Faculty Publications

The University Center for the Humanities is continually working to support and promote humanistic inquiry on campus. This page celebrates our faculty and their recent publications. If you are WMU faculty and  have published a book within the past 3 years, please use email us (use contact form) with a link to the book and/or relevant publication information including author, title, publisher and image of the book cover.

List is organized alphabetically by author / editor / translator

 

Against Knowledge Closure

Alspector-Kelly, Marc

Philosophy

Knowledge closure is the claim that, if an agent S knows P, recognizes that P implies Q, and believes Q because it is implied by P, then S knows Q. Closure is a pivotal epistemological principle that is widely endorsed by contemporary epistemologists. Against Knowledge Closure is the first book-length treatment of the issue and the most sustained argument for closure failure to date. Unlike most prior arguments for closure failure, Marc Alspector-Kelly's critique of closure does not presuppose any particular epistemological theory; his argument is, instead, intuitively compelling and applicable to a wide variety of epistemological views. His discussion ranges over much of the epistemological landscape, including skepticism, warrant, transmission and transmission failure, fallibilism, sensitivity, safety, evidentialism, reliabilism, contextualism, entitlement, circularity and bootstrapping, justification, and justification closure. As a result, the volume will be of interest to any epistemologist or student of epistemology and related subjects.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again - Shigeru Kayama

Angles, Jeffrey - Translator

Japanese Literature and Translation - World Languages and Literatures

Although the Godzilla films have been analyzed in detail by cultural historians, film scholars, and generations of fans, Kayama’s two Godzilla novellas—both classics of Japanese young-adult science fiction—have never been available in English. This book finally provides English-speaking fans and critics the original texts with these first-ever English-language translations of Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again. The novellas reveal valuable insights into Kayama’s vision for the Godzilla story, feature plots that differ from the films, and clearly display the author’s strong antinuclear, proenvironmental convictions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE THORN PULLER - Hiromi Itō

Angles, Jeffrey - Translator

Japanese Literature and Translation - World Languages and Literatures

The first novel to appear in English by award-winning author Hiromi Ito explores the absurdities, complexities, and challenges experienced by a woman caring for her two families: her husband and daughters in California and her aging parents in Japan. As the narrator shuttles back and forth between these two starkly different cultures, she creates a powerful and entertaining narrative about what it means to live and die in a globalized society.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

KILLING KANOKO / WILD GRASS ON THE RIVERBANK - Hiromi Itō, 

Angles, Jeffrey - Translator

Japanese Literature and Translation - World Languages and Literatures

A landmark dual collection by Ito Hiromi, one of the most important contemporary Japanese poets, in a “generous and beautifully rendered” translation by Jeffrey Angles.

Now widely taught as a feminist classic, Killing Kanoko is a defiantly autobiographical exploration of sexuality, community, and postpartum depression, featuring some of Ito’s most famous poems.

Set simultaneously in the California desert and Japan, Wild Grass on the Riverbank focuses on migration, nature, and movement. At once grotesque and vertiginous, this later collection interweaves mythologies, language, sexuality and place into a genre-busting narrative of what it is to be a migrant.

Winner of the 2006 Takami Jun Prize

 

 

 

 

Factory Girls: Selected Poems of Takako Arai - TAKAKO ARAI 

Angles, Jeffrey - Editor, Translator

Japanese Literature and Translation - World Languages and Literatures

This first English-language volume from Japanese poet, performer and publisher Takako Arai collects engaging, rhythmically intense narrative poems set in the silk weaving factory where Arai grew up. Factory Girls depicts the secretive yet bold world of the women workers as well as the fate of these kinds of regional, feminine, collaborative spaces in a current-day Japan defined by such corporate and climate catastrophes as the rise of Uniqlo and the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Locus Amoenus - MUTSUO TAKAHASHI

Angles, Jeffrey - Translator

Japanese Literature and Translation - World Languages and Literatures

What turns a house into a home? What is necessary to make a home come alive?  Mutsuo Takahashi, one of Japan's most important and prolific contemporary poets, broaches these questions in this gorgeously illustrated coffee-table book, which intersperses Takahashi's Japanese poems with English translation by Jeffrey Angles and photographs of Takahashi's stunning home taken by photographer Hajime Sawatari. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Forgeries and Historical Writing in England, France, and Flanders, 900-1200

Berkhofer, Robert J.

History & Medieval Institute

A close analysis of forgeries and historical writings at Saint Peter's, Ghent; Saint-Denis near Paris; and Christ Church, Canterbury, offering valuable access to why medieval people often rewrote their pasts.

