A Pre-Columbian Bestiary

Fantastic Creatures of Indigenous Latin America

Ilan Stavans, with etchings by Eko

“The imaginary and real beings described by Ilan Stavans with whimsy, wit, irony, and, most of all, wonder, emerge from the pre-Columbian and colonial Americas to remind us that even in our own decolonial times, the imaginary and the nonimaginary, the fantastic and the historical, the speculative and the real continue to coincide in the Americas on the elusive line between fact and fiction, where ‘what is known and what is hoped for intermingle.’”—Ramón Saldívar, author of The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary

The Objects That Remain

Laura Levitt

“[An] aching, concentric rumination on loss, in which writing through the aftermath leads to insights on letting go and holding on.”—Foreword Reviews

Elevate the Masses

Alexander Gardner, Photography, and Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America

Makeda Best

“Elevate the Masses takes a fresh look at the career of Alexander Gardner by focusing on his social and photographic work in his home country of Scotland and situating that work in a transatlantic discourse on political rights and reform. The book’s reconsideration of Gardner’s photographs in the context of the US Civil War promises to shift how scholars think about this well-studied area of photography’s history.”—Tanya Sheehan, author of Study in Black and White: Photography, Race, Humor

Stripped

Reading the Erotic Body

Maggie M. Werner

“Stripped is an admirable, frank, and at times deliberately fraught read of eroticized performance with the body. Maggie M. Werner’s analysis is accompanied by frequent personal, auto-ethnographic interludes. This multimethodological approach to writing is refreshing to read.”—Joshua Gunn, author of Modern Occult Rhetoric: Mass Media and the Drama of Secrecy in the Twentieth Century

Embodiment, Relation, Community: A Continental Philosophy of Communication by Garnet C. Butchart has won the NCA Philosophy of Communication Division Distinguished Book Award for 2020.

Out in Central Pennsylvania: The History of an LGBTQ Community by William Burton and Barry Loveland has won the Arline Custer Memorial Award book prize.

H-Judaic calls The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture by Samantha Baskind “daring work of scholarship on American art.”

WPSU’s BookMark says of Beyond Civility by William Keith and Robert Danisch: “Beyond Civility warns us that democracy is a wicked problem that is unlikely to be solved.”

New Journal!
Bishop-Lowell Studies is forthcoming in 2021 in cooperation with the Elizabeth Bishop Society and Robert Lowell Society.

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Perspectives on the History of Ancient Near Eastern Studies

Edited by Agnès Garcia-Ventura and Lorenzo Verderame

How have political contexts determined the conduct of research? How do academic agendas reflect larger social, economic, and cultural interests? How have schools of thought and intellectual traditions configured, and sometimes predetermined, the study of the ancient Near East? Contributions treating research during the Nazi. . . (more)

Reconsidering Creation Ex Nihilo in Genesis 1

Nathan J. Chambers

Drawing on the theology of Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas, Chambers considers what the ex nihilo doctrine means and does in classical Christian dogma. He examines ancient Near Eastern cosmological texts that provide a potential context for reading Genesis 1. Recognizing the distance between the possible historical and theological frameworks for interpreting the text, he illuminates. . . (more)