Featured Research and Creative Activities

View a snapshot of work by the esteemed faculty within the School of Arts and Humanities.

Please note this list is not inclusive of all work produced by faculty within the School.
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History

Mira Balberg
- When Near Becomes Far: Old Age in Rabbinic Literature
- (Oxford University Press, 2021)
- Exploring the representations and depictions of old age in the rabbinic Jewish literature of late antiquity (150-600 CE).
Wendy Matsumura
- Waiting for the Cool Moon: Anti-imperialist Struggles in the Heart of Japan's Empire
- (Duke University Press, 2024)
- In Waiting for the Cool Moon Wendy Matsumura interrogates the erasure of colonial violence at the heart of Japanese nation-state formation. She critiques Japan studies’ role in this effacement and contends that the field must engage with anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity as the grounds on which to understand imperialism, colonialism, fascism, and other forces that shape national consciousness.
Rebecca Jo Plant
- Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era
- (Oxford University Press, 2023)
- Of Age is the first comprehensive study of how Americans responded to the unauthorized enlistment of minors in this conflict and the implications that followed.
Edward Watts
- The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome: The History of a Dangerous Idea
- (Oxford University Press, Nov 2023)
- The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome tells the stories of the people who built their political and literary careers around promises of Roman renewal as well as those of the victims they blamed for causing Rome's decline.
Daniel Widener
- Third Worlds Within: Multiethnic Movements and Transnational Solidarity
- (Duke University Press, 2024)
- In Third Worlds Within, Daniel Widener expands conceptions of the struggle for racial justice by reframing antiracist movements in the United States in a broader internationalist context.

Literature

Sara E. Johnson
- Encyclopédie noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry's Intellectual World
- (University of North Carolina Press, 2024)
- Johnson's arresting investigation of race and knowledge in the revolutionary Atlantic surrounds Moreau with the African-descended people he worked so hard to erase.
- The book has won five awards, including the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, J. Russell Major Prize in French History, American Historical Association, Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for African and African Diaspora Studies, P. Sterling Stuckey Prize and Mary Alice and Philip Boucher Book Prize.
Kazim Ali
- Sukun: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan Poetry)
- (Wesleyan University Press, 2023)
- Kazim Ali is a poet, novelist, and essayist whose work explores themes of identity, migration, and the intersections of cultural and spiritual traditions. "Sukun" means serenity or calm, and a sukun is also a form of punctuation in Arabic orthography that denotes a pause over a consonant. This Sukun draws a generous selection from Kazim's six previous full-length collections, and includes 35 new poems.
Amelia Glaser
- A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails
- (Arrowsmith Press, 2023)
- Translated with the utmost of care by Amelia Glaser and Yulia Ilchuk, A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails is a guidebook to the emotional combat in Ukraine.
Page duBois
- Democratic Swarms: Ancient Comedy and the Politics of the People
- (The University of Chicago Press, 2022)
- With Democratic Swarms, Page duBois revisits the role of Greek comedy in ancient politics, considering how it has been overlooked as a political medium by modern theorists and critics.
Ameeth Vijay
- TOPOTHESIA: Planning, Colonialism, and Places in Excess
- (Fordham University Press, 2023)
- Topothesia reads urban planning as a mode of speculative fiction, one inextricably linked to histories of British colonialism and liberalism through a particular understanding of place. The book focuses on town planning from the late nineteenth century to the present day, showing how the contemporary geography of Britain—sharply unequal and marked by racial division—continues ideologies of place established in colonial contexts. Specifically, planning allows for the speculative construction of future places that are both utopian in their ability to resolve political disagreement and at the same tantalizingly realizable, able to be produced in concrete reality. This speculative imaginary, I argue, is only possible within the ideological framework of colonialism and the history of empire within which it developed.
Kathryn Walkiewicz
- Reading Territory - Indigenous and Black Freedom, Removal, and the Nineteenth-Century State
- (The University of North Carolina Press, 2023)
- The formation of new states was an essential feature of US expansion throughout the long nineteenth century, and debates over statehood and states' rights were waged not only in legislative assemblies but also in newspapers, maps, land surveys, and other forms of print and visual culture. Assessing these texts and archives, Kathryn Walkiewicz theorizes the logics of federalism and states' rights in the production of US empire, revealing how they were used to imagine states into existence while clashing with relational forms of territoriality asserted by Indigenous and Black people.

