Olivia DrakeKit Reed, resident writer in the English Department, is the author of Son of Destruction, published by Severn House (U.K.) in October 2012. The U.S. version will be released in March 2013. When his mother dies, Dan Carteret has only two leads to the identity of his father: a photograph of four young men, and a newspaper cutting showing the remains of a victim of spontaneous human combustion. Carteret travels to his mother's hometown of Fort Jude and discovers that three cases of spontaneous combustion have occurred there in the recent past. In the search for his father, he confronts…
Lauren RubensteinRob Rosenthal, provost, vice-president for academic affairs, and the John E. Andrus professor of sociology, is the co-editor of a new book, together with his son, Sam Rosenthal. The book, Pete Seeger: In His Own Words, is a collection of the legendary folk singer's private writings—including letters, notes to himself, published articles, rough drafts, stories and poetry—spanning most of the 20th century and into the 21st. Seeger has never published an autobiography, but these documents provide the most detailed picture available of him as a musician, an activist and a family man. From letters to his mother written as a…
Lisa Cohen, assistant professor of English, is the author of All We Know: Three Lives, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in July 2012. The book is 448 pages and includes 52 illustrations and notes. In All We Know, Cohen describes three women’s glamorous choices, complicated failures, and controversial personal lives with lyricism and empathy. Esther Murphy was a brilliant New York intellectual who dazzled friends and strangers with an unstoppable flow of conversation. But she never finished the books she was contracted to write—a painful failure and yet a kind of achievement. The quintessential fan, Mercedes de Acosta had intimate…
Hilary Barth, assistant professor of psychology, assistant professor of neuroscience and behavior, is the co-author of "Active (not passive) spatial imagery primes temporal judgements." Written along with Jessica Sullivan of the University of California-San Diego, the article was published in the June 2012 issue of The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. For this article, Barth and Sullivan looked deeper into the previously demonstrated cognitive connections between how we think about space and time. They found that only when people are asked to imagine actively moving themselves through space are their perceptions of time influenced. When participants in the experiment were primed with a similar…
Elizabeth McAlister, associate professor of religion, associate professor of African American studies, associate professor of American studies, is the author of “Slaves, Cannibals, and Infected Hyper-Whites: The Race and Religion of Zombies,” published in Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 85, No. 2, pages 457-486, 2012; And “From Slave Revolt to a Blood Pact with Satan: The Evangelical Rewriting of Haitian History," published in Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, Vol. 41, No. 2, 2012.
Mary Jane Rubenstein, associate professor of religion, is the author of "Cosmic Singularities: On the Nothing and the Sovereign," published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 80, No. 2, pages 485–517, in 2012. Until very recently, the paper explains, "the creation myth of secular modernity has been the hot big bang hypothesis: the explosion of our single universe out of a single point. Physicists concede that in its traditional form, this story performs an uncanny recapitulation of Christian creation theology: the universe bursts forth suddenly, in a flood of light, out of nothing. As many contemporary thinkers have…
Leo Lensing, chair and professor of German studies, professor of film studies, is the co-editor of the book, Träume. Das Traumtagebuch 1875-1931, published by Wallstein Verlag in 2012. Träume is the dream journal of Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931). Schnitzler is the author of La Ronde, Fräulein Else and other classics of early 20-century Austrian literature. Prepared together with Peter Michael Braunwarth to celebrate Schnitzler's 150th birthday, the revised and expanded version of the dream texts originally included in Schnitzler's diaries can be read as an implicit challenge to Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. Schnitzler's Träume (Dreams) is both an "unconscious" autobiography of its author, whom Freud called his doppelgänger, and a dark, surreal reflection of…
John Kirn, professor of biology, chair and professor of neuroscience and behavior, is the co-author of three recent articles. They include: "Adult neuron addition to the zebra finch song motor pathway correlates with the rate and extent of recovery from botox-induced paralysis of the vocal muscles," published in the Journal of Neuroscience, 31(47): 16958-16968. Yi-Lo Yu ’03, MA ’04 co-authored this paper. "Morphological plasticity in vocal motor neurons following song crystallization in the zebra finch," published in the Journal of Comparative Neurology, Accepted manuscript online on April 2, 2012. DOI: 10.1002/cne.23120. Biology major Kathryn McDonald Ph.D. '09 co-authored this article. And "Adult neurogenesis is associated…
Kari Weil, University Professor of Letters, is the author of the book, Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now?, published by Columbia University Press in April 2012. In Thinking Animals, Weil provides a critical introduction to the field of animal studies as well as an appreciation of its thrilling acts of destabilization. Examining real and imagined confrontations between human and nonhuman animals, she charts the presumed lines of difference between human beings and other species and the personal, ethical, and political implications of those boundaries. Weil's considerations recast the work of such authors as Kafka, Mann, Woolf, and Coetzee, and such…
A new book by Lisa Cohen, assistant professor of English, was given an enthusiastic early review in The New Yorker’s book blog on March 12. Her book, All We Know, will be published in July 2012. "Cohen’s remarkable, sui generis study about three modernist figures—Esther Murphy, Mercedes de Acosta, and Madge Garland, for many years a fashion editor at British Vogue—is, in part, about dread, which is to say failure and fear of self-exposure, and how we accommodate our lives to suit the various shadows splashed by the sun of occasional triumph... By servicing Murphy and, in the book’s shattering final section about Madge Garland,…
Richard Adelstein, the Woodhouse/Sysco Professor of Economics, is the author of The Rise of Planning in Industrial America, 1865-1914, published by Routledge in March 2012. In the book, Adelstein explores the remarkable transformation undergone by business in the U.S. over the half-century following the Civil War—from small sole proprietorships and proprietorships to massive corporations possessing many of the same constitutional rights as living men and women. Approaching this story through historical, philosophical, legal and economic lenses, Adelstein presents an original, three-pronged theory of the rise of business firms. He traces the big business boom to three historic developments: a major managerial…
Dana Royer and Ellen Thomas are among the 21 authors of a review paper, "The Geological Record of Ocean Acidification," published in Science, March 2012: Vol. 335, no. 6072, pages 1058-1063. In the paper, the authors review events exhibiting evidence for elevated atmospheric CO2, global warming, and ocean acidification over the past 300 million years of Earth’s history, some with contemporaneous extinction or evolutionary turnover among marine calcifiers. Ocean acidification may have severe consequences for marine ecosystems; however, assessing its future impact is difficult because laboratory experiments and field observations are limited by their reduced ecologic complexity and sample period, respectively. Royer is…