictions of Jewish people and topics in these cultural spaces can create powerful learning experiences. However, learning about Judaism through the arts can also be mis-educative, reinforcing stereotypes or creating misunderstandings.

At its core, this book makes the case that adult audiences learn about Judaism and Jewishness in significant ways when they experience Jewish culture, and that we need to expand our understanding of where and how religious education happens. The volume shows not only that religious learning happens in diverse spaces, but that learning in leisure time can take on social, cognitive, and affective dimensions, too. Judaism Mediated offers compelling case studies of contemporary American religion relevant for readers interested in how people enact religion in everyday life

Sharon Avni is Research Affiliate, Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education, Brandeis University, as well as Research Associate, Research Institute for the Study of Language in Urban Society, CUNY Graduate Center. Previously, she was Professor, Department of Academic Literacy and Linguistics, BMCC, CUNY. She is coauthor of Hebrew Infusion: Language and Community at North American Jewish Summer Camps.

Laura Yares is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Michigan State University and author of Jewish Sunday Schools.

Secular-

Christian Social Justice Climate, Race, and Gender in the Twenty-First Century

Noa Ben-Asher

Explores the Christian-theological foundations of modern social justice movements and how they've shaped contemporary debates on climate, race, and gender

From Pope Francis’s call to “repent for ecological sins” to murals depicting George Floyd in the Virgin Mary’s arms, Christian motifs have permeated contemporary justice discourse. In Secular Christian-Social Justice, legal scholar Noa Ben-Asher investigates the often-hidden theological foundations of seemingly secular social justice movements, exploring how climate, racial, and gender justice are fundamentally animated by Christian themes and values.

Combining critical legal theory, theology, feminist and queer thought, and cultural analysis, Ben-Asher demonstrates that contemporary social justice movements operate through four distinctly Christian theological frameworks: apocalyptic worldviews that frame social crises as existential battles between good and evil; trauma-centered narratives that mirror Christian concepts of grace and redemption; appeals to human dignity rooted in Catholic social teaching; and critiques of material inequality that echo biblical economic justice traditions. This interdisciplinary approach allows for tracing the subtle yet pervasive influence of Christian thought across climate, racial, and gender justice. Thus, Ben-Asher argues, the so-called “culture wars” in the United States aren’t taking place between religious and secular forces, but between two Christianities: one traditional and institutional, the other reformist and ostensibly secular.

The book contends that reckoning with these theological foundations is essential for both intellectual honesty and effective legal and political action. Providing a critical diagnosis of contemporary law and activism, Secular-Christian Social Justice challenges and deepens readers’ understanding of the relationship between religion, law, and politics in America, and calls for more radical forms of climate, racial, and gender justice that transcend inherited theological paradigms.

Noa Ben-Asher (they/them) is Professor of Law at Pace University's Elizabeth Haub School of Law and the author of articles published in journals such as the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender and the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism.

False Starts

The Segregated Lives of Preschoolers Casey Stockstill

New in Paper!

Winner, 2024 Bourdieu Best Book Award, given by the Sociology of Education Section of the American Sociological Association

Honorable Mention, Outstanding Scholarly Contribution Award, given by the Children and Youth Section of the American Sociological Association

The benefits of preschool have been part of our national conversation since the 1960s, when Head Start, a publicly funded preschool program for low-income children, began. In the past two decades, forty-four states have expanded access to preschool, often citing preschool as an antipoverty policy. Yet, as Casey Stockstill shows, two -thirds of American preschools are segregated concentrating primarily poor children of color or affluent white children in separate schools. Stockstill argues that, as a result, segregated preschools entrench rather than disrupt inequality.

Stockstill spent two years observing children and teachers at two preschools in Madison, Wisconsin. Madison, like many other small and medium cities in the United States, is segregated, with affluent and middle-class white people and working class or low-income people of color occupying different sectors of the city. Stockstill observed one preschool that was 95% white and another that was 95% children of color. She shows that this segregation was more than a background variable or inconvenient image; segregation had an impact on children’s experiences in multiple ways, but especially in the ways they spent their time, the supervision and instruction they received, and the ways they learned and socialized with other children. Stockstill shows that even in high-quality preschools that on paper have similar resources, de facto segregation creates different school experiences for children that ultimately reinforce racial and class inequality.

False Starts suggests that as we continue to invest in preschool as an anti-poverty policy, we need a fuller understanding of how segregated classroom environments impact children's educational outcomes and their ability to thrive.

Casey Stockstill is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Dartmouth College.

Law, Narrative, Narratology

Interdisciplinary Essays

Edited by Simon Stern and Greta Olson

Explores the diverse applications of narrative in law beyond the courtroom, from client-lawyer interactions to legal decisions

Once regarded by law professors as serving an ornamental purpose in legal argumentation, narrative has gained an increasingly prominent role in legal scholarship. Yet while scholars have examined the many functions and effects of narrative in legal decisions, courtroom arguments, and the stories we tell about the law, research on law and narrative has generally limited its focus to the most overtly noticeable place for narrative in legal writing the factual material presented in trials.

Law, Narrative, Narratology explores legal narrative in a variety of contexts, including pre-trial litigation, trial argument-framing, legal decisions, human rights law, media reports on court cases, and work advocating for legal change. Taking a comparative approach to the intersections of law, narrative, and narratology, contributors consider various “narrators” of law to make sense of areas of legal argumentation beyond the current scope of narratological-legal research. By examining topics ranging from the distinction between a s tory’s narrative and its discourse to the use of narrative perspective, the essays in this volume illuminate the techniques legal actors use to craft stories, as well as the narrative arcs their interlocutors inhabit.

Editors Greta Olson and Simon Stern have cultivated a collection of essays by global legal and narrative scholars, allowing the volume and its contributors to assess an array of narratological issues across national and international boundaries, and civil and criminal law contexts. Offering a fresh analysis of narrative’s uses in the law, Law, Narrative, and Narratology provides a needed expansion of the study of narrative across the justice system.

Simon Stern is Professor of Law and English at the University of Toronto and the coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Law and Humanities and The Routledge Research Companion to Law and Humanities in Nineteenth-Century America.

Greta Olson is Professor of English and American Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Giessen and the author of From Law and Literature to Legality and Affect .

Unsettled

American Jews and the Movement for Justice in Palestine

Oren Kroll -Zeldin

Examines how young Jewish Americans’ fundamentally Jewish values have led them to organize in solidarity with Palestinians

Unsettled digs into the experiences of young Jewish Americans who engage with the Palestine solidarity movement and challenge the staunch pro-Israel stance of mainstream Jewish American institutions. The book explores how these activists address Israeli government policies of occupation and apartheid, and seek to transform American Jewish institutional support for Israel.