Philosophy

Saba Bazargan-Forward
- Authority, Cooperation, and Accountability
- (Oxford University Press, 2022)
- The book develops a theory of accountability in the context of cooperation and applies this theory to war ethics, criminal law, business ethics, and institutional racism.
Nancy Cartwright
- The Tangle of Science: Reliability Beyond Method, Rigour, and Objectivity
- (Oxford University Press, 2023)
- This book mphasizes that science is not just about theory and truth but all the products of science that underwrite reliability.
Manuel Vargas
- The Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology
- (Oxford University Press, 2022)
- This state-of-the-art volume covers contemporary philosophical and psychological work on moral psychology, as well as notable historical theories and figures in the field of moral psychology, such as Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, and the Buddha.

Music

David Borgo
- Sync or Swarm, Revised Edition: Improvising Music in a Complex Age
- (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022)
- The revised edition of Sync or Swarm promotes an ecological view of musicking, moving us from a subject-centered to a system-centered view of improvisation
Amy Cimini
- Wild Sound: Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life
- (Oxford University Press, 2022)
- Wild Sound: Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life discerns meeting points between frameworks for life that emerged from Amacher's multidisciplinary study of sound and listening: within acoustical spectra, inside human bodies and ears, across cities and edgleands, hypothetical creatures and virtual, fictive or distanciated environments.
Mark Dresser
- Tines of Change
- (Pyroclastic Records, 2023)
- Dresser finds in the double bass orchestras within orchestras, crosscurrents of harmonic and multiphonic inspiration that engage in captivating and entrancingly beautiful dialogues.

Theatre and Dance

Lisa Porter
- Stage Management Theory as a Guide to Practice: Cultivating a Creative Approach
- (Routledge, 2020)
- Stage Management Theory as a Guide to Practice offers theory and methodology for developing a unique stage management style, preparing stage managers to develop an adaptive approach for the vast and varied scope of the production process, forge their own path, and respond to the present moment with care and creativity.
Allan Havis
- Clear Blue Silence
- (Ktav Publishing House, 2022)
- Film professor Jonathan Klein resolves a debt left by his deceased Jewish father due to a New York crime figure. Klein, a single parent in California, also learns unsettling details about his late wife, about his brilliant Chinese student, and about his suicidal colleague days before Yom Kippur. The story, set during Covid, finds Klein straddling California and New York as his crisis of conscience overwhelms him against a madcap landscape.
Hentyle Yapp
- Minor China: Method, Materialisms, and the Aesthetic
- (Duke University Press, 2021)
- In Minor China Hentyle Yapp analyzes contemporary Chinese art as it circulates on the global art market to outline the limitations of Western understandings of non-Western art.

Visual Arts

Grant Kester
- Beyond the Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Avant-Garde to Socially Engaged Art
- (Duke University Press, 2023)
- Instead of grounding art in its distance from the social, Kester shows how socially engaged art, developed in conjunction with forms of social or political resistance, encourages the creative capacity required for collective political transformation.
Teddy Cruz
- Socializing Architecture: Top-Down / Bottom-Up
- (The MIT Press, 2023)
- With a focus on deepening inequality across the world, this richly illustrated monograph of social practice in architecture shows how to catalyze productive change in the world's border regions.
Paul Mpagi Sepuya
- Orifice + Aperture
- (TBW Books, 2022)
- Orifice + Aperture is a new collection of studio studies by Paul Mpagi Sepuya. In the collaborative style for which he has become renowned, Sepuya uses mirrors, screens, and the loaded visual motif of the camera lens to address structures within photography, portraiture, and queer sociality.
John C. Welchman
- On the Last Afternoon: Disrupted Ecologies and the Work of Joyce Campbell
- (The MIT Press, 2020)
- A richly illustrated retrospective of interdisciplinary artist Joyce Campbell and her three decades of work in photography, film, and video.