StephenKMackSD's Blog

 

Edited by Luis Nicolau Parés and Roger Sansi

304 pages | 6 x 9 | © 2011

Most scholarship on sorcery and witchcraft has narrowly focused on specific times and places, particularly early modern Europe and twentieth-century Africa. And much of that research interprets sorcery as merely a remnant of premodern traditions. Boldly challenging these views, Sorcery in the Black Atlantic takes a longer historical and broader geographical perspective, contending that sorcery is best understood as an Atlantic phenomenon that has significant connections to modernity and globalization. Continue reading →

Rebecca Messbarger

248 pages | 50 color plates, 20 halftones | 7 x 10 | © 2010

Anna Morandi Manzolini (1714-74), a woman artist and scientist, surmounted meager origins and limited formal education to become one of the most acclaimed anatomical sculptors of the Enlightenment. The Lady Anatomist tells the story of her arresting life and times, in light of the intertwined histories of science, gender, and art that complicated her rise to fame in the eighteenth century. Continue reading →

Edited by David M. Halperin and Valerie Traub

408 pages | 22 halftones, 1 DVD | 6 x 9 | © 2010

Ever since the 1969 Stonewall Riots, “gay pride” has been the rallying cry of the gay rights movement and the political force behind the emergence of the field of lesbian and gay studies. But has something been lost, forgotten, or buried beneath the drive to transform homosexuality from a perversion to a proud social identity? Have the political requirements of gay pride repressed discussion of the more uncomfortable or undignified aspects of homosexuality?

Gay Shame seeks to lift this unofficial ban on the investigation of homosexuality and shame by presenting critical work from the most vibrant frontier in contemporary queer studies. An esteemed list of contributors tackles a range of issues—questions of emotion, disreputable sexual histories, dissident gender identities, and embarrassing figures and moments in gay history—as they explore the possibility of reclaiming shame as a new, even productive, way to examine lesbian and gay culture. Continue reading →

The relationship between Western democracies and Islam, rarely entirely comfortable, has in recent years become increasingly tense. A growing immigrant population and worries about cultural and political assimilation—exacerbated by terrorist attacks in the United States, Europe, and around the world—have provoked reams of commentary from all parts of the political spectrum, a frustrating majority of it hyperbolic or even hysterical. Continue reading →

Dan Edelstein

184 pages | 1 table | 5-1/2 x 8-1/2 | © 2010

What was the Enlightenment? Though many scholars have attempted to solve this riddle, none has made as much use of contemporary answers as Dan Edelstein does here. In seeking to recover where, when, and how the concept of “the Enlightenment” first emerged, Edelstein departs from genealogies that trace it back to political and philosophical developments in England and the Dutch Republic. According to Edelstein, by the 1720s scholars and authors in France were already employing a constellation of terms—such as l’esprit philosophique—to describe what we would today call the Enlightenment. But Edelstein argues that it was within the French Academies, and in the context of the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, that the key definition, concepts, and historical narratives of the Enlightenment were crafted. Continue reading →

“Prague Palimpsest is one of the most intriguing and exciting books written about this ancient cosmopolitan city. Based on prodigious research, Thomas offers a complex close reading of the main figures and topics of Prague’s cultural and literary history. He begins with the foundational legends of the fascinating Libuše corpus before moving on to Kafka and his contemporaneous foreign visitors to Prague, like Apollinaire; he then considers the dramatic rupture of the Holocaust and the post-Shoah palimpsestic reelaborations in the works of Bachmann, Celan, and Sebald before concluding with an outlook on postmodern Czech authors. In doing so the book sets new and attractive standards of intertextual research and dialogical comparative cultural expeditions, inviting us to revisit Prague and at the same time to rediscover lost splinters of our own past or identity.”—Primus-Heinz Kucher, University of Klagenfurt, Austria

[shorter version]
“Prague Palimpsest is one of the most intriguing and exciting books written about this ancient cosmopolitan city. Alfred Thomas invites us to revisit Prague and at the same time to rediscover lost splinters of our own past or identity.”—Primus-Heinz Kucher, University of Klagenfurt, Austria

Wendy Kline

200 pages | 10 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 2010

Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, women argued that unless they gained access to information about their own bodies, there would be no equality. In Bodies of Knowledge, Wendy Kline considers the ways in which ordinary women worked to position the female body at the center of women’s liberation. Continue reading →