Author Oren Kroll-Zeldin identifies three key social movement strategies employed by these activists: targeting mainstream Jewish American institutions, participating in co-resistance efforts in Palestine/Israel, and engaging in Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns. He argues that these young people perceive their commitment to ending the occupation and Israeli apartheid as a Jewish value, deeply rooted in the changing dynamics of Jewish life in the twenty -first century. By associating social justice activism with Jewish traditions and values, these activists establish a connection between their Jewishness and their pursuit of justice for Palestinians.

In a time of internal Jewish tensions and uncertainty about peace prospects between Palestine and Israel, the book provides hope that the efforts of these young Jews in the United States are pushing the political pendulum in a new direction, potentially leading to a more balanced and nuanced conversation.

Oren Kroll-Zeldin is Assistant Professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies as well as Assistant Director of the Swig Program in Jewish Studies and Social Justice at the University of San Francisco. He is the co -editor of This Is Your Song Too: Phish and Contemporary Jewish Identity

Families We Lose A New Explanation for Family Estrangement

Rin Reczek

Charts novel territory for the future of family in the 21st century

As society becomes more polarized around political and cultural beliefs, family estrangement has received increased attention. Going no contact with a parent, sibling, grandparent, or other extended family members is often portrayed as a sign of the further fraying of society, sometimes even as a result of selfish choices that privilege the rights of the individual over the ability to compromise. In Families We Lose Rin Reczek takes a different view, arguing that going no contact isn’t done on a whim by selfish people, or due only to specific individual circumstances. Instead, she argues that contemporary family estrangement is indicative of a more fundamental culture clash in the very meaning and expectations of family in the US today. Reczek shows that estrangement is sparked by a confrontation between the traditional culture which demands the family of origin is unconditionally forever and a rivaling idea of family that values the quality of contact, focusing on equity, accountability, personal and relationship evolution, mutual respect, and maturity. At stake in the clash between compulsory and democratized kinship is a battle to determine the very meaning of “family” in the US today.

Based on in-depth interviews with a diverse set of adults who are ‘no -contact' with one or more family-of-origin member, Reczek reveals how these adults set new expectations about family. She shows that estrangement can be a path to healing, self-acceptance, and democratized configurations of family around the shared values of mutuality and intentional community. Shifting the focus from family reunification to family freedom, Families We Lose imagines a world where adults are empowered to choose who gets to be in their family – even if it means leaving some ties behind.

Rin Reczek is Professor of Sociology at The Ohio State University. She is the coauthor of Families We Keep: LGBTQ People and Their Enduring Bonds with Parents and the co-editor of Marriage and Health: The Well-Being of Same -Sex Couples.

Living Redemption

Latinas Building Evangelical Futures Under Carceral Control

Melissa Guzman -Garcia

Examines how Latino Evangelical churches promise salvation while reinforcing logics of surveillance and criminalization systems that oppress their congregants

Living Redemption examines how faith-based institutions in Latinx communities enhance the state’s carceral power even as they attempt to empower and redeem their adherents. Drawing on four years of ethnographic research across two Latinx congregations in Fresno and the San Francisco Bay Area, Melissa Guzman-Garcia explores how Mexican, Central American, and Chicana women build their own spiritual services and support systems while recruiting other criminalized people into their church. While these services are meant to offer support, Guzman-Garcia uncovers how they also end up enacting their own spiritual versions of carceral control.

These faith-based organizations tend to socialize people to sanctify state power, either by promoting the idea that collective protests and social movements that challenge capitalism or capitalist exploitation would be unsuccessful, or by putting forward beliefs that the solution to social problems is a matter of “saving your soul,” not working for structural change. Thus, these evangelical settings both perpetuate and disrupt the dominant the racial and gendered social order, sustaining and strengthening state power.

Guzman-Garcia’s analysis urges us to assess the gendered logics and spiritual ideologies that fuel contemporary forms of American carceral governance and consider who exactly benefits from this spiritual and political labor.

Melissa Guzman-Garcia is Associate Professor in the Department of Latina/o Studies at San Francisco State University.

Habla!

Speaking Bodies and Dancing Our América

Jade

Power-Sotomayor

Under colonial repression and the rationalizing ideals of Enlightenment thought, one practice has long carried the pulse of resistance: dance.

Habla! explores how the dancing body speaks how, through movement, sound, and rhythm, Latinx American communities enact forms of knowing and being that “talk back” to colonial modernity. Centering the traditions of Puerto Rican bomba, Mexican son jarocho, and the global phenomenon of perreo, Jade Power-Sotomayor reveals how these practices transform the body into a site of worldbuilding, social critique, and survival.

Introducing the concept of “embodied code-switching” the corporeal strategies people use to move across cultural, linguistic, and affective registers PowerSotomayor traces how dancing navigates and disrupts the logics of separability, ownership, and extraction that underpin Western colonial thought. From bomba’s dialogue between dancer and drummer to perreo’s unapologetic assertion of a pleasure and power rooted in interdependence, Habla! shows how these embodied traditions sustain collective life and offe r new grammars of relation.

Through performance, community practice, and activist projects, ¡Habla! demonstrates how the dancing, sounding body continues to generate meaning, connection, and possibility. In its motion rooted and mobile at once the dancing body speaks beyond words, carrying forward the histories and futures of Latinx América, and remapping the contours of Our América.

Jade Power Sotomayor is Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at UC San Diego.

Published by Fonograf

Editions

Bird Watching and their First Three Books of Poetry

Eileen Myles

Any future film director planning to make a movie of Myles’s iconic novel Chelsea Girls (it’s always just about to happen) would be wise to read Bird Watching first. Written in 1978 and unpublished until now, the central character of the book is a twenty-something that is already filled with memories. Living in New York City, resplendent, full of both grandeur and awkwardness, they are about to embark on a life fully invested in art. Bliss happens, as does uncertainty. Everything is here and now.

The Irony of the Leash, A Fresh Young Voice from the Plains, and Sappho’s Boat , the other collections contained in the volume, comprise the first three books that Myles published, when their promise as one of the most important writers of their generation was just coming into view. Immensely readable, raw, and slightly unhinged, the poetry that comprises these three texts is post young. Slight creaky but fully functional, all of these poems are beautiful and funky.

Bird Watching and Their First Three Books of Poetry contains a critical foreword by poet and scholar Rosa Campbell, along with a preface by Eileen Myles contextualizing the book within our contemporary moment.