What modern scholars call "forgeries" (be they texts, seals, coins, or relics) flourished in the central Middle Ages. Although lying was considered wrong throughout the period, such condemnation apparently did not extend to forgeries. Rewriting documents was especially common among monks, who exploited their mastery of writing to reshape their records.

Monastic scribes frequently rewrote their archives, using charters, letters, and narratives, to create new usable pasts for claiming lands and privileges in their present or future. Such imagined histories could also be deployed to "reform" their community or reshape its relationship with lay and ecclesiastical authorities. Although these creative rewritings were forgeries, they still can be valuable evidence of medieval mentalities. While forgeries cannot easily be used to reconstruct what did happen, forgeries embedded in historical narratives show what their composers believed should have happened and thus they offer valuable access to why medieval people rewrote their pasts.

This book offers close analysis of three monastic archives over the long eleventh century: Saint Peter's, Ghent; Saint-Denis near Paris; and Christ Church, Canterbury. These foci provide the basis for contextualizing key shifts in documentary culture in the twelfth century across Europe. Overall, the book argues that connections between monastic forgeries and historical writing in the tenth through twelfth centuries reveal attempts to reshape reality. Both sought to rewrite the past and thereby promote monks' interests in their present or future.

 

Christians under the Crescent and Muslims under the Cross c.630 - 1923

Berto, Luigi

History

This book examines the status that rulers of one faith conferred onto their subjects belonging to a different one, how the rulers handled relationships with them, and the interactions between subjects of the Muslim and Christian religions.

The chronological arc of this volume spans from the first conquests by the Arabs in the Near East in the 630s to the exchange between Turkey and Greece, in 1923, of the Orthodox Christians and Muslims residing in their territories. Through organized topics, Berto analyzes both similarities and differences in Christian and Muslim lands and emphasizes how coexistences and conflicts took directions that were not always inevitable. Primary sources are used to examine the mentality of those who composed them and of their audiences. In doing so, the book considers the nuances and all the features of the multifaceted experiences of Christian subjects under Muslim rule and of Muslim subjects under Christian rule.

 

 

 

 

 

Christians and Muslims in Early Medieval Italy - Perceptions, Encounters, and Clashes 

 Berto, Luigi

 History

In the early Middle Ages, Italy became the target of Muslim expansionist campaigns. The Muslims conquered Sicily, ruling there for more than two centuries, and conducted many raids against the Italian Peninsula. During this period, however, Christians and Muslims were not always at war – trade flourished, and travel to the territories of the ‘other’ was not uncommon. By examining how Muslims and Christians perceived each other and how they communicated, this book brings the relationship between Muslims and Christians in early medieval Italy into clearer focus, showing that the followers of the Cross and those of the Crescent were in reality not as ignorant of one another as is commonly believed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Early Medieval Venice - Cultural Memory and History

Berto, Luigi

History

Early Medieval Venice examines the significant changes that Venice underwent between the late-sixth and the early-eleventh centuries. From the periphery of the Byzantine Empire, Venice acquired complete independence and emerged as the major power in the Adriatic area. It also avoided absorption by neighbouring rulers, prevented serious destruction by raiders, and achieved a stable state organization, all the while progressively extending its trading activities to most of northern Italy and the eastern Mediterranean. This was not a linear process, but the Venetians obtained and defended these results with great tenacity, creating the foundations for the remarkable developments of the following centuries.

This book presents the most relevant themes that characterized Venice during this epoch, including war, violence, and the manner in which ‘others’ were perceived. It examines how early medieval authors and modern scholars have portrayed this period, and how they were sometimes influenced by their own ‘present’ in their reconstruction of the past.

 

 

 

 

  

History of the Venetian Dukes (1102-1229) with an appendix of Brief Venetian Historical Texts

Berto, Luigi, Editor

History

The twelfth and early thirteenth centuries were a crucial period for the emergence of Venice as one of the major powers in the Mediterranean. Taking advantage of the conquest of the Holy Land and the weakening of Byzantine naval power, the Venetians’ policy in the eastern Mediterranean aimed both at strengthening their position in that area and acquiring new markets. In order to do so, they demonstrated their readiness to use force. For the first time in their history, the Venetians went to the eastern Mediterranean not only for trading but also for fighting, becoming involved in the Crusades and establishing a relationship with the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem after the First Crusade.

The goal of this volume is to present the edition of the Latin text and the English translation of the Historia ducum Venetorum (History of the Venetian Dukes) which describes this period. It is the first Venetian historical text composed after the Fourth Crusade, and it is also the only extant chronicle composed in Venice after the beginning of the eleventh century.

