Networks of Touch

A Tactile History of Chinese Art, 1790–1840

Michael J. Hatch

“Thoroughly researched, smartly conceived, and artfully presented, Networks of Touch is one of those rare books that would satisfy both the specialist scholar and the general reader. With his intellectual ambition, formal visual analysis skills, and fine eye for details, Hatch has enlivened both the forest and the trees down to the textures of the bark and leaf.”—Dorothy Ko, author of The Social Life of Inkstones: Artisans and Scholars in Early Qing China

Qayrawān

The Amuletic City

William Gallois

“Gallois’s magnifying-glass-close archaeology of late nineteenth-century photographs, postcards, and related ephemera provides an ideologically engaging model for rethinking visual cultures of colonized people. Details accidentally captured in hegemonic images reveal push-back tactics and truths too long ignored. Unobtrusive graffiti on the walls of the Great Mosque and other buildings of Qayrawān (Kairouan), Tunisia, was talismanic expression by local women seeking to protect their communities from the ignominious physical and epistemic violence of racialized French pretense. Brilliant.”—Allen Roberts, Coeditor of Devotional Spaces of a Global Saint: Shirdi Sai Baba’s Presence

Tastemakers, Collectors, and Patrons

Collecting American Art in the Long Nineteenth Century

Edited by Linda S. Ferber and Margaret R. Laster

Tastemakers, Collectors, and Patrons explores the dynamic landscape of American art collecting in the United States from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. The geographic range of collecting histories presented in this publication spans the country, including the Eastern Seaboard, the Old South, the Midwest, and the West Coast.

A Delicate Matter

Art, Fragility, and Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France

Oliver Wunsch

“A lyrical and witty rereading of eighteenth-century French art that connects the popularity of physically fragile artworks—from cracking Watteau paintings to precarious Clodion terracottas by way of disintegrating pastel paintings and quixotic experiments with encaustic—to a nascent consumer culture dependent on ephemeral goods. Wunsch adroitly joins sophisticated technical analysis to a thought-provoking argument about the ways in which the market shaped artistic practice, art collecting, and aesthetic theory.”—Amy Freund, author of Portraiture and Politics in Revolutionary France

Congratulations to Brigitte Buettner, whose book The Mineral and the Visual has won the 2023 Book Prize from the International Center of Medieval Art!

Congratulations to J. H. Chajes, whose book The Kabbalistic Tree was named a finalist for the Nahum M. Sarna Memorial Award at the 73rd National Jewish Book Awards!

The Christian Century says that J. H. Chajes’s The Kabbalistic Tree is “bound to become a classic.”

William Gallois’s Qayrawān was listed on InsideHook’s 10 Books You Should Be Reading This January.

A new open access journal, Palestine/Israel Review, published this month. Find more information here.

A free article is available from Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies. This article details a project which created a digital elevation model of the Agora and Acropolis of Athens utilizing an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). This article will be free through March

A free article is available from Pennsylvania History. “The Material Culture of Pennsylvania’s African American Cemeteries and Burial Grounds” is free to access on the Scholarly Publishing Collective through March 1.

Journal of Natural Resources Policy Research is free to access on the Scholarly Publish Collective! A new issue is available now.

The Southern Wall of the Temple Mount and Its Corners

Past, Present and Future

Edited by Yuval Baruch, Ronny Reich, Moran Hagbi, and Joe Uziel

“The Temple Mount/Haram aš-Šarīf has fascinated scholars since the dawn of modern archaeology, and the pious for millennia before that. The studies assembled here document excavations and conservation at the southern and southwestern retaining walls of the Herodian Temple, with special care for all periods—from the Iron Age to Herod the Great to medieval Islam. This magnificent volume is a monument to decades of dedicated research, a resource for generations to come!”—Steven Fine, Churgin Professor of Jewish History, Yeshiva University

Before There Were Kings

A Literary Analysis of the Book of Judges

Elie Assis

“Assis utilizes a close reading of the book of Judges and interacts with the secondary literature while contributing to a reading of the text that explains how the parts produce the whole. Before There Were Kings makes an important contribution, not simply in the method of reading, but in the particular way in which Assis’s perspective contributes to an understanding of the book.”—K. Lawson Younger, Jr., Divinity School, Trinity International University

Good Girls Go to Hell

Tohar Sherman-Friedman

“A delicate coming of age tale illuminating contemporary Israeli society. A powerful graphic novel that masterfully tackles the major conflicts of our time, including religion versus atheism, conservatism versus liberalism, and occupied territories versus the big city. Through her unparalleled talent and mastery of the comics form, Tohar Sherman-Friedman proves herself to be one of the most important voices in graphic literature today.”—Asaf Hanuka, author of The Realist

Escaping Wars and Waves

Encounters with Syrian Refugees

Olivier Kugler

“Artistically masterful. . . . Sketchbooks like Kugler’s make readers feel as if they are sitting beside the artist—watching the refugees climb onto the beach of the Greek island of Kos after crossing the Aegean from Turkey, or smelling the tea sold by a vendor in an Iraqi refugee camp.”—New York Review of Books