Eileen Myles (them/them, b. 1949) is a poet, novelist and art journalist whose practice of vernacular first-person writing has made them one of the most recognized writers around town (globally). They live in New York & in Marfa, TX.

04/14/2026 | 232 pages | Paperback: 9781964499550 | $24 NYUT

To Compare

Xuela Zhang

A bracing and variegated debut, Xuela Zhang’s To Compare inhabits the fraught condition of living in and through translation in the age of globalization, social media, and the Chinese-American neo-Cold War. In To Compare, Zhang navigates the quagmire of transnational life, where one is always both here and away. “Has language/passed you by/like a curvy city/or shielded/and isolated you,/an illuminated vehicle/against the flooding/tenors of light?” Zhang writes in To Compare, reflecting on the nature of translation both linguistic and otherwise as a way of life. Disjunctive, alluring, To Compare poetically represents our contemporary age.

Born and raised in China, Xuela Zhang writes in English and Chinese. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Oxford Poetry, Gulf Coast, Bennington Review, PROTOTYPE, and 诗刊 Shikan, among others. She received her MFA in poetry from Columbia University and PhD in Comparative Literature from Washington University in St. Louis.

The Wallet and Other Thefts

Stories

Kristen Gleason

Closely observed and slyly destabilizing, The Wallet and Other Thefts is a book of short fiction shimmering with mystery and menace. This surreal, precise collection unfolds in a world beyond conventional time and space. Concerned with theft, shame, exile, tourism, masochism, God, and “Nature,” these stories are lightly linked objects, diseases, and landscapes reappear. Gleason’s elliptical prose refuses traditional narrative logic, resisting easy resolution. Reminiscent of the work of Anna Kavan, Jane Bowles, and Marie NDiaye, The Wallet and Other Thefts is a work of slipstream fiction that pulses with a sense of something generously withheld.

Kristen Gleason is a fiction writer whose short stories have appeared in BOMB, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, The White Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. Her work has won a number of awards, including the BOMB Biannual Fiction Contest and the White Review Short Story Prize. She received a Writing Fellowship from A Public Space and was a fine arts Fulbright grantee in Tromsø, Norway. She lives in Athens, Georgia.

They Marched Under The Sun A

Novel

Cris Judar

Translated by Lara Norgaard

Ana and Joan. The first, a woman of daytime, of the contemporary, bombarded by consumerism and the aesthetic and behavioral pressures of our times. The second, a woman immersed in the realm of the night, attuned to ancestralism, rites of passage, and the intuitions of her subconscious. Both are on the brink of turning eighteen, and their stories run in parallel, month by month, until their birthdays. But more than just a tale of the two young women's journeys, They Marched Under the Sun is a novel about violence, religious persecution, the loss of freedom and rights, as well as a statement on our need for ritual, dreams, and the resignification of bodies and social roles, conveyed in the author's vibrant and singular literary voice.

Cris Judar is a Brazilian journalist. They are the author of the graphic novel Lina' and 'Vermelho, Vivo, and the book of short stories Roteiros para uma Vida Curta, which received an Honorable Mention in the Prêmio SESC de Literatura. Their novel Oito do Sete was a finalist for the Prêmio Jabuti and winner of the Prêmio São Paulo de Literatura.

Published by Review Press

Silencing "Fighting Bob”

The Attack on Antiwar Progressives During the First World War

Eric T. Chester

Published by Monthly Review Press

Silencing "Fighting Bob” tells the story of the coordinated attack by the federal government on the progressive opponents of the first world war. As Eric Chester reminds us, the American people saw no reason for the United States to become directly involved in Europe’s conflict in 1917. President Woodrow Wilson, ignoring that fact, forced the United States to join with its allies in carrying the war to the bitter end: the total and unconditional surrender of Germany. To accomplish this, Wilson notably, a Democrat was convinced that harsh repression of dissent was necessary. Reexamining a wide range of archival sources from a new angle, Chester describes the rollout of this campaign of suppression, showing that the most radical opponents of the war were the first to come under attack, beginning with the imprisonment of members of the Industrial Workers of the World and the sentencing of left-wing socialists to long terms in prison. Chester reveals that, as soon as the radical Left was quashed, the federal government turned its attention to reformists committed to working within the system that is, Progressives, as led by Senator “Fighting Bob” LaFollette, the Wisconsin Republican at the forefront of the Progressive movement.

What does it say that, although some of the first World War’s most ardent opponents were situated in the United States, few today recall that most Americans opposed the decision to enter the First World War? What can we learn from the fact that it was a Democrat who brought that antiwar movement down? As Chester demonstrates, history shows the struggle to uphold civil liberties can only succeed when everyone’s right to dissent is defended, no matter what their views and no matter who holds power. Chester documents the process by which a Democrat who viewed himself as a reformer took down a Republican, along with the countless Progressives he counted among his allies leaving a lasting legacy for the Democratic Party: the repression of the most potent Progressive forces in the United States.

Eric T. Chester is the author of several books published by Monthly Review Press, including Rag-Tags, Scum, Riff-Raff, and Commies: The U.S. Intervention in the Dominican Republic, 1965–1966, and, more recently, Free Speech and the Suppression of Dissent During World War I

01/01/2026 | 216 pages | 5 1/2 x 8 1/4 | Paperback: 9781685901264 | $24 NYUS

A Radical Anthropologist

The Trials and Triumphs of Kathleen Gough

Sandra Lindemann

“Anthropology is a child of Western imperialism,” asserted the Marxist anthropologist Kathleen Gough in 1968, during an intense period of anti-colonial struggle in Asia and Africa. Since then, this assertion, now largely taken for granted within the discipline, has become more well-known than the intellectual who articulated it. A Radical Anthropologist: The Trials and Triumphs of Kathleen Gough tells the story of a scholar who, like many of her female peers, has been largely overlooked by history in spite of her striking contributions to her field. In her day, in the face of rampant sexism, she was an internationally renowned intellectual and political activist, publishing some seventy articles and ten books.

With clear and empathetic prose, author Sandra Lindemann, herself an anthropologist, invites us to trace the arc of a life lived according to the values of a radical anthropologist. Born in England in 1925 as the youngest daughter of the village blacksmith, Gough entered the world of higher education on scholarship and continued into academia with a pronounced sense of fairness and justice. Her outspokenness in favor of civil rights and against nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War led to her placement on an FBI watch list, and institutional reactions to her progressive views disrupted her career trajectory on several occasions. She fielded the array of obstacles presented by workplace misogyny, only to find herself fired from some jobs and compelled, on principle, to resign from others. Eventually she withdrew from academia altogether to become an independent radical scholar, but not before her painstaking fieldwork in South India on marriage, class, and caste reshaped the anthropological understanding of these critical social relationships, and helped to transform the world of academia she had left behind. Through it all, she maintained her fierce dedication to the liberation of workers and peasants whether in India, Vietnam, or anywhere in the world people were oppressed.