In this volume the edition and translation of the Historia ducum Venetorum is accompanied by other two historical texts: the Brief Venetians Annals and the Account of the Election of Dominic Silvo as Duke of the Venetians by Dominic Tino.

 

 

Franks and Lombards in Italian Carolingian Texts - Memories of the Vanquished

Berto, Luigi

History

Franks and Lombards in Italian Carolingian Texts examines how historians of Carolingian Italy portrayed the history of the Lombards, Charlemagne’s conquest of the Lombard kingdom, and the presence of the Franks in the Italian Ppeninsula.

The different contexts and periods in which these writers composed their works allows readers to focus on various aspects of this period and to highlight the different ways the vanquished remembered Carolingian rule in Italy. The ‘"memories’" of these authors are organized by topic, ranging from the origin of the Lombards to the conflicts that broke out among the Carolingians after Louis II died in 875. Besides presenting the English translation and the original Latin text of the excerpts from the Italian Carolingian historical works, the volume also contains the English translations of the same events recorded in Frankish and papal narrative texts. In this way it is possible to compare different memories about the same episode or topic.

 

 

 

 

 

The Little History of the Lombards of Benevento by Erchempert - A Critical Edition and Translation of ‘Ystoriola Longobardorum Beneventum degentium’

Berto, Luigi, Editor

History

This volume presents the analysis, English translation, and critical edition of the Latin text of The Little History of the Lombards of Benevento, thus offering an important contribution for a better understanding of early medieval southern Italian (and Mediterranean) history.

In the 840s, having passed the danger of subjugation by Charlemagne, southern Italy’s Lombards experienced a bloody civil war that put an end to their unity and turned southern Italy into the playground of several competing powers: Lombard lords, the Neapolitans, the Frankish and the Byzantine Empires, the Muslims, and, sometimes, even the papacy. At the end of the ninth century, the Cassinese monk Erchempert composed a chronicle about this period that blamed the southern Lombard leaders for the terrible crisis of southern Italy. It was Erchempert’s desire that future generations could learn from the folly of their forbearers, and his chronicle has since become the most relevant source for southern Italy between the 770s and the 880s.

 

 

 

 

 
 

Andershimmel

Blickle, Peter

Emeritus - German - World Languages and Literatures

Andershimmel (Other Heavens). When his twin sister checks herself into a mental hospital, a German-American professor of medical anthropology returns for the first time after thirty years to the German Christian sect, in which he and his sister grew up and from which he escaped at the age of seventeen. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Routledge Companion to Media and Poverty

Borden, Sandra, Editor

Communication

Comprehensive and interdisciplinary, this collection explores the complex, and often problematic, ways in which the news media shapes perceptions of poverty.

Editor Sandra L. Borden and a diverse collection of scholars and journalists question exactly how the news media can reinforce (or undermine) poverty and privilege. This book is divided into five parts that examine philosophical principles for reporting on poverty, the history and nature of poverty coverage, problematic representations of people experiencing poverty, poverty coverage as part of reporting on public policy and positive possibilities for poverty coverage. Each section provides an introduction to the topic, as well as a broad selection of essays illuminating key issues and a Q&A with a relevant journalist. Topics covered include news coverage of corporate philanthropy, structural bias in reporting, representations of the working poor, the moral demands of vulnerability and agency, community empowerment and citizen media. The book’s broad focus considers media and poverty at both the local and global levels with contributors from 16 countries.

 

 

 

 

 

Why Teaching Matters - A Philosophical Guide to the Elements of Practice

Farber, Paul and Dini Metro-Roland

Teaching, Learning, and Educational Studies

Why Teaching Matters is an introductory guide to core elements of teaching, getting to the heart of what teaching is, and why it matters. Paul Farber and Dini Metro-Roland introduce the following 8 elements which encompass the many issues, themes and social complexities of teaching:

The Resilient Self: Gender, Immigration, and Taiwanese Americans

Gu, Chien-Juh 

Sociology

The Resilient Self explores how international migration re-shapes women’s senses of themselves. Chien-Juh Gu uses life-history interviews and ethnographic observations to illustrate how immigration creates gendered work and family contexts for middle-class Taiwanese American women, who, in turn, negotiate and resist the social and psychological effects of the processes of immigration and settlement. 

Most of the women immigrated as dependents when their U.S.-educated husbands found professional jobs upon graduation. Constrained by their dependent visas, these women could not work outside of the home during the initial phase of their settlement. The significant contrast of their lives before and after immigration—changing from successful professionals to foreign housewives—generated feelings of boredom, loneliness, and depression. Mourning their lost careers and lacking fulfillment in homemaking, these highly educated immigrant women were forced to redefine the meaning of work and housework, which in time shaped their perceptions of themselves and others in the family, at work, and in the larger community.

