Gabe Rosenberg '16Jeffrey Juris ’93 is the co-editor of the new book Insurgent Encounters: Transnational Activism Ethnography, and the Political (Duke University Press, 2013), a collection of scholarly essays on the dynamics of contemporary, transnational social movements. With co-editor Alex Khasnabish, assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at Mount Saint Vincent University, Juris structures the collection around themes of emerging subjectivities, discrepant paradigms, transformational knowledges, and subversive technologies. In his contribution to the book, “Spaces of Intentionality: Race, Class, and Horizontality at the US Social Forum,” Juris examines the establishment of an intentional space at the 2007 USSF in Atlanta as a…
David LowWilliam Klaber ’67 is the author of a new novel, The Rebellion of Miss Lucy Ann Lobdell, published by Greenleaf Book Group Press. This fictional memoir is based on the real-life Lucy Ann Lobdell who, in 1855, decided to live the rest of her life as a man. She was involved in what may have been the first same-sex marriage in America when she married Marie Perry and made history when she was put on trial in Minnesota for wearing men’s clothes. While Lobdell promised to write her own memoir about her adventures in male attire, her account was never found, and…
In his new collection Cut These Words into My Stone: Ancient Greek Epitaphs (Johns Hopkins University Press), Michael Wolfe ’68 brings together his English translations of ancient Greek epitaphs, with a foreword by Richard Martin, a classics professor at Stanford University. Greek epitaphs, considered by some scholars to be the earliest artful writing in Western Europe, are short celebrations of the lives of a rich cross section of society that help form a vivid portrait of an ancient era. Wolfe divides his book into five chronological sections spanning 1,000 years, beginning with the Late Archaic and Classical periods and ending…
For his new study Japanoise (Duke University Press), David Novak MA ’99 has conducted more than a decade of research in Japan and the United States to trace the "cultural feedback" that generates and sustains Noise. Noise is an underground music—made through an amalgam of feedback, distortion, and electronic effects—that first emerged as a genre in the 1980s, circulating on cassette tapes traded between fans in Japan, Europe, and North America. This unusual kind of music has captured the imagination of a small but passionate transnational audience, characterized by its cultivated obscurity, ear-shattering sound, and over-the-top performances. For its dedicated…
Natalie Robichaud ’14In her new book Geographical Diversions (The University of Georgia Press), Tina Harris ’98 employs cultural anthropology, human geography, and material culture to explore the social and economic transformations that take place along one trade route that extends through China, Nepal, Tibet, and India. She makes connections between the seemingly mundane motions of daily life and more abstract levels of global change by focusing on two generations of traders and how they create “geographies of trade that work against state ideas of what trade routes should look like.” She observes the tensions between the apparent fixity of invisible national boundaries…
Tejas Desai '03, author of The Brotherhood and creator of The New Wei Collective, will release Dhan's Debut and Other Stories, his first collection of short stories, this fall. Desai's previous novel, The Brotherhood, the first book in The Brotherhood Trilogy, is a noir thriller that deals with contemporary social issues facing the Indian-American population.While at Wesleyan he wrote a collection of short stories with the same title and similar themes. Reworked over the years into its current version, the novel expresses Desai's interest in “the different ideologies inherent in Hinduism and Buddhism, differences of personality and outlook, the relationship…
Frances Northcutt ’97 is the co-editor with Scott Silverman of the newly revised 5th edition of How to Survive Your Freshman Year (Hundreds of Heads Books), which offers tips and advice directly from students on today’s campuses. This guide for those heading off to college was compiled from interviews with hundreds of students at more than 120 colleges across the country. Northcutt, who most recently has been an honors advisor and admissions reader for Macaulay Honors College of the City University of New York, contributes her expert guidance and helpful commentary. Chapters of the book are devoted to such topics as…
David Hessekiel ’82 is co-author with Philip Kotler and Nancy Lee of Good Works! Marketing and Corporate Initiatives that Build a Better World … and the Bottom Line (John Wiley and Sons), a guide that offers actionable advice on integrating marketing and corporate social initiatives into broader business goals. The book suggests that purpose-driven marketing has moved from a nice-to-do to a must-do for businesses and explains how to balance social and business goals. The book’s introduction explores why some marketing and corporate social initiatives fail and others succeed and then looks at six social initiatives for doing well by…
David Igler ’88 has written the new history book, The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush (Oxford University Press), the first book to combine American, oceanic, and world history in a vivid portrayal of travels in the Pacific world. He researched hundreds of documented voyages to explore the commercial, cultural, and ecological upheavals following Captain Cook’s exploits, and concentrated on the eastern Pacific in the decades between the 1770s and the 1840s. Igler starts with the expansion of trade as seen via the travels of William Shaler, captain of the American Brig Lelia Byrd. Soon he…
Gregory Heller ’04 is the author of Ed Bacon: Planning, Politics, and the Building of Modern Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania Press), the first biography of the controversial architect and urban planner. A book launch will be held on Thursday, May 16 at the Center for Architecture in Philadelphia (1218 Arch Street) at 6 p.m. The event is free and open to the public. Go to http://hellergreg.ticketleap.com/edbacon/ for more information. In the mid-20th century, Edmund Bacon worked on shaping urban America as many Americans left cities to pursue life in suburbia. As director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission, Bacon forged…
Storyteller and cultural anthropologist Ruth Behar ’77 is the author of Traveling Heavy: A Memoir Between Journeys (Duke University Press), in which she recounts her life as an immigrant child and later, as an adult woman who loves to travel but is terrified of boarding a plane. Behar shares moving stories about her Yiddish-Sephardic-Cuban-American family, as well as the kind strangers she meets on her travels. The author refers to herself an anthropologist who specializes in homesickness and repeatedly returning to her homeland of Cuba. She asks the question why we leave home to find home. Kirkus Reviews writes: “A…
Virginia Pye ’82 has published her first novel, River of Dust (Unbridled Books), which begins on the windswept plains of northwestern China not long after the Boxer Rebellion. Mongol bandits kidnap the young son of an American missionary couple. As the Reverend sets out in search of the child, he quickly loses himself in the rugged, drought-stricken countryside populated by opium dens, nomadic warlords, and traveling circuses. Grace, his young wife, pregnant with their second child, takes to her sick bed in the mission compound, and has visions of her stolen child and lost husband. The foreign couple’s dedicated Chinese…