With the rise of fascism in the United States, and the unleashing of malign forces around the world, more than ever before those who struggle for justice are searching for examples of how to live a politically relevant life: Kathleen Gough’s is such a life. Fervently anti-colonial, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist, Gough lived her life keeping a Marxist vision of a better, more peaceful, more equitable world in clear view at all times, never losing faith that such a world was within reach.

Sandra Lindemann is a researcher/writer living in Adelaide, South Australia. She holds degrees in anthropology based on research conducted in Kerala, India, and a doctorate in life writing studies.

Metabolic Rifts

Capitalism's Assault on the Earth System

Ian Angus

Like an autoimmune disease that attacks the body it dwells in, capitalism is tearing apart the very planet that feeds it. Metabolic Rifts: Capitalism’s Assault on the Earth System, builds on Karl Marx’s insight that while capitalism is dependent on the natural world, it is also waging war on the natural systems that sustain life on Earth.

Focusing on deadly rifts in two of the most important natural systems the carbon and nitrogen cycles Ian Angus explains and elaborates on the Marxist view that capitalism is massively disrupting essential exchanges of matter and energy between society and the rest of nature, putting the entire Earth System in danger. After tracing the longneglected history of metabolic rift theory in scientific and socialist writing, Angus draws on a wealth of modern research to extend and deepen the natural science basis of Marxist ecology. In clear, non-technical language, Metabolic Rifts offers a scientific basis for understanding the deep causes of today’s environmental crises, and a program for action to prevent catastrophe in our time.

Ian Angus is the author of Facing the Anthropocene (Monthly Review Press, 2016) editor of the online ecosocialist journal Climate and Capitalism, and co-author of the Belém Ecosocialist Declaration. His previous books include Too Many People? Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis (with Simon Butler) and The Global Fight for Climate Justice .

Late-Stage Capitalism? Accumulation in the Ruins

Socialist Register 2026

Edited by Greg Albo and Stephen Maher

What is neoliberalism transforming into? This year’s Socialist Register identifies gaps in Marxist state theory by examining the ongoing, differentiated development of capitalism, from counter-revolutions in public finance and central banking, to changing economic policies under globalizing forms of contemporary fascism and trade in the midst of Trumpism. Puzzling through the rubble lefty behind, Late-Stage Capitalism? Accumulation in the Ruins highlights Sri Lanka’s confrontations with the IMF, examines authoritarian developmentalism in Korea, scrutinizes accumulation in Latin America, reveals the impact of de-dollarization on India, and zeros in on de -development in Palestine.

Greg Albo teaches comparative and Canadian political economy at York University. He is the co-editor of the Socialist Register and author and editor of numerous books.

Stephen Maher teaches in the department of economics, SUNY, Cortland, and is coauthor of The Fall and Rise of American Finance .

The Ragged Edge of Freedom Race,

Capitalism, and Class

Struggle in Slavery’s Borderland

Matthew E. Stanley

The Ragged Edge of Freedom explores the long shadow of slavery in the Lower Midwest. In the decades after the Civil War, elites in southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois constantly raised the specter of “cheap” Black labor to divide workers, discipline markets, and gain political adv antage. At the same time, powerful outsiders depicted the borderland as dirty and degraded, pathologizing the region’s working poor through a rising capitalist ideology that linked a human’s worth to their economic productivity. Desperate to maintain their precarious standing and avert the phantasma of “negro invasion,” countless Lower Midwesterners envisioned a republic of “free white labor” predicated on the ruthless exclusion of Black “competition.”

Yet, as Matthew Stanley demonstrates, racial division is only one part of this story, as class-based interracialism materialized in unlikely places and against impossible odds. In the heat of border-making and white supremacist violence, ordinary people challenged the free white labor consensus through bottom-up struggle over shared material goals. From settler dispossession through the age of mass incarceration and deindustrialization, this absorbing book recounts dramatic and previously neglected clashes between workers and the formidable bastions of wealth and power. Stanley excavates the stories of abolitionists, freedpeople, agrarian populists, militant coal miners, and socialists, Black and white, who risked everything in defiance of the region’s restrictive boundaries and its racial capitalist grip. Against a backdrop of blood-stained civil wars and riveting industrial battles in a pivotal yet often overlooked American region, The Ragged Edge of Freedom is a people’s history one of inspiration and urgency and complex resistance from below.

Matthew E. Stanley is associate professor of history at the University of Arkansas, and the author or editor of four books, including the award-winning, The Loyal West: Civil War and Reunion in Middle America.

Monopoly, Finance, and the Crisis of Capitalism

Paul M. Sweezy and his Legacy

Amos Cecchi

Monopoly, Finance, and the Crisis of Capitalism is the first-ever biography of the scholar who brought Marxian theory to the English-speaking world. Paul M. Sweezy was one of the greatest political economists of the twentieth century. Born in 1910, his upbringing during the Depression deepened his understanding of capitalism, especially its tendency toward stagnation the inability of capitalist economies to generate sufficient capital investment to make use of abundant resources, much less produce a harmonious social order. During the Second World War Sweezy taught at Harvard, and doubled as an intelligence officer until it became clear that his political views would prohibit a future in any mainstream arena. Leaving Harvard, in the midst of the Red Scare, Sweezy boldly cofounded what is North America’s most distinguished and enduring Socialist magazine, Monthly Review, where he remained until his death in 2004.

In Amos Cecchi's Monopoly Finance and the Crisis of Capital published for the first time in English readers are given a comprehensive examination of Sweezy’s massive body of work prior to, and throughout, his many decades at Monthly Review. Each of Sweezy’s major works is given a careful reading, from his seminal interpretation of Marxian economics, The Theory of Capitalist Development , to his pathbreaking study of the impact of monopolized markets, Monopoly Capital , written with Paul Baran, to his pioneering analysis of the financialization of capitalism, written with Harry Magdoff. Cecchi also explores the various exchanges Sweezy had with other political economists, along with those who influenced his thinking, including Maurice Dobb, Charles Bettelheim, Rudolf Hilferding, Thorstein Veblen, John Maynard Keynes, and Josef Steindl as well as several of the political economists who were, in turn, greatly influenced by Sweezy. Throughout, the author highlights the impo rtance and timeliness of Sweezy’s open and creative Marxist approach particularly in terms of his view of “the present as history.”