 

 

 

 

 

Twice There Was A country

Hamza, Alen

English

"Alen Hamza is a lyric poet of the first order, and TWICE THERE WAS A COUNTRY proves it with poems that alchemize past and present, personal and political, and grief and celebration in a way that leads to absolute stillness: 'Silence has a mother in it and summer / refuses to move on.' Throughout this volume, Hamza acts as an Adam of sorts, naming people and places and events with the exactitude that allows him to reclaim all that was ever lost: 'Those under us are not dead. / They are dancers. We are the music.' This is a brilliant debut."-Jericho Brown

"Alen Hamza writes poems that oscillate between forgetting and remembering, between the two gods of his soul-Bosnia and Herzegovina and America-between two languages, and between the life that passed and the life that is passing... His poems face you with your own life and hurt and cure you with the same intensity."-Lidija Dimkovska

"With these darkly magnetic poems, Alen Hamza locates us in a world of political upheaval, personal dislocation and emotional fracture with a stunning balance and decorum. Reading TWICE THERE WAS A COUNTRY, I feel like I am being guided by a gentle firm hand while bombs are exploding around us, and surely this is one of the best things poetry can do."-Dean Young

"TWICE THERE WAS A COUNTRY explores Hamza's identity as a Bosnian refugee attempting, and equally resisting, to assimilate to the cultural politics of the United States. Hamza's poems are playful and often surreal; their examination of how language shapes both our political and cultural identities is timely and nuanced. Here, the legacy of wartime trauma is approached with an ironist's touch and a fabulist's sense of play, paying exquisite attention to the ways in which both English and Bosnian get used-or misused-by speakers desperate to remake but also preserve their sense of self. '[I]n the end I realize I really wanted / to be a poem,' Hamza writes, and it is in the beauty of these poems that the many contradictions inherent to the immigrant's identity come to life."-Paisley Rekdal

"Alen Hamza delicately shows us what happens to the internal psyche during exile and during its aftermath. There's longing, displacement, absurdity, yes; but oh there's also humor, surprise, and joy... Hamza acknowledges that 'this age calls for chewing,' and in this brilliant debut, he gives us 'American-chewed words.'"-Javier Zamora

 

The Accidental Reef and Other Ecological Odysseys in the Great Lakes

Heasley, Lynne

Institute of the Environment and Sustainability

In The Accidental Reef and Other Ecological Odysseys in the Great Lakes, Lynne Heasley illuminates an underwater world that, despite a ferocious industrial history, remains wondrous and worthy of care. From its first scene in a benighted Great Lakes river, where lake sturgeon thrash and spawn, this powerful book takes readers on journeys through the Great Lakes, alongside fish and fishers, scuba divers and scientists, toxic pollutants and threatened communities, oil pipelines and invasive species, Indigenous peoples and federal agencies. With dazzling illustrations from Glenn Wolff, the book helps us know the Great Lakes in new ways and grapple with the legacies and alternative futures that come from their abundance of natural wealth. Suffused with curiosity, empathy, and wit, The Accidental Reef will not fail to astonish and inspire.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Great Czech Navy

Katrovas, Richard

English

Written over the course of more than twenty years, The Great Czech Navy is a collection of stories that chronicles the relationship between Czech citizens and Americans who chose to live in their midst from 1990 more or less to the present. Post-Velvet Revolution Prague is the stage on which a new nation’s ancient culture is encountered by American expatriates often ill-prepared to fathom its depth and complexity, but who are dazzled by its beauty and inscrutable relation to the rest of the world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poets and the Fools Who Love Them: A Memoir in Essays

Katrovas, Richard

English

Poets and the Fools Who Love Them blends autobiography with cultural commentary and meditates on creative writing as a cottage industry within humanities higher education. Celebrated poet and memoirist Richard Katrovas examines his picaresque early years with a criminal father, a beleaguered mother, and four siblings as state and federal authorities pursued the family across the highways of America. His freewheeling, wide-ranging essays consider, among other social constructs, the relation of crime and art, and the relation of both to the authority of the state, particularly in terms of race and class. Katrovas speaks candidly about how white privilege facilitated his father’s criminal career, as a lifestyle of larceny and used-car scams, perpetuated state to state, would have surely had different implications for a family of color.

