Olivia DrakePeter Gottschalk, chair and professor of religion, is the editor of the book, Engaging South Asian Religions: Boundaries, Appropriations, and Resistances, published by the State University of New York Press in May 2011. The book looks at Western understandings of South Asian religions and indigenous responses from precolonial to contemporary times. Focusing on boundaries, appropriations, and resistances involved in Western engagements with South Asian religions, this volume considers both the pre- and postcolonial period in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. It pays particular attention to contemporary controversies surrounding the study of South Asian religions, including several scholars' reflections on the contentious reaction…
(more…)
Scott Higgins, associate professor of film studies, edited the book, Arnheim for Film and Media Studies, published by Taylor & Francis, 2010. Rudolf Arnheim (1904-2007) was a pioneering figure in film studies, best known for his landmark book on silent cinema Film as Art. He ultimately became more famous as a scholar in the fields of art and art history, largely abandoning his theoretical work on cinema. However, his later aesthetic theories on form, perception and emotion should play an important role in contemporary film and media studies. In this new volume, edited by Higgins, an international group of leading…
Katherine Kuenzli, associate professor of art history, is the author of The Nabis and Intimate Modernism: Painting and the Decorative at the Fin-de-Siecle, published by Ashgate, 2010. According to the publisher,"this is the first book to provide an in-depth account of the Nabis' practice of the decorative, and its significance for 20th-century modernism." "Over the course of the 10 years that define the Nabi movement (1890–1900), its principal artists included Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Paul Sérusier, and Paul Ranson. The author reconstructs the Nabis' relationship to Impressionism, mass culture, literary Symbolism, Art Nouveau, Wagnerianism, and a revolutionary artistic tradition in…
Mark Slobin, professor of music, is the author of Folk Music: A Very Short Introduction, published by Oxford University Press, 2010. According to the publisher, "This is the first compact introduction to folk music that offers a truly global perspective. Slobin offers an extraordinarily generous portrait of folk music, one that embraces a Russian wedding near the Arctic Circle, a group song in a small rainforest village in Brazil, and an Uzbek dance tune in Afghanistan. He looks in detail at three poignant songs from three widely separated regions--northern Afghanistan, Jewish Eastern Europe, and the Anglo-American world--with musical notation and lyrics included.…
Giulio Gallarotti, professor of government, tutor in the College of Social Studies, is the author of The Power Curse: Influence and Illusion in World Politics, published by Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2010; and Cosmopolitan Power in International Relations: A Synthesis of Realism, Neoliberalism, and Constructivism, published by Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Joyce Lowrie, professor of romance languages and literatures, emerita, is the translator of the book, Arthur Rimbaud ILLUMINATIONS, published by XLibris in 2010. Norm Shapiro, professor of romance languages and literatures, wrote an introduction to the book. According to Lowrie: “to see – or not to see: that was[ Rimbaud’s] option. 'To See' became his will. In his poetic career, Rimbaud chose 'to see' by confounding the very instruments of vision: his eyes and his intellect. He dreamed about and 'saw' the Crusades, he 'saw' enchantments, magical dream-flowers, a flower that says its name, a digitalis that 'opens up over…
Barry Chernoff, the Robert Schumann Professor of Environmental Studies, professor of earth and environmental sciences, professor of biology and director of the Environmental Studies Certificate Program, is the co-author of "A new species of suckermouth armored catfish, Pseudancistrus kwinti (Siluriformes: Loricariidae) from the Copename River drainage, Central Suriname Nature Reserve, Suriname," published in Zootaxa 2332:40-48, 2010.
Corrina KerrThis issue, we ask 5 Questions to . . . Katja Kolcio, associate professor of dance, and author of the new Wesleyan University Press book Movable Pillars Organizing Dance, 1956–1978. Q: How did you become involved with the “Branching Out, Oral Histories of the Founders of Six National Dance Organizations" assignment, which led to your book? A: In 2001, I was invited by the American Dance Guild to conduct interviews with founders of six major American dance organizations. Marilynn Danitz and Margot Lehman, past presidents of the Guild, conceived of the project. These organizations were founded in the '50s and '60s,…
American history has almost completely edited out Henry Roe Cloud from its story, even though this full-blood Winnebago was one of the most accomplished and celebrated American Indians in the first half of the twentieth century. Joel Pfister's The Yale Indian: The Education of Henry Roe Cloud corrects this omission. Pfister, chair of the English Department and the Kenan Professor of the Humanities, and former chair of the American Studies Program, began exploring American Indian archives when he was a Yale doctoral student in the 1980s and started his research on Yale’s Roe Cloud letters in 1995. Very little has…
Tsampikos Kottos, assistant professor of physics; Joshua Bodyfelt Ph.D '09; and Mei Zheng '10 are the co-authors of the paper "Fidelity in Quasi-1D Systems as a Probe for Anderson Localization," published in Acta Physica Polonica A, Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Quantum Chaos and Localisation Phenomena, Warsaw, in 2009. They wrote the paper with Ulrich Kuhl, and Hans-Jürgen Stöckmann, who are collaborators from the University of Marburg. This publication is part of the conference proceedings for a workshop at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw where Kottos presented this past summer. The combined theoretical and experimental work done in this…
David PesciPriscilla Meyer, professor of Russian language and literature, was awarded the University of Southern California Book Prize by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) during their annual conference. The prize is awarded annually for an outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern Europe, or Eurasia in the field of literary and cultural studies. Meyer is the author of How the Russians Read the French. She speaks about her book online here. More than 2,100 scholars attended the conference.