Amos Cecchi (Florence, Italy, 1948) is an essayist and collaborator with Critica Marxista and the author of Paul M. Sweezy.

Requiem for French Theory

Transatlantic Funeral Dirge in a Marxist Key

Aymeric Monville and Gabriel Rockhill in conversation with Jennifer Ponce de Leon

French Theory is due for an insider critique, and in Requiem for French Theory, Aymeric Monville and Gabriel Rockhill do just that. Drawing upon decades of studying French philosophy in Paris, they build upon the best Marxist criticisms of postmodernism, while further developing them by situating postmodern theory within the global political economy of knowledge and U.S. driven intellectual imperialism. The result is a broad dialogue on topics ranging from international class struggle and the dissemination of ideology, to fascism, identity politics, dialectics, actually existing socialism, and more.

Requiem for French Theory soundly criticizes this tradition’s chameleonic ideological permutations under new names, such as postcolonial thought, decolonial theory, new materialism, and other trendsetting discourses. But it also reveals how these theoretical developments are all p art of a broader anticommunist cultural front. Most importantly, Monville and Rockhill develop the positive project of antiimperialist Marxism as the ultimate antidote to French theoretical sophistry. Far from indulging in the political defeatism characteristic of the Western Marxist critiques of postmodernism, this intellectual exchange issues a clarion call for revitalizing revolutionary theory and putting it into practice.

Aymeric Monville is the founder of Éditions Delga (Paris) and a specialist in political philosophy. He is the author or editor of eight books, including Neocapitalism According to Michel Clouscard.

Gabriel Rockhill is a philosopher and activist who has published nine books. He is the Founding Director of the Critical Theory Workshop and Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University.

Jennifer Ponce de Leon is Associate Director of the CTW and Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Published by New Village Press

Letters That Breathe Fire

El Corno Emplumado / The Plumed Horn

Margaret Randall

Arguably one of the most important independent literary magazines of the 1960s, El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn made new work from the South available in the North and vice versa. Its scope exceeded that of any clique or group, publishing the most exciting new work of the time along with texts by established writers, its only criterion being quality. Each bilingual quarterly issue included a Letter Section, which reproduced correspondence from contributors and readers among them: Thomas Merton, Ernesto Cardenal, Julio Cortázar, Denise Levertov, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Raquel Jodorowsky, Clayton Eshleman, and Cecilia Vicuña. They wrote to us about their lives and communities, ideas and aspirations. In these letters, arguments about important issues of the day also took place. Personal and political stories offer a sense of how creative people lived and worked, and those stories continue to have relevance in today’s very different world.

Margaret Randall is a poet, writer, translator, photographer, and activist who has lived in New York, Mexico City, Havana, Cuba, Managua, Nicaragua, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, with short stays in North Vietnam and Lima, Peru. Her time in these places often coincided with major sociopolitical upheavals or pivotal historic moments. She edited an important bilingual literary magazine for eight years out of Mexico City and has known some of the great minds of her generation. When she returned to the United States, the US gove rnment ordered her deported because of opinions expressed in some of her books, and she was forced to wage a five -year battle for restoration of citizenship. Her correspondence with those she met along the way makes for exciting reading.

Randall is the recipient of numerous international awards and the author of over 200 books, four of which were published by New Village Press: My Life in 100 Objects, Artists in My Life, Risking a Somersault in the Air, and Luck.

02/10/2026 | 384 pages | Paperback: 9781613322833 | $25 NYUS

My Deepest Desire

Tamiki Hara

Illustrated by Sandy Walker

Translated by Liza Dalby

My Deepest Desire is Tamiki Hara’s final work, published posthumously after his tragic suicide in 1951. A short yet grippingly moving meditation on the desire to live a different, fuller life, free from pain, isolation, and the intrusively haunting experience of tragedy, it is a demonstration of how dreams, memories, and traumatic despair intertwine inside a person’s psyche.

Tamiki Hara was a Japanese writer and poet. Born in Hiroshima, he lived through the atomic bombing in 1945. In the years preceding his death, Tamiki Hara wrote about the destruction he witnessed in autobiographical short stories and poems, making him a known figure in the atomic bomb literature genre.

Liza Dalby is an anthropologist specializing in Japanese culture. Her nonfiction books, Geisha and Kimono, have become classics, and her best -selling historical novel, The Tale of Murasaki has been translated into nine languages. Dalby’s memoir, East Wind Melts the Ice, is a gardener's diary and an enlightening excursion through cultures east and west. Dalby lives in Berkeley, California.

Groundbreaking

My Unmapped Path as an Academic, Mother, and Gardener

Clare Cooper Marcus

Clare Cooper Marcus’s Groundbreaking is a sweeping autobiographical memoir that spans nearly nine decades of personal history. Moving from a wartime childhood in England through her academic career in the United States, the book weaves together stories of resilience, intellectual discovery, and the healing power of nature. The narrative alternates between richly detailed life episodes-growing up as an evacuee during WWII, becoming a pioneering woman in academia, raising a family as a single mother-and lyrical “Garden Stories,” meditations rooted in her Berkeley garden that serve as metaphors for growth, loss, and renewal. Through these interwoven strands, Marcus reflects on identity, motherhood, love, resilience, and the solace found in landscapes both cultivated and wild. Ultimately, Groundbreaking is a meditation on survival and thriving-on how land, gardens, and memory shape a life. It is as much a personal journey as it is a testimony to the enduring human need for grounding in place and nature.

Clare Cooper Marcus is Professor Emerita in the departments of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. She is internationally recognized for her teaching, research, and publications on the social and psychological implications of design, especially regarding urban open space, family housing, outdoor space in healthcare facilities, and environments for children and the elderly. She was educated at the University of London with a BA in Cultural and Historical Geography, at the University of Nebraska with an MA in Urban Geography, and at the University of California, Berkeley, with an MCP in City and Regional Planning. She is the author of four books and numerous articles. Two of those books were co-authored with former students: Healing Gardens: Therapeutic Benefits and Design Recommendations (1999) with Marni Barnes and Therapeutic Landscapes: An Evidence-Based Approach to Designing Healing Gardens and Restorative Outdoor Spaces (2014) with Naomi Sachs. A previous memoir, Iona Dreaming: The Healing Power of Place, was published in 2010. Her forthcoming autobiography, Groundbreaking, comes out in 2026 from New Village Press. She lives in Berkeley, California, where she is an avid gardener. She is a grandmother, published poet, and holds joint British and American citizenship.