Drawing on his adulthood in academe, Katrovas’s memoir in essays chronicles a quest to locate surrogate fathers among older poets and other creative writers, and reflects upon the ways in which that search has affected his role as the father to three Czech American daughters. The book flows from the love of a poet for other poets, for the “community of poets,” one likened to a “gang of priests” and a “herd of bears.” Katrovas maintains that most lovers of poets are themselves poets, and those lovers of poets who are not themselves poets are saints. 

At its heart, Poets and the Fools Who Love Them contemplates, with care and unabashed honesty, the role of art and the artist in the madcap twenty-first century.

 

 

 

The Woman with a Cat on Her Shoulder 

 Katrovas, Richard

 English

 The Woman with a Cat on Her Shoulder is a gathering of “punk formalist” lyrics that collectively are a meditation not on mortality so much as on the terror of   extinction, how that terror is the reservoir of love. Katrovas declaims from the margins of faith, the cliff edge of doubt, seeking to measure the conductivity of private   troubles to public issues. Katrovas’ “riffs” are verse essays jotted in the antechambers of nightmares and erotic dreams.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Queer Voices in Hip Hop: Cultures, Communities, and Contemporary Performance

Kehrer, Lauron J.

School of Music

Notions of hip hop authenticity, as expressed both within hip hop communities and in the larger American culture, rely on the construction of the rapper as a Black, masculine, heterosexual, cisgender man who enacts a narrative of struggle and success. In Queer Voices in Hip Hop, Lauron J. Kehrer turns our attention to openly queer and trans rappers and positions them within a longer Black queer musical lineage. Combining musical, textual, and visual analysis with reception history, this book reclaims queer involvement in hip hop by tracing the genre’s beginnings within Black and Latinx queer music-making practices and spaces, demonstrating that queer and trans rappers draw on Ballroom and other cultural expressions particular to queer and trans communities of color in their work in order to articulate their subject positions. By centering the performances of openly queer and trans artists of color, Queer Voices in Hip Hop reclaims their work as essential to the development and persistence of hip hop in the United States as it tells the story of hip hop’s queer roots.

 

 

 

 

 

 

CARBON CRIMINALS, CLIMATE CRIMES

Kramer, Ron

Sociology

Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes analyzes the looming threats posed by climate change from a criminological perspective. It advances the field of green criminology through a examination of the criminal nature of catastrophic environmental harms resulting from the release of greenhouse gases. The book describes and explains what corporations in the fossil fuel industry, the U.S. government, and the international political community did, or failed to do, in relation to global warming. Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes integrates research and theory from a wide variety of disciplines, to analyze four specific state-corporate climate crimes: continued extraction of fossil fuels and rising carbon emissions; political omission (failure) related to the mitigation of these emissions; socially organized climate change denial; and climate crimes of empire, which include militaristic forms of adaptation to climate disruption. The final chapter reviews policies that could mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, adapt to a warming world, and achieve climate justice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Emotion

Kurth, Charlie

Philosophy

Emotions have long been of interest to philosophers, with deep historical roots going back to the Ancients. They have also become one of the most exciting areas of current research in philosophy, the cognitive sciences, and beyond.

 In this book Charlie Kurth explains the philosophy of the emotions, structuring the book around seven fundamental questions: What are emotions? Are emotions natural kinds? Do animals have emotions? Are emotions epistemically valuable? Are emotions the foundation for value and morality? Are emotions the basis for responsibility? Do emotions make us better people?

 In the course of exploring these questions, he also discusses cutting-edge empirical research on emotion, feminist approaches to emotions and their value, and methodological questions on how to theorize about the emotions. The book also contains in-depth discussions of specific emotions like compassion, disgust, anxiety, and curiosity. It also highlights emerging trends in emotion research.

Including suggestions for further reading and a glossary of key terms, Emotion is ideal for those studying and researching the philosophy of emotion as well as ethics, epistemology and the philosophies of mind and psychology.

 

 

 

 

Transference

Lynde-Recchia, Molly

French - World Languages and Literatures

Transference is published by faculty in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Western Michigan University. Focusing exclusively on poetic translation, the journal publishes translations from Arabic, Chinese, French and Old French, German, Classical Greek, Latin, and Japanese into English. We feature translations and accompanying commentaries on the art and process of translating poetry. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Natural Allies: Environment, Energy, and the History of US-Canada Relations

