Books

Designing Resilience presents case studies of extreme events and analyzes the ability of affected individuals, institutions, governments, and technological systems to cope with disaster. Individual case studies, including Hurricane Katrina in the United States, the London bombings, and French preparedness for the Avian flu, are analyzed to determine effective and ineffective strategies.

A study of the rise of Bolivian tin miners into a politically active labor movement during the early twentieth century, and their eventual challenge to the oligarchy controlling the nation.

Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents is the first-ever comprehensive examination of views of animals in the history of Western philosophy, from Homeric Greece to the twentieth century.

An original study examining the primacy placed on physicians and medical care to generate population growth and increase the workforce during the late eigteenth century in colonial Peru.

This work examines critical intersections of rhetoric and solidarity in order to demonstrate that a rhetorical imperative—an underivable obligation to respond—is the condition for symbolic exchange, and therefore not only for the “art”of rhetoric, but for all determinate relations.

Winner of the 2010 JAC W. Ross Winterowd Award

In this volume, an international group of environmental historians examine the significant ways in which humans have impacted their surroundings throughout history.

An international group of writers explore conceptualizations of what defined “East” and “West” in Eastern Europe, imperial Russia, and the Soviet Union. The contributors analyze the effects of transnational interactions on ideology, politics, and cultural production.

In the late nineteenth century, the Brazilian army staged several campaigns against the settlement of Canudos in northeastern Brazil. The colony’s residents followed Antonio Conselheiro, who promoted a communal existence free from taxes and oppression. Estimates of the death toll range from fifteen thousand to thirty thousand. Sentencing Canudos offers an original perspective on the hegemonic intellectual discourse surrounding this event. In her study, Johnson views the process of nation building and the silencing of “other” voices through the reinvisioning of history. Looking primarily to Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sert›es, she maintains that the events and people of Canudos have been “sentenced” to history by this work.

A historical guidebook for topics ranging from the networked city to the global internet that illuminates the political, economic, and technological forces shaping the infrastructure of modern life.

A Comprehensive History of Pittsburgh’s Black Population from Colonial Times to the 1930s

These multidisciplinary essays explore the cultural mediation of relationships between people and urban spaces in Latin/o America, and how these mediations shape the identities of cities and their residents.

Miller defines college English studies as literacy studies and examines how it has evolved in tandem with broader developments in literacy and the literate. He maps out “four corners” of English departments: literature, language studies, teacher education, and writing studies. Miller identifies their development with broader changes in the technologies and economies of literacy that have redefined what students write and read, which careers they enter, and how literature represents their experiences and aspirations.

Winner of the 2010 Drue Heinz Literature Prize

This book offers a very different kind of short fiction, blending story with verse to evoke fantasy, allegory, metaphor, love, body, mind, and nearly every sensory perception.

Queloides catalogs an art exhibit on the persistence of racism and racial discrimination in contemporary Cuba. Despite the social transformations implemented by the Cuban revolutionary government since the early 1960s, racism continues to be a deep wound in Cuban society, one that generates countless social and cultural scars. The twelve artists who participate in Queloides insist on the need to acknowledge and debate this social problem. Bilingual in English and Spanish, the book includes several essays that analyze the work of these visual artists in the context of changes experienced by Cuban society since the 1990s, including the resurgence of racist attitudes and behaviors.

The Double Truth is a collection of poems that arc from myth to history, knowledge to mystery, Eros to natural love, animals to human beings, then back in an alternating poetic current that betrays a speaker who is at once a privileged witness of her time and a diachronic amalgam of voices that are as imagined as they are real in their anonymous legacy.