Art Against Brutality

Community and Collaborative Art Projects with Survivors of Political Violence

Claudia Bernardi

Art Against Brutality brings a much-needed contribution to the field of community arts and the burgeoning field of social practice art, as well as adding to post-conflict literature, dealing with the aftermath of state terro in Latin America (El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, Argentina, México) and with native people in the United States. It outlines truly collaborative approaches, based on ideas from the community participants, rather than shaped by the facilitating artist. Often the form of the art project is a mural, in which the participants decide on the theme and storyline. These collaborative, community-based art projects engage children, youth, and adults to converse and to find a common thread of intention. Often this thread is rooted in shared historical memory; it emerges from personal and communal stories, from people’s expectations, fears, and tenacity to continue living despite the carnage, losses, and displacement they have suffered.

Claudia Bernardi is an installation artist, painter, and printmaker whose artwork is impacted by war and post war periods. Born in Argentina, Bernardi was affected by the military junta (1976–1983) that caused 30,000 desaparecidos (disappeared). In 2005, Bernardi founded Walls of Hope in a war zone in El Salvador, a communitybased art, education, and human rights project that has been replicated in many countries around the world. Bernardi designs and facilitates collaborative art projects with survivors of political viol ence, survivors of torture, survivors of sexual violence, and with communities forced into exile. Bernardi is emerita professor at the California College of the Arts.

Stories from Alternate ROOTS

It'll Take Some Tellin'

Coedited by Kathie deNobriga, Yvette Angelique, Ashley Minner Jones, Ron Ragin, and MK Wegmann

Written by more than 50 contributors, Stories from Alternate ROOTS chronicles the origins and fiftyyear journey of a nonprofit arts organization that began in 1976. Bringing together interviews, poems, illustrations and essays, both personal and analytical, the diverse stories touch on a wide range of lessons, philosophies, issues and themes including the transformative power of community arts, democratic leadership, racial and gender equity, and navigating organizational and generational change.

Kathie deNobriga, raised in the Blue Ridge Mountains, founded two community theaters in North Carolina. After a full career as director, producer, consultant, and organizer, Kathie is now the chief wrangler of the annual community arts festival in Pine Lake, Georgia, where she served two terms on the city council and one as mayor.

Yvette Angelique is a poet and teaching artist whose work blends mindfulness education, storytelling, and leadership. Her work guides artists, activists, and communities toward healing and liberation.

Ashley Minner Jones is a community-based visual artist and folklorist from Baltimore, Maryland, where she has lived on the same block her entire life. Her interdisciplinary practice is deeply rooted in place and is focused on honoring and celebrating everyday people by lifting up their stories. She is an enrolled citizen of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina.

Ron Ragin is a researcher, coach, strategist, organizer, and interdisciplinary artist. His creative practice is rooted in music of the African Diaspora, improvisation, liberation aesthetics, and the development and maintenance of spiritual technologies. Ron’s artistic work centers the role of the unamplified human voice in transforming our environment, our selves, and one another.

MK Wegmann, a lifelong New Orleanian, advocates for social and racial justice. Over a fifty-year career, she has steered the Contemporary Arts Center, Junebug Productions, and the National Performance Network and continues her work as a consultant.

Published by University of Regina Press

Spare the Child

Ending Childhood Corporal Punishment

Ailsa Watkinson

An urgent examination of Canada’s legal, cultural, and historical acceptance of corporal punishment and the children it continues to fail

In Spare the Child: Ending Childhood Corporal Punishment , author Ailsa Watkinson exposes a troubling truth: since 1982, Section 43 of the Canadian Criminal code has granted legal defense for parents and caregivers who use corporal punishment on children for the purpose of “correction.” Remarkably, children remain the only group in Canada explicitly left unprotected from physical punishment under the law.

In 2004, a legal challenge heard by the Supreme Court of Canada argued that Section 43 directly violated children’s equality and security rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The challenge argued further that Section 43 undermined the three P’s of children’s rights provision, protection, and participation as outlined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Despite all this, the Supreme Court upheld the right to use corporal punishment in the home, reinforcing a legal framework that prioritizes parental rights over those of children. Watkinson critically examines that decision, its legal implications, and the psychological and social consequences of permitting physical force against children.

Beyond the courtroom, Spare the Child deconstructs a practice long accepted as a common sense means of disciplining children. It traces the deep historical roots of corporal punishment, including the legacy of European colonization, religion, and ideology in its justification particularly through its devastating role in residential schools and lasting impact on Indigenous communities.

Grounded in evidence-based research, the book reveals the long-term psychological harms of corporal punishment, urging parents and policymakers to defend children’s fundamental right to dignity, safety, and protection.

Ailsa M. Watkinson is Professor Emerita of Social Work, University of Regina, and a human rights advocate. She is the mother of three sons and grandmother to two grandchildren. She lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

01/20/2026 | 229 pages | 6 x 9 | Paperback: 9781779401045 | $29.95 NYUS

Blue thinks itself within me

Lyric poetry, ecology, and lichenous form

Kim Trainor

Part autotheory, part activist manifesto, and part ode to the oldgrowth specklebelly lichen, this book about making poems in an age of ecological desperation is both heartbreaking and beautiful.

Blue thinks itself within me chronicles the poet Kim Trainor’s blockade to prevent logging of Vancouver Island old growth forests. The twoyear blockade on logging roads and in tree-sits became the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history this multi-genre work brings the reader to the front lines of the fight for human and non-human survival in a climate catastrophe. Trainor asks what, if anything, ecopoetry can do in the face of intensifying extraction of ecological capital. Can poems incorporate nonhuman species, like the oldgrowth specklebelly lichen that thrives in Fairy Creek, into their very form? How can poetry resist the urge to “capture” the non -human object and instead approach nature with sympathetic care? How might a poem offer an opportunity, like sunlight penetrating a clearing in the forest, to think about nature, to approach, and to be approached by the non -human? How might poetry contribute to a co-making of the world with more-than-human-species?

Kim Trainor has won the Gustafson Prize, The Malahat Review’s Long Poem Prize, and The Antigonish Review’s Great Blue Heron Poetry Prize. Her work has been anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry in English, Global Poetry Anthology, and Worth More Standing: Poets and Activists Pay Homage to Trees . She lives in Vancouver.

02/03/2026 | 344 pages | Paperback: 9781779401205 | $27.95 NYUS

Knowledge Under Siege

Charting a Future for Universities

Edited by Marc Spooner and James McNinch

At a time when universities are being defunded by governments and vilified by ultra-conservative pundits, defining their value has never been more urgent

For decades, efforts to quantify the value of universities in dollars and cents led to the corporatization of institutions that are meant to serve their students and society by creating knowledge and teaching not by turning a profit. Now more than ever, the role of the university in advancing discovery, democracy, equity, and in contributing to its students’ success is under siege and needs to be defended.