MacFarlane, Daniel 

School of Environment, Geography, and Sustainability

No two nations have exchanged natural resources, produced transborder environmental agreements, or cooperatively altered ecosystems on the same scale as Canada and the United States. Environmental and energy diplomacy have profoundly shaped both countries’ economies, politics, and landscapes for over 150 years. Natural Allies looks at the history of US-Canada relations through an environmental lens. From fisheries in the late nineteenth century to oil pipelines in the twenty-first century, Daniel Macfarlane recounts the scores of transborder environmental and energy arrangements made between the two nations. Many became global precedents that influenced international environmental law, governance, and politics, including the Boundary Waters Treaty, the Trail Smelter case, hydroelectric megaprojects, and the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreements. In addition to water, fish, wood, minerals, and myriad other resources, Natural Allies details the history of the continental energy relationship – from electricity to uranium to fossil fuels –showing how Canada became vital to American strategic interests and, along with the United States, a major international energy power and petro-state. Environmental and energy relations facilitated the integration and prosperity of Canada and the United States but also made these countries responsible for the current climate crisis and other unsustainable forms of ecological degradation. Looking to the future, Natural Allies argues that the concept of national security must be widened to include natural security – a commitment to public, national, and international safety from environmental harms, especially those caused by human actions.

 

 

 

 

Fixing Niagara Falls - Environment, Energy, and Engineers at the World’s Most Famous Waterfall

MacFarlane, Daniel 

School of Environment, Geography, and Sustainability

Since the late nineteenth century, Niagara Falls has been heavily engineered to generate energy behind a flowing facade designed to appeal to tourists. Essentially, this natural wonder is now a tap: huge tunnels channel the waters of the Niagara River around the Falls, which ebb and flow according to the tourism calendar.

Fixing Niagara Falls reveals the technological feats and cross-border politics that facilitated the transformation of one of the most important natural sites in North America. Daniel Macfarlane details how engineers, bureaucrats, and politicians conspired to manipulate the world’s most famous waterfall. During the first half of the twentieth century, the United States and Canada explored various ways to maximize hydropower from the Niagara River while “preserving” the falls. Decades of environmental diplomacy and transborder studies led to a 1950 treaty that allowed new hydro-electric stations to funnel most of the river’s water to generate power. To facilitate these diversions and lessen the visual impact of redirecting so much water, the two nations cooperated to install a range of control works while reshaping and shrinking the Horseshoe Falls. This book offers a unique perspective on how the Niagara landscape embodies both the power of technology and the power of nature.

 

 

 

 

 

The First Century of the International Joint Commission

MacFarlane, Daniel, Editor

School of Environment, Geography, and Sustainability

An essential introduction to, and overview of, the International Joint Commission and Canada-U.S. water relationships.

The International Joint Commission oversees and protects the shared waters of Canada and the United States. Created by the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909, it is one of the world’s oldest international environmental bodies. A pioneering piece of transborder water governance, the IJC has been integral to the modern Canada-United States relationship.

This is the definitive history of the International Joint Commission. Separating myth from reality and uncovering the historical evolution of the IJC from its inception to its present, this collection features an impressive interdisciplinary group of scholars and practitioners. Examining the many aspects of border waters from east to west The First Century of the International Joint Commission traces the three major periods of the IJC, detailing its early focus on water flow, its middle period of growth and increasing politicization, and its modern emphasis on ecosystems.

Informative, detailed, and fascinating, The First Century of the International Joint Commission is essential reading for academics, contemporary policy makers, governments, and all those interested in sustainability, climate change, pollution, and resiliency along the Canada-US Border.

 

 

 

 

Children's Books on the Big Screen

Meeusen, Meghann 

English

In Children’s Books on the Big Screen, Meghann Meeusen goes beyond the traditional adaptation approach of comparing and contrasting the similarities of film and book versions of a text. By tracing a pattern across films for young viewers, Meeusen proposes that a consistent trend can be found in movies adapted from children’s and young adult books: that representations of binaries such as male/female, self/other, and adult/child become more strongly contrasted and more diametrically opposed in the film versions. The book describes this as binary polarization, suggesting that starker opposition between concepts leads to shifts in the messages that texts send, particularly when it comes to representations of gender, race, and childhood.

After introducing why critics need a new way of thinking about children’s adapted texts, Children’s Books on the Big Screen uses middle-grade fantasy adaptations to explore the reason for binary polarization and looks at the results of polarized binaries in adolescent films and movies adapted from picture books. Meeusen also digs into instances when multiple films are adapted from a single source such as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and ends with pragmatic classroom application, suggesting teachers might utilize this theory to help students think critically about movies created by the Walt Disney corporation. Drawing from numerous popular contemporary examples, Children’s Books on the Big Screen posits a theory that can begin to explain what happens—and what is at stake—when children’s and young adult books are made into movies.

