Books

Chronicles Helen Clay Frick’s lifelong commitment to social welfare, the environment, and her purchase of many significant works of art for her private collection, the Frick Collection in New York, the University of Pittsburgh teaching collection, and the Frick Art Museum.

Winner of the 2008 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence

The Plum Flower Dance includes new poems and poems from Weaver’s earlier works My Fathers Geography, and Timber and Prayer, among others.

Contests the assumption that vitalism and contemporary rhetoric represent opposing, disconnected poles in the writing tradition. Vitalism has been historically linked to expressivism and dismissed as innate and unteachable, whereas rhetoric is seen as a rational, teachable method for producing argumentative texts. Hawk calls for the reexamination of current pedagogies to incorporate vitalism and complexity theory and argues for their application in the environments where students write and think today.

Winner of the 2007 JAC W. Ross Winterowd Award Honorable Mention, 2007 MLA Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize

Traces the production of nationalist imaginaries through the public visual representation of modern state formation in Brazil and Argentina. The purpose of these imaginaries was to vindicate political upheavals and secure the viability of the newly independent states through a sense of historic destiny and inevitable evolution. The visions of national heritage, territory, and social and ethnic composition were conceived in a complex interplay between government, cultural and scientific institutions, as a means of propagating political agendas and power throughout the emerging states.

Other South raises new questions about the scope and attitude of Faulkner’s project, positioning his work as an inherent critique of colonialism and emphasizing a more specific conceptualization of coloniality. Engaging with theorists from the former colonies, Aboul-Ela draws on an understanding of economics, social structures, and the colonial/neocolonial status of the Third World, and steps outside the preconceptions of current postcolonial studies to offer a view of our shared literary heritage.

After the Fall refers to the twin towers, and is Field’s ode to the events that transpired thereafter—the war in Iraq andthe attack on civil rights in America—as well as his own personal struggles over the indignities of aging.

Winner of the 2006 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry.Angela Ball’s lyrical, wry, and rueful poems float on a river of incongruities on which we may find Ron Popeil, Lord Byron, and Rudyard Kipling sharing the same raft; they create a fascinating commerce between the sublime and the ridiculous.

These poems, threaded by the teachings of Buddha, examine loss—the death of a loved one, the longing for a child, the yearning for another place and time—and the suffering such attempts transpire, but ultimately the poems are an affirmation that to be born into human life is our greatest opportunity to transform loss and sorrow into awakening joy.

Winner of the 2006 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize

Krygowski’s poems—often sad, sometimes humorous, always generous—are lovingly grounded in the ordinary. They are thinking poems—tightly crafted, accessible inquiries more interested in exploring stark and complicated knowledge than in proclaiming it.

Myths of Harmony examines a foundational moment for Latin American racial constructs. While most contemporary scholarship has focused the explanation for racial tolerance in the colonial period, Marixa Lasso argues that the origins of modern race relations are to be found later, in the Age of Revolution. Lasso’s work brings much-needed attention to the important role of the anticolonial struggles in shaping the nature of contemporary race relations and racial identities in Latin America.

An original and significant study of the developmental diversity within the discipline of composition that opens the door to further examination of local histories as guideposts to the origins of composition studies.

A comprehensive history of the development of Houston, examining the factors that have facilitated unprecedented growth—and the environmental cost of that development. Examines the steps Houston has taken to overcome laissez-faire politics, indiscriminate expansion, and infrastructural overload. An analysis of the environmental consequences of large-scale energy production and unchecked growth.

Pittsburgh in Stages offers the first comprehensive history of theater in Pittsburgh, placing it within the context of cultural development in the city and the history of theater nationally.Lynne Conner details the defining movements of each era and analyzes how public tastes evolved over time. She offers a fascinating study of regional theatrical development and underscores the substantial contribution of regional theater to American theatrical arts.

Sites Unseen challenges conventions for viewing and interpreting the landscape, using visual theory to move beyond traditional practices of describing and classifying objects to explore notions of audience and context. Treats landscape as a spatial, psychological, and sensory encounter, opening a new dialogue for discussing the landscape outside the boundaries of current art criticism and theory.

Winner of the 2009 Allen Noble Book Award from the Pioneer America Society

A critique of current pedagogies that introduces a psychoanalytical approach in teaching composition and rhetoric. Thomas Rickert builds upon the advances of cultural studies and its focus on societal trends and broadens this view by placing attention on the conscious and subconscious thought of the individual.

Winner, 2007 JAC Gary A. Olson Award