Knowledge Under Siege picks up where Spooner and McNinch’s Dissident Knowledge in Higher Education left off and analyzes today’s volatile higher education landscape one where hostility towards the academy is a growing trend across the globe. Bringing together leading international voices, including Gloria Ladson -Billings, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Christopher Newfield, Kevin Kumashiro, and many others, the book considers how universities are facing unprecedented threats that include defunding, criticism of and the dismantling of initiatives to diversify the academy, academic gag orders, and efforts to undermine tenure and academic freedom. It asks how institutions can resist these incursions while working towards becoming engines of social mobility for a diverse student body (not merely serving the most privileged) and graduating critical thinkers who aspire to build a better world.

There is a consensus in higher education that universities must remain autonomous so that our societies can better understand both our history and our rapidly changing world. Knowledge Under Siege is a call to action to fight for our institutions and make them self-reflexive spaces where truth and learning continue to thrive.

Marc Spooner is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Regina.

James McNinch is professor emeritus and former dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Regina.

02/17/2026 | 360 pages | Paperback: 9781779401243 | $36.95 NYUS

wîhtamawik / Tell Them!

Essays and Poems on a Life of Inspiration

Louise Bernice Halfe – Sky Dancer

Cree poet and kēhtē-aya Louise Bernice Halfe –Sky Dancer chronicles her childhood in a cabin on reserve, through the Indian Residential School system, and into her reclamation of her nēhiýaw language, culture, and spirituality.

My parents taught us the art of observation. I learned to hunt, skin, and butcher game through non-verbal methods. I also watched my grandparents work on the land and live their spirituality. I helped gather, dry, and grind their medicines. I inhaled the medicines’ power and ingested it. When I left for residential school all this fell asleep.

In never-before-collected essays and new poems, poet and kēhtē-aya (Elder) Louise Bernice Halfe – Sky Dancer tells the story of how she woke up from the trauma of separation and found the source of her inspiration: her culture and the land. In Cree, inspiration is described as a sudden insight. It can come from visits from spirit, from the charged reciprocal experience of being taught by Elders and teaching the next generation, from speaking Cree, which allows the poet to “somersault into memory,” and from the practice of observing and being in relationship with the land as it “constantly gives birth to itself.” wîhtamawik / Tell Them is a stunning love song to nēhiýaw ways of knowing ways which Halfe has spent her life working to reclaim from the violence of colonization, in order to celebrate their survival and share their enduring teachings with future generations.

Louise Bernice Halfe – Sky Dancer is an acclaimed nēhiýaw (Plains Cree) poet and writer from the Saddle Lake First Nation in Alberta. She has been the recipient of multiple awards and appointments for her work, including the Saskatchewan Centennial Medal, Saskatchewan Provincial Poet Laureate, Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal, Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate, the King Charles III Coronation Medal, and Member of the Order of Canada. She resides on the northern plains outside of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

Queer and Muslim On Faith, Family, and Healing

Edited by Rahim Thawer and Maryam Khan

What does it mean to be queer and Muslim in a world that insists you cannot be both?

Queer and Muslim is a powerful collection by and for LGBTQ+ Muslims navigating layered identities across lines of faith, family, culture, and community. With contributions spanning essays, poems, letters to past and future selves, and more, the book explores the emotional and spiritual dimensions of queer Muslim life and challenges the perception that faith and queerness are inherently incompatible.

These raw accounts confront the psychological toll of grappling with tensions between religious expectations and queer identity and offer rare insight into the ways mental health is lived, expressed, and supported across diverse cultural and theological landscapes. They tell of building chosen families and reconnecting with birth families, radical healing, cultivating spaces of belonging, and reclaiming faith on your own terms.

In an era of rising Islamophobia and escalating threats to queer and trans lives, the stories contained within Queer and Muslim stories of resilience, grief, pleasure, rage, and joy are vital, each of them an affirmation of the multiplicity of queer Muslim identities. Queer and Muslim invites readers to listen deeply, think expansively, and care more courageously.

Rahim Thawer (he/him) is a registered social worker, psychotherapist, and author based in Toronto, Canada. Rahim explores intersections of mental health and systemic oppression in his practice and writing.

Maryam Khan (she/her) is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Social Work at Wilfrid Laurier University. Maryam conducts community-based research with 2SLGBTTIQ+ individuals and communities.

04/21/2026 | 216 pages | Paperback: 9781779401281 | $25.95 NYUA

On Settler Colonialism in Canada

Relations and Resistances

Edited by Emily Grafton and David MacDonald

A bold, forward-thinking collection exposing the colonialist ideology embedded within the Canadian settler state and building strategies to dismantle it

On Settler Colonialism in Canada: Relations & Resistances presents strategies for carving pathways to decolonial futures. It builds on the landmark work On Settler Colonialism in Canada: Lands & Peoples, which reckons with the legacy of the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Final Report and lays a foundation for understanding the settler state and society.

Bringing together Indigenous, racialized settler, immigrant settler, and white settler perspectives, the book cultivates a dialogue on how reconciliation can become a lived and shared reality. Contributors offer approaches on seeking solutions outside of the settler state, honouring Treaty responsibilities, centering Indigenous knowledge systems, and making space for Indigenous self-determination.

On Settler Colonialism in Canada: Relations and Resistances poses essential questions: what do decolonial efforts look like on the ground today? How do we meaningfully support Indigenous resurgence movements? And what are the responsibilities of the settler in the ongoing work of decolonization?

Emily Grafton is of Métis ancestry, raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and an Associate Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of Regina (Saskatchewan).

David B. A. MacDonald is an Indo-Trinidadian and Scottish political science professor at the University of Guelph and was previously on faculty at the University of Ōtago, Aotearoa (New Zealand). He was raised in Regina, Saskatchewan, on Treaty 4 territory.

05/05/2026 | 368 pages | 6 x 9 | Paperback: 9781779400680 | $36.95 NYUS

Free To Be More

Creative Activism in the Era of Black Lives Matter

Edited by Syrus Marcus Ware and Ra'anaa Yaminah Ekundayo

W ith d’bi.young anitafrika

Celebrating the artists at the forefront of a Black aesthetic renaissance and how they harness the arts to shape a freer future

In the wake of the murder of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin of the Minneapolis Police Department and the death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet during a mentalhealth episode attended by Toronto Police Services in the turbulent summer of 2020, communities rose up in rage, grief, and resistance. Alongside mass protests came an outpouring of creative expression by Black artists, producing art that helped make sense of the moment and mobilize for change.