 

 

 

 

WHY TEACHING MATTERS - A PHILOSOPHICAL GUIDE TO THE ELEMENTS OF PRACTICE

Metro-Roland, Dini  and Paul Farber 

Teaching, Learning, and Educational Studies

Why Teaching Matters is an introductory guide to core elements of teaching, getting to the heart of what teaching is, and why it matters. Paul Farber and Dini Metro-Roland introduce the following 8 elements which encompass the many issues, themes and social complexities of teaching:

Nassaney, Michael S., Editor

Emeritus - Anthropology

Fort St. Joseph Revealed is the first synthesis of archaeological and documentary data on one of the most important French colonial outposts in the western Great Lakes region. Located in what is now Michigan, Fort St. Joseph was home to a flourishing fur trade society from the 1680s to 1781. Material evidence of the site—lost for centuries—was discovered in 1998 by volume editor Michael Nassaney and his colleagues, who summarize their extensive excavations at the fort and surrounding areas in these essays.  
 
Contributors analyze material remains including animal bones, lead seals, smudge pits, and various other detritus from daily life to reconstruct the foodways, architectural traditions, crafts, trade, and hide-processing methods of the fur trade. They discuss the complex relationship between the French traders and local Native populations, who relied on each other for survival and forged links across their communities through intermarriage and exchange, even as they maintained their own cultural identities. Faunal remains excavated at the site indicate the French quickly adopted Native cuisine, as they were unable to transport perishable goods across long distances. Copper kettles and other imported objects from Europe were transformed by Native Americans into decorative ornaments such as tinkling cones, and French textiles served as a medium of stylistic expression in the multi-ethnic community that developed at Fort St. Joseph. Featuring a thought-provoking look at the award-winning public archaeology program at the site, this volume will inspire researchers with the potential of community-based service-learning initiatives to tap into the analytical power at the interface of history and archaeology.  

 

 

 

 

How Other People Make Love

Nissen, Thisbe

Enlgish

In How Other People Make Love, Thisbe Nissen chronicles the lives and choices of people questioning the heteronormative institution of marriage. Not best-served by established conventions and conventional mores, these people—young, old, gay, straight, Midwestern, coastal—are finding their own paths in learning who they are and how they want to love and be loved, even when those paths must be blazed through the unknown. Concerning husbands and wives, lovers and leavers, Nissen’s stories explore our search for connection and all the ways we undercut it, unwittingly and intentionally, when we do find it. How do we hold ourselves together—to function, work, and survive—while endlessly yearning to be undone, unraveled, and laid bare, however untenable and excruciating?

How Other People Make Love contains nine stories. "Win’s Girl" features a single woman who works at an Iowa slaughterhouse and uses the insurance money from a car accident to update the electric system in her dead parents’ old house, only to be unwittingly embroiled with a shady electrician who ultimately forces her to stand up for herself. In "Home Is Where the Heart Gives Out and We Arouse the Grass," a young woman flees after cheating on her husband and winds up at a Nebraska roadside motel populated by participants in a regional dog show who help her decide what to do next. In "Unity Brought Them Together," a young man heads to his favorite New York coffee shop intending to finish the Christmas cards his vacationing fiancée insists on sending, but winds up meeting another displaced young Midwestern man there and going home with him instead. All these stories explore the question, "how do we love?" as well as the answers we find, discard, follow, banish, and cling to in all our humanness and desperation.

How Other People Make Love asserts that there aren’t right and wrong ways to love; there are only our very complicated and contradictory human hearts, minds, bodies, and desires—all searching for something, whether we know what that is or not. These are stories for anyone who has ever loved or been loved.

 

 

 

Muslim American City: Gender and Religion in Metro Detroit

Perkins, Alisa

Comparative Religion

In 2004, the al-Islah Islamic Center in Hamtramck, Michigan, set off a contentious controversy when it requested permission to use loudspeakers to broadcast the adhān, or Islamic call to prayer. The issue gained international notoriety when media outlets from around the world flocked to the city to report on what had become a civil battle between religious tolerance and Islamophobic sentiment. The Hamtramck council voted unanimously to allow mosques to broadcast the adhān, making it one of the few US cities to officially permit it through specific legislation.

Muslim American City explores how debates over Muslim Americans’ use of both public and political space have challenged and ultimately reshaped the boundaries of urban belonging. Drawing on more than ten years of ethnographic research in Hamtramck, which boasts one of the largest concentrations of Muslim residents of any American city, Alisa Perkins shows how the Muslim American population has grown and asserted itself in public life. She explores, for example, the efforts of Muslim American women to maintain gender norms in neighborhoods, mosques, and schools, as well as Muslim Americans’ efforts to organize public responses to municipal initiatives. Her in-depth fieldwork incorporates the perspectives of both Muslims and non-Muslims, including Polish Catholics, African American Protestants, and other city residents.

Drawing particular attention to Muslim American expressions of religious and cultural identity in civil life―particularly in response to discrimination and stereotyping―Perkins questions the popular assumption that the religiosity of Muslim minorities hinders their capacity for full citizenship in secular societies. She shows how Muslims and non-Muslims have, through their negotiations over the issues over the use of space, together invested Muslim practice with new forms of social capital and challenged nationalist and secularist notions of belonging.

 

 

 

Julia and the Illuminated Baron

 Slawinski, Scott

 English

Julia and the Illuminated Baron (1800) opposes the European Illuminati in the belief that it was behind the French Revolution, which, from a Federalist point of view, Wood opposed. But in the process, she reveals much about the situation of women at the turn of the 19th century, while, in setting a part in the U.S. Northeast, she compliments the culture of prominent American women writers. At the same time, Julia offers a rollicking narrative adventure in search for identity and the struggle to maintain female virtue.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Children's and Young Adult Comics

Tarbox, Gwen Athene

English

A complete critical guide to the history, form and contexts of the genre, Children's and Young Adult Comics helps readers explore how comics have engaged with one of their most crucial audiences.

In an accessible and easy-to-navigate format, the book covers such topics as:

- The history of comics for children and young adults, from early cartoon strips to the rise of comics as mainstream children's literature
- Cultural contexts – from the Comics Code Authority to graphic novel adaptations of popular children's texts such as Neil Gaiman's Coraline
- Key texts – from familiar favourites like Peanuts and Archie Comics to YA graphic novels such as Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese and hybrid works including the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series
- Important theoretical and critical approaches to studying children's and young adult comics

Children's and Young Adult Comics includes a glossary of crucial critical terms and a lengthy resources section to help students and readers develop their understanding of these genres and pursue independent study.

 

 

 

Estudios de lenguas amerindias 4. Escenario actual de la investigación sobre lenguas yuto-aztecas. Homenaje a Jane H. Hill.

Tubino-Blanco, Mercedes, Editor

Spanish - World Languages and Literatures

This book is the fourth of the Series Estudios de Lenguas Amerindias published by the University of Sonora. The present is published in honor to Jane H. Hill, whose most important area of ​​research was focuded in Uto-Aztecan languages. The volume includes tenth research works written by twenty fourth authors specialized in different languages. The volume also includes a chapter dedicated to Jane H. Hill. The chapters of the volume discusses different morphosyntactic aspects and one is focused on prosody. Languages that are discussed are: Yaqui - Hiaki, Uto-Aztecan from the Sierra Tarahumara, Northern Tepehuan, Wixarika Huichol, O'dam, and Nahuatl.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The California Days of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wilson, Brian

Comparative Religion

In the spring of 1871, Ralph Waldo Emerson boarded a train in Concord, Massachusetts, bound for a month-and-a-half-long tour of California—an interlude that became one of the highlights of his life. On their journey across the American West, he and his companions would take in breathtaking vistas in the Rockies and along the Pacific Coast, speak with a young John Muir in the Yosemite Valley, stop off in Salt Lake City for a meeting with Brigham Young, and encounter a diversity of communities and cultures that would challenge their Yankee prejudices.

Based on original research employing newly discovered documents, The California Days of Ralph Waldo Emerson maps the public story of this group’s travels onto the private story of Emerson’s final years, as aphasia set in and increasingly robbed him of his words. Engaging and compelling, this travelogue makes it clear that Emerson was still capable of wonder, surprise, and friendship, debunking the presumed darkness of his last decade.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Untamed Shrews: Negotiating New Womanhood in Modern China

Yang, Shu

(World Languages and Literatures)

Untamed Shrews traces the evolution of unruly women in Chinese literature, from the reviled "shrew" to the celebrated "new woman." Notorious for her violence, jealousy, and promiscuity, the character of the shrew personified the threat of unruly femininity to the Confucian social order and served as a justification for punishing any woman exhibiting these qualities. In this book, Shu Yang connects these shrewish qualities to symbols of female empowerment in modern China.

Rather than meeting her demise, the shrew persisted, and her negative qualities became the basis for many forms of the new woman, ranging from the early Republican suffragettes and Chinese Noras, to the Communist and socialist radicals. Criticism of the shrew endured, but her vicious, sexualized, and transgressive nature became a source of pride, placing her among the ranks of liberated female models.

Untamed Shrews shows that whether male writers and the state hate, fear, or love them, there will always be a place for the vitality of unruly women. Unlike in imperial times, the shrew in modern China stayed untamed as an inspiration for the new woman.