Books

By transporting waves of newly arrived immigrants along rail lines from both coasts, railway companies played an active role in repopulating the interior of the country. Spaces of Immigration follows the travel routes of immigrants during a foundational period of American infrastructure—from ports of arrival to train cars and ...

Trade flowed across Eurasia, around the Indian Ocean, and over the Mediterranean for millennia, but in the early modern period, larger parts of the globe became connected through these established trade routes. Knowledge, embodied in various people, materials, texts, objects, and practices, also moved and came together along these routes ...

The Dictator Dilemma tells the story of US bilateral relations with the Alfredo Stroessner dictatorship (1954–1989). Tyvela focuses on how and why that diplomatic relationship changed during the Cold War from cooperation, based on mutual opposition to communism, to conflict, based on clashing expectations concerning democratic reforms and human rights. The ...

Over the past 250 years, energy transitions have occurred repeatedly—the rise of coal in the nineteenth century, the explosion of oil in the twentieth century, the nuclear utopianism of the 1950s and 1960s. These transitions have been as revolutionary as any political or economic upheaval, and they required changes in ...

Cinema can both reflect the world as it is and offer escape from it. In Modernity at the Movies, Camila Gatica Mizala explores the ideas of reflection versus escapism and examines how modes of understanding the current moment emerged through the practice of going to the movies in Santiago and ...

Mass media in the late nineteenth century was full of news from Mars. In the wake of Giovanni Schiaparelli’s 1877 discovery of enigmatic dark, straight lines on the red planet, astronomers and the public at large vigorously debated the possibility that it might be inhabited. As rivalling scientific practitioners looked ...

Ana Forcinito explores how testimonial voices have played a pivotal role in the fight for justice, memory, and gender rights. Through the concept of diffraction, she examines how these voices move through and reshape barriers to construct sonic spaces that connect bodies and create spaces for listening. While Argentina is ...

Winner of the 2026 Drue Heinz Literature Prize Taking place during the decades-long civil conflict, Those Who Vanish follows the stories of Guatemalan citizens and North American expats set on a collision course by war. Across eight stories, martyrs and missionaries, guerrillas and gringos are thrown together amid political violence. A ...

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are reshaping our world. This book draws on more than 100 interviews with scientists and practitioners to investigate how experts in the field communicate their work, including how they define terms, work in teams, share their research, and think of ethics. It showcases the expertise from ...

Desire Path is a sweeping exploration of nationhood and small communities across cultural landscapes and national boundaries. In praise of community, these poems are invested in examining everyday life through personal narratives, oral tradition, and collective memory. In this collection, individual and communal disquiet opens to eros, spirituality, and haunting ...

Throughout history, architects, politicians, and planners have framed shantytowns or slums as aberrant, unplanned developments that stand apart from the city proper—merely as problems to be solved. Describing a site as a bidonville—the Francophone equivalent of shantytown—positioned it as a foil to and catalyst for new architectural ...

retrovirology oscillates between Queer childhood erasure and the AIDS epidemic, pulling from the ACT UP oral history project, informal interviews with survivors, and AIDS historians Sarah Schulman and David France. While some poems elegize key figures of AIDS history such as Larry Kramer and Gaëton Dugas, others operate as ...

Novel Distortions analyzes recent (1996-2019) Mexican and Central American novels through aesthetic, economic, and political lenses to interrogate two interrelated crises: the decline of national modernity and the shifting role of the novel as a genre that shapes national identity, instructs citizens in proper conduct, and conveys ideology to the ...

The Decadent Movement is a book-length suite of poems that spins backward in time through the early days of parenthood and the preceding nine months of pregnancy. Beginning a year after childbirth in the harried throes of marriage and parenting, the collection proceeds toward its finale “Minus Time,” which marvels ...

Equal parts sad, sexy, and searching, Abider opens with the central lament/brag of its lover-speaker, that she can never truly leave anything—or anyone—behind. The origins of this abidingness are traced in odes and elegies for a rural girlhood beset with jeopardy and scarcity and neglect. But it ...