Today, as anti-Black violence persists fueled by the rise of white supremacy and fascism, even within the highest levels of government Black artists, too, persist in painting, dancing, drawing, writing, and expressing their outrage and hope.

Free to Be More honours the creative revolutionary labour of Black artists, past and present. This vibrant collection of essays, poems, images, and interviews affirms the deep connection between art and activism. More than that, it’s a testament to how art can amplify a movement and offer tools to gather, organize, and enact transformative interventions in antiBlack racism.

Continuing and expanding the conversation from the bestselling Until We Are Free, Free to Be More brings together contributions from Rodney Diverlus, Ravyn Wngz, Aisha Sasha John, and other visionary artists to serve as both a singular creative archive and a rallying cry for future changemakers

Syrus Marcus Ware is a Vanier Scholar, visual artist, activist, curator, educator, and cofounder of Black Lives Matter Canada. An assistant professor at the School of the Arts, McMaster University, he is the co-editor of the bestselling Until We Are Free: Reflections on Black Lives Matter in Canada

Ra’anaa Yaminah Ekundayo is a multimedia activist scholar who co-founded and currently chairs Black Lives Matter Sudbury.

d’bi.young anitafrika is a Dubpoet, playwright, performer, and educator. A triple Dora Award winner and author of twelve plays, seven books, and seven Dub poetry albums, they are also the founding Artistic Director Emeritus of the Watah Theatre in Toronto and founding Creative Director of the Anitafrika Retreat Centre.

Published by Wits University Press

Bloke of All Ages Persepectives on Bloke Modisane

Edited by Siyabonga Njica and Siphiwo Mahala

Bloke of All Ages is an expansive reflection that offers refreshing new insights into the works of one of South Africa’s most important literary, intellectual and artistic figures, William Bloke Modisane. Born in Sophiatown, Modisane was a remarkable author, playwright and actor, and a leading member of the DRUM generation in the 1950s. The contributors trace Modisane’s intellectual and cultural journey from his early years in South Africa to his exile in the United Kingdom, East Africa, North America, Italy, the German Democratic Republic, and the Federal Republic of Germany. Through a comprehensive and diverse exploration of Modisane’s body of work, they offer critical literary essays on his early short stories, his autobiography Blame Me on History , his journalism as well as his writings while in exile. The volume also includes little-known and previously unpublished essays by Modisane, written during his time in exile. Bloke of All Ages highlights the relevance and resilience of Modisane’s intellectual and cultural contribution by situating his work in the broader historic context of South African creative arts.

William (Bloke) Modisane (28 August 1923 – 1 March 1986) was a South African writer, actor and journalist.

02/01/2026 | 272 pages | 6 x 9 | Paperback: 9781776149759 | $40 NYUS

Dissonant Intimacies

Srila Roy

This engaging essay collection reflects on transnational feminism in the Global South, exploring solidarity, decoloniality, and feminist knowledge-making across borders.

Srila Roy is Professor of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. She is the author of Changing the Subject: Feminist and Queer Politics in Neoliberal India (2022). She leads the Governing Intimacies project that promotes new scholarship on gender and sexuality in southern Africa and India.

Queer Mozambique

From the Mines to the Manas

Francisco P V Miguel and Marc Epprecht

Postcolonial Mozambique decriminalized homosexual acts in 2015. This legal reform was not a response to litigation or public pressure, but came from a parliamentary initiative and lobbying by a few organizations. Subsequent public opinion polls show that Mozambique is an outlier in Africa in its relatively tolerant behaviors and attitudes toward non-heterosexual relationships.

What are the cultural and historical specificities toward gender and sexual dissidence in Mozambique that might explain its distinctive path, and what can we learn from them? Queer Mozambique provides a lively response to these questions.

Contributors employ different modes and styles ranging from photographs to storytelling to text interpretation to tell stories of Mozambique's distinctive cultures of sexual and gender dissent and fluidity, from the South African mine compounds of the late nineteenth century to the current LGBTIQ+ movement and the formation of new sexual and gender identities, such as those of the manas trans women.

The first book in English on queer issues in a Portuguese -speaking African country, Queer Mozambique not only assembles and interprets empirical evidence for the Anglophone reader, but also brings new debates and theories from the Global South. It aims at a truly global dialogue between international and Mozambican scholars of queer studies.

Francisco P V Miguel holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Brasília. He is a FAPESP postdoctoral fellow based jointly at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), Brazil and the Department of Global Development Studies at Queen’s University, Canada.

Marc Epprecht is Professor in the Department of Global Development Studies at Queen's University. He is a visiting research professor at the History Workshop at University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

06/01/2026 | 256 pages | 6 x 9 | Paperback: 9781997461043 | $40 NYUS

Original Apartheid Hustler

The ﬁction and fabrications of Dugmore Boetie

Benjamin N Lawrance and Vusumuzi R Kumalo

A powerful literary biography uncovering Dugmore Boetie’s erased legacy, blending archival research, oral history, and decolonial critique to challenge apartheid’s racial and cultural erasures.

Benjamin N Lawrance is Professor of History at the University of Arizona. He is the author of Amistad’s Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and Smuggling (2014) amongst other books.

Vusumuzi R Kumalo is Senior Lecturer in History at Nelson Mandela University in Gqeberha. He is author of From Plough to Entrepreneurship: A History of African Entrepreneurs in Evaton 1905 -1960s (2020) and South Africa’s Struggle for Independent Education (2023).

Rogue Spying

South Africa’s Crisis of Accountability in the State Intelligence Sector

Jane Duncan

In South Africa's democracy, the civilian intelligence agency's power has been weaponized to spy on political rivals, the media and civil society, while oversight institutions largely falter. As inquiries into Jacob Zuma's presidency opened doors for intelligence reform, Cyril Ramaphosa's administration has, at important moments, offered superficial fixes, entrenching state control.

Jane Duncan is Professor of Digital Society at the University of Glasgow, holds a British Academy Global Professorship and is Visiting Professor in the Department of Communication and Media, University of Johannesburg. She is the author of The Rise of the Securocrats (2014) and Stopping the Spies (2018).

Caught in Neutral Labour, Global Production Networks and the Green Transition in South Africa’s Auto Industry

Alex Mohubetswane Mashilo

Analysis of South Africa's automotive industry within global production networks, critiquing inconsistent industrial policies and highlighting worker's agency in shaping equitable labor conditions, and a just transition to